School is consuming me. Completely. Gah. The teachers and the parents and the government have this really neat way of making you feel like you are a complete failure at life if you’re not getting an ENTER score of 100. * Basically, you study. And if you don’t study, you can get to do things that you can have a chance at enjoying, but even those are ruined by this constant feeling of guilt for not studying.

Lately I’m finding that all the maths work I’m doing is slowly burning me out. I used to be quite a proficient programmer. Even though my language of choice, VB6, was on its way out of popular use last time I was using it (2005), I could still do some pretty good things with the language. I even dabbled in .NET, which led me to winning first prize in the state-wide VITTA / Microsoft Programming Excellence Awards in 2005. However, since about then, I seriously haven’t sat down and written another app. My skills have slowly crumbled away. While I was busy trying to do well in Year 11 and 12, VB6 practically vanished from existence. VB.NET evolved into VB2005 which is a really nice language for beginners now. Now, I’m about at a point where I don’t really remember how to do anything in VB anymore. By the time I’ve finished school  I think I’ll sit down and learn Ruby or PHP or Python from scratch, and maybe learn some WxWidgets for some cross-platform GUI action.

Most of my efforts have been directed towards Year 12 Specialist Maths. My efforts are futile to say the least. See, there is this concept in maths of Calculus, where you look at rates of change. It sounds like interesting, useful stuff, but I’ve completely lost my respect for it lately. I never used to dislike maths before I knew Calculus. But now, for the first time, things aren’t working for me, and it’s pissing me off terribly. I used to be excellent at maths. Well, excellent enough to be pretty much at the top of my classes from grade 1 until the start of Year 12. ** From the start of Year 12, my test grades plunged. A lot. WTF.

The interesting thing is, I’m doing a lot better in Monash first-year uni maths than I am in Specialist. I passed the first semester of Monash with a high-distinction. I passed Specialist Maths as well, but if the tests we did were counted, I wouldn’t have. You would expect university-level courses to be more difficult than Year 12 courses, right? Monash is harder, there are more concepts to know and they go more in-depth. Then how am I screwing up Specialist so badly when I’m doing so well in Monash, while Monash has the same concepts but extended further? How the hell is that supposed to work?

Anyway, enough rambling about how my life was ruined by maths … I saw The Simpsons Movie last night. It was pretty awesome. There were some very funny scenes, including one of Bart naked (yes, you see it.). I won’t talk too much about the plot, so I don’t spoil the movie for you, but a whole summary is on Wikipedia if you want to ruin the experience. Anyhow, while it might not be a completely-excellent movie (many of your favourite characters only have very short appearances in the film), and it doesn’t seem like it was worked on for the 16 years or whatever, it is still very entertaining and worth watching. I’ll give it four out of five geeky stars.

Another thing I did in the last three weeks is reformat my laptop. Goodbye Windows Vista, it has been not-very-nice knowing you. I had to get rid of it because Vista totally screwed itself. Networking randomly stopped working, no matter what I did if I booted in any mode other than Safe Mode then I had no wireless networking. Plus it bluescreened a lot in its last week of running. It’s kinda odd because it didn’t bluescreen until the last week that I used it. Anyway, I’m back on Windows XP, and it’s being nice to me. It certainly feels good to be back.  However, I made the mistake of making my system partition 15gb, which doesn’t go well with a 2GB hibernation file and a 2GB pagefile. I moved my pagefile, but due to limitations in the Windows OS, you can’t move your hibernation file. Gah. Oh well. I’ve got all my favourite apps installed, including my copy of Office 2007. I’m now using Outlook and OneNote to organise my life, and I’m loving it all the way. There is no equivalent to Outlook, not even Gmail is as good at managing everything. Thunderbird? Forget it, it’s more like Outlook Express.

My desktop is also looking super-sweet thanks to a new theme I found. Office 2007 has a new, distinctive look. The problem is, none of your other apps look as nice. Well, now that has been fixed by the excellent andymorum of DeviantArt. He has created a perfect Office 2007 visual style to add to his impressive repertoire of themes (Check out System5 and PxlPlus especially, they are awesome!). I highly recommend downloading one of his themes. Note that you will need the UxTheme Patch to use themes which aren’t made by Microsoft.

If you made it this far through the blog post, congratulations, you’re either bored or are genuinely interested. Probably bored. I’ll try and blog more frequently, with more short posts … time-permitting ….

–Ben
Now Listening To: John Lennon – Working Class Hero.

* – Note: an ENTER score is a percentage of people who you are ranked higher than. It is impossible to obtain an ENTER score of 100, no matter how you try. It might be possible for Chuck Norris though.
** – Excluding grade 2, but that’s a different blog post.

Eighty six megabytes for LAN DRIVERS?! This is unacceptable. Software cannot have bloated that much over the years. All it is, is a tiny little piece of software that talks between the Windows kernel and the network card. Back in the good old Windows 95 days, a LAN driver was perhaps a few KILOBYTES. Yet this download is 86mb? Wtf?

So what can explain this? Well, it appears that Intel are bundling LAN drivers for every motherboard they make into the one package. That would be great if I were building my own unattended Windows install CD. But I’m not, I’m just installing onto one machine!

Now I’ve got to wait about half an hour for these LAN drivers to download before I kickstart my awesome autoinstaller script. I’ve got this batch file on my server that installs about 30 of the best programs at once, which is certainly a timesaver. It’s a bit like Automatix for Linux, except this is for Windows. Combined with Autopatcher, and your favourite Office apps, then you’ve got a nice desktop setup in about 45 minutes. That is, of course, excluding the download time for these drivers .

–Ben

For instance, I have a shiny new server here. By “shiny new” I mean Pentium 3 800MHz. It’s going to be my little digital media hub at my house. Once I buy 4x 320gb hard disks and a SATA controller for it, I’ll have a pretty nice rig to throw away into the closet to use as a storage server.

Anyway, I looked in my server today to check the feasability of mounting four drives. Firstly I found that there are only three drive bays in the drive cage. That’s okay, there’s an empty 5.25″ bay to hijack.

However, the second thing was slightly more annoying. Instead of providing holes to screw disks into place like practically all desktops, the manufacturers of this server have gone for requiring drive-cage-specific drive rails to be attached to the sides of each drive before the drives will sit properly. This isn’t too uncommon in servers. Unfortunately there were only one set of these drive rails, so therefore I could only mount one drive in there.

Oh well, no problem I thought. As a resourceful geek, I went straight to the spare parts division of the OEM’s website, found the part number of the drive rails, and added it to my online shopping cart. Then looked at the price: (click to see a larger picture)

Right.

So that’s $76.54 for two pieces of blue plastic and four screws? Let me show you exactly what we’re talking about here:

Yes, it really is just two pieces of blue plastic and four screws. Yet it’s worth nearly $80?

Good thing there’s eBay, where these rails are selling for as low as about $3.95 a set. Those prices sound a little more realistic.

–Ben

Anyway, I’m going on holiday to Western Australia for a week, so being the dutiful student I am, I thought I would collect the work I would otherwise be missing. However, after being given all this work, I’m now realising it’s a crapload. So let’s iterate through it:

Mathematics (both methods and specialist) : 2x Assignments, Work on Probability, Long Division of Polynomials and Surds, preparation for tests as soon as I get back
English : Preperation for text-response (essay) as soon as I get back
Physics : Questions/work on nuclear fission
IT Systems : Preperation for SAC task, network maps using Visio
Media : Summaries of American Beauty and Psycho plots, summaries of key scenes from Psycho (x3), and preparation for a SAC task.

Okay, so in total that’s 7 assessment tasks which I must finish while I’m away, and after all that, I come back to do two tests, two essays and a Visio network diagram. Geh, I probably couldn’t have chosen a worse week to go away, but it will be worth it. Western Australia is fun.

–Ben