Yum9me's Journal! » Life

An Unexplained Absence

yum9me — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 04:03:19 +0000

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.

A Month Of Fatso

yum9me — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:43:49 +0000

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!

It’s A New Year!

yum9me — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:00:06 +0000

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.

It’s Christmas!

yum9me — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:00:16 +0000

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.

Enough Said…

yum9me — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:12:08 +0000

…for now.

The Geocaching Trip

yum9me — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:16:59 +0000

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!

Exam Time

yum9me — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:14:18 +0000

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.)

End Of School, Forever!

yum9me — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:59:11 +0000

Tuesday this week was my last day of high school. It was only a half day, but no worked happened, at least not for me anyway. Just before lunch started, someone had set off a fire alarm and the fire department came. Anyway, in the afternoon we had prizegiving practice which was alright. I knew I was getting a prize at that stage, I just didn’t know what for. After that we got to go home. We would have to return later that night for the real thing.

I went out to dinner with my parents before prizegiving. We went to a small steakhouse. I had Beef Teriyaki which was really good. I would be willing to go back there for a meal. After that we made our way to school for the prizegiving. When I got there, I had a look at the booklet they give to the parents to see what I was getting a prize for. My certificate was for Excellence with Diligence in Statistics and Modelling, Merit with Diligence in Electronics and Diligence in ICT. That wasn’t bad I guess. Another part of the prizegiving was the farewell of the year 13′s. For this, the dean read out our names and what we planned on doing next year and we walked across the stage to get our leavers t-shirts. This was this years school t shirt with all the names of the leavers on the back. That was pretty much the night.

The next day, we returned to school for the leavers mass. This was a mass for the year 13′s as well as the year 12′s. On this day, all the year 13′s wore their leavers tshirts to the mass. As well as the mass, there were also pictures and later on some videos of us year 13′s. That was really interesting to see and watch. That would be the last time we all meet together like that. The next time would be when we return our gear and sign out, which will be the last time most of us will see each other.

So now I am done with school. All I have left to do is the 3 exams I have in a weeks time. After that, it’s off to University next year. Goodbye Kavanagh College, it was nice having you for the past 7 years.

The Lego Bots

yum9me — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 06:55:19 +0000

Our last unit in Electronics at school was Robotics. For this, we got to use the Lego NXT robots and program them to do different things. This was the unit most people were looking forward to because it means we can play with robots, Lego, not learn any theory and it was a very easy standard to achieve. There were many different robots, all built differently, that all did different tasks. Most of these robots did obvious things like Line Following, Object Avoidance, Light Sensing and such.

The one me and my robot partner, Martin decided to do was the Line Following Robot. it seemed like a simple enough one to do and shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After doing the starting paperwork, we then got given one of the Robot Kits. Lucky for us it was already pre-built so we didn’t have to make it from scratch. This allowed us to quickly getting into the adding of sensors and the programming. The annoying thing about the robots was the software used for programming them. It was a flowchart based language which was really annoying, and even painful due to the really slow lab machines. But it wasn’t too long till we hard a nearly working robot. After some minor tweaks in the power levels, we have a fully functioning line following robot.

Because we did that so fast, our Electronics teacher made us an “extension course.” The original course was a curvy lined course, which was pretty simple to achieve, but the advanced course had sharp angles in it, which required different programming techniques and such to get around it. After a bit of fiddling around with code, we couldn’t get anywhere near getting it to work on the new course. In theory, our ideas would work, but in practice, weird things happened. It just never seemed to work. It required some more thinking and different approaches.

After looking at some other robots on YouTube, I came up with the idea of adding a 3rd sensor onto the robot. This still didn’t work, but we did once get it to go around over half of the extension track, but it struggle on some of the angles over 90 degrees. This is when we admitted defeat. Unfortunately when messing around with the new course, we seemed to have lost out curvy lined program that we needed for the assessment. We managed to modify one of the 3 sensor codes to work with the curvy line.

Some of the other cool robots was another pair that made a line following robot. It also went around the curvy line but it hopped around instead of going around more smoothly. My friend Aaron made a light sensing robot which found the darkest place in the room and went there. This worked alright, but it was pretty average. My other friend Morgan made a Collision Avoidance Robot (again,) but this time with the Lego Kit. His seemed to have trouble at times which it strangling itself and hitting into things. Another pair did this same robot except took a different approach. It worked pretty well and looked cool. There was also a completely original robot that another pair made, and it was put on a table and avoided falling off the edge.

Making the robots and programming them was really awesome, and it was really great to see other peoples ideas and robots doing the same, and other tasks. This was definitely the best part of the year because robots a the best! Now all that I have to do is finish the paperwork for the standard so I can get my credits for this unit. I wish I had some spare money lying around so I could get some robots, I love playing with these things!

Files Destroyed!

yum9me — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:44:07 +0000

Over the past few days, I seem to have been struck with a bit of bad luck. I seem to have the worst luck with computers at times, but it is not normally a group of things going bad in the space of a couple of days. This time it has been overwritten files, disappearing files, corrupt files, and closing unsaved files. Where to start..?

First off, in Electronics we are programming our Lego robots. We had been trying many different approaches at trying to tackle a second problem after easily accomplishing the first task. During all this mess, we had left all our programs unsorted in the default directory that the programming software saved to. We were shuffling around with so many versions of code we hadn’t organized this well by keeping the default untiltled-1 filename. Anyway, for some reason our original program for the assessment of the first task went missing, and the closest thing that would work needed a bit of modification. When we went to the computer to get it, it wasn’t right. Somehow, someone else got access to the computer and managed to overwrite our working program. After a lot of hunting for it, I did manage to find a similar, modified version which I has to remodify to get it to work again. This was a huge hassle.

The next morning when I booted up my comptuer and launched Firefox, it didn’t do what it usually does. I was expecting it to launch and load up my 15 or so tabs from last session. But for some reason it just loaded with an empty tab, empty bookmarks toolbar, empty bookmarks and history in fact. All this had gone and all I had was a 6kb bookmarks html file and those bookmark backups Firefox does automatically. I first tried to restore them, but all I got was an error. It seemed like I had lost around 3 years worth of bookmarks. I needed to get them back but i didn’t have time to try then and there. Later on in the afternoon, I tried to see if there was anything that Recuva could find. I had no luck there. I decided to go to Google with my problem but it didn’t help me much. I tried to restore from backup one more time without luck. I decided to Google the error I got and this time I got lucky. It turns out my backups couldn’t restore because the sqlite database was corrupt. After deleting these files from my profile, the restore worked and I was once again left with my huge collection of bookmarks. I didn’t have any of my history, which is disappointing, especially since the Awesome Bar ain’t so awesome without history, but at least I have my bookmarks, which is a huge relief.

But wait, there’s more! I was doing an assessment in ICT at school in spreadsheets, worth 5 credit (ones that will come in handy I my add.) This is the last one of the course and I was zooming through it. I had one more task to do which was a write up with instructions on how to use the spreadsheet I created. After copying a similar task from another assessment and spending a good amount of time changing it to match what I was doing, I acidentally printed the wrong instruction list and closing without saving the new one that I had done. All I was left with was the wrong thing printed and a blank document where the correct copy should have been. Now I had to redo it again, which I did very sloppy because I could’t be bothered spending all that time repeating it again.

All these problems could have been easily prevented, or files resored ithout hassle if I was better organised and had good backups of my work. This would mean I’d have the original code for my robot, I’d have a backup html copy of my Firefox bookmarks, and I’d still have that good instruction document for my assessment. Anyway, everything turned out fine but it was a bit of an inconvenience and a huge shock. There is nothing worse that the feeling of when you lose important data on your computer.