Alfreido's Blog

It usually hits you with little warning, little provocation and little effort. The realisation that you are a nerd. Here are 10 tell-tale signs that you are starting to become a nerd:

1. Your girlfriend/boyfriend made you choose between her/him and the computer… and the computer won.
2. You don’t call it pornography… you call it ‘pr0n’.
3. When you start your car in the morning, you wait for 3 beeps and someone to yell ‘Go!’
4. You quote Wikipedia in your English essays.
5. You can only talk to the opposite sex on MSN Messenger, and fumble for words when meeting up IRL.
6. Speaking of IRL, you actually say ‘IRL’ as opposed to ‘in real life’.
7. You create a list of 10 tell-tale signs that you are becoming a nerd (knowing full well you must be a nerd to know of the tell-tale signs)
8. Your idol is someone along the lines of John Carmack or Jimmy Wales. (Notice how I qouted Wikipedia… fark I’m such a nerd :P)
9. Your best joke is: “There’s 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary… and those that don’t.”
10. You feel at home at Harvey Norman Electrical and Computer stores.

Image: A spoon-bending, 1337-5P34K-ing image of the Matrix

Apparently, these days, you can never enjoy a movie that was based on a best-selling book, according those “wise” people who call themselves movie reviewers. You have people like Roger Ebert (pictured right), who probably don’t do anything else but watch movies judging by his figure, saying that YOU, the innocent movie goer who might be scarred for life for watching BAD MOVIEZZ, shouldn’t watch certain movies because they don’t follow the books close enough.

Please, do the world a huge favour and shut those excrementitious orifaces that you people call your mouths.

What has sparked this anger, I hear you ask? Probably the can of Bundaberg Rum sitting right next to me. Oh… and the fact that I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix on the weekend. I must say, although I wasn’t as thoroughly impressed with it as I was with Goblet of Fire, I still enjoyed it immensly. Being the inquisitve person I am though, I logged onto Rotten Tomatoes to see what everyone else said about it. Sure enough, plenty of people were whinging about the movie. It doesn’t follow the book. They cut side-stories. J K Rowling is my hero. It’s the kind of dribble that makes you just shudder at the thought that these people represent our best interests with movies. I have read the book, ableit quickly, but the point is, whilst the movie deviates from the book in some cases, none of the magic (excuse the pun) is lost. Hell, I prefer the streamlined approach of the movie, as some of the details of the book weren’t needed. And by the way… J K Rowling liked the movie. The author of the book liked the movie. That’s saying something.

So, my closing comment is… If you haven’t seen the new Harry Potter movie, go and see it.

Image: A psychically confused Harry Potter from Order of the Phoenix.

Now for some good news for a change :P… I have a new job as a web developer. I am now under the employ of a company called Bam Creative. Be sure to check them out if you want your website done the proper way

Image: A dastardly copyright-infringing image of Bam Creative.

Let’s try out a hypothetical scenario for a second. You are part of the management staff for a very popular and well-respected Internet Service Provider (you can guess which one by looking at the title of this post :P), but a problem has arisen in the last few months. You see, there is a system in place called shaping which, when you go over your download limit, is activated and limits your speed to 64k for the remainder of the billing month. That’s all good. But then there is currently no limit to how much you can download AFTER you have been shaped. So a couple of nerds in front of their computer unable to remove themselves from the computer chair without using a blowtorch to separate the chair from their ass decided that they would download as much as they want after being shaped by setting up their torrents programs to just leech the crap out of everything they can get their hands on, 24/7. Suddenly, the ISP starts realising that they are absorbing the costs of way too much bandwidth and could potentially start losing money. So they need to fix this problem. Now let me ask you a question, you have 3 choices of fixes. What would you do?

1. Raise prices by up to $40 on some plans, to recuperate costs.

2. Invest in some P2P shaping software, to limit download speeds on torrent applications.

3. Fix up the broken implementation of ’shaping’ and have additional punishments for heavy over-users.

Most companies would only implement one of these fixes, preferably one of the bottom 2. Unfortunately, the customers with Internode have been stung by 2, possibly all, of those fixes. They raised prices, added additional punishments for heavy-users and, with the luck us Internode customers are having, will probably invest in P2P shaping.

I tell you what, it’s a real kick in the teeth for most people with Internode, especially me. Whilst I will admit that I download stuff from P2P all the time, I rarely ever go over my limit. In fact out of the 24 months I’ve been with Internode, I’m pretty sure I was shaped twice. But unfortunately, my plan went up $20, from $79.95 a month (affordable) to $99.95 a month (dream on). Because of some shit-head kids who wanted to download, say, 100 gigs of pr0n every night, everyone connected to Internode has to suffer.

I would say it’s a bit of a disaster for Internode, as Whirlpool has housed a lot of angry customers who are saying Internode have lost the plot. Now I am not going to leave Internode because their service is one of the best. But I’m seriously pissed that I have to drop back to a lower plan, and STILL pay the same bloody price I was paying before.

Damn leechers.

I recently went out and bought a new headset, something fancy and with some decent noise-cancellation because the amount of noise in my house rivals that of a plane taking off. I happened to notice that Austin Computers was having a sale for the Zalman 5.1 headsets and I thought, why not, I’ve never had surround sound headphones before, let’s give them a try.

After having an extensive test for them for a couple of days, I’ve been left with one word: Meh.
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Haven’t updated this blog in a while because I haven’t had a lot to say. Well… that’s still the case, but I need to update this anyway. TAFE is shitting me at the moment, I can’t find even the slightest amount of effort to do any of the work, and we only have a couple of weeks left. I should soldier on because it’s the last bit of learning I will have to do for a long time, but it’s just so hard

Watched all the available episodes of Heroes last week. I can’t say I was particularly drawn into the show when I saw the first episode all those months back on TV, but after watching it again with a more open mind, it has now become one of my favourite TV shows. I love how well written each episode is, and enjoyed each episode, causing me to not be able to wake up in the mornings because I wanted to watch ‘just one more episode’ the previous night. If you don’t watch or like the show, I urge you to look at it with an open mind, and you’ll enjoy every minute of it.

My other “favourite” show however, 24, has seemed to take a nose-dive into the “predictable plotlines and annoying characters” territory. The current series started off absolutely excellent, one of the best introduction to a series ever, and then by about episode 6 or 7, the excitement and clever story just withered away. I am almost convinced not to watch any more series after this, as I feel they have killed the series, I mean… how many bad days can one man have? I’m pretty sure I knew how this day would end by around episode 13, it’s that predictable.

Well there, I’ve updated it. See you all in 3 months.

The media in Australia at the moment is useful for two things:
- Giving you biased, twisted “truths” of current events
and
- Blowing things WAY out of proportion.

For example, the AFL season is starting, and already the media train is spitting out all kinds of rumors and hearsays. Ben Cousins, former captain of the West Coast Eagles, has recently been caught drinking and drugging it up in Perth, sending the media into a frenzy. As soon as Ben was caught, the media brought up rumors about other players involving in the same life-style. Now while I don’t condone the act of taking drugs (but drinking, go for it :D), these guys are just trying to have a good time, and when the media follows these guys, the moment they slip up, the media has the big scoop in the next mornings’ paper. They blow the story way out of proportion too. Going back to the Ben Cousins example, he got a whole page dedicated to him in the Monday newspaper. Yet the battles going on in the Middle East, where countless people are dying, got half a page.

Now let me re-state that paragraph in bold and centered to emphasize how ridiculous the media is:

The mind boggles.

Gotta love 40-degree-plus temperatures. Went down to the beach yesterday arvo, will probably go down again this afternoon. Drove down and my car nearly overheated while trying to get down there. Speaking of my car, it’s giving me teh shits as of late. The right-side speaker has popped so whenever there is a hint of bass, it starts crackling. Which is REALLY good news when you play a lot of Pendulum or Nine Inch Nails on your radio :(. One of the wheels on the right also has a stuffed brake pad so that squeeks for a little while before the car warms. AND a lot of smoke is billowing out of the exhaust when I start the car, which says that the oil rings are going out.

All in all, around about $3000+ worth of repairs to do. That’s twice the amount I paid for the bloody thing. Lesson here kids is: Don’t buy a bloody car.

Right, now to something a bit more light-hearted, for the 3 or so people who actually view my blog, here’s a preview of the new Gamestah site:
Image removed, it’s too old

If you see the current site, you should see that the new site is much of an improvement. If you want to leave any comments about it, feel free, although I will probably be told off for this because its meant to be secret.