And I can't blame you. I can't even be stuffed updating it most of the time. Life is boring, workdays are long. I did buy rollerblades during the week so that has certainly been a bit of adventure. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to consume vodka then strap wheels to my feet and roll home. This might have worked if it weren't for the significantly large hills along the way. Going up was fine, albeit a bit slow. Down was the exciting part. Having had rollerblades for about 2 days at this point and not rollerblading at all in the last 10 years or so meant that I was a bit fuzzy on the idea of stopping, (i.e. I had no idea). As soon as I started to pick up speed I was totally out of control. I crashed into a dozen fences along the way. The most exciting was when I had totally lost control and there were no fences or space to stop on either side of the path and I was heading for a busy intersection. I reached out and grabbed onto some random sign post and I was going fast enough that both my feet were lifted off the ground as I spun around before landing on my face. On the upside I wasn't hit by a car, but the downside was nearly ripping my arm off. So for the last 2 days I have just been practicing stopping. The next part of my adventure home was to give up trying to stop, and just keep going until I started going uphill again. This worked until I went across a road, and on the ramp thing back up to the footpath on the other side was some non-slip tiles. These sent me veering to the left and towards a water fountain. Just at the last second I managed to regain control or I probably wouldn't be writing this right now. In the end I made it home with just a few scrapes. My blades took significant damage but still work.

What's next? Finishing my new website. I know I have been going on about this for over a year and honestly, I haven't looked at it in months, but I will be finishing it soon because I want to use it. Added to the proposed feature list has been a rich-media module. Designed to integrate video into my posts easily and neatly. After that there might be some exciting watching as I crash into things on rollerblades. The funniest bit being the look on people's faces just before I hit them.

Just joking.

Take it easy!
Maz

Too early to think, who needs to think?:


Early morning mishap:


Tapping in on bad puns:


The pier, (with awesome weird flare due to not having a lens hood):
Note: Flare may not be visible due to being saved as a jpg

I'm getting up tomorrow morning at like 4:30am to try and take some sunrise photos. Bugger me! So this is just a test to see if my site still works so I know if I'll be able to put some photos up here, (in the unlikely event that any are ok to look at).
Fingers crossed.
Maz

Using 802.11n here with D-Link gear. Just thoguht I'd mention it for anyone else who is having the same problem, it only connects at 54mb/s unless you are using WPA or WPA2 as well as AES. It was driving me mad all week until I managed to stumble upon the solution. Nothing online seems to say this (not that I found anyway) so figured I'd put it up.
Hope this helps.
Maz

This weekend, for the first time ever, I bought myself some games to play online. I bought them online using steam and I'll have to admit that the whole process was relatively painless. The biggest issue is that I don't have media for the games now but you download them off the net. At this time I was up at KJ's and using his ADSL1 and downloaded Team Fortress 2 at about 550KB/s from the Internode mirror so didn't take too long. We played that online for a fair chunk of the evening until I went home.

Today, I decide I want to play Counter-Strike so I have to download the last 9% or whatever I hadn't got while I was KJ's. On my nice 'fast' ADSL2 service from Exetel I get 20KB/s. So it took a few hours. Here's the funny bit. It's not just a slow steam mirror. That's as fast as my internet is now apparently. Speed tests from an Exetel mirror get me some fancy godlike speeds of almost 33KB/s! As you could probably guess, popping online and simply playing the game is just too much for my dial-up, (oops. I mean.. really fast ADSL2+) service and I've had to give it away for the weekend.

It's not just rediculously SLOW data either. It's almost getting 50% packet loss too!

This has to be the worst internet connection I have used since living in rural Australia using Telstra dial-up. Ping times on game servers constantly jumps to over 800ms. For this amount of money each month, I could sticky-tape a few dial-up modems together and get better speeds. So I logged a fault with Exetel who email and then ring to tell me that, "A fault has been logged with our supplier for you, as soon as we receive an update we will contact you and inform you on what needs to be done."

No doubt I'll put an update on here as soon as I get fast enough net to download the images on my main page without killing MSN.
Maz