You may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated in a couple of weeks. The reason is because I have found some work which is what I have been doing for the past week. That is also the explanation for my disappearance from the internet during the day time. A lot of you wouldn’t have noticed due to going back to school or being at work or uni or whatever. So that is the reason for the lack of blog updates and why I haven’t been spending as much time on the internet.

It has become much harder to manage time that I am doing things, especially when there are some other things I want to be doing and other responsibilities taking up my time too. I may have to drop half a dozen to a dozen TV shows from my weekly schedule just so I don’t have such a huge backlog of things to watch over the weekend. I have also gotten back into gaming on the Wii after finding some cool games to that make me want to go back and keep playing. I’m sure you will hear more about that on this blog. Not necessarily game reviews or such (unless you want that) but I may mention a few games here and there.

So this blog doesn’t completely die, I have a few blog post in the queue, some completed and some nearly there which will be able to be finished off and posted in a few minutes which will hopefully keep this blog updated over the next little while while I’m working and then when University starts. I do have a handful of other ideas in line for posting here too so really all I need is time and motivation to get some of these things put out there. So that explains where I’ve been, what I am doing and what is happening in terms of this blog.

Before school had finished for the year, I was lucky enough to acquire a promo code for a one month free trial of Fatso. Fatso is basically what Netflix is in the US, except in New Zealand. Fatso allows you to rent DVDs from their website which they deliver in the mail to you instead of you going to the store and picking them up.

You start off by adding movies you want to rent into a queue. They have a large selection of titles, over 22,000 according to the website. Not being a huge movie person, I didn’t find the selection lacking, but more overwhelming for me. I feel that the range is more than adequate for any normal movie loving person. You can view movies by genre or by new release, most popular or any of their other categories. You can also search for a title if you want. This service works best if you have a large queue, and in that queue you have some titles that are not new release. If you only go for new releases, I think you are going to be disappointed with this service.

When you have titles in your queue, Fatso will send you out the number of DVDs according to your plan. For the trail, I had Unlimited with 3 DVD’s at a time. When you are looking at your queue, beside the movies that are out, it will say how high the demand for that title is. This will give you a good indication of how long it could be till you will be able to get that movie. When a disc is available for rent, there is a “Get Now” button which will automatically add the DVD to your dispatch queue ready to be sent out to you. For the new releases, it felt like a race most of the time, which the “Get Now” button only showing up on the hour, and you had to be very fast to get it. Sometimes the service would go down because of the demand, which is very poor on their part. I think they should have a better way of handling New Releases. However I was lucky to get 2 new releases on the day of their release automatically without having to use the “Get Now” feature.

You can see the status of the DVD in your dispatch queue. When the DVD has been sent out, it will say the date that the movie has been sent out to you. The service was really fast with the movie coming the next day, expect for weekends (which i understandable.) When you get the movie you are free to watch it as many times as you like and keep it for as long as you want (well for as long as you are continuing your subscription) and can send it back at your leisure. To send it back, back you just put it in the included envelope which is freepost and put it in any postbox. Simple. During the Christmas season, it did take about a week for it to return to them, although that is to do with the postal service and not Fatso. Although after the Christmas season, it only took 3 days to get there, which is much better. When you sent the movie back, you can go on the site and tell them you have shipped it back and they will then dispatch replacement DVDs, even before the ones you’ve sent have returned. The idea of this is that you’ll get movies while the other ones are still in transit so this will minimize waiting time and give you the best experience form the service.

One last thing I want to mention about the service is it’s movie recommendations. How this works is that when you rate movies on the service, it will go and find movies that people with a similar taste like and give you recommendations of movies they liked. This is sort of how the algorithm works. I found it to be very average, mainly because it kept recommending me TV shows when I just wanted movies. There was no way for me to say I was not interested in television shows so it would stop recommending me them. Maybe if I could have done that, the movie recommendations could have been better. I really needed good recommendations from movies to see, and unfortunately this service failed me there.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to continue my service and needed to cancel it. They make it very easy to do so and even help you out by extending your subscription time so you can watch and send back those movies that you still have lying around your home. 2 weeks is more than generous to give you to return these DVDs. In that amount of time, you can watch them half a dozen times and then send them back on time. They don’t delete your account when you leave them either, meaning you ratings, reviews and queue still remains for whenever you decide you want to come back, or in my case when you can afford it. Kudos to them for making the leaving of the service a great experience. It makes me feel bad for having to leave them in the first place.

Overall, I did love this service and would recommend it to anyone looking for a Netflix service, or anyone who loves renting movies. I think it’s great value for anyone that is more than a casual movies watcher. The postage both ways is fast and you will always have a movie in your hands. If I could afford it, I would have definitely continued my subscription with them. Do give Fatso a try. They have a 2 week free trial which is plenty of time to get a feel for the service and fall in love with it. After that, plans start at $10, although for the Unlimited with 3 DVD’s at a time will cost you only $32. If anyone out there wants to pay for a 1 year subscription to Fatso for me, feel free to!

Well it officially just ticked over to 2009 in New Zealand. I wish my regular readers a Happy New Year! Best of luck for 2009 and lets hope it brings joy to you and your friends. Hopefully this blog can survive one more year longer.

The clock just ticked over to Christmas Day in New Zealand. I wish you a happy Christmas day and hope today is great and you have a good feast and get fat. Also say hello to all your relatives from good old yum9me. Have a great day and enjoy your presents. Sorry about not getting my one, the shipping container fell into the sea and destroyed them all.

See you in a few days after I’ve finished playing with my beauty below.

…for now.

On Saturday morning, my friend Josh and I were up bright and early to hit the road for our first out of town Geocaching trip. This is the first time we have been out of the Dunedin Area together to get Geocaches and we had planned this trip carefully to maximise efficiency of getting a large number of caches, 67 to be exact. There is no point travelling so far and using so much petrol to waste time piddling around. Preparation for this included printing off maps, the cache pages, making labels and uploading GPS data to the GPS receivers.

To start off, about 1/3rd of the caches we planned to getting were on the way up to Oamaru. Unfortunately for us, the first cache on the road we passed before we knew it, so were started off pretty bad, but then we managed to get seven for seven on the next map which rose our spirits again. We did considerably well on the way up there finding half of the ones on the road, missing the other half with a few did not finds but mostly we skipped the rest so we could make out way to the main destination for food and because we would maximise the number of caches we could get in in the same time period.

When we got there, we stopped for food. For some reason, all the fast food places were really full of people, there was some concert thing in a park and the main street was an absolute mess. Lucky for us, we don’t need to be there so after eating, we made our way to the first cache we plan to get in Oamaru. When we were going to our first one, there was a lady walking around there which we though would make it difficult to get to the cache. Lucky for us, her husband was down underneath getting the cache so we were lucky enough to meet a fellow Geocacher.

Next we slowly made out way to the closest caches to the previous one and made our way around. We were cutting it for time so we had to cut all the more difficult multi-caches from our maps. Still as we went around, we again only found about half of the ones we attempted. There are way more caches in Oamaru than you would expect and a lot take a bit of time to get to, and time is something we didn’t have much of. When we realised we only had about an hour left before we should start heading back, we decided to just go for the easy ones to get to and do them and then make our way back home.

Unfortunately for us, we only managed to find about 1/3rd of the ones in Oamaru. We will definitely need to come back here some time to acquire the rest. Although if there is a next time, we won’t be spending a great proportion of our time getting the ones on the road there. Partly because we have already got half of them. Our trip wasn’t as successful as we would have liked with some of the caches no where in site and mostly us running out of time to find the other caches. Our final stats for the day were 27/67 caches. Not too bad although it would have been nice to get them all. Maybe next time our trip will go as well as we planned. Still had a blast roaming around looking for the Geocaches anyway!

Starting from the 15th of November, secondary students from across the country have been sitting NCEA exams. The majority of these exams span over two weeks, which covers most of the students subjects. I myself only had 3 exams this time round, the final time round. I had none on the first week but I had 3 exams the next week on consecutive days. As with my Level 1 and 2 exams, I did no study at all. I know, that is bad and I should have, but everything will work out in the end.

My first exam on that second Monday was Statistics and Modelling. This was the exam I was looking forward to the most. This was also probably my most important exam of the 3 because I put a lot of weight onto getting at least 2 of the papers which will make this my 3rd University Entrance subject. Generally I found the papers in this exams pretty alright. Once of them I found so alright that when I got to the end of the paper, I was wondering where the excellence questions were. It was either an easy paper or I am really good at that topic. I could have done a bit better in the other papers if I had prepared for them better, which I kinda wish I did have now.

My second exams on the Tuesday was Physics. This was the exam I was dreading the most. It is the subject I am worst at out of all the ones I take. I decided at the start of the exam, that I was only going to do the 2 big papers worth 6 credits in the exam. My reasoning behind this was that I already have credits from the waves topic and I don’t really need to sit it again for a better (*cough*) mark. I also didn’t do the atoms paper because it wasn’t worth many credits. Getting either one of the Mechanics or Electricity papers would give me enough subjects to use it as a UE subject. Anyway, I did as much of the papers as I could and I would be lucky to pass one of them, even luckier to pass both.

My last exam was Geography on Wednesday. I didn’t really want to do all the papers here because I hate writing essay type responses. I did the skills paper which was pretty alright. The skills is definitely the thing I most enjoy about Geography (other than the field trips, but we don’t get credits for that. ) I did do one of the written papers which was on natural processes. I answered the questions to the best of my ability with my limited knowledge at the time. Hopefully it was enough to get me a pass at least.

Now I am free from all the testing at this level. I am also unofficially free from secondary school forever. For everyone else who sat exams, or is still sitting exams, I hope you get the grades you deserve. Good luck to you. Now that this is all over, its off to University next year! (I hope.)