Generally Specific

I read somewhere that if you want to make your blog popular you must have a specific topic in mind and not be too general. So I've done some introspection and decided that my topic will be anything and everything. I'm not going to let any internet hot shot tell me how to run my blog. If I want to talk about clowns I will. If I want to talk about STD's I sure as hell will. Speaking of STD's, let's talk about herpes.

I actually have herpes, but NOT of the STD nature. There are two kinds of herpes, Herpes 1 and Herpes 2. Ocular Herpes is a special type of facial Herpes that is caused by Herpes 1, the non-STD. And it sucks. My one friend started talking about how she had a fly fly into her eye. Well after pitying her for a bit I told her that a fly is nothing really. Because when you have ocular herpes, you can't even open your eye for three days.
I had to lie in bed with my curtains closed for two days, on the third day my curtains were opened and felt like someone was holding a blowtorch to my iris. I tried to go on my computer after the 5th day or so and I was blinded by Google.
So I told her to get Herpes on her eye first then we'll talk, then again, I don't wish Herpes on anyone, ocular or not.
After we saw the ophthalmologist (Greek for Destroyer of Eyes), who stuck something in my eye to prove it had no feeling then vigorously stuck something in my other eye to prove it had feeling, I was prescribed some eye-drops and a white icky substance that I had to rub onto my eye, which is madness. I can't even look at a pale ray of light and here I must open my eye and stick something into it? Medicine seems to be slightly backwards. Well, it was that or blindness, so I weighed up the pros and cons and with hesitation I put this stuff in. It didn't hurt or anything, it just was a very strange mushy feeling.
The best part of this was that this all happened during my mid year exams. After a few phone calls I didn't have to write geography and some other subjects and would just get assessed marks, which was fantastic. Then I only had to go to school to write the last few, but I went to school only for the 2 hours of the exam, instead of a full school day.
Still, knowing that I have this dormant virus in my eye doesn't seem to outweigh the fact I didn't have to write geography, as much as I hate it.

So there, that was what I wanted to write about. Take that, advice man!
Since I'm going away these holidays I won't be blogging for a while, probably for a good two weeks at least, where I can think of more random stuff... that's mine... and whatever I want.

Procrastination is next to Cleanliness

Some people clean their rooms, houses, garden, whatever to just not get around to doing the task at hand. I just don't do it. I know I have to study for accounting, but not now. There's still 9 good hours in the day where I can do that, so I'll just wait a while, relax, update my blog, the usual.

Recently I just received my computer back from the technical guys who, after 3 weeks, finally fixed what was wrong.
I first noticed something was wrong long ago when, while playing Neverwinter Nights 2, polygons decided to start drawing themselves everywhere.
So in a clever fashion I opened up the PC and decided to bash around. Everything looked fine so I went to my next most credible resource, the internet.
I googled "gfx prob NWN2 weird shape thingies geforce 7900gt need 1337 help". After narrowing my keywords slightly I found a sight telling me about the wonders of keeping your card cool.
I downloaded a nVidia utility that would tell me how hot my card was.
IT WAS HOT! Anyway, I told you all this earlier. Eventually I did get a cooler and it dropped nicely down to around 50 degrees celsius.

But this didn't solve my problem as about 2 months ago Warcraft III, a game made ages before NWN or Crysis or any others that used near the intense graphics that I believed overheated my card, started flickering between the picture on screen and black.
This was very worrying and eventually I was left with a completely frozen screen and all I could hear was Matthew Bellamy singing from windows media player in the background.
So I restarted my PC and ran my nVidia utility, with it taking logs of the temperature. I opened up Warcraft and it didn't get past the main menu before it was frozen.
Rebooting and opening the log I saw that there was no abnormal temperature. Heading off to the kitchen, I found the screwdriver.
When I had opened the case, inspected the card, sighed, and saw nothing wrong I put the card back in, closed the case and switched on my PC's power.
Nothing.
The screen was black and only the PC was whirring. The disk drives opened, but it didn't get further than that.

I decided the graphics card had exploded or something and decided I needed a new one. After a few phone calls I had a GeForce 8600GTS waiting to be delivered.
A good 12 days later it came. Plugging it in and pressing the power button, nothing happened.
This was really annoying me so I gave up and sent it in the professionals, the same ones that took 12 days to get a card. Another good few days and I had my PC back, with a new motherboard, and formatted. Why they had to format the hard disk I don't know, but at least I had my PC back.

And after all this I have even less of a desire to study. Life's good....

Nearing the bright light...

It's the end of the tunnel!
Or rather, an oncoming train.
Exams are nearly over, I just need to get through Maths and Accounting and Afrikaans Setwork and I'll be A for 'Away'... or if I was unlucky B for 'Better next time' or really unlucky with C for 'Hahahaha'.

Anyway, regardless of mark I'll be going away these holidays to the Kruger National Park. The largest game reserve in South Africa. Where I'll be getting in touch with my photographic side and seeing if I can snap any nice photos.
In the mean time, I have completed The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar!!!.



And while sitting through the last hour of an easy Afrikaans language exam I came up with Time Traveling Monks, which you can see here.
I'll be updating it sporadically at best, with school and holidays and all that. But maybe I'll get some time in on the 8 hour trip up to Kruger.
And that's all. Nothing really major happening in life. Exams slows everything down. Ah, how wonderful.

The Rusty Machete of Anti-Grammar

*casts resurrect on Rawr-Zebra*
"I live once more!" -- Mal'Ganis (Warcraft 3)

And so does this blog, he said to the roaring applause from all his fans.
*tumble weed goes by*
Right, well let's cultivate some readers.

So there I was, minding my own business, after I had just written an article for the school's newspaper thing. When I get a response from a friend I just sent it to for proof reading. She said Haha, awesome. I love it, and then said, That's it. I'm writing a blog.
And with that she drew me into to reviving this one.

So, onto The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar!!!

While procrastinating instead of writing this (already 2 weeks late) article, I was hurting my thumb and sending my airtime balance into the red. Most of you who can relate to this, know about “text speak”. It is thought to have originally started with the fact that there is a 160 character limit, well with my network anyway, in the text messages and with the desire to say as much as possible, people started to hack away at the English language with The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar. This invented the use of Shorten My Sentences, more commonly known as SMS. People would replace ate with 8 , for example I am l8 (late) , or I h8 (hate) machetes .

This carried through most of the alphabet as “for” became “4”, “the” became “da” and my personal favourite butchering being “cya” (see you).

Of course I am not blameless at all. Who wants to pay the price for two messages when you could just cut off a few unsuspecting words and half your costs?

N E wai, this dialect has spread amongst the teenage populace and can be seen written where there isn’t even a word limit.

However, another, arguably more skilful use of characters to replace letters, is 1337 speak. What is one-three-three-seven speak? Well it’s not numbers at all. Each number represents a letter. So you actually read it leet speak. It was developed by internet gamers who didn’t have a character limit, but rather had to send messages quickly or risk losing their base to the enemy, a terrible thought.

Leet is short for elite, as it was first used as an adjective for gamers self-proclaiming their awesomeness at shooting each other. The most basic use is substituting letters with symbols, such as @14n71c (Atlantic) or 4/\/\4z1n9 (amazing). One person’s interpretation of a symbol can differ from another’s however.

Nevertheless, there are some standard acronyms that are in the language; arguably the most well known being lol. LOL stands for laughing out loud and basically represents laughter in text form. Intentional misspelling of words seems to make someone more leet . Common ones are teh (the) and joo (you) and rawr (roar). One that could be considered as a misspelling is pwn (er, pawn?). Presumably when some hot shot was typing so fast to protect his base his finger slipped while we was typing own (which is leet for dominate, superior etc., i.e. “I owned him”) and hit the P key by mistake. This caught on quickly with his buddies and so word spread that own got pwned .

Another saying is roxxorz my soxxorz / boxxorz (rocks my socks/boxers). This probably has nothing at all to do with the state of your underwear but is generally used to show great satisfaction with something. noob / n00b / newb is the term applied to a newbie or just someone who has little to no skill at the game at all. The greatest form of owning takes place when a noob , for instance, kills a really high level player. This roxxorz many people’s soxxorz and sends lol's all round. Normally the veteran can shrug it off and say, "n00b got a lucky shot" and then the other old wisened sages (with RPG's) nod in agreement.

However, in most cases in life we don’t have a 160 limit on all that we write. So just write it out in full and don’t cut it down. Kkthxbai!

Arithmeticphobia (The fear of 1 + 1 equalling 2)

If you noticed the dates of my blog entries, they started from 1 day apart, to 2, to 4. So in theory I should be waiting til the 22nd to post. This is another reason why maths is pointless and should be dropped from the syllabus..... for ever.... everywhere.

And in other news: School is going along as usual. Maths is going great. Grrr. Also involving school. Some friends of mine just came back from a Cycle Tour to raise money for kids suffering from cancer. After much fanfare of their arrival, another non cycling friend, and myself, took the liberty of telling them they had maths to catch up (the evil never ends, eh?). After Cycling some 2300 kilometres, I'm sure the last thing you want to hear is that you have maths... then again, the last thing you ever want to hear ever is that there is maths homework to be done.

And now for something not maths related, but I'm sure if you tried you'd find something related to maths in it, but then I'd have to kill you, because you just ruined a perfectly good story. So, I'm writing a story, yay! So far I have about 4000 words, and that translates to 8 A4 pages. M says it's better than J K Rowling. If it is then chances are I'll need to think of a sequel. If it isn't, M will make me think of a sequel (I have one guaranteed fan in M, hehe). Hmm, I believe I have just forseen my own doom. If there are 4000 words in 8 pages how many words in a page? Well, 500? Well... this isn't good at all. Farewell. *Graeme has committed Seppuku due to the fact he has brought dishonour to his blog*

3gb is enough for anyone!

So my hair is now short. Yay for school rules...

Give it another 5 weeks or so and it will be back to its length that makes me really good looking, like Derek Zoolander :

Hmmm, that was a good movie.
Back to school on the 16th... on the bright side that means that I'll be out of it sooner... I hope.

Recently we got a friendly reminder from Telkom, our ISP, that we had almost used up all our cap. now if you aren't familiar with the spawn of satan that is a bandwidth cap, then let me explain.
In sunny South Africa we have one telecommunications company, Telkom, affectionately nicknamed Hellkom, Telscum, Monopolydotcom and many others. So we have our internet plan with them and all the other ISP's basically have to use Hellkom lines so they set their prices at so and so rand and the minimum for a 512kb/s line, just the line, is about R320 which is about US$47 per month. Now if you add in an extra R200 (US$30) for a 3gb cap you get a lot of money. Or rather, you pay a lot of money.

And, from what I hear, you get uncapped 5mb/s connections for even cheaper. "But what is this cap?" I hear you who have been unscathed by the Hellkom menace. Well, we are only allowed to download (and upload) a combined total of 3gb per month.

So lets say you're a gamer. Most games differ but let's say it's a game, or combination of such, that uses 30mb per hour. So 4 weekends of gaming gives you about 48 hours (5 for Saturdays and Sundays and 2 for the Fridays). 48 x 30 = 1440mb worth of gaming. So that is effectively half your cap. Now games come with their associated content, such as maps, patches, and all that. So let's round it off to about 1700mb for gaming. Your remaining bandwidth is now 1,3gb. Well that's not so bad, is it? Ah, but did we count general surfing?

Now this may depend on what you have open, and quantity, but the average web page is about 130kb. So lets say you go to 200 pages a day, a very rough estimate, that equals 2,6mb a day,. Times 30 gives you 78mb. Not much, eh? So that's 1,2gb left. Wow, Telkom isn't looking so bad after all. Oh wait, we forgot the miscellaneous downloads! Mp3's, pictures, and some other fancy application or other. There's always something new to download. So let's put downloads to a meagre 200mb per month. 1 gb left? Wow, that's a lot!

Ah, but what about the family multiplier? So we have 4 members in our family that use the internet. None of them game as much as I do, that would be quite a sight indeed hehe, but they might even surf more or download more. So is 3gb enough? Well, we find it is just exactly. But you have to control yourself and now that we have a webcam I think it's gonna shoot through the roof. Hey, it already has. Yay for monopolies.

In Contrast

I was right. I really need to work on my Unreal Tournament skills. Although when you're having yourself blown to bits every corner it is somewhat gratifying when you end third last in a game's ranking, as opposed to the expected solid last.

Also been playing Crysis recently. It's a fun game, although somewhat easy. Maybe I should've started on Hard mode... or Delta, the hardest difficulty because the Koreans speak Korean. Big shock there. Only problem is I have to play it on such a low graphics setting that my eyes bleed. This is because my cooling in my PC isn't working properly or some such. The graphics card is reaching 120 degree Celsius temperatures, which is about 40 too many. So my very technical solution is to buy a fan or some such and stick it in my case. Hopefully that will do some good.

Anyways, I was recently at a friend's house and he just got Blackadder on DVD. Which is exactly like Blackadder on VHS, except obviously better quality and "graphical menus". You know that it hasn't got that much when they advertise their menus. So we were watching an episode from Blackadder the Third, which is where Hugh Laurie is the Prince Regent, and the penny only dropped when I saw his name in the credits. Then I thought, "Isn't Hugh Laurie House in House, the TV series?" This was kind of shocking as he is two completely different characters.

1) The Prince Regent


2) House


Except imagine him more cynical... and evil, and generally cool.
I looked quickly on IMDB and found that he has had a wide range of acting jobs. From Stuart Little, to Flight of the Phoenix. But the contrast that is Prince Regent George and Dr House was one that truly got me saying, "Wait, that's the same guy?".

In other contrasting news, a friend of mine called me cute which is weird because A) she's typically sarcastic about that kind of stuff B) hardly says anything like that at all and C) was almost completely out of the blue! And the worst part of it is that she lives so far away and none of the local girls seem to ever compliment me about that. Maybe she knows she's safe that far away, heh. Anyways, time to go see if I can rank 4th last!

I has online goodness!

After much fiddling with the HTML, which is a generally bad idea for me as I have little to no clue what's going on, I finally manage to make the page more Zebra-esque!! Altering Dan Cederholm's Tic Tac design, and dodging copyright lawyers, I have made a mess of the page and added a nice bluey/grey colour scheme. Very Zebra-esque indeed.

My aunt and uncle came over from up north and just a few hours ago asked me for something to connect to their laptop for their digital camera's memory card. So a few phone calls later and we're off to the shops to buy some USB Card Reader for them. In the process I get waylaid by the games section and pick up a copy of Unreal Tournament 3. I was a big fan of 2004 but only really LAN'ed that with my friends. But now I have my UT3 copy I'll be having the daylights blown out of me in a few short minutes! Woohoo!!

And in other news Muse are coming to South Africa, which is something I really really would like to see but am already going on a school trip to Europe. Bit of bad timing I guess, but I'm sure I could go catch Muse somewhere else in the world. You only go to school once, thank goodness!

Singapore Stockholm Syndrome

Welcome to The Roaring Zebra

My word that sounds like a pub...

This is where I will share my ravings and stuff. Mostly it will have what happened in the week, so therefore will probably be very empty. Anyways, let's get on with what the title suggests:

For those who don't know, Stockholm Syndrome is a condition where someone who has been taken hostage might come to terms with their captor. Like actually liking the person who has put them into danger. Wiki it. So what does this confusing condition have to do with Singapura? Well.... not much actually. This past December our family went to New Zealand for holiday. We flew via Singapore Airlines. The problem with flying from South Africa to New Zealand is that it is 20 hours of pain in the air. This is probably because we save money by not flying business class which is about triple or so for extra leg room. Although you really want that leg room after 11 hours in the air.

So now you have this situation. You are stuck on a plane for 11 hours, essentially trapped in the meaning you can't go anywhere (ironic since you are very much so going somewhere). So who are your captors? Non other than the Singapore Airlines Air Hostesses. The Demi-Goddesses of the skies (that could be the Syndrome talking though...). Well there is no denying that they are definitely good looking women, but when you're mixing in Stockholm Syndrome with the people who give you food, well, it's a euphoric feeling. And despite the numb legs, lack of sleep, general are-we-there-yet-ness, you are sad to leave the plane, not knowing when you may ever see a Singapore Airlines attendant again. Of course this is all Stockholm Syndrome and you are quickly infuriated when you hop on the next 10 hour flight.

So, let's see how regularly I update this blog... or how soon I burn out, hehe.