While driving to work this morning, I was listening to some music through the mp3 CD player in Justine’s car. I was listening to We Are Scientists when the player started skipping; the way it was skipping was quite interesting.

Instead of endlessly skipping a small section like with a broken CD, or jumping back a few seconds like with a scratched record, or even playing garbled sounds for a few seconds like with a damaged mp3, the disc was doing a combination of all three: it would jump backwards and forwards, play a few seconds and jump back, play a second and then jump forward. I let it go for around thirty seconds before I took the disc out of the player.

It was covered in condensation!

I’ve never seen this before, so excuse my apparent excitement in that previous comment. Almost the entire surface of the bottom of the disc was “foggy”, just like the car windows were this morning. Wiping the disc on my jeans while waiting at a red light, I put it back in and it played fine.

I’m not sure this is part of the normal operating environment for a CD player.

We’ve had our two mice for around 5 or 6 months, and for the last 3 or 4 months they’ve been fighting almost every night as male mice do.

Most of the time, it looked as though Whitie was attacking Blackie but since there was never any sign of damage on either mouse, we just attributed to them arguing over a piece of food or just being generally annoyed.

This morning though, there was a lot of noise — though not louder or more violent sounding than usual. Justine got me out of bed to see that there were a few splotches and streams of blood on the glass of their tank. A sure sign that the mice fighting had become escalated. When this happens, mice have to be separated.

We put Blackie into a smaller, unused (clean and without water) fish tank with a few toys and intended to leave him there for the day. I decided that before I went to work though, I’d separate their tank with some chicken wire, since this way they have companionship (mice are very social) but will be unable to fight. It’s a pity really, as every time they were asleep, they always slept together huddled up close and most of the time they seemed to be quite close with one another. Still, if they’re going to fight we can’t chance one dying. This way, they’ll still be in contact.

I just hope that they’re unable to burrow through the wire somehow since they can fit through pretty small gaps. If that’s the case, they may need to be permanently separated in different tanks/cages, and I’d prefer not to do that.

Following on from yesterday’s rambling, I heard on the radio that police were cracking down on “petrol thieves”. Presumably, these are the people who fill up at petrol stations and drive off without paying. That wasn’t, however, my first thought.

My first thought was of people sneaking up to my car while it’s parked at the shopping centre, and siphoning the fuel into a small can he’s got.

Later, when my car is almost empty and I need fuel, I’ll duck down a few dodgy streets to find my local black market petrol dealer. He will tell me the fuel’s not cut, but I’ll know it’s cut with water, or milk, or whatever’s fashionable nowadays. He’ll tell me it’s quality stuff and I won’t be able to find anything like it in this city, and I’ll buy it. I will then rush to my car to get my fix of being able to drive.

All for the bargain-basement price of $20.00 a litre.

So, after our recent little jaunt to see Revenge of the Sith, I got to thinking. I tried to recall the last time we had gone to the cinema to see a film; the last time we’d gone to the cinema was to see The Incredibles, and I think that might have been right near the end of last year (we did see Garden State recently, but that was probably before The Incredibles). More recently, we saw Ferris Bueller at the moonlight cinema, but I dobut that counts.

I then began to wonder why we hadn’t been going to the cinema very often. Well, the main reason is there’s not really a compelling reason to go. Sure, there’s a bunch of films I want to see and I bet a couple of them are even good. It’s expensive to go to the cinema; usually I pay for both Justine and I, and since I like movie popcorn for some reason, I pay for that too. That brings us up to around $40. If we were to do this once a fortnight, we’d be out over a thousand dollars after a year.

And what do you get out of it? Twenty-five minutes of ads and previews (that I’ve usually seen thanks to Dave’s Trailer Page stealing links from apple.com/trailers). Sadly, you never really know if it’s going to be fifteen, twenty or twenty-five, so even though you can be late to a screening, you can’t be that late if you like seeing the whole film.

What else do you get? The pleasure of sitting in front of, behind, and beside selfish idiots. Sitting behind isn’t usually so bad any more, since angles at the cinema are steeper. In front of, though, is usually craptacular, as you have morons shifting in their seats every two minutes because they have the attention span of a retarded monkey. And beside, eesh; at the Revenge of the Sith screening, the girl beside me took off her shoes and put her feet on the seat… great (now might be a good time to link to an appropriate clip from the original trilogy).

The only benefits from seeing a flick at the cinema are the large screen (which can be easily solved nowadays, with a decent LCD/DLP projector) and the crowd. Most of the time, the crowd is a negative, though occasionally it’s a positive. A crowd cheering, or laughing together in unison is sometimes rather enjoyable.

So that’s why rarely go to the cinema any more: the way-too-high prices, and the awful, awful people that go to the cinema and ruin my experience.

A friend at work was recently discussing with me his plans for building a new computer. Many of his questions were of a “will this work with that” nature, to which my answer was almost always “yes”. It’s strange when you’re an IT guy, you are supposed to know about computers, building computers, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, video cameras, cameras, digital cameras, iPods, scanners and almost anything else electronic… but I digress.

My resounding answers of “yes” got me thinking about a time, way back in the past, when building a computer wasn’t simply plugging the purple, green, blue and red connectors into their corresponding spots. Oh no, it was a shambles, full of trial-and-error mistakes which any seasoned computer-builder could make, let alone a beginner like me.

Floppy and IDE cables, for instance (I heard someone refer to one as “ide” [as in the "ides of march"] cable recently too, but I’m again digressing… should stop that) used to be bloody awful to connect. There was no plastic surround, so you could easily connect all but one row. There was no little “notch” thing, so even if you managed to put it in the right place, it was probably the wrong way around. The red strip indicating pin 1 was there, but it was so light it may as well not have been. This meant that you had to check the actual cable for a tiny little “1″, which had to line up with another “1″ on the motherboard.

You would eventually get the drive connector connected and move onto RAM. RAM didn’t have little notches in it either, so it was a common mistake to have it connected the wrong way.

And what about the BIOS? It was all “dip switches” this and “jumper” that. Now, it’s “choose an option through the software”. Well, that was painless. In fact, usually you don’t have to choose anything. It was way too easy to miscalculate the dip switches needed for your CPU and have nothing boot up at all before you had to start over, and check every little connection.

I’m forgetting the CPU. Ah, the CPU. There was no simple little lever to move the lightly-placed CPU in place. Oh no, you had to shove that little blighter in place, hoping that you’d aligned it the right way — there was no cut off corner on the CPu, so you had to guess the correct alignment — and not bend any pins in the process. If you had been paying attention, then the thermal paste (no pre-attached pads, thank you) was in proper contact with the heat sink. If not, well, there goes your nice new CPU come power-up time (actually, that’s the case now, but it used to be a lot easier).

The sliced fingers. There were no rolled edges on the cases, no rounded ones either. It was sharp and pointy all the way. You could always tell a computer tech who’d recently built a machine, because their fingers were sliced every which way with tiny little nicks and cuts.

There are probably lots of other pitfalls I’ve forgotten to mention, but these are the ones I remember most… least? fondly. It seems everyone who built computers around this time (whether for fun or profit) has a story about that one, horrible disaster of a machine they put together. Ahh, the memories… and this is just the inside of a computer!

It might look like I haven’t been posting much since I haven’t posted for over a week, but this is the sixth post this month, which means I’ve been posting (on average) once every four days. Actually, that’s pretty bad anyway, since I’m aiming for at least once a day (ha!). So, let’s quickly go over the last week:

A new IT guy — Lesly — started last Monday with me in Melbourne. Thrilling. Wednesday and Thursday I attended an overnight work seminar thing which was totally underwhelming. I’ve been playing with software, such as ProShow Gold to turn a bunch of so-so photos into a semi-interesting slideshow with music; it’s all automated (if you want it to be) which is nice I suppose. I also spent a great deal of time with Adobe Premiere making a few slideshow, though it’s a lot more involved/complex (but you do get better results than ProShow).

Since Optus’ “download-all-you-want-between-2-and-8-am” thing is still going, I’ve been trying to get as much TV as I can in that time. Since Chris graciously gave us That 70’s Show and Scrubs episodes from the beginning to a month ago, we’ve been watching a lot of those. As well we’ve been watching Black Books (I have all of the episodes), Arrested Development (on Trav’s suggestion, I wonder where Jason Bateman has been all this time), Lost (keeps getting more interesting), Stargate Atlantis (now I just need to get all of the original SG-1 series, since I never bothered with it), The Thin Blue Line (mid-90s Rowan Atkinson/Ben Elton comedy), Joey (I have no idea why I find this so funny, since I never really got into Friends), The Prisoner (interesting 60s TV series). All this hardly leaves time to watch our cable TV!

Enough rambling for now, I’ll try to post something interesting later toda… this week. I’ll try not to make it about Firefox or my Xbox either, but I can’t promise anything!

With Christmas gone for another year, I can safely say this was one of the easiest and most relaxed I’ve had for ages.

Christmas Day started off not at the crack of dawn, but at 9:30ish — i.e. when we finally decided to roll out of bed — which is when the presents began. Shortly after, I received a call from mum — who is now doing quite well after her extremely serious operation — in the middle of the early-morning present delivery. A few hours later, when we could be bothered, we went off to Diane’s (Justine’s mum) place for lunch. Lunch was fine — no traditional turkey though I couldn’t care less — and Justine was the lightning-fast distributer of Christmas cheer/gifts. The kids enjoyed playing with the sticky wall clingy things that Justine gave them; they got other presents, sure, but they didn’t care since they were sticky wall clingy things.

Around dinner time we got off our arses and went to Dad’s place. The mountains of uneaten food largely stayed that way though we did manage to have a few small bits and pieces. Much talking and watching of television ensued — not too Christmassy, watching TV, but we can be thankful we weren’t forced to play charades or some such.

Lunchtime on Boxing Day was spent at Justine’s “little nana’s” (the one mentioned here house and dinner was spent back at our house with a traditional Christmas fea… no, wait, it was a barbecue. Probably nicer anyway since it was me cooking.

Presents of note for me:

• The aforementioned Simpsons sericel, which I won’t see until February
• Evan Williams Single Barrel Bourbon 1994 vintage, put into barrel on the 23rd of July, 1994 — in barrel 211
• A piece of paper with a monetary value attached (commonly called a “gift voucher”); redeemable at JB Hi-Fi stores
• About 4-5kg of lollies/chocolate from various members of Justine’s family; for some reason she told them I wanted lollies for Christmas

Note: This post was back-dated.