Tuesday this week wasn’t a normal Tuesday. There were no classes, but the whole school was required to go to the Caledonian at Logan Park for Athletics Day. The day pretty much consists of doing athletic events, eating, socialising and sitting in the stands. The day is also an opportunity for the school houses to earn house points.

That is all great but personally, I don’t care about or feel like participating in the sports events, I socialise at school with people and a whole day of it would be too much for me. And eating and sitting all day (doing nothing) is pretty much what I do at home everday, right now for a matter of fact. So again this year like the past 2 years, I have felt no reason to go to this even so I stayed at home.

Anyway, I had a nice relaxing day at home. My mother took a sick day so she was here too. I pretty much did what I normally do, and that is go on the internet. Although I did take my day off to do something more constructive. I finished reading, well listening, to my audiobook that I downloaded from Audible. A also did some light housework and got $10 for it. Finishing an Audiobook  and making $10 or sitting down and hanging around talking to people and doing absolutely nothing, what would you do?

Going to Athletics Day is compulsory and you get a detention if you do not attend. But this year, and the two before it, I have managed to slip through the gaps and have had no punishment. To be honest, as far as they know, I was there. They wouldn’t know if I was there or not. I’m not one of the loud people or the people that get noticed so my absence goes unnoticed. If I did happen to be there, no one would probably notice either.

I’m pretty happy about getting the day off, again, like the other years. I’d always trade a more enjoyable and productive day for a boring and unproductive day. So pretty much I took a sick day when I wasn’t sick, although the ironic thing is the next day, I woke up a little sick with a cold that has been progressing for the rest of the week.  Karma, it gets you doesn’t it?

At the end of January, my friend introduced me to this fun, outdoor treasure hunting game, called Geocaching. The main idea is that you are given a waypoint, and from that waypoint, you either find the geocache or find the GPS co-ordinates to the cache location. A cache generally is a container containing a logbook and items such as toys and nick nacks.

So far, I have found 16 of these geocaches. Each cache varying in size, from a film canister, to a lunchbox and bigger. The locations also vary. Some are just at the side of a road, some are in a park hidden in the bush, others are well into bushland and require you to go in the middle of no where to find a cache. The hiding spots also vary in difficulty, and generally all factors determinethat such as size, terrain and location. A GPS is extremely handy and necessary for most of the caches to help you get to the co-ordinates of the cache.

Yesterday, my friend plus a few other people went to find a cache called “Omega Nutcase,” which is a five star cache. Geocaching is much more fun when you are doing it with friends or other geocachers, also having more than one pair of eyes is always an advantage. My friends came over the night before and brought the other puzzle pieces from the other caches in the series so we could try and figure out the co-ordinates for this cache. We had a general idea where it was located but we jut needed to pinpoint exactly where it is or else we would never find it. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack, literally.

The puzzle was pretty abstract but after 30 or so minutes, he managed to figure out what we were supposed to do, (he had already started doing the puzzle but the solution so far didn’t make sense.) I pretty much did the typing and then we were all sorted. We knew where on the island the cache was located, now it was just a matter of getting there, at the right time. We had to plan when we were going so we could get across to the island and back before the tides came in.

Anyway, yesterday morning at 11am, we left to go out to Warrington Beach. By the time we got there, it was about 11:40am so we quickly made it across the water over to the island. (Google Maps) We had to cross 2 streams of water to get there. The first one was a bit over the knees and the second one was at the knees. There were heaps of snails, cockles (well the shells,) and crabs. Oh, lets not forget all the sandflies, but I was well covered and didn’t get any bites.

When we were on the island, it was now time to venture into the trees and bushes to get to the middle of the island to get to the cache. It took about 20 to 30 minutes to get around the the location of where the cache was. It was a bit hard to use the GPS because it was bouncing everywhere. There could be many reason to that such as the overcast weather, or all the trees in the area. After about an hour of looking and going around in circles (literally,) we thought we had the general area worked out, and it was within 10 to 20 metres from the area where we were.

After looking around the area and climbing a few trees for the next 30 to 40 minutes, we were getting a little tired. We couldn’t stay here for too much longer because the tide would be starting to come in. This was our only opportunity because we would most likely, never come back. We stepped over a fallen tree and my mate looked up a few small trees to find a green ammo tin that was well camouflaged in the tree. We climbed the tree, took a look inside and signed everyone’s names in the logbook. There were only 2 other peoples names in the logbook when we got there.

Now it was time to get out of there and on to the beach. We ran through all the bushes and tree branches onto the beach. Then we ran down the beach to get to the point where we started from, where we left a bag with our belonging in it. When we got there, we had a cup of coke and some jelly beans before making the journey back to where we began. We knew the streams would be higher because we could see the water coming in. The first stream was now half way between out waist and knees. The next one was deep. On me, it was just below my arms, but on the rest of the group, that are a little taller than me, it was a bit past their waists.

When we got back, we were soaking and tried to dry ourselves and our clothes the best we could before making our way back into the city. We were happy that we finally found the cache! We thought we done a good job. To be honest, the best part of the adventure was the nice warm shower at the end. Geocaching is a lot of fun. If you would like to start looking for some caches, you can go to the Geocaching website, and look for caches near you.

This day, 365 days ago to be precises, the date was Monday, the 19th of February 2007. This day marks the day I purchased my very own personal computer, which happened to be a Compaq Presario notebook. 3 weeks before my purchase, Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista hit the retail stores. My laptop had Windows Vista pre-installed, just like eighty to ninety percent of the computers on sale at that point in time. Today, I have used Vista for a whole year.

I instantly fell in love with its shinyness and smoothness. I was extremely happy to be using Vista instead of Windows XP. This was until I was welcomed with a nice bright blue screen, known to all as the Blue Screen of Death. I knew that i would be seeing that screen quite frequently, and when I did, I either welcomed it, or ripped my hair out in frustration. To be honest, a BSoD is so common in Vista, that it is more of a feature of the operating system. Vista wouldn’t be Vista without the occasional death screen.

Luckily, at least once a month, patches and updates arrived via Windows Update. To this date, updating that operating system still scares me. Whenever there is an update, half of the time it fixes problems and makes your computer crash less, while other times it completely breaks everything and you start seeing more of that blue screen. Even if it does make your system more stable, it probably broke a driver or something else wouldn’t work right. On the subject of Windows Update, I do have to point out how much I like that it is a part of the operating system, and not some website you visit when you think about it.

My Vista experience has been a pleasant nightmare. Do I regret being an early adopter of this operation system? No, of course not. I love Windows Vista. It does have its downsides like the regular blue screens and the driver issues and the software issues and all the other issues that I haven’t mentioned because I have forgotten. But there is one upside of this poor little operating system and should be the reason that everyone using a PC should upgrade to Vista, its damn shiny!

A month ago I finally decided to put a few dollars towards upgrading the RAM on my computer from 1GB to 2GB. It was really easy to install. All you do is remove a screw or two and pop out the old RAM and slide in the new RAM. It is as simple as that.

I noticed that performance increase from my laptop after doubling the amount of RAM I have. Programs seem to be much more snappier, to open and to do tasks. Another thing I noticed, which was really odd, was that the time it takes for my computer to go into hibernation is a bit less than before. You would think that it would take longer to hibernate with more RAM.

I am very happy with my RAM and recommend that everyone that doesn’t have 2GB or more of RAM upgrade ASAP, especially if you are using Windows Vista. RAM is cheap anyway and shouldn’t cost you a fortune. You will be much happier with more RAM, just like I am.

A week or so ago, a new bunch of icons were included in one of the nightly Minefield builds. These are more than likely going to be the same, or very similar to the buttons that will be part of Firefox 3.0. They have changed a little, and the first thing you will notice is that they are shiny. The back and forward buttons are closer together and take up less room on the Navigation Toolbar, the drop down arrow buttons have merged into one and feature both previous pages and pages you have went back from, and the refresh button and the cross on the stop button have lost a bit of weight.

The home button has been moved off the Navigation Toolbar and has moved down below to the Bookmarks Toolbar. It also features a shiny new icon. I think it is nice that they have relocated that button because personally, I never use that button. All my homepage tabs open up on startup and I don’t end up closing them, or my last session loads up. Having it down there shows that it is a secondary function and is less important that the forward, back, refresh and stop buttons.

These new spunky icons should be included in Firefox 3 Beta 3 which will be released sometime in the next fortnight.

On Monday, school started again for me. I am now in Year 13, which is my final year. Pretty much this year is for getting University Entrance requirements. My first day subjects were my two favourite ones, Electronics, followed by ICT. All the class consisted of was admin stuff and course outline and such, not a lot of learning. In ICT, there were new computer which were really small, but powerful enough for what they are supposed to be used for, office crap!

The other subjects I do are Statistics, which is a small class and should be pretty smooth except with all the homework given. Geography should be easy. There is one problem, they have stuffed in 26 or so students into a small classroom ideal for 20 students. It is really squashed and you hardly have room to move. I hope they can get us a proper classroom. Then there is Religion Studies, which is compulsory, and I have nothing much to say about this subject. My final subject this year, which I finally had last period of this week is Physics. This is going to be slightly difficult, but the teacher is pretty good and has some new toys and technology for us to try/play with soon.

My week at school has been pretty cruisy, except for the annoying homework. Next week everything shold be normal. I still have a little trouble keeping up with my TV shows and podcasts, but that could be because I have been doing other things. Hopefully I can fit school, homework, internet and media all into my day and have it all done and watched before the weekend so I can have them free for other things, erm… I mean more internet.

SugarSync (formerly known as Hummingbird) is a service from Sharpcast that allows you to sync and access your files and media from anywhere” on different computers, on the web, even on your mobile phone. SugarSync securely backs up all your computers online and synchronizes them automatically so you always have access to your files. Best of all, SugarSync takes care of everything automatically in the background, so you never have to make backups or email files to yourself. Say goodbye to CD burning and emailing files to yourself; say hello to SugarSync.

I have been using SugarSync for a few weeks now. You install a program to your computer and it will automatically backup everything in your user folder, or folders of your choosing. I found it useful to backup a few important folders, but I did find the software to be a little restrictive. First off, you are limited to 1GB (but you get 10GB more for the beta) which is hardly enough space to backup much. You also cannot pick which files not to backup, which means it is all or nothing.

I did have a problem with accidentally deleting a folder that was backing up. What I thought it would do is delete the folder from the backup, but what it really did was delete the folder from my computer. Then after I managed to restore the files, it went and deleted them again. I don’t think it is right to let a piece of backup software do that. That is probably the killing point in this software for me.

If you want to try out this software, the first 7 people to comment below will get an invitation to this service.