Nintendo A Capella



The most difficult SMB mod EVER! (and the most patient player)

I am officially scarred for life...

I've heard some pretty grizzly stories in my time, both my sister and dad are doctors who've worked in emergency departments. Honestly nothing comes close to the story I heard yesterday morning from a co-worker.

It made me sick then, it makes me sick now. No horror movie writer could ever conceive of something as gruesome, and certainly no one would be willing to produce the special effects...I've tried and failed to re-tell the story, the words just won't come out. It is far worse than death for the poor guy involved.

The accident happened at a mining town, but honestly it could have happened anywhere - it was a cycling accident involving only the rider and a non-flat surface!

Scary scary stuff...

Wheee something challenging at work, we get this request for an in process automated measurement system to replace a manual stop work and tape measure affair. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The specifications are a little rough though. They want to know a distance to within +/- 0.5mm (they don't really need this level of accuracy for what they're doing but don't like to make things easy on us - I'd like to suggest the tape measure wasn't up to this but haven't the heart to imply the operator's claims are so flakey), so anyway better yet it requires measuring at least two other distances to +/- 0.25mm to achieve this. Still, that sounds do-able...except for the fact it's over a range of more than a thousand times that, in a dusty environment hot enough to fry any electronics. To top it off there's bits flying everywhere with explosive force and they want an average failure rate of less than once a year.

Apparently these restrictions don't apply to their own work, the internal mechanical designs have the weight of a related part estimated to within an accuracy of +/- 153,000kg(!) Funny how people's acceptable degree of accuracy changes depending on who's problem it is to sort out... ;)

Time table for selling my cars (both of them) has stepped up a notch, so if anyone's interested speak soon or forever hold your piece ;) Be looking at ~$8k for the '88 rx7 turbo convertible manual, and ~$2k mark for the '91 323 hatchback auto. (These prices are based on the low end of the range these cars typically sell for according to The Red Book)

And as obligatory....



so basically I'm a greedy, lazy, cynical, well-travelled young professional.....damn straight! lol

and agreeing with socialists 39% of the time means you are one? so American this test rofl

You know it's a slow day when a cheap, safe, patentless, cure for cancer gets noticed by one or two news sites.

I love training courses. The whole getting paid to do very little except eat classy restaurant meals at the company's expense is somehow appealing...

in other news, thinking about selling my turbo RX7 convertible...so if anyone happens to be looking for or contemplating something like that, let me know.

Just saw "Babel". I can't think how to describe that movie, it's such a strange mix that it's difficult to decide if I enjoyed it (There are three very loosely linked stories spanning Morocco, The US/Mexico and Japan)...certainly the film is engrossing, possibly a little unecessarily shocking in rare moments, but it's really hard to judge such things.

Got to wake up in a few hours for third day of my new job. It's absolutely staggering how large this company is compared to the previous places I've worked. There are five seperate offices in the Perth CBD alone (the head quarters are in Sydney.) The one I work in is only mid-sized and still occupies four entire floors of the building its located in. The level of organisation is extremely impressive, although that does mean the processes are at times a little bureaucratic. Lots of other engineers starting now, although the only other one I knew before (another UWA EE grad) hasn't started yet. Most of the other fresh grads are mechanical or civil, with people from all uni's it seems. The first couple of days have been very pleasent, and I think if I don't like this job I'll have to leave Perth to find anything that might be more appropriate, so fingers crossed.

been putting off posting in lj a long time...not sure if procrastinating procrastination qualifies as laziness, busyness or both.

Actually it's more my inability to click the submit button on anything I do write these days.

Spent the best part of '06 working rather unusually solidly on various parts of thesis project. It's pretty boring stuff to anyone except me at that time. Suffice to say I worked far too hard for the meagre point allocation (equivalent to two normal units.) Learnt/increased experience in many useful skills, got more marks than I needed, spent lots of reasonably fun late nights of excessive tea consumption, bad food, bad singing to out of date songs, and otherwise being silly with various other honours students who lived in the same building, enjoyed seeing thousands of dollars wasted as a fellow student set some of my supervisor's equipment on fire, and otherwise made the best of it all...but it still sucked >____<

'07....I'm just gonna hate you now and avoid any disappointment >:(

actually the last week, inc. most of the '07 part has been pretty good, but one bad thing today soured my mood enough to let this one get submitted, call it foreshadowing :P

I suspect to be 100% I would have to be born in London rather than Nottingham, because I'm sure I've spent enough time in the East Midlands to know how people would answer those questions.

normal service will resume in 14 days....

Honours student 1: I appear to have created a circuit that operates faster than light, the answers are coming out before I supply the input data!!!

Honours student 2: That should make it easier to decide where to go for dinner tonight

So true.

Somehow I managed to accidentally leave a stray section break in an essay I was writing Sunday night. This made my page numbering go 1,2,3,4,5, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and I ended up writing 13 pages when there was a hard limit of 8. Don't think I'd be fitting in sleep anytime soon even if I avoided making mistakes like that eheh. Going to miss uni...sort of.

So the crew of Top Gear went on a caravan holiday (Season 8 Episode 6, if anyone hasn't seen this they must...best Top Gear ever.) Anyway as they enter Dorset (the region of England with their booked camp site) Richard Hammond, who booked it, frantically tries to remember the name of the camp site, and then giving up stammers "Dave....the camp site's called Dave."

I swear that's not as ridiculous a guess as it might seem. I'm used to my name causing the odd bit of confusion - in a 21 person geometry and trigonometry class at school we had 5 Daves. The teacher used to side-step the problem by qualifying his comments "Shut up Dave ...all of you."

Tonight I realised that once again my name may have been causing a little confusion. I finally added starph0x to my msn list (previously communicating through ICQ) and realised that we both have our MSN names set simply to "Dave". It's worth pointing out that the two "ahaha" did not come from the same person, so anyone considering dragging us into a group conversation ... be afraid! ;)




Update: One of my friends is now complaining that he actually has a third "Dave" on his msn list!

So I managed to go a whole night at uni with no weird 3:30am incident.

Unfortunately that was last night, tonight was a little different...

I was kicking around not doing any work for a bit, and discussing respectively owned jap import sports cars with a fellow final year guy in another department. This particular owner was less enthusiastic than most, having a non-turbo engine and yet still managing to spend a fortune on repairs. I was explaining how my turbo seems to stand up to pretty much everything including the track and drag strip.

When my fellow petrol-head went back to work I decided to go for a bit of a joy ride. Came back 5 min later with a warmed up engine and convinced this same guy to come for a ride (and yes, at you guessed it, 3:30am.) We had a little fun, then pulled in the servo on the way back to get some supplies. Of course what should befall the person who was espousing his car's reasonable reliability than a break down. Engine is turning, can hear spark plugs firing but it just doesn't seem to want to go through the last ignition phase succesfully. Tried deflooding it to no avail, and that's about as much as I can do without tools.

Guess I'm not going anywhere before my 9am lecture...Which is ok I guess since I wasn't really planning too anyway.

Finish off with massive congrats in anarch_kitty's direction on the engagement, apologies to bonta_kun for being late to discuss things earlier in the day - sleep got the better of me for a while, and lucky last this solid piece of advice from a free footy I got earlier today:



Everyone got that?


edit: Tried to start my car again just now, and all is well. Guessing it was some kind of flooding or a temporary electrical glitch (Rotaries seem to love to do that kind of thing.) Important thing is I don't have a huge repair bill and it's back where it belongs at my home now (home as in uni, not my less common other home)