The online home of Appleman1234 / Benjamin Southall

Hi everyone,

My current status is a bit of a conundrum. I have been stressed, sick, sore, tired, happy, busy, concerned, GIR-like, distracted, in awe, inspired and then some. I am enjoying my holidays, kind of, although given the amount of work I have to do still, I really couldn’t say that I am enjoying them.

At least the blackberry pudding and the 3 hours sleep I got this afternoon (to cure my headache…) helped my unusual mood. I also found my copy of Railroads Tycoon 2 and after redoing the first campaign and tutorial, and wasting more time playing ET only to be disrespected by idiots. (where did the good Internode servers go, Game Arena just isn’t the same).

I hope to be visiting several people in Toowoomba tomorrow, but we will see how that goes. If this holiday has taught me anything, it is either A. Don’t make plans that circumstances lobotimise or B. Focus is important. (Just because I am feeling miserable and not upto coding / working / studying doesn’t mean that chatting to people, or playing games or chilling online will help my mood. (Although theoretically it should)).

To my ITB712 team, don’t worry that I am behind schedule, I already have mockups of my GUI design and code segments, and have actually gotten a chance to look at your source code for once. It should all be done (to or past Phase 1) close of business friday.

Thanks for the wish to stay in contact email Kristina, if anyone else is interested in staying in contact, then please contact me or I will contact you. (I know I have a large list of people I want to stay in contact with, and a smaller list of people I want to improve my relationship with.)

Now to be brutally honest but not secret revealing (much), Seeing as my taking my soul out of silver box after highschool seemed to be an appropriate but costly decision, I conclude that for the moment I accept who I am (not to say that I wasn’t before) and rejoice in mine me-ness.

Although I will say the social interaction / networking boom that people normally experience when the start Uni was kind of damaged when several key players either quit Uni or deferred. This is the flaw in hierarchical social networks over web or mesh networks, their is no social redundancy, because the majority of social interactions are transmitted via the organisation and glue of a few popular sanguines.

(Hippocratic personality type, also mentioned in Personality Plus book series) (sanguines’ organised, you say, well yeah, they tend to be the sparkiest social butterfly to ever flutter the game that is social interaction in the Massive Multiplayer Real Life Experience (hence forth MMRLE or RL) )

That said Ruben is trying to place some organisation back into things by rerunning forums and IRC on Olympus, and we still have Gunther who maintains a nice little network of EIR players. I am not sure if I should make public my todolist yet, but as aforementioned (yes, this is a rare a occasion I reference a previous blog post), I am looking for good company.

So those people that I am friends with currently, I want to stay friends with and also improve that friendship. This was part of my plan of going to Toowoomba tomorrow, as it was supposed to go last holidays but didn’t get the chance. I am not sure what I am doing for my birthday this year, nothing as big as last year, although I will probably organise a more diverse get together involving Mao, Mafia, and other games card, board, computer and otherwise during the next holiday period.

I also got the regression test done for WinMx under WINE. (which was another thing I was supposed to do last holidays).
I would write more, and I have several post and post ideas in draft form (Thanks Redhatter for the inspiration of draft form) (include some bits and pieces of on software engineering, some of sitcom and other dialogues in my head, and more music and audio recordings) but I need sleep if I want to wake up early tommorow in order to get to Toowoomba on time. (especially because I wanted to stay more then one day, but won’t be now, and I was also considering visiting (Great .. I think)Uncle Rod and Auntie Carol.)

Thanks to Sabrina for the Neopets (adds to the list of online games he will actually consider playing, (unlike WoW)) conversation, and her friend Ash for the translated lyrics of Gaukt songs. The redemption music video was riveting, and it inspired me to see the 30 minut music video which was also awesome.

Shame that torchwood isn’t on still. (Thanks to Chrystle, for the reminder, best of luck with your anatomy study) I need watch more anime, old animation films, Doctor Who and Torchwood, and more Zim probably, as well as writing more wxPython GUI code, C code, x86 assembly ISRs and Matlab code.

This post’s question is What makes you ask the questions you ask ? What makes you seek the answer for them ? Why are you curious ? Is the desire for knowledge a primeval urge ?

Best wishes, best of luck with study, work, fun and such and such, and keep wondering ….

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hey everyone,

I am currently sitting here, cleanly out my laptop’s 100gb hard drive, and updating as much software for my Gentoo as I can since I had to leave the software updates to the weekend as their were several blockers (packages that can’t be installed with other packages), but I believe I have them all sorted out now.

Other current blockages include our toilet which has caused the most grief this weekend. Because it is a septic system it isn’t just as easy as using a caustic or acidic solution like Draino to unblock, and we are currently using an enzyme based solution which may or may not be working and can take upto 12 hours to fully process….

The worst outcome of this is that my Mum has banned toilet paper (She believes this is the solution, I believe it is just avoiding the problem.), and my parents are seriously considering banning internet given my little brother’s online gaming habits (an almost addiction to the game Conqueror Online…).

This combined with numerous other factors promote and encourage me to reevaluate my current situation and to remember my identity and comfort zone, outside that of my family. I currently done really feel at home, either in the City or Peachester, in fact ironically I feel more at home sitting anywhere with decent internet typing or uploading stuff to this site, which now that I think about it isn’t that ironic, ironically. (two levels of irony, how many will cope ?, n levels of irony, how many still cope ?)

I would probably move out on my own if my resources and circumstances allowed me to do so, but unfortunately they currently do not. I also need to reparse and update my todolist to ensure that all the stuff I need to do gets listed and eventually done. When I do move out or possibly before then I am going to have to find my own doctor, lawyer, etc, etc …
(Circle of professionals….)

Today my mother’s sister and her husband visited us as they were over our side of the country (they are from WA), and they were an hour late, which wasn’t that important, other than the fact that Dad wanted to go to the beach early, and Mum had other plans which they then had to change to accommodate an early meeting time 9am, which ended up happening later anyhow. (I don’t normally talk about family much, if my talking about family on this occasion bothers any of the people that read my blog (Wait a second, people other than me, or those that I have told, or Bots actually read my blog ???… If so this is a triumph…)), well you will just have to comment about it in the comments )

Anyways I said to my Aunty and Uncle, with my parents in the car, a small slightly humorous advertisement which I am going to repeat here. 18 YO M N/S N/D Maths/IT Student Seeks FFI (Fast Free Internet) and GC (Good company) along with the occasional shared meal and card game….

I spent most of Wednesday to Friday last week playing Europe in Ruins in the company of Ruben and completing my group MAB422 Maths modelling assignment which was using differential equations to model love. (Thanks JC Sprott for your initial groundwork). If anyone wants a copy of the report, feel free to request one from me ……

The general conclusions were that in order to have a strong relationship with someone whether a positive or negative relationship, the direction of the relationship was determined by romantic or social profile or personality and the strengh of the relationship was determined by the amount of influential interaction .

I intend to exterpolate and interpolate the findings of this report to the majority of my social interactions in general, although the findings of the report weren’t exactly new to me.

I updated to the new STK11xx webcam drivers and they seem to have memory allocation issues so I will have to file a bug relating to that. I also have to get around to doing the regression test for WinMX under Wine, to get the Netrek Cow Client to compile and a valid ebuild, let alone the release of my Wesnoth Maps and the Indonesian translation for Wesnoth and my Gentoo development quiz. I am also going to have to setup all the ACPI buttons, get the wireless LED working, and setup hibernate or suspend…

I found a local (1km down the road) biodynamic blueberry grower, and was able to purchase Chrystle’s birthday present(two blueberry bush / shrub cuttings) for her and give it to her today. The fact that I have a local blueberry grower nearby is awesome, it means decent priced delicious biodynamic blueberries. Hazzaar and Hooray

I am in a gift giving mood and am currently thinking about the wxMozilla code I have to write for my ITB712 (Software Enigeering Studies) group project, the Matlab code I have to write for my MAB220 (Computational Maths 1) assignment and about forms of government and Polybius’ musings on Kyklos.

Chrystle made a very good point , when I was talking to her after dropping off her present, she says whenever I talk to her, I have recently been eating cake or pie or something. This makes me think, who many other people do I talk to that see or hear of my eating other things…

My little brother says I am too loud as he is always asleep when I am quite, imagine the effect you could have on someone if their only exposure to you was that of a particular emotion or behaviour, they would logically stereotype and limit you as someone as only exhibiting that emotion or behaviour. That is social conditioning at its best for you…

I think society needs to start using social conditioning for a positive improvement in the morale and morality of humanity. Then the world would be a better place for all. As a sidenote GIR from Invader Zim is awesome….

This post’s questions are What do you all think my diet consists of ? and What is the gift you most want to receive ? (I am in a gift giving mood) , and What is the gift you most want to give ?

Best wishes and hope your having fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

I am very very busy and probably shouldn’t be writing this post, but I figure I may as well now that I have started.

Anyhow, OPEC is on in Sydney, Austria and despite the city being shutdown and secured in order to avoid protesting and anything else productive, the Team from the Chaser (www.chaser.com.au) still manages to get past two security checkpoints and make the majority of us laugh. Apparently if convicted, they will face 6 months in jail.

What defines humour ? what make funny funny ? I know that my funny isn’t your funny and vice versa. When is something comedy and when is it mere stupidity ? I happen to prefer genuine humour that relies on wordplay,wit, intellect and other such comedic devices, as opposed to some one calling my Mother something, or the flaming paper bag with fecal matter inside on someone’s porch.

Sydney did like look quite desolate in the news, almost like the city in Julians Lennon’ s “Saltwater”. However at least most (least most, best worst, black white, hehe) people in Sydney got a day off. Maybe they should make an OPEC holiday permanent and erect a statue of a motorcade with Juilan Morrow & Chas Licciardello in the middle of Sydney somewhere.

But at least it demonstrates that people have been receiving the subliminal messages of the Spooky Men’s Chorale’s “Vote the Bastards Out” as well as the messages from Penlope Swales’ “Madness,Mines & Mortgages ” (http://www.penelopeswales.com/archive.html) (Yes I am folkie, so shot me….)
(or more specifically The money and the machinery
The greed of the nuclear industry
You’d have to be deaf dumb and crazy
To pit yourself against that
But the ones that do and the only sane ones
Everyone else is mad)

Anyhow I get to vote for the first time this year (which is probably why I am mentioning news and politics), and whilst I am not exactly a fanboy of Kevin 07, the fact that he is offering a faster broadband plan to Australia, and his ability to speak in Mandarin to the Prime Minister of China, make the choice of voting for him, (there are other reasons but I am not going to list them) much better then that of voting for “Howard The Coward”.

I have to send away the form for changing my address to the AEC (not the AEC from Finding Nemo ) and receive the form for my Keypass application. But anyways moving on… Happy Birthday to Jerub, sorry I missed your party. Happy Birthday for Chrystle for next week. and Best wishes to everyone else whose birthdays I have forgotten.

The only problem with the Translink website is their journey finder doesn’t tell you where you have to walk towards only how far, related to this interface problem was the Commonwealth Bank ATM that didn’t give me the option to widthdraw $40 , so I choose $50 and it had no $50 notes, so it gave me a $20, Commonwealth Bank fix your ATMs so there is an option to specify how much a customer wants to withdraw. (See codinghell.com for more interesting software system and design flaws and antiflaws (good hacks))

Anyhow, I am currently very busy with uni projects , assignments and study, I submitted my ITb744 assignment on time on Friday, but it wasn’t 100% finished, and for some reason ld wouldn’t link the assembly object files and C object files. I wish the practicals for ITb744 actually demonstrated the techniques and methods assessed in the assigment. But I suppose I did leave the assignment slightly to the last minute.

(Note to self and possibly to others, you can understand Pointers in 20 minutes, you can understand Structs in 20 minutes, and you can understand dynamic memory allocation in 20 minutes, this doesn’t mean you can write code to dynamically allocate memory for structs of pointers in 40 minutes (especially if the argument to calloc requires multiplication (* for pointer, * for multiplication )))

Anyways the groups I am in have a Design Specification for ITb712 due Wednesday 5pm and a Mathematical Modelling Report due Friday 10am next week, so I better get typing them up instead of this. Other side notes, why doesn’t QTWebKit have Python bindings yet ? and I wonder if I can get wxMozilla working for our project…

I feel great, and not euphoric great, which is unusual for me. The next message in this topic is a quote I said to Gatl (Celia), in response to her MSN message, I hope she gets her ITB003 project in on time for Monday. I got to catch up with Gatl briefly on Friday night (whilst coding in C and Assembly) which was nice. Another thing I just noticed is I was wearing my shirt back to front, this entire day, and that earlier in a MAB281 tutorial, I said I know complex numbers uptofront and backside down. (So this is my new MSN name and quote)

I am going to see a Midsummer Night’s Dream at 4pm, with family (Shakespeare is awesome, I was in Midsummer Night’s Dream play in Grade 5 or 6 in Darwin) . I have been singing more on the way to uni and will probably eventually write down and upload the lyrics and possibly the recordings, but since I don’t have any feedback from the previous song, I am not really sure what people think about it.

I did the new Nerd Test and I reckon it was broken and worse then the previous one. Eventually I will reattempt to make ebuilds for the Netrek packages as a new COW release it out. But shmeh ….

Anyknow I have to get into some form of work , as my thoughts are all organised and some of them are even digitised on this post.

The question for this post is

If something bad happens , why get stuck on it , or let it immobolise you, why not learn from it and move on ?
When you lose a life in a video game? With the next life don’t you normally avoid the obstacle that lost the previous life ? There is no use crying over split milk, or is there ?
Is Laughter the music of the Soul ?

Best wishes, Hang in there and keep living …

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234