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*
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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!
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!
Monday, January 7, 2008
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.
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.
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