After a long, grueling eighteen months, Justine has finally finished the last exam in her course!

So, let me be the first to post a congratulatory note on my website. Just think of all the free time you’ll suddenly have! I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say you’ve performed admirably; everyone who’s tasted your awesome creations has enjoyed them immensely and they always look as good as they taste.

So, congratulations!

Often when you ask Justine how things are going, you’ll get a “good” without much else.

Well, she’s just let me know that results of her second assignment. The first assignment, handed in about five weeks ago, scored an ‘A’. One handed in a couple of weeks ago has just been returned with a mark. It was a an ‘A+’!

Keep up the good work!

On Saturday, I finally caved in and agreed that Justine really needs a printer this year for school. I have had no need for a printer for around the last six years and things in the world of printers have changed quite a bit.

We ended up at OfficeWorks in the torrential rain (so that was going to be our last stop) in front of a small wall of printers. We ended up getting an Epson Stylus C67, mostly because it was under a hundred bucks (excluding paper, USB cable, and all the other crap you need) and has four separate print cartridges (CMYK) which may or may not end up being a good thing. Probably good.

I also bought a 50 pack of Canon glossy photo paper to play with, since the printer has 70,653,324dpi resolution or something. The printer supposedly prints at a not-particularly-speedy 17 pages per minute but print out a 6×4 photo with a lot of strong colours, and you’ll be waiting over 5 minutes. Nice one!

Speaking of the photos, the colour reproduction is alright, as is the sharpness. However, the “depth” of the colour reproduction is not there. Imagine looking at a CRT then looking at a washed out LCD… that’s the feeling I get.

For the price though, I’m not complaining, as Justine got a printer for school and we both got an average photo printer.

Today is Justine’s first “real” day of school at William Angliss.

After finishing high school, Justine bummed around for a few years working here or there as many of you know. Patisserie is the sort of thing that Justine has wanted to do for quite a while so it’s good to see her finally actually getting out there and starting the course. It’s really happening!

Please join me in wishing Justine the best of luck this year.

We’ve been waiting since November patiently and semi-patiently to see whether Justine will be offered a place in a Certificate IV in Patisserie. And at 7:30 this evening, along with around thirty other people at the Pinewood newsagent, we found out our future.

Justine was accepted.

Firstly, this means that Justine will be working less (dependant on the course requirements) so we’ll have less money. Not a big deal I suppose, we should be able to live modestly during that time. I am hoping that due to her existing commercial experience, Justine will be able to get a recognition of prior learning for a number of the modules.

Secondly, this could mean big things in the realm of me eating cake. And that’s very important.

Very important.

As E3 draws to a close, so do the soppy memories relayed from my keyboard. We were actually talking about this one the other day, it was the catalyst for the last few posts so why not include it here?

Back at high school, in years 11 and 12 (1995 and 1996) we had as much control over the computer systems as we needed. The administrator account — admin — password was batman. I don’t remember how we found it out, though I do recall looking over one of our teacher’s shoulders as he typed it; not sure if that was after we already knew it though. At one point, mid-year, they changed the admin account’s password. Pity though, that instead of renaming the administrator account to admin, they simply copied it. This meant that instead of using admin, we simply used administrator with the good ol’ batman password. The password for the Unix machine’s root account at Chisholm was toucan, if you’re interested. I definitely know I found this one using the same look-over-the-shoulder method. I initially thought it was topgun since the teacher typed it rather fast, but figured it out after a short while. A good lesson to make your passwords complicated and not real words! But I digress.

So what did we do with the system now that we had full control? Why, we installed (and played) games! In year 12, we played (for almost the entire year) Duke Nukem 3D (I expect the sequel will be played by my kids when they’re in year 12). Since the systems were running some sort of Novell Thin Client with Windows 3.11, all we had to do was to install a game in a directory once, and it was available to all!

Eventually, the teachers cottoned on to this, and started deleting the games. No matter, we starting using our favourite compression tool at the time — ARJ to compress the games as an archive. We would name the games things like dn3d.dll or win.dll and “hide” (i.e. move) them in the Windows installation directory. Then, we created batch files similarly obscured which extracted them to a directory so we could recover them when they were deleted.

But it didn’t stop there, since we didn’t want just anyone playing games, myself and another student wrote two similar programs in Turbo Pascal; these programs had a hard-coded password (that we’d change and recompile every few days/weeks) which had to be entered to execute a renamed .exe file. Of course, you could just rename the .exe and run it but we never told more than a few people about this.

Obviously we “beat” at least one of the teachers, because eventually he just let us play which ever games we wanted, even during class. The most popular games were Duke Nukem 3D (as previously mentioned) and Stunts. I remember at one point the Stunts password being schumacher, which was great, because even when people knew it they couldn’t spell it! Later in the year the shareware version of Quake was released; luckily the computers were Pentiums (I believe they were the 100MHz ones) so they could run it, unlike my home PC of the time.

As we have since found out, the teachers had no idea about our obscured games, even the next year! Stephan’s younger brother, Simon, was told the “secrets” of the games on the school computers, and proceeded to continue our legacy.

That’s enough nerdy gaming memories for now. I have a lot more I’m sure I could tell, but I’m sure I’ve bored you all enough this week. It was fun for me, though!

Even though it’s often quite busy where I work, I don’t expect to see people I haven’t seen for a long time. Working in the city, it happened every now and then simply because that’s where a lot of people go (whether it’s work or play). I don’t expect to see people I know simply because most of them who did go to university (and there’s not that many from high school would have likely finished and gone on to other work by now.

Anyway, rambling aside, I saw Brett… something-or-other who I know from high school. He’s now working as a security guard with our on-campus security firm so I expect I’ll see him around the place. Interestingly, he seemed to recognise me before I recognised him.

It’s interesting because I don’t consider myself to look very much like what I did in high school (except, obviously, for things like my face); he looked rather like what I remembered. Problem is, it took a while for me to remember from where I actually knew him. I almost reverted to the old, “Hey… you!” failsafe which is always fun; haven’t had to use that one for a while now.