Sorry I haven’t been at my computer as much as I’ve wanted to for the last few days. I’ve been studying up a bit for VCE and Monash and everything else, which I really don’t want to do. But, it looks like I have to.

Hopefully you’ve all had excellent easters (notice how I skilfully avoided the “eggsellent’ pun that plagues so much literature that appears around this time of year ). Mine was pretty good, I didn’t do much except decapitate bunnies. Chocolate bunnies of course.

There isn’t too much to say really about the last few days, except I’ve gotten a bit more furniture for my room, mainly a hutch. I didn’t know what a hutch was before I went and bought one; it’s the technical term for shelving that goes on top of a desk. Here’s my hutch in action:

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Unfortunately my hutch makes my priorities obvious, it looks like I’m going to spend more time doing work this year than ever before. Nnnooooo! On the floor to the left is my Athlon XP machine, which runs with all the speed of a turtle. I can’t quite work it out, it got a virus on it a year ago which reduced its speed to close to nothing, so I reformatted it with a nice clean copy of Genuine Windows XP Pro *cough*, yet after being freshly formatted it’s still very slow, nowhere near the speed that the machine originally felt like. Meh, I’m still thinking about it, but there’s no rush because I’m not even really using it much anymore. The Dell’s two cores seem to do nearly everything I want.

If you look closely at the LCD in the picture though you’ll notice it’s my desk again, and again, and again… I decided it would be fun to put a bit of recursion into my life. Mwaha!

Speaking of hardware, my friend Matt is going to order a MacBook Pro tomorrow. I’m going to hear about this for the next four years. Matt is, how should I put this, an uber Apple evangelist. An evangelist is someone who preaches how good something is to other people. I’ll be constantly reminded of the MacBook Pro’s aluminimum casing, backlit keyboard, built-in iSight, and Mac OS X. Many negative comparisons will be made between the MacBook Pro and my Dell with its plastic casing, not-backlit keyboard, lack of built-in camera, and XP Media Centre. Care has been taken to make sure that the MacBook Pro has a faster processor, better graphics and better build quality than my Dell. However, I’ve still got the upper hand in only one crucial way: screen real estate. The 15.4″ MacBook Pro has 1440×900 pixels, while the Dell’s 15.4″ UltraSharp LCD has 1680×1050. That’s an extra four hundred thousand pixels!

In other news, two shows you MUST torrent now (oh, I mean, watch on TV locally in 15 months time!) …. the new episodes of South Park, and the new episodes of The Chaser’s War On Everything. Both are instant classic shows, but the latest episodes have been just that slightly bit more excellent. I laughed very hard at the recent South Park episode that parodied the TV show 24, the “someone snuck a snuke up your snatch” thing was hilarious. It’s great to see on the South Park Studios site that the team that makes 24 sent  them a real snuke (suitcase nuke) as a present. They didn’t sneak it up anyone’s snatch though.

Here’s something excellent that happened today: guess what finally came in the mail, not it wasn’t a Sports Illustrated Football Phone. Thanks to Amazon, I’ve now got my hands on two classic pieces of literature from the God of hacking: Kevin Mitnick.

The titles say it all. The Art Of Deception is a book about social engineering and getting your way by exploiting the weakest link in all security systems: people. The Art Of Intrusion has real stories about hacking, and countermeasures to avoid certain types of attacks happening. Excellent reading!

Anyway, my apologies if this post has been as boring as a Steve Jobs keynote, but I hadn’t blogged for a while.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 1:03 am and is filed under Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.