Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

Recently, I've decided to upgrade my old Squier Strat for a 7-string Ibanez 7321 . The strat is about 4 years old, so decided to give it a clean, which included a complete restring. Now, a bit more background - I'm an avid Guitar Hero player, quite good, but can't really bring myself to play it often enough to be among the top league of players. Plus, it's not really very popular here in Aus, so while I've won beer and an IPod from T, I doubt i'd be able to earn much more. It's still fun though, so I figured I'd use the opportunity to learn a new skill - ambidexterity. You see, there's this option to play 'lefty-flipped' = everything reversed, where you strum with your left hand, and fret with your right. I'd never noticed until I tried, how hard it was at first. You see, while it was easy to think what you should do, muscle memory inevitable took over. When playing normally, you always fret (left-hand) slightly before strumming (right-...

So, happy September everyone! The following is the usage stats of my site for August, each bar representing how much data was downloaded from it per day by visitors: The lowest horizontal (i.e. about day 1's total) is roughly 80Mb/day, which I used to be happy to hit - that translated into about 50-75 listens per day on mp3 sites. Then it kinda slowed down, and I thought I was in for a slow month...then August 24 happened, and BOOM. I mean, some rise was to be expected due to the end of the Olympics, especially as my listeners mostly seem to come via a chinese-language site, but still - almost 250Mb/day. Strangely, the # listens doesn't seem to gave grown much, people are just listening to songs for longer it seems. I've also had a number of odd referrers (= sites people get to mine from) include a few spam, one that looks like a ringtone site, and another apparently from ninemsn :S Maybe it was after the 20th = Pegasi's first gig, but either way, hopefully it'll ke...

Ever look back on yourself five years ago and think how silly you were back then? Whether it's a memory of screwing up a question at a quiz night, or finding a guitar song easy that I remember having trouble with, or looking back at old forum posts thinking "uhh...I actually said that? What a fool!", it's amazing to think of the changes over the last five years. And even more scary, wondering whether, five years (and probably 4 blog posts) from now, I'll think the same thing looking back '08. If so, I'll be one odd fellow in '13. Anyhow, onto non-me topic: Time. I'm not sure whether I've written it here before, but it is still my idea that, as we are all still here, if time travel were possible, it'd only be used by socities who can utilise it safely without any paradoxical activities. This also means that they don't travel to any societites for which this is not the case - including us. And as it seems to me we're a long way from ...

Kudos to anyone who got the Led Zeppelin reference in the title. Anyway, this is a semi-rant over something that has started to bother me recently, but looking back I realise it's actually been happening for a while, just has increased over the last while so is more noticible. You see, verbal communication (i.e. speaking) is great for getting whatever is in your head into someone else's, for sharing your thoughts with others. Thus it intrigues me whenever people say something vocally, yet then act in a way which completely contradicts their sentiments. As they say, actions speak louder than words, and I tend to trust body language/actions as how someone truly feels, moreso than what they're saying, for this exact reason. Is it truly that hard to say what you mean, to mean what you say? The first question from this is: Is the contradiction intentional? Or are people just so unaware of themselves that they don't realise they don't agree with what they're saying? ...

Recently , an early painting by Monet was sold for $80 million, not bad for something that was bought in 1971 for $320,000 and hasn't been seen much since. The worth apparently comes from it being an example of what he'd later work on, so the moral of the story seems to be: If you think you're going to become famous, don't throw anything out... Anyway, thinking about art and walking through uni, I noticed Magritte had come to Adelaide: (for those who don't get the reference, check out The Treachery of Images ) Otherwise, no new music due to exams, and skiing for 2 weeks soon, but afterwards I'll start some predictions posts - and maybe, due to being very un-impressed with what is playing on the radio these days, actually do the song-in-a-day/week project to see what comes out of it.

First up, I recently found out that my second-last blog entry 'Beans' did rather well in the contest it was written for, in fact coming in the top 10 ! So many thanks to Bodie for helping with the eloquence, and to all the folks running the NetBeans contest. This is only a short entry to let readers know that I've managed to get myself a job at a little-known website company who have an office in Sydney. Which means moving at the start of next year, and making the most of Adelaide until then (hopefully I'll be able to come back on some weekends too). Speaking of which, my band should soon have a name, and once a permanent drummer is found, the next step is finding gigs (probably some time after ski-trip in the mid-year break) so I'll keep you posted. Oooh, and the most recent TCO just finished, congrats to the winners and JD on his 4th place (competing in style wearing sunglasses). Until next time, adios!

I'm starting to really love the walk home at night - so peaceful, so scenic, I'd strongly recommend it, you're welcome to come along some time but the most creativity comes from doing it alone while tuning out the rest of the world. On the way home today, the result was this, influenced by My Chemical Romance's Black Parade : To those who stand alone tonight - beaten, broken, unseen by the eyes of others, with unheard voice projected from unappreciated lips; undervalued, overlooked yet still running the gauntlet - Know that we're standing here with you, beaten together, broken together, united by this humble existance. We'll carry on. In other news, due to 88Mb on the last day, plus new recordings , padster.gyronet.org managed to serve 1 Gb last month. As I write this, it is 3 hours into gyronet's March, and the old 'Final Goodbye' mp3 has had 39 hits already, and the new 'less ordinary' is on 17. Kinda makes me wish I could play full time on...

Amazing news in from Microsoft: That's right, a P2P chat application with NO code written by the user at all. I was struck by two thoughts - (a) Is Microsoft just telling a big fib, and (b) is it a good thing that P2P apps can be written with no code? Having recently downloaded the NetBeans 6.1 Beta IDE to help with some Java GUI, I decided to test this out...so channeling the reviewing style of Jeremy Clarkson and simile generation of Zero Punctuation , welcome to my first ever IDE roadtest: Can NetBeans create a code-less P2P app? Armed with only NetBeans 6.1 Beta, a little plastic ball of mouse in my right hand I can start this java experiment ‐ while my left hand is free to go off and make itself some coffee, play golf with Donald Trump, or really do whatever it wants now that it's not required to write any code. I foresee it could soon become quite the socialite. The first step is upgrading my old NetBeans 6.0 to the new 6.1 version. Unfortunately, 'upgrade' he...

Random update.... My indoor team The Blues (now Team Judas) just won our division indoor grand final, in sudden death extra time :) Twas much fun, and now we have 570ml glass steins :) Anyway, I shall have an update soon for the net-beans blogging contest , but until then, here's some awards: Maths lecture quote of the week - split between: "Let a and b be in A" "F is algebraically closed if F is algebraically closed over F" "It shouldn't surprise you that the number 2 features prominently in this, as there are circles happening" F1 commentary quote of the week: "You can see the tyre mark there on the top of the wing" Randomly overheard quote of the week: "So that's when I decided to never again wear a backless dress cut that low" SMS of the week: "Hey Pat, do you have Andrew's number? My phone fell into a toilet" Reaction of the week: " aaaaaaaahahahahahaa LOOK hehehehe IT'S LEGS hahahahahahahaha ARE ...

First post for '08 - before rant, quick summary: Music / Reading = going well, Work/Coding = not so fun, but earning enough to take a long break soon :D Uni's looking like it'll be good. Anyhow, I'm up to book VI in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and just attended a (very awesome) Dream Theater concert, so enjoying the creativity in this world when I noticed something odd. At work, I was looking at how to add multi-language support into an installer (as you do), so googled " I18N Setup Project ". Here's a summary of what I found: 1) A thread on a forum eggheadcafe by Norman Diamond: "My C# code is I18N'ed by appropriately naming and editing .resx files. At execution time, it works. ...(snip)", with a response by "Johannes Passing" and a final comment by Norman again. 2) A thread on google groups with the same question by Norman, answered on a different page 3) A thread on microsoft.com from a discussion in 'microsoft....