Ahoy!

Now that it’s finally June, an awesome night is now in sight. What could it be you ask? Just ask yourselves, what are the most awesome beings in existance? PIRATES, of course. On June 20 I’ll be going to Brisbane to see Alestorm with some friends, it’ll be awesome. Pirates and power metal are two awesome things combined! Now if I introduce some of my Awesome Fives into the equation… :O

Anyway, I’m anticipating an awesome night filled with pirate metal and Awesome Fives. I’ve been wanting to see Alestorm for a while, and they just happened to come to Australia a few months after Sonata Arctica. Brisbane is actually the last Australian show, unfortunately. There’s chance it could be lowest grade performance, or the best one if they decide to put more effort into it. I’m hoping for the latter. In case you’ve never heard them, here’s one of the few high quality videos I could find.

In case you were wondering about what an “Awesome Five” is, it’s the name I’ve given to my high fiving technique which produces frequent hand injuries for the receiver. The theory behind them is, that I am a pirate. As such, I am filled with awesome, a property that exists within certain entities just because it can. Being filled with this awesome energy means that my everyday activities become awesome, as I transfer my energy towards doing things, high fives included. Seeing as there is additional awesome energy included in my high fives, it has to come out somewhere, as the law of conservation of energy in physics states that energy cannot be lost, created or destroyed. It can only be transferred to another medium in the same form, or converted into another form of energy. In the Awesome Five, the mass of awesome energy  is converted into immense pain, sound and heat upon impact.

Before I leave I have one question. Should I wear my Alestorm shirt, or another power metal shirt? I’m a little bit iffy about wearing the shirts of the band you’re going to see, only to find that most other people are also wearing similar shirts. That’s the reason why I wore my Alestorm shirt to Sonata Arctica. At that time, nobody knew that Alestorm even had shirts, so I was unique. But what about now? What are the chances of others still being completely oblivious, leaving my Alestorm shirt individual and awesome? I suppose it all comes down to whether it’s better to be seen as unique and not just another nameless supporter, or wear their clothing and show your support. What do you guys think? I think I’d most like to wear either my Alestorm shirt, Ensiferum Australian Tour shirt, or a new Sonata Arctica “Flag in the Ground” shirt (with a ship on it! ) if I can order and receive it in time.

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In other news though, not too much has been happening lately, hence my inability to write interesting entries. It mainly depends on how I’m feeling, which has been pretty crap the last few months, though I won’t go into detail. I’m not much of a writing person, or completely confident at the moment, so unless I have something interesting to say, I won’t say anything. Lately I’ve just been trying to keep going with tafe, which has been getting a little more stressful now that the 80 page report is nearing its deadline of the June 18. Lately I’ve just been procrastinating playing GTAIV instead of working on it at home. It’s just hard to find the motivation to work on it. Occupational Health & Safety is boring… *sigh* Disaster Recovery Plans are boring… *sigh sigh* Well, at least I have one thing to look forward to two days after it’s due. I really do hope that positive things start to pick up again  after this. Perhaps I”ll name a few… Alestorm (June 20), followed by more than four friend’s birthday between then and July 1st, including mine. Hopefully something good will happen around then, some sort of combined birthday celebration perhaps.

Well, I believe that’s all for now. I’ve been hashing data for DC++ tonight to prepare for a LAN tomorrow. Even though I’m only taking half of my anime, and some other data I have on my main PC, I’m still sharing 680GB. :O

Well I’m off, night all.

-Lachy

Guess what? I’ve been getting more technical devices. Technical things make me happy inside. I recently bought two cheap computers to use as my new download PC (With double the power ), and a file server. They don’t have particularly fancy components, but they’re plenty to do what I need them to. The specs for each of them are:

Download PC

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1500+ 1.4GHz
• M/B: GigabyteGA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 1.x)
• RAM: 1GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 5500FX
• HDD: 40GB + 120GB
• OS: Windows XP SP3

New Download PC

The download PC is much easier to use now, it’s faster, does more without complaining, and… It actually turns off when I tell it to! The old one used an old motherboard, back in the days when the PSU didn’t switch off when you shutdown the OS. Now I can finally shut it down remotely without having to get up and turn it off. The only problem with this new machine is the noise, it has a large heatsink and fan that is so loud when running at full speed. It has a fan controller, so I can at least reduce the speed/noise a little, but it’s nowhere near quiet.

File Server

• CPU: AMD Athlon 3200+ 2.00 GHz
• M/B: Gigabyte GA-K8N-Pro SLI
• RAM: 2.6GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 6600GT
• HDD: 200GB + 200GB + 500GB + 750GB + 1TB = 2.6TB
• OS: Windows Server 2003 SP2

New File Server

My new server looks good too, it’s using a gaming case. Currently has a front 80mm fan with blue LEDs, one rear 120mm fan with green LEDs, and it had two 80mm fans with blue LEDs on the side below the window, but one of them was completely dead, so I took it out. I decided to go with Win Server 2003 for this server instead of WinXP, as this allows me to manage file sharing a little more, like controlling which users can access certain locations. I was thinking of making it run automatic backups on my computers in the network, but I realised that it can’t turn on the other computers remotely, as my router doesn’t support Wake on LAN. Using my server for just file sharing seems a bit of a waste, so I’m thinking I might run VMware Server on it as well.

You may also be wondering, “Where did you get all the extra hard drives for your server?” I have an awesome explanation for that. What happened was, I ordered two Samsung 1TB drives from an online store for $87 each as part of a group order with three other friends from Tafe. We ordered seven 1TB drives in total and to our surprise, something amazing happened. When one of us was setting up the drive in an external enclosure, we saw the size of the disk as being 1800GB and thought, “That isn’t right…” We checked the others and found that they’d actually sent as four 2TB drives and three 1TB drives. Score! So, we divided our spoils evenly, and I ended up with 3TB instead of 2TB. I’d planned on moving my old drives into the server anyway, including my anime/video drive so that I didn’t need to keep it all on my main PC, and just keep the two new 1TB drives in there. Now I’ve done that and have so much extra space, I’ve got nothing to do with it all. Managing data gets a bit difficult once you get so much, I still need to go through and delete some redundant data on my server, then figure out how I’m going to organise it all.

I’m finally gonna start using my Steam account as well, as I just got Portal for free. I might even buy another game as well, now that I have a bit of money. Maybe Half-Life 2 or Counterstrike: Source, or Garry’s Mod. Or maybe something entirely different, depending on what I find. Any other ideas? Let me know.

That’s all I’ve got for this entry right now actually, I thought I had a bit more to say about techinal things, but I guess not. I’ll have to make another entry if something else comes up.

Ciao!

-Lachy

Who here is familiar with the theory of quantum mechanics?

For those who are unaware, it’s basically the theory that any object of matter doesn’t necessarily have one state. It could be anywhere, in any form, in any size, in any quantity… until we observe it. There are endless possibilities in the world, and the way we observe things eliminates all other possibilities and brings us to see the object how it is at the current time. While we aren’t observing, anything could be possible. The topic is covered in the film/documentary “What The Bleep Do We Know?”, that I watched quite some time ago in 2006.

What got me to thinking about this tonight is how amazing the theory is, that anything is possible, and anything can happen at any given time. I’ve brought up quantum mechanics in a few of my daily conversations and it always gets me thinking how good it would be if we could begin to utilise quantum mechanics more, like the quantum computers that are currently being researched. Think how much data I could store using loads of qubits Though I have no idea how I’d access specific data…

Anyway, tonight I had the most awesome thought in existance. “I am a Quantum Pirate.” That means that I could be anywhere, at any time, pillaging anything. I really could be almost everwhere right now (except the places where I’m not ), doing anything. As long as it hasn’t been proven otherwise, it is completely possible.

The thought of manipulating quantum states in the future makes me feel all good… But, unfortunately that probably won’t be for some time. I’m sure we could all expect hoverboards before then, in the next five years (by 2015). Back To The Future can’t be wrong! D=

So here’s hoping we get to see some progress on hoverboards and quantum mechanics soon. I have no idea how I’d react if we don’t have hoverboards by at least mid 2015, but I imagine it would be dangerous…

Until next time, ciao.

-Lachy

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Finally getting around to writing this entry, three months later. Prepare yourselves to hear about my awesome trip up to Brisbane.

For the  month leading up to New Year’s, I’d been planning to go up to Brisbane with Dalton and Enya to see my favourite band, Sonata Arctica. They were playing on January 3, 2010 at the Hi-Fi Bar in West End, along with Ensiferum, a viking metal band from Finland also, and Vanishing Point, a power metal band from Melbourne, Australia.

We arrived in Brisbane on the 2nd at about 9:30pm AEST and made our way from the transit centre, got on a train to South Brisbane, and got a taxi to our apartment in West End, which turned out to be only a short distance to the gig, much closer than we expected. There was loads of different kinds of food around, Mexican… Thai… Vietnamese… Chinese… Indian… To name a few… We only ended up going to one of them though, a Vietnamese restaurant before we went to the show.

The whole night was awesome, about an hour before the show we found a fair few people already in the streets wearing power metal shirts, so we knew exactly where they were going. Some of them even admired my Alestorm shirt, as they’d only just been made recently in Europe. I was unique, I was that guy, that guy with the Alestorm shirt who is awesome. : Anyway, the show started off with Vanishing Point, followed by Ensiferum, then Sonata Arctica had a 1.25 hour set.

Tony Kakko

Sonata Arctica

Sonata Arctica

It was the most awesome 4 hours of my life. And it was going to get better, as we waited around after the show until they came out for a smoke and met them. I got my shoes signed! Dalton also got someone else’s rightful his ticket signed.

Signed by Sonata Arctica

Signed by Sonata Arctica and Ensiferum

So, the night really ended around 2am, instead of 11:45pm. Waiting around was definitely worth it. I wish I took an actually decent camera, all I had was my phone…

The rest of the trip was mainly just going to central, and looking at things. Nothing that requires great detail. Dalton left early (6am ) on the 4th, and Enya and I left on the 6th.

Tha’ts all for now, I shall return soon.

-Lachy

I just had to post this as soon as I saw it. It is is win! A USB Japanese-style bamboo fountain.

USB Bamboo Fountain

It’d be awesome to have in my room. I’ve always wanted a fountain, more specifically a bamboo fountain. This is a great step towards that dream, a mini one powered by USB! It’ awesome in itself. I’m just wondering if it will make the trademark sound that bamboo fountains do.

It costs $25 USD, who wants to buy me one? I’m not exactly sure if they ship to Australia or not at this stage, probably becaue I haven’t checked, but if they don’t, somebody is going to have to get it for me and post it to me.

What other awesome USB gadgets have you found? Do you own any? Do tell.

Currently I own a USB Plasma Ball and USB cup warmer/4 port USB2.0 hub.