This is old news, but I only discovered it the other day. Those that are old enough to remember when computers didn't know what graphics were will probably remember ASCII art. It's where you take a whole bunch of standard keyboard characters and put them all together so that when you look at it (normally from a distance) it looks like art (i.e. it looks like the graphics that the computers were too old and dumb to do).

Some clown has taken ASCII art to the extreme by coding his own version of the original Star Wars movie.

To view it you need a telnet client as you have to telnet to the server that then sends the simple characters to you. If you click on this link then it should all happen for you.

You have to kinda wonder just how low the Australian share market can go. The litlle graph on the left isn't broken, the value of my portfolio really has dropped that low. If you look at the starting point and then look at where it's at now you can see that I've lost quite a bit of value. 

I used to worry every time there was a bit of a dip, but now that it's plummeted I just think it's funny. I don't actually loose any money unless I sell, and I have no intention of selling right now.

 I know I've mentioned this stuff before,  but I'm holding shares in Brockman (BRM) at the moment. They are an Iron Ore mining startup with 1.6 Billion tons of iron ore in the ground in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They havn't started to dig the stuff up yet, but they do have over 1 Billion tons of iron ore in the ground, and 110 Million dollars in the bank. The weird thing is that their share price has followed the Australian market down the gurgler to the point where the company is now worth only 65 Million dollars. That means that if someone had a spare 65 odd Million dollars available and they could convince enough people to sell their shares at the current price then they would end up buying 110 Million dollars for the bargain basement price of 65 Million dollars (that's an instant profit of 45 Million dollars) and then have over one Billion tons of iron ore to on sell to someone else.

That's why I'm not too worried. Sanity has to return to the market at some stage.

One of Brad's music teachers asked him how I managed to convert the audio cassette recording of their bands song Tomorrow's Another Day to an mp3 (see the original story here). It was pretty easy really;

The guys had already recorded the song onto an old audio cassette by plugging a Playstation microphone into a portable cassette recorder and just sitting it in front of them as they all performed.  

 I put that cassette in my own stereo and then used a $4 cable that had a mini stereo connector on both ends to connect the headphone socket of the stereo to the line in socket on my laptop.

I left the stereo volume at the same level I had it on for listening through the speakers and then used the Sound Recorder application that comes with Windows XP to record the whole song to a file on the laptop. The result was pretty crappy. It was too hard to get the sound levels correct.

I then did a bit of Google'ing and downloaded a free trial version of a little program called LP Recorder. I'm sure there must be heaps of free sound recording programs out there, but this one was a small download, simple to use and had stereo level meters that made setting the sound level's much easier.

LP recorder saved the file in WAV format onto my laptop hardrive. That's all well and good, but it's an uncompressed file format so the song itself was way too large to be streamed off my website. A bit more Google'ing lead me to another application called winLAME. LAME is a well known Linux based audio file encoder/decoder and winLAME is a Windows version with a pretty graphical interface. Once again it's a very simple program that took the WAV file I had already recorded on my laptop and converted it to an mp3.

Just to make sure that Brad's phone displayed the right info when he played the mp3 I then used  a third free program called AudioShell to enter the artist, song name, recording date, genre etc as tags in the mp3 file.

I'm sure there must be heaps of other programs that I could have used, and many of them are probably much better than the ones that I chose. There is probably something that does everything all in one program, however this story is just to explain how I did it myself this time, next time I might do it differently.

{mosgoogle}

Time for something a bit weird. Have you ever heard of the Spanish baby jumping festival? Perhaps you know it by it's traditional name "El Colacho"? Come on, you must have heard of this one! 

It seems (I could be wrong of course, don't believe everything you read on the Internet) that there are some nutter parents in Spain who think that their babies are possesed with evil and the only way to rid them of this evil is to have Elvis jump over them. 

They have been doing this weridness since 1620. I have no idea how many babies have been squashed by overweight Elvis's who didn't quite make it.

Good news. A bit over a year ago my boss told me that he was going to send me to Brisbane to attend a vendor conference. It's called Networkers and is held by a company called Cisco. They sell most of the bits that make the Internet work as well as the networks of many businesses and stuff. The network that I look after is almost all Cisco kit. 

 Why is that good news now over a year later? Because this time last year I was told at the last minute that they had to cut costs and my trip was canceled. It was meant to be reward and recognition for something cool that I can't remember. Having that trip canceled didn't make me feel particularly recognised or rewarded. The good bit is that I've just been told that it's on again this year and this time I really am going.

I've booked my flights, accommodation and the conference so I'm as good as locked in this time. It's a four day event so I'm going to stay up there for a week to have a look around Brisbane. Mel and I have started to spend a bit more time together again, so she is going to fly up and spend a few days with me as well.

Now, Iron Mountain (IRM). It probably is a place, but it's also the name of an iron ore mining company that I'm holding shares in. If you click here and it's still somewhere close to August 2008 you can see that this company has dropped heaps in the past three months. This is the perfect example of how stupid the Australian stock market is at the moment. This company has over one billion tonnes of iron ore in the ground and are about to commence digging it up, and yet according to the current stock price the entire company is only valued at nine million dollars.

That's crazy in itself, but get this - they also have a heap of magnetite in Tasmania that's just pending the proper assaying results to confirm it. Is that not enough for you? Well they also have another two iron ore tenements that they don't have the resources to mine themselves, so they are selling them to another company. Guess how much they are selling them for? Ten million dollars. Yup, a company with over a billion tons of their own iron ore, an unconfirmed amount of magnetite, and a resource sale that's about to be closed for ten million dollars is only worth nine million dollars according to the stock market.

This is why I'm hanging onto the poorly performing shares that I'm currently holding and just waiting for the stupidity to end. Expect the little share graph to continue to fall before some sanity finally returns.

Hidden Fate. Watch out for em!

After Brad swore black and blue that he would never go in Tournament of Minds ever again guess what he has just gone and done? Yep, along with Louise, Noah, Josh, Ben and Katherine they entered into the Social Science section of this years event. The theme for their presentation was based around a newly formed rock band called Hidden Fate and their attempt to make it onto the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The central part of the presentation was a performance of an original song that they all wrote together in the weeks leading up to the event. They didn't have time to work out the songs name, but "Tomorrow's another day" seems to fit. Brad played lead guitar, Josh did the vocals, Ben was looking after the drums, Noah took control of bass and Louise was their number one fan!

It was always going to be too hard to setup all the gear required on the day so they decided to record the song and then mime it for the judges, but the school stage performance was on that week and all of the teachers, equipment and music rooms were busy or in use so the guys had to improvise and ended up recording it on a portable cassette player (remember them!) with a Playstation Singstar microphone in the shed at Noah's place.

It was all meant to be tied together by Katherine, their narrator, but unfortunately she didn't turn up and the phone number we had for her was incorrect so we were unable to contact her. On top of that Josh was playing in a footy final and arrived one minute before they had to go "on stage". Brad didn't have time to fit his guitar strap so he had to sit on a chair to do his piece and Ben's cardboard drums were a bit low to the ground.

To their credit they put all of that aside and went ahead anyway, but it all fell apart without the narrator being there to tie everything together and they had to pull out. The judges were great and encouraged them to perform the rest of the piece anyway, so another Kingston High guy from the audience offered to read the narrators piece from the script.

They all did an awesome job and I could tell from the comments the judges made afterward that they were very impressed. They especially liked the fact that they wrote and recorded an original song all on their own and I think they would have scored well if they had all been there.

You can listen to their song by clicking on the little play icon below. Just remember that it was done by a bunch of resourceful 12 year old's on a little portable tape player with a toy microphone in a backyard shed (isn't that how all great rock and roll bands start?), so please excuse the quality! If any of the others want a copy of the mp3 then just ask Brad as he has it on his phone.

 {mp3}hidden_fate-tomorrows_another_day{/mp3}

I stumbled across this very funny video the other day, but when I saw that it had been posted on YouTube by someone called SassyDonna I started to wonder if this might be where I went wrong!

{youtube}SZ3SC-gVvy0&NR{/youtube} 

I purchased my Topfield TF5000PVRt standard definition personal digital video recorder about four years ago when they first came out. It's a great little box with twin SD digital tuners and an 80Gig hard drive. All that techo guff means that you can pause and rewind live TV as well as watch a pre recorded show whilst recording two different shows on different channels all at the same time.

You can also put your music on it if you want via a USB connection, but the 80Gig hard drive is the limiting factor. It's good for about 30 hours of TV. A bit later on they increased it to 120Gig, but even that's not enough. Over time I had filled mine up with movies and shows (mostly cooking shows - Food Safari rocks!) so that I was always deleting stuff to make more room.

Enter Ebay. I've purchased a brand new 400Gig drive via Ebay for the bargain basement price of $79.00 and now I'm about to go about upgrading my trusty Topfield. Read on if you would like to see how it went (with photo's!)..........

That would be right. The highway between my place and the city is closed this morning because it's covered in snow at Mount Nelson. I could have had the day off work (well at least worked from home via the magic of the Internet) but instead I'm tucked up in bed with a chest infection feeling like garbage. I know us guys like to sook and moan whenever we get a little bit of a sniffle, but this time I really am crook. My chest really hurts. The doc has given me some magic pills so I'm sure I'll be OK soon and the Olympics are on the telly so it's not all bad.

Speaking of bad, have you had a look at the little share graph over on the left hand side? It's not broken, and we haven't had a sudden increase in gravity, my shares really have dropped that low. That sort of thing used to really stress me out, but now I'm not so worried. I'm holding shares in way more companies than I should be, but they are nearly all resource sector start up's with great technicals so it's only the current "the sky is falling" mentality that's forcing their value so low. There is nothing wrong with the sector or the companies so I know that they will turn around as soon as the nutters realise that the sky is firmly bolted to whatever is above it and it ain't going to fall.

What are you doing on Saturday? Well not you, but that's what Jo, one of my friends from tennis, asked me last week. Luckily I didn't have anything major planned for the day because she had scored tickets to the match day entertainment in the Centenary room at Bellerieve oval for the Devils football game against Williamstown. The Devils haven't been traveling too well this season so I wasn't expecting a great game of football, but I was looking forward to a collar and tie function with good food, good drink  and good company along with hearing from the guest speaker Australian cricketer Damien Flemming.

The food was OK, but nothing to write home about. The beer was free flowing and available in copious amounts. The company was great, Jo works with a very funny bunch of people and their partners were great fun as well. Damien Flemming was very funny. He is a great speaker and has a lot of funny stories to tell.

As expected the football was crap with the Devils being thrashed, but to be honest I didn't see a lot of that. There were a few funny things that happened during the day. My divorce lawyer was there and I was sitting next to one of his female clients (not Jo!). When he spotted us chatting together he did a double take, but then he almost died when he saw her ex partner (the one he represented her against) sitting on the other side of her! Only in Tasmania. There was an assisted wardrobe malfunction at one point, but that's a story for another time. One of the guys on our table won almost $1000 on the horses, so he was pretty happy.

We went into the Clarence football club rooms after the game (the rules say you must leave the room quickly and quietly as soon as the game is over. The also say there is to be no physical contact. I'm not sure what they meant by that one!) for a few more beers and I was a bit scared to see that many of the Devil's players girlfriends were no older than my own daughter. 

We then split up and headed our own ways. Jo had a family dinner to go to and I had a dinner planned with some friends (Colin, Anne, Andrew, Vicky and Yeutha). Apart from the fact that I drank more alcohol in one day than I have in the past year and felt very sorry for it in the morning, it was a great day/night all round.

OMG!!! Google released street view for Australia last night and they have done Tasmania. We haven't been left off the map this time. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, Google street view is an add on to their Google Maps website. They drive all over the country in a special car equipped with a heap of camera's on the roof and GPS and stuff then put it all into their computers and allow you to "drive" down the roads looking around as you go at the photo's they have taken. The photo's are all stitched together really well so it just looks like driving a car. You can see people on footpaths, cars in driveways etc etc. I checked out my place but someone else's car was in the drive so it must have been before I moved in. I checked out my old place and my car was parked out the front and my wheelie bin was sitting there empty!

There are web sites dedicated to finding interesting things in street view like a child falling off his bike or a car on fire, but I found one today only a few hours after it was released. I was looking at the channel court shopping centre in Kingston and found the Google camera van stopped outside the wine cellar. Does that mean the Google man was driving under the influence?

Click here for the street view map, or check out the snap I took below.

  {mosgoogle}

Emma has made it onto the little screen yet again. She starred on both Southern Cross and WIN news tonight. Kingston High School participate in some awesome community projects and this one is no exception. The Eating With Friends project aims to encourage our more senior members of the community to get out of the house and have a healthy meal and a bit of a chat. Check out the two video's below and keep an eye out for Emma giggling!

{youtube}P3sk18yHsVU{/youtube}

{youtube}FYlDt-w7k-E{/youtube} 

It's not very good news really. For the third time since I started this caper I'm actually lower than my original stake. That means that I've lost over ten thousand dollars in the past few months. When I say it that way it sounds bad, but I haven't really lost that much. It's only funny money really because I never actually had it in the first place, it is just a paper loss. My actual loss if I sold everything now would only be a few hundred dollars. The other thing that I find interesting is that on each of the previous two dips there has been a larger following gain. I'm hoping that pattern will continue, however I don't expect it to happen any time soon.

If this is real then it's pretty awesome. I heard Kim and Dave talking about it on SEA-FM this morning and had to have a look for myself.  The bible for finding out if stuff on the Net is fake or not is a site called Snopes. They say it's real, so it must be!

{youtube}adYbFQFXG0U{/youtube} 

[UPDATE] Oh my God!!! It actually worked. I was so suspicious of this offer. The BA Software website was pretty dodgy. It didn't display correctly in Firefox and the grammar was very bad. The email didn't arrive after the promised 48 hours with my download links and activation key so I assumed it was a con. Then this morning I found an email only 24 hours late with the links and my activation key. I downloaded the software to a safe place then ran two different virus scans over it to make sure that it was OK before installing it. It all went to plan, but then I had to enter my activation key. This is where I thought it would fail, but even that worked. The last stage was to activate the key online via the Adobe Photoshop website. I wondered if they were sending everyone the same key, but no, even that worked! I now have a fully functioning legal and activated copy of

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