mazzanet's Lair

Wee, it's the last day of the holidays, with another whole term (10ish weeks) till the next ones.
On Saturday and Sunday I mostly worked, which involved little actual work and much money. A bit of the 'work' on Sunday was hacking up some pipe for my yet-to-arrive satellite dish, which is what I spent this morning doing.
The dish along with a receiver and motor (motorised 2.3m dish :D) is coming from Queensland and got sent on Thursday. All up it weighs 45kg, giving me a nice delivery charge of $90. Now you'd think $90 would be enough to make it come guaranteed the next day, but no. It turns out that it'd only give me Road Express which could be anywhere from 2 to 5 days. Profit for them, lost hair and mental anguish for me.
The rest of today I was supposed to be at work but I instead decided to go see Fantastic Four with some friends (theres a little story behind how I made that decision, but I won't go into it here for obvious purposes). It was a good movie and like others, recommended. A fun afternoon indeed.
In the afternoon I continued working on my wok wireless antenna. As crazy as that sounds, yes, I am using cheap Chinese cookware for an antenna. So far it's been mostly made out of recycled bits, apart from the wok which was $8 from Bargins Galore with a free Chinese teapot set. For those interested, my design is a wok (slightly parabolic) with a biquad placed at the focal point which should theoretically leave me with a high gain antenna. The 2.5mm wire I'm using for the biquad is the conductor stripped out of some mains cable which I yoinked from a building site near my house. Recycled to the max.
First day of term 3 tomorrow, I wonder what it'll bring...

Wee, another week goes by. And theses no guesses at all to what I did each day. Work. Three weeks of holidays (of which there's 3 days left of) may sound fun but can actually be quite boring when you run out of things to do or can't go anywhere due to parents working full time so you have to resort to going to work. And when you wonder I'm not writing much over the holidays, it's simply because there's nothing to write about. So this post will be just a smallish summary of my doings this week.
The main highlight was me getting a GPS (Garmin eTrex Venture for those interested) on Wednesday - and it came with a PC cable, delivered overnight for $220. So on Thursday on the way to and from work I did another wardrive (well warwalknbus) with my laptop in a backpack with an antenna cabletied to the top, this time with my GPS hooked up. Like last time I found the same 50 odd accesspoints plus a few more from when I down Edward St, into Hargraves St and through the mall, only getting one or two funny looks from people with one guy even saying he knew what I was doing and told me to walk over near Maccas in High St and try out their free net access (which I did and succeeded). To make something prettyful out of the results, I wrote a small mapping engine with a lot of ugly maths (converting pixels to meters to degrees is fun children) which you can see here.
What kind of annoyed me though was that a group of people (female) I know just happened to be standing around in the mall, and come on the same bus home. In particular, I seen to get along with them pretty well but they're the kind of people that see someone doing something 'advanced' technology related and completely freak out, regard you as a nerd/freak and glare at you the whole way home. Infact a lot of people are like that, mostly females but not all. And I know some that might even be reading this. I mean really, how about you suggest something better for me to do. Yeah, that got you stumped...
Earlier this week I also ordered a satellite TV package (2.3m motorised dish with receiver) which was supposed to arrive today, but it didn't. So much for $90 overnight delivery from Queensland.
Aside from all the ranting, tomorrow I'm working 9 till 1ish then I am running around madly through the bush.
I also rediscovered the magic of pineapples.

Eep, almost a week without posting, someone spank me.
Now... Wednesday. What I did then is quite vague, I probably went to work. It was a wednesday, so Mike must have been in. Ah yes, I found another thing about Mike - he can't solder for shit. That is all. I also probably spent the night eating food of some sort and chatting to friends. Kinda usual and boring...
Thursday. I think that was the day I upgraded all the network gear at work. Yes, it was. Network wise, the building is in 3 sections. Each section was managed by a 16 port 10mbit hub. Apparently they've been there since the dawn of time and the place began. You try copying a file from a server that has to in through 3 hubs before getting to you... I have collisions for breakfast. Needless to say, they're now 16 port 100mbit switches.
That night I spent at the Rifle hotel with some of the other guys at work. The Rifle has a lot of in-house drinks, though I tried some Beez Neez - which is honey malted beer, quite nice. They also have really nice hand made cakes, I tried their cuppacino cheesecake which was also really nice. If you haven't figured already, I really like my food. Also that day, my new wireless access point arrived. An initial discovery was that it runs embedded Linux (2.4.18-MIPS kernel).
Friday, didn't do much apart from confusing some of the people at the marketplace who know me as a regular from my lunches. Some time that week my namebadge disappeared so every day I've been wearing a different namebadge from the pile of badges from previous staff. One day I was Mark, another I was Nick, there was also Steve and Rob. I confused one guy so bad that he forgot my real name. Heh.
I went to work on Saturday morning, one of the guys arrived half an hour late due to a late night. He's told me of his mad tales with his housemates by putting everything known to mankind in microwaves before, this time they built a jacobs ladder out of the big transformer from the microwave they recently broke. Not only did it light up the whole shed be make the transformer catch fire, it caused all the streetlights in the street to dim. Yes, they are insane. Just like me and some friends. That afternoon I went out to a friends property at the foot of Mt. Alexander to a 'gathering' of some other friends. Most of the time was spent chatting around a bigish bonfire and watching Dodgeball. But the highlight was blowing up a small dam with explosives my friend's dad had made (yes, he has an explosives license).
I would go into a whole deep and meaningful on what I thought of/wanted to do/wanted to happen that night but that's best left for another day...
Today I went to work again. And my experiences today, I have some advice: Don't try to do some coding over remote desktop from work to home. No further comment required.
Also a friend visited work and had a wander around, which was quite good. They also had a cool top on with a snake on it that runs over the shoulder from the back.
*insert another mental comment on deep and meaningful stuff* I think I'm expecting too much too quickly. Hmmm, I don't know...
Wow. That took me almost an hour to write, though I was doing some other stuff, but it was worth it, in a way.

I haven't been up to much lately.
On Sunday I ended up not going orienteering and instead slept in and then went to work. Say no more.
Yesterday I also went to work. I fixed a bunch of things and pondered some more. Work's phone system is Commander based and is at least 5 years old and theres 5 or so lines coming in. One of the lines has got ADSL enabled on it which is shared with a fax (filtered of course). There's also an EFTPOS terminal. The problem is the ADSL drops out at least 50 times a day (also 50% of the EFTPOS transactions fail due to communications errors). After a bit of snooping around, calling mates to do line checks and what not it turned out that the EFTPOS terminal is also on the ADSL line and is unfiltered since everyone thought it was on its own dedicated line. Which solves everything.
After work I visited a friend who was still at work (which was awkward but cool) and had a look around at all the snakes, lizards, fish and other amphibious or reptilian creatures.
Today I also went to work, shock horror. I repaired a few exhibits including a high pressure spray gun and remembered to buy the filter for the EFTPOS terminal.
When I got home I fed the dog etc, and ordered tea. After spending a minute waiting on the phone for someone to pick up, I ordered my BBQ chicken pizza with garlic bread and coke.
When it arrived 45 mins later the delivery guy came to the door puffing and panting, apologised for being late and said they are really busy and flat out, found he had forgotten the garlic bread and coke, gave the pizza to me for free and tore off again in his WRX leaving me at the door confused.
There's no guesses to what I'm doing tomorrow...
On a parting note, have a watch of this short clip.

Yay, some time to post.
I didn't get up to much on Friday, went to work, apart from burning things and accidently adding $300 to the till. I also went for a warwalk with my laptop in my backpack and a 5dBi antenna cabletied to it. The 'walk' consisted of my route to work, see here. In that shortish trip I picked up 52 wireless networks, some from schools too, see here and here.
That night, I was at the dance section of the Bendigo Competitions doing lighting. Sound was operated by the dance teachers themselves and damn they can be annoying and whingey. They want everything to be perfect and snap randomly, I went to move a fader on the lighting desk and got snapped at - "Don't touch the light thingy, it's buzzing and you'll blow it up". Another time I went to take a sip from my coke bottle and got blasted with "Don't fiddle during the performance". Like I've said before, some people really need slapping hard.
Today I spent the morning at work and then went orienteering in the afternoon which consisted of sprinting through a very detailed map of a gold mining area. It was part of the Vic squad training weekend which continues tomorrow morning - but I might not go. Also at 6:30 we went to La Porchetta as a group (of 16) for tea, which was really nice.
I got home at 9:15, and now I'm here watching Live8 and chatting to friends.