This weekend I have been playing with dodging and burning. Yesterday’s shot had a little bit of dodging and burning done which I hope wasn’t too obvious.

Today’s shot has had a hell of a lot of dodging and (mostly) burning to try and bring out the look of a very complex lighting setup. I did use a spotlight on the bits I wanted lit up as well.

To be honest it’s not a particularly good job and on a bright screen probably looks pretty crap. If you want to ruin it, just have a look at the funny dark and light spots on the microwave on the left.

I’m not certain whether it’s something that is unique to Australia, or whether it’s a popular method of warning other motorists, but it certainly seems Australian — letting others know that the police are around just so we can all get out of a fine.

It is, of course, expected that one will reciprocate when the tables are turned, though I have noticed a lot fewer cars on the road warning of this “menace” (that is, the police) in recent years.

Sure enough, a few hundred metres later, there was a speed camera waiting to catch the unwary drivers (down quite a long hill I might add — not cool).

Gotta love the Aussie “let’s all help each other” culture some times.

Not long after, a few sites stepped up to the plate and tried to become the next SuprNova. I don’t think any have quite achieve the popularity, but one site — Lokitorrent (and shortly after, their mini-site TorrentStop) decided to really shake things up. The admin of the site, “Lowkee”, put up a voluntary donation banner on the site. The banner was asking for money not to run the site, like many do, but for a legal defence fund should the RIAA or MPAA attempt to take down the site.

Noble — and gutsy — intentions, to be sure. The initial request was for $30,000 US with an estimate of around $10,000 a month legal fees. After around eight weeks, users of the site donated over $40,000. Off to a good start, no? A few weeks later, Lowkee put the site up for sale. Members of the site were in an uproar. Lowkee proclaimed that he was “just seeing what the domain is worth”. In other words, he wasn’t planning on selling anything but the domain, and only if the sum was large enough. A bit strange, but fair enough. He also mentioned that should he sell the site, he’d simply pack up and move to another domain. Hey, why not?

Then, on the 10th of Feb (in the US), the site suddenly looked very different. There was a large MPAA notice on the front page stating that the website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures.

Now, to my knowledge, the MPAA does not have authority to take “hijack” domain names. It would seem that there are sinister motives by the site’s former owner. Conspiracy theories have formed pretty quickly, and many are guessing that the money — once destined to help save the site, and all Torrent-dom — has now been used to pay off the MPAA and save the former site administrator’s butt (and probably keep himself a tidy little sum). Additionally, in a press release, the MPAA also states that they have obtained the server logs. This seems to indicate that Lowkee has sold out the “community”, by not only wilfully taking money — which was probably never going to be used for legal fees — but by “naming names” to save his own back.

Poor form.

Since the store turned into the Domino’s chain, however, I don’t mind eating there every now and then. I’d never really looked in detail at their menu until today; the number of surcharge applies type messages on the menu are astounding.

You want a special type of pizza base? Surcharge applies. How about chicken or prawns? Surcharge. What about one of the fancy “maniac” pizzas? Yup, surcharge still applies. Half and half? Still a surcharge. Eating on a public holiday? A surcharge is still applied. The “normal, everyday” pizza price? Surcharge applies if you don’t pick it up. Even the “lunch special” has limits, go outside those limits and you guessed it, surcharge applies.

I’m surprised there’s not a surcharge surcharge. I mean, adding all those extra surcharges is hard work, it surely requires an additional surcharge just for the costs to be added!

The pizza was OK, by the way. Not as good as it was the last couple of times we visited, but still passable (and miles better than Big Daddy’s).

Next up is my Christmas present from Justine. It’s currently being framed at the Silver K Gallery in Armadale. Unfortunately, it won’t be ready for me to gaze upon tomorrow. In fact, since much of the framing industry is closed until three weeks into January, I won’t receive it until the end of that month. Hopefully I’ll my see Christmas present (which I’ve seen once) before February. Eesh. That’s OK though, I’ve seen it, and I know it’s nice anyway.

The thing I’m most disappointed about, though, is Justine’s Christmas present. I ordered the darn thing almost two weeks ago, and it still hasn’t arrived. If you ask me, Strathfield’s online store is pretty bad; to make it worse, their support/customer service is horrible (if you want to talk to them, you need to speak directly to the head office in NSW). I checked with both our local post offices in case it”d slipped through the cracks (after being posted from NSW a week ago, and should have already arrived since it was an “e-Parcel”), and they didn’t have it. I have other presents for Justine but still, I’d like her to receive everything.

Well, will you look at that? Looks like I wrote too soon; Justine’s present has just arrived, by courier! Hopefully she won’t read this post before tomorrow morning! Off to play with my, err, her new toy…

After getting bored of playing with the gigantic G5 screens and the current range of iMacs and generic widescreen laptops, I headed over to the TVs.

This leads us to the title, why the heck do they set them up so badly? The LCD and plasma TVs had HD television inputs, of course, but the colours were all over the shop and half of the TVs don’t even display HD properly. I walked over to some of the rear-projection TVs since they’re more in my price range, and after fiddling with a couple (one of the Sony ones looked particularly nice after I spent a few minutes with it, I shall have to find out more about it) came to realise that not only was the input sent to these HD TVs not a HD input, but it wasn’t widescreen either.

However, the widescreen TVs had been set to “zoom” the image to fill the TV anyway. “Stuff this” I thought, so I went and changed half of them to “normal” or “pillar box” mode. If Megamart isn’t going to pipe proper input into TVs that support it (a few of them support 720p and 1080i, which is better than the majority of LCD/plasmas!) then they sure as hell shouldn’t be showing them like that — it looked awful.

At the desk exchanging my stuff, the five people standing around doing nothing were talking about digital cable TV and other such things. If this interests them, why can’t they even setup the TVs right? Of course, the five people busied themselves when I turned up for help. Eesh.

The machines are sort of dodgy, except for the really expensive (i.e. $500+) ones. Basically, they consist of a big bowl that you put in the freezer, and a churning attachment. Once the big bowl is frozen, you pour the pre-made ice cream mix (that you make yourself, from real ingredients; it’s not a packet mix) into the cold bowl as it’s churning. Even then, the only real difference with the expensive ones is that they have a freezer unit inside them instead of the bowl you put in your freezer.

And since we couldn’t wait until June 9, we decided to make ice cream yesterday. Well, I decided to make ice cream yesterday.

I made some lemon sorbet using some lemons from the tree in our back yard and some strawberry ice cream using strawberries from … the store. The lemon sorbet turned out pretty well, except that it was quite a lot sweeter than we’d anticipated. Next time we’ll use a lot less sugar (1.5 cups in 1 litre). The strawberry ice cream turned out really well though. Perhaps a little too egg-yolky flavoured but otherwise really nice.

Hopefully it will cut down our ice cream costs, which seem to soar into the thousands every year.

Here are a couple of examples of why Internet Explorer is as dodgy as it is.

Here we have a page using transparencies. Internet Explorer simply drops the information, while Mozilla does exactly what it’s told.

Here is another page which shows well why Internet Explorer is so bar behind. Mozilla shows the page properly while Internet Explorer has no idea (try the page in both browsers, and you’ll see what I mean).

The second example page is generally what I tell people is the main reason I switched browsers. After seeing how Internet Explorer simply can’t draw pages it’s supposed to, I decided it was time to give Microsoft the flick.

In yet more Microsoft idiocy, I went to purchase a component video cable for my new Xbox (since it supports progressive-scanning, it must have component cables) and found out that Microsoft completely screwed up the implementation of progressive-scanning into PAL Xboxes.

Basically, because the UK hadn’t fully decided on their HDTV specifications, Microsoft thought it a good idea to drop all support for anything remotely similar. Upon the Xbox release, Australia was being sold the component cable pack but no one could actually use it. In fact, the only way you can get component cables to work are with a completely modded Xbox, software to force it to change to NTSC, and an NTSC-compatible TV. What a gip.

Over the last couple of minutes I’ve been trying to think up some dodgy stuff I’ve done, computing-wise.

One thing I can think up is the time I accidentally clicked “apply to all subdirectories” while on one of our work’s NT4 servers. In this instance, I was applying permissions changes across an entire section of our corporate data drive. This accidental click prevented people from accessing stuff for a few days, while I feverishly restored all files from a backup, exported the permissions to a file and copied those permissions over the current data (which seems to sound a lot easier than it actually was).

I can’t really think of too many more, which is a bit sad. The reason I’m writing this topic though, is to announce my pleasure of “doing a dodgy” yesterday with a hard disk. While trying to backup all important data from this hard disk (so it could be formatted), I managed to flick the jumper (which designates the drive as a master, slave, etc) and couldn’t find it among all the other crap on my desk. There is, by the way, an awful lot of crap on my desk. After about an hour of searching, I decided to try my hand at some dodginess.

I rifled through one of the vans belonging to an electrician who works for us. I found some wire made up of many strands of which I grabbed one. I twisted the strands around two pins and link them together and perform the same function as the jumper.

To my surprise it actually worked. I had expected that it would work, since that’s basically what the jumper does. However, I’d expected some sort of side-effect, like smoke, fire, explosions, sparks or something similarly exciting.

And now I’m pulling keys off a keyboard to see if I can fix that. Given the way that everything here is normally chucked out if it’s not easily fixable, I’m having a bit of fun anyway.