I’ve applied a few site updates over the course of the day. There’ll be more over the next couple of days, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please comment on this post

I’ve recently become aware of an increase in noise on Jackson St. Perhaps it wasnt until I lost my hearing through an eardrum exploding, and then regaining my hearing, and then losing it and regaining it, and then losing it again… The point is I’ve come to cherish the sense of hearing and I have to say – the amount of boy racers and trucks clogging up Jackson St unnecessarily and making a racket while they’re at it is just plain infuriating.

Once we were sitting at Murphy’s Law, enjoying a nice brunch and a beer, and a stock truck came past. A F*CKING STOCK TRUCK! What business does a stock truck have going down Jackson St? And boy racers – I’m all for them having a hobby, what I’m not for is them cruising up and down Jackson St making a racket, impressing nobody, and just adding to the congestion. They’re more than welcome to have their fast and the furious wannabe culture, but they can go and have it elsewhere. When will people learn that Jackson St is NOT an arterial route?

I think that Jackson St should be closed to heavy traffic except for Bus traffic, and exceptions have to be licenced by the council.

Oh, look at that, a truck with no trailer just went past. Is it dropping goods off to a business? No. Then why isn’t it on The Esplanade?

I should really get myself one of these and collect some data

Today at work my right ear, the one that has been problematic in the last couple of months, started hurting again.

Right now it hurts to chew and the ear canal discharged a lot of soft wax and a bit of blood. I’m guessing the BDO didn’t help, either way, an entire side of my head is not feeling too good

update: Last night the pain was just too much, neurofen was making no difference at all so I came up to the LV (Levin) and got into a stash of codeine. Even codeine wasnt enough, and it only took the edge off.

Now I’m on DHC Continus, Ciprofloxacin and Kenacomb, with wax ear sealant to reduce the amount of noise entering my ear

I recently put together a new workstation, it consists of the following hardware:

CASE: A really nice Lian Li
PSU: Silverstone 400W (atx2 compat, reviews well, priced excellently)
MOBO: Asus M2NPV-VM
CPU: AM2 Athlon64 X2 3800+
RAM: 2gigs of Corsair Value Select

And a bunch of drives and a DVDRW moved over from my outgoing workstation. And DesktopBSD 1.6 RC1 arrived just in time, it was almost too good to be true.

And it was.

For some reason the workstation kept crashing. I suspected perhaps a conflict of onboard gear, which would be farfetched seeing as I anal retentively disable anything in the BIOS that I’m not using (why dish out resources?), but I disabled the onboard audio and the onboard NIC, and that seemed to help, but still it crashed. I then turned to the memory, a whole day of memtest86+ proved that my memory subsystem is fine, so it had to be elsewhere. DBSD supported all the other hardware that was installed, so it wasn’t software… Then I started checking for hot spots – CPU HSF was fine, Northbridge HSF was a little hot, but not the end of the world, and then I touched the Southbridge. I no longer have prints on that finger.

The Southbridge was insanely hot to the touch, and as it’s at the core of the audio and NIC – ergo the slight improvement when those devices were disabled – it all made sense. I put on a couple of ramsinks I had lying around and it’s been great since.

I currently have an Intel Pro 10/100 card installed, a generic 5.1 soundcard (DBSD doesn’t support the onboard HDA sound yet, though it is possible to get it working), and a Geforce 6200 as the onboard refuses to behave with the FreeBSD nvidia driver. Kind of defies the point of getting all that onboard stuff huh? Once I get a slightly better heatsink onto the Southbridge, I’ll re-enable the NIC and have a crack at getting the onboard audio working.

ok, my BDO report: I started out with The Larry Normans on the green stage who were ok, then mucked around perving for a bit, hitting the Boiler Room for the North Shore Pony club, I thought they were choice but their song transitions were a bit abrupt IMHO, otherwise they were a great lead up to Minuit who started off with some technical difficulty (ie No mic) but wound up cranking out a great set. I then got a bit of Sinate, who were a bit boring, and later observed Trivium who were a ho-hum rip of Metallica with a bit of wannabe Mike Patton vocal layering – on paper it’s a great combo, in practicality they were missing a bit of shine.

Then off to the back of the south stand to get drunk and sunburnt with some mates I’d bumped into, My Chemical Romance got out and to their credit they were regularly telling the emos to back up and give everyone some room, apart from that they were pretty uninspiring. The anti-emo establishment was strong, with a lot of shirts loudly proclaiming things like “Kill an emo, die a hero”, this provided scores of entertainment. We then moved to the beergardens enjoying overpriced beer and extreme UV levels, and maybe some other stuff…

When Scribe came on, I sensed that the set would be truely awful and inspired some mates to relocate to where we could get a better view of both the orange and blue stages, to say that Scribe was a stadium emptier is to understate. His set was “yoyo wiggidy welcome to 2004, yo!” with a few shoddy covers of other people’s stuff. His new tracks were ok, but the emphasis on what he thought was tried and true, and too much “yo yo P Monay in da hizouse!” did not go down well with a crowd who were enjoying rock and waiting for more rock. In short, Scribe would have been better served on one of the smaller stages like the Green stage, or the Boost Mobile stage amongst his g-funk moron followers

Then the big three happened – The Killers finally worked the crowd over, something that hadn’t happened since My Chemical Romance inspired ten thousand emos to write emo haikus about their dark souls. And what a great effort it was by The Killers as a leadup to Welsh Radiohead-replacements Muse who made a pitch perfect set, the only gripes with them were sound problems that had affected all the other bands all day, and the last song in their set was, in my opinion, a bit too low key as a build up to Tool.

I personally reckon that every so often a couple of bands could have conspired to do a handover of sorts – eg Muse could be rocking out and as they like to add bits to their songs, they could start playing some Tool riffs, then Tool themselves takes over on the next stage over. North Shore Pony Club and Minuit did this quite well in comparison to the ~20 minutes of silence between bands on the blue and orange stages…

Tool themselves had no sound problems, but that’s probably because they had the volume cranked up to 150% (ie my ears were ringing) and had a competent sound tech, I personally found their gig underwhelming and escaped to grab a hot dog. The laser show was cool, and keeping the idiot bogans out of my way while I retreated to the Boiler Room was handy.

Shapeshifter went off. There’s not much more that I can say about that – they just plain.fucking.rocked. Getting some bump and grind from random hotties on the dance floor was cool too.

In amongst all of this I managed to catch glimpses of Blindspott (great), Evermore (dandy), Peaches (overrated), and Lilly Allen (choice!)

All in all, not the best day of my life, but money well spent. One pix of hot arse chicks and one youtubed video of hilarious drugged dancer guy coming up later today…

I just want to share with the world that I love Chloe. She’s everything that blah de blah blah chick flick featuring Ben Stiller as me ensues from here on.

This post will remain until she goes out on a date with me (ha! as if!) or until she posts me some job details (more likely!)

Come on CJ, cough up the details!

I’m rapt because I have 5 days away from my hellhole job. Off north to Auckland I’ll be travelling, to go to the BDO. I’ll be there primarily for Muse and Shapeshifter, but I’ll check out some other bands too (already seen Tool)

Hopefully I don’t get death by snoo snoo, just a little snoo snoo thanks Auckland!

http://sheldonbrown.com/

That is all.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the office politics, the dramas, the demanding clients, the pushover manglement. When I first started in my current job, it was great – a company full of bright, friendly, intelligent and inspiring people. After the takeover it has slowly but surely been squashed into a dilbertonian nightmare.

So I’ve had enough, I havent quit, but I’m checking seek.co.nz several times a day and I’m throwing my CV around. I’m also studying hard to get a couple more quals under my belt to make me even more appealing.

Three years, and I’ve achieved very little professional growth.

So if anyone knows of any IT jobs in Wellington, looking for Desktop support or junior admin, or SOHO admin in the 50-55k bracket, please let me know!

The Jackson St Fiesta is happening on Saturday the 10th of February. I just Googled it looking for more information, but alas, nothing. However, Wotzon.com has come through:

http://www.wotzon.com/freelist_event.html?event_id=5012088

The Fiesta is back with a new date for 2007! This fabulous one-day street carnival features a vibrant and eclectic mix of hot music, delicious food, theatre, arts and a great festive atmosphere!

Several stages will feature some of New Zealandâ??s best emerging and established talent including Auckland beatsters OPENSOULS and Wellington dance funk phenomenon the RECLOOSE BAND LIVE!

Check out the European style artistâ??s alley showcasing the works and wares local painters, sculptors, weavers and craftspeople – so keep an eye out for a bargain or even have a go yourself!

Thereâ??s something for everyone, so bring the family down and join in the party!

For enquires contact Verve Consulting Ltd on (04) 499 6909. Listen to ZM & Classic Hits for further information.

For ease of parking we encourage the use of public transport phone Metlink on 801 7000 or visit www.metlink.org.nz for timetable information.

I hope the main stage will be at the intersection of Jackson and Buick like it was last year – me and my mates were able to sit on my balcony and get a good view of Fat Freddy’s Drop