Mat’s Blog

So it’s been an incredibly long time since my last post on here and since then lots of things have happened.

My girlfriend and I broke up. It’s all my fault and I have felt really bad since then. I now have nothing to do besides work. After work I come home and go sit in my room and play Xbox for 5 hours while I drink myself silly. It’s not exactly healthy and I feel bad for doing it but there’s nothing else to do here. At least we have been talking lately and things are good between us. Maybe one day there’ll be another chance for us. I would really like one.

The army has also contacted me and in 4 hours time from now I will be doing an aptitude test and a medical. This is the first step in my enlistment and then I need to do another 3 or 4 sessions before I actually join. I’m having mixed feelings about today but it should be worth it when it’s all done. Plus I’m not complaining about the amount of money I stand the make in the army

I also turned 19 since my last post on here. I had to work on the day but it was a nice day. I feel bad about birthdays now. In Australia once you turn 18 you can pretty much do anything. You get your full license, can legally buy alcohol and cigarettes and can gamble. Now there’s nothing to look forward to. I just get older on each birthday now. Had a good weekend with my friends though. We got a few Xboxs together and played some system link gears of war which was fun as hell.

Lately I have been visiting my friends that moved to Lakes Entrance a lot. It’s a 45 minute drive but it’s good to actually see some of my friends. It’s not good for my wallet because one of my friends there owns an Xbox and we always end up in EB Games and buy 3 or 4 games each. At least I have an expanding collection. I have over 30 games now, most only half completed but it gives me something to do on rainy days haha.

Recently I have been thinking about getting myself a new car. At the moment I have a 1993 Mazda 626 which is an awesome car but it’s costing me a fortune in maintenance. There seems to be a lot of things going wrong with it. I’m thinking about getting myself a Holden Commodore ute. The Commodore has a bigger engine than my 626 and a ute would be handy. I don’t really carry passengers with me when I’m driving because of the passenger restrictions on my license at the moment and the extra space in the back would be real handy for moving stuff around. I’ll have to see what happens. I just need a car that’s a little bit newer than my Mazda because it is starting to get a little bit old and recently ticked over 300,000kms on the dial. It’s still a great car and it goes hard but maybe it’s time to upgrade.

I am also starting to save for a new TV. I just reread my last post and besides the terrible spelling thanks to my iPhone I noticed that I mentioned the 37″ LCD TV on the Kogan site. I’m going to get one of these TVs. It’s good because I can hook up my Xbox to it but I can also hook up my laptop to it via HDMI so I may end up also using it as an external monitor for my laptop.

Sometime in August I plan on going to Sydney to catch up with my friend in the army. He’s been posted there and so I’m going to go up and see him. I’ve never been to Sydney so it should be interesting. I’m not really looking forward to driving in the city. My car is a manual and so it is a pain in the ass driving in the city and everyone is so aggressive. I like driving out here in the country more.

Well that’s about it for now. I think I might try and post on here a little bit more often now depending on how I go for time.

At the moment it is 9:40pm on a Saturday night and I am already in bed. I am so tires from everything that I’ve been doing lately that I am just about burnt out.

This week has not been an overly busy one. I have worked most days be aide by boss has been away at a conference but it has been absolutely dead in the shop. I left work at 1pm the last couple of days and didn’t go back on the afternoon so I gave had a lot of free time. It’s good for the development of my program and my gamer score on my xbox but not so good for my pay slip.

This week I played two games of basketball with the lens competition startig again. Now I’m not a big tough guy, I’m only scrawny. Playing against these huge guys is tough as and it gets a bit rough. After the lens game on Wednesday night I was really sore in my shoulders for some reason. By Friday I was right again, just in time to play my under 19’s game. This was a fun game and easier than the mens but when I was on a fast break a guy blocked me and I ran into his leg and now I am really sore. I managed to play the rest of the guy but after that I could hardly walk. It’s still hurting today but I’m hoping that it’s alright for tomorrow.

Lately I’ve been thinking of things I could spend my stimulus package on and I’ve come up with a few ideas. I found a 37″ full HD LCD TV at the kogan site, I to need a couple of me tires on my car so I might be able to get them. That’s basically all I’ve come up with so far.

Lately I’ve been thinking about converting my desktop computer into a rackmount server seeing as I have a few other rackmountable bits and pieces. The only thing is I don’t have a server rack. I’ve been looking into building one and decided that I might be able to make one out of 12mm or 16mm MDF. Then use some aluminium tubing for the rails. I have really sussed it all out yet but building it is definitely way cheaper than buying a rack, especially when I don’t really need such a pro job seeing as I’ll only be using it for a knock around sort of thing. I’ve also been looking for a copy of windows server and I think I might be able to get a copy of server 2008. I think server will be better than just running vista ultimate.

I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do in the future lately as well. I still haven’t heard back from the army so I’ve been thinking of alternatives. I deferred my uni course at the start of this year so I may be able to take that up or I was thinking of moving to Warnambool with a couple of my friends and doing a tafe course in business or something. Just try and boost my qualifications a bit. In the end I would like to start a web design business with some friends. We gas planned to do this a while ago but then one if my friends joined the army for this year.

That’s about all for now because it’s a pain in the ass trying to type on my iPhone. Sometimes it doesn’t keep up with all the letters I’m pressing and so sentences don’t make sense. Just this paragraph has had to be edited About 20 times -_-” see ya.

So once again I am late in posting on my blog. I have been rather busy lately, running all over the state. Well, not really running and not really all over the state. I drove from Orbost down to Pakenham on Friday night and then on the Saturday I drove from there into Essendon.

On the Friday night I called into Lakes Entrance so that I could buy myself a GPS system for my car so that I didn’t get lost while I was driving around in the city on the weekend. I ended up buying myself a laptop bag and a Uniden GPS from the big Retravision shop there. It’s a good GPS and it’s really accurate. After passing a speed sign lower than the zone I was currently in the GPS would warn me of the speed change approximately 1 second after entering the zone.

Once we got to Essendon we needed to find somewhere for lunch. I decided to drive. This was a really bad idea. Driving in the city is terrible and it really stresses me out. After cruising around for 10-20 minutes we drove back to the motel and then walked back to the shops. It was much less stressful. While we were there we decided to go for a walk down a side street and we were a bit surprised to find a shopping centre hidden down there. We walked in and we found an EB Games in there so I picked up myself a couple of Xbox 360 games for 50 bucks, which wasn’t bad.

After we met up with our friend we went back to the motel and killed a couple of hours until we had to go back into town and get some tea before the show. We wandered around for a bit after we had eaten and then we went to go and see Akmal. He did recycle some jokes from the last show I went and saw but it was still funny. I really like his comedy and I look forward to seeing him again sometime.

Since I got back from Melbourne I only have a 1/4 of a tank of petrol in my car and hardly any money in the bank since I spent it all in the city. It’s a bit sad because now I have to ride my bike to work, something that I haven’t done since I got my license. It’s not been too bad but now I’m sick and it probably isn’t doing me any good.

This week basketball starts up again which is something I’m pretty excited about. I now play two games a week, with mens finally starting up. I’m not really looking forward to playing mens, Under 19’s is where I’ll do my best basketball.

I’m at work right now. We’ve been getting ridiculous amounts of goods in becauseof the Easter break screwing up the transport companies and our suppliers. It should be back to normal soon though. It just means I have a lot of work changing prices and stuff.

I haven’t been programming too much lately. I really need to get back into it. I’m still looking for a database engine for D that is compatible with Tango. I was using a wrapper for SQLite that I found but since I switched to the DWT GUI library, which uses Tango, the SQLite wrapper hasn’t worked. Unless it’s something to do with DSSS not doing something correctly. I’ve found a library called DWin which seems promising but might only be for the Windows platform which is not ideal but might have to do for a while. I was looking at another library called FileBase but I think the project has been abandoned.

That’s about it for this extended week. I’ll try and post about my mundane week again on Friday.

So it’s been a week since my last post and nothing interesting has happened. It has a basically been the same old, same old. I’ve been to work, I’ve come home from work, I’ve programmed a little and that’s about it.

It’s school holiday time at the moment and my girlfriend has gone to her other house down near the city for the holidays, leaving me with nothing interesting to do. School holidays also mean that there are more tourists around and, man, they are a bunch of morons. They drive so bad it isn’t funny. Last night we went to Bairnsdale, a town 1 hour from my home town, for my cousins 18^th birthday and on the way home we almost had four accidents in 5 minutes due to the stupidity of the other drivers. For starters, they all drive at around 80km/h in the 100km/h speed zones and so when we got to an overtaking lane we were going to pass the lot of them. We slid into the right hand lane to start passing them and then as we drew up beside a green P plate driver they put their blinker on and were going to come into the lane we were in while we were next to them. They realised that we were there before they moved too much and that was OK. We pulled past them and then we started passing the second car. As we were passing the second car the two slower cars that were in front of us both moved into the right hand lane in front of us so we had to slow right down and the car that was passing us had to overtake them on the outside lane. We had to quickly slip back across into the outside lane and then put the foot down to pass them. Next we were up to the last car and we were both coming up in the right hand lane. Next thing we know they’re swerving all over the road and ended up in the left hand lane without using an indicator. We just put the foot down harder, we ended up passing them at about 140km/h I think. But we got home safely and that’s the main thing.

On a lighter note, in the last week I have bought myself a new laptop and mouse. I got a HP Pavilion dV5z (Onyx) “Entertainment Notebook PC” with a Microsoft Arc Mouse. My laptop has an AMD Turion X2, which is a 2.1Ghz dual core CPU, 3GB of RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 with 256MB of VRAM. I’m not sure if it’s dedicated or not. It also has a 160GB hard drive which is not overly capacious but it is good enough for what I need it for. When I first booted into Windows I went to connect to my home WiFi network and was a bit annoyed to find that it can’t connect to my home network. I was told that it had an 802.11b/g card in it (my home WiFi is 802.11b) and when I checked it out in Device Manager I found that the card in the laptop is an 802.11a/g/n card, everything except 802.11b L. Since then I have ordered an 802.11n router so that I can connect and I’ll run it in tandem with my 802.11b router so that my sister can still connect to the internet from her laptop. I’m also planning on buying a second 20″ LCD monitor for my desktop computer to replace the 17″ CRT I have going at the moment. I’m using a dual screen wallpaper and because the two monitors are different heights and have different size screens and resolutions it just looks really weird.

Next weekend I am going to Melbourne to go and see Akmal do some stand-up as part of the International Comedy Festival. I’m going down with Erika and one of her friends and Erika and I are staying in the city. It should be a good weekend. I always love a bit of comedy and when I went and saw Akmal back in 2007 with some friends it was really good. While I’m down in the city I’m going to be keeping an eye out for a decent laptop bag for my laptop because at the moment I have nothing and I don’t really want it to get damaged.

On Tuesday I got my mum to go and photocopy some of my old school reports and my VCE results and then take them to the police station to have them witnessed and signed. This was the last part of my Defence Force paperwork and so I sent it all away yesterday morning and am hoping to hear from them soon, hopefully within the next week. I really want to get out of Orbost, it’s not the most lively of towns and I don’t think I could live my whole life here. It’s a good place to grow up but there’s not so many opportunities around.

I have been coding a large amount of D lately and it’s been good. I have switched from using the D Forms Library to using the DWT, a D based port of the SWT for Java. I find it to be much better and more flexible. I’ve sort of begun rewriting my progress from the program I was writing in DFL to DWT but because it is based on Tango instead of the default Phobos I am having a little trouble. I’ll have to look into it a bit more later on.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week. I will update again maybe next week from the city.

So how bad is it that I can’t even manage to post on here once a week when I’m supposed to. In my defence I have been really busy with things going on.

Today I got a day off work and I was busy as. Had a few tasks to do. I had to pay for my car registration so that I can drive it for another whole year. I had to pay for the new laptop that I bought off eBay, I am eagerly awaiting its arrival. I was supposed to go to the Police Station to get some documents signed so I can join the army but I didn’t manage to get there today. It will have to wait for another day.

The comedy festival is in Melbourne again and I’m trying to go with my girlfriend and one of her friends. We’re trying to go and see Akmal but to book tickets you need to have a credit card, which I do not have nor do I have access to one. It’s a pain in the ass because I am trying to get one of my friends’ debit card to book the tickets for us but he’s a bit unreachable at the moment. Just hope that I can get the tickets booked before they are sold out. I have booked a motel room for the night which is just up the road from the venue where Akmal is. If we can’t get to Akmal then hopefully we will be able to see some other show or we might just have to go out shopping or something.

Last Friday I went to the Orbost Secondary College Debutante Ball because my sister was dancing. I was there with my girlfriend and one of her friends managed to get onto our table which was not bad, she’s pretty funny. My mum forced me to get my photo taken which I was not too impressed about but it wasn’t such a bad night.

I haven’t played basketball for weeks now and I’m really bummed out about it. I can’t wait to get back onto the hardwood court and play again, which is not until the end of April which is a bit of bullcrap and a half. Then I found out that on my mens division team I have the same mentally handicapped guy that I did last season and that is fucking annoying. He can’t play for shit and messes everything up. He was forced onto my team last season so we’ve done our bit. They should palm him off to some other team. Our team has eight players and there’s teams that have five or six players, so they should get him instead.

Seeing as I finally managed to get a day off work today I went down the the Secondary College and caught up with some friends that are still in school. Ended up staying and watching Kopps with a friend. It’s an awesome Swedish movie so check it out if you can.

My girlfriend has gone to Pakenham for the next two weeks. I haven’t seen her for a while and now I won’t see her for another two weeks. I’ll just have to find something else to entertain myself with. I have been playing a hell of a lot of Brother’s in Arms: Hell’s Highway on my Xbox 360 and it’s not a bad game once you get into it. I still have to get back into Star Wars Force Unleashed seeing as I never finished it.

It’s been a while since I have done some situps so I should probably go and do some more. To get into the Army I need to be able to do 45 and then to get out of the basic training I have to be able to do 70 so I have been working and trying to be able to do 70 before I even get in. It will make things easier for me while I’m in there if I don’t have to worry about getting fit enough to do 70 situps.

Anyway, I think that is about all the useless information I can provide you with this week. I’m going to change to posting on Fridays instead of Wednesdays. It’s more convenient for me. Cheers.

I know this post is late but it’s for a very good reason. I have finally finished adding all the products to the new till at work! The final count stands at 5,198 products but there’s a few more that can be added that aren’t entirely necessary.
For the first time in about a month I did not spend all (or at least most) of a day in front of the computer or carrying big heavy tubs of products around. Doing this job has absolutely killed my back and it hurts a fair bit now so I’m going to have to book myself into the osteopath sometime. After I got back from lunch I cleaned up my boss’ office because it was in a bit of a mess after I had control of it for a month. I finally moved the new till out onto the counter and now we have two tills going on our front counters, one on each side. It’s going to stay like this for a while until all the staff learn how to work the new till and are comfortable with it. I am in favour of the new till because it has way more features than the old one and has a proper screen on it that can list the products that have been entered in a transaction and you can also add a custom scroller message on the customer pole display. Took me a while to learn how to do it but it now scrolls along “Welcome to Orbost Home Hardware.” Just in case you forgot where you were .

Lately I have also started working on my invoicing program that I’ve been writing in the fairly new D language. It’s a great language to learn. It’s as powerful, if not more powerful, than C++ and it’s a hell of a lot easier. I’m a bit proud of my efforts because I have had to teach myself and I’m not really good at compiled languages, I’m more used to interpreted languages.

I also signed up on GitHub which is a site where you sign up and they will host git repositories for you. Its also got social networking elements and the motto of the site is “Social Coding.” You can check out my profile here or you can check out the repository for my invoicing program here. If you know D then I would be grateful if you could give me a bit of a hand with a couple of things but other than that I’m not doing too bad.

That’s about all for now. I think I’m going to start posting less often. My schedule has been a bit hectic lately so I might only post once a week now. Every Wednesday sounds good so you might have to watch out for that.

So I’m actually on time this time. Not much has happened lately. I have still been adding products to the computer at work, the good news is that I am so close to finishing. Only a little bit to go. The current count is around 4,600 products. Just a little bit less than the 8,000 I predicted. There may be a total of maybe 6,000 products.

Played basketball again tonight. It was such a fun game. I played against the team that I will be joining next week. They only had four players so we just mucked around a bit. I got some pretty sweet blocks and was a bit of a bastard and stole it off all the girls .

Well this was only a short post. Maybe another one coming up shortly.

It’s been a while since my last post and with good reason. I’ve been a bit busy driving around Australia and with work.

I got back from Wagga Wagga last Friday and it was the shittest drive home. Had to drive through really heavy rain for 3 hours and just when we were about to call it quits and hole up somewhere for the night the rain let up. It was way better to drive without it raining and we were able to make better time, rather than being stuck on 70-80km/h we could hit the limit of 100km/h. The next problem was the GPS. I thought it would be good and handy to take a GPS with us so that we didn’t get lost and spend ages trying to figure out where we were. Turns out that the GPS decided to bring us down the Bonang Highway, which instead of being a highway should be just a road. We could have come back down the Princes Highway and had a nice drive but instead we had to take this narrow windy road for 2 hours in the dark. It was not a bunch of fun. I got really frustrated and sick of driving. The first thing I did when I finally got back home was crack a beer. Felt good to drink something. At least I had a good couple of days with my friend in the Army.

Since then it’s been work as usual. The reason I’ve been a bit lazy and haven’t posted on here in a while is because while I was in Wagga Wagga I bought a couple of cheap Xbox 360 games and so I’ve been spending most of my time playing them.

Yesterday I received a phone call from Defence Force Recruiting. The guy told me that my appointment has been changed from the 1st of April to a later date that I don’t know yet. The good news is that because I live so far away from the city I can be what’s known as a 36 hour candidate which means that instead of having a session and then waiting weeks before I have the next session in my recruitment I can just do all the tests and exams in one day and then if I pass everything alright then I can enlist the next day. After that I would just have to get everything ready and then jump on the bus when it’s time for me to leave. I opted to be a 36 hour candidate and now I ahve to fill out a hell of a lot of paperwork. The man from Defence Force Recruiting will call me back in three weeks and we’ll see where we go from there.

I’m going to Erika’s for tea tonight which should be good. It’s always nice to spend time with her. So I’m leaving straight after work.

Speaking of work, I’m still here so I better actually get off here and go and do my job. Not that I really do much. I’m so sick of adding products to this computer. Anyway, I’ll try and post again in a couple of days, depending on how much Xbox I play.

So I’ve been a bit busy lately. Since my last post it’s been mostly the usual - at work adding products to the new till. But yesterday there was a bit if a deviation from the usual routine. I am writing this post from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. Yesterday I drove 600km to come up here. I did this because my friend is doing the Australian army gap year and today he has finished his basic training and gets to march out. So me and another friend jumped in my car and had a massive roadteip up here :D.

Yesterday we left Orbost at about 9am and drove all day until about 3:30pm when we finally arrived here. Along the way we only made three stops - one for some petrol and two for some food. When we finally got to Gumly Gumly, which is where our motel is and is just outside Wagga Wagga, we hit a massive dust storm and then a massive rain storm. Was pretty crazy to drive through, visibility was really bad.

We’re sharing our motel room with my friends brother so we went into Wagga Wagga and grabbed a slab and spent last night playing our Xbox 360s that we brought and drinking beers. Wasn’t such a bad night except for the lack of sleep.

Anyway, I think that’s about all for now.

So it’s been a long weekend and nothing could be better. Seeing as my girlfriend is using my computer I have to write this post from my iPhone so please excuse me if there is any spelling mistakes.

I worked again yesterday (no rest for the wicked ) and since it was a Sunday it was only for three hours. The thing that really annoys me is that people will wait until the last half an hour before we close to decide they want a big order of timber or household gas bottles which means going down to our other yard when we’re trying to pack up. But all in all it wasn’t a bad day. I spent the afternoon watching movies and playing Halo on my computer because by girlfriend spent the weekend with friends.

Now today was the famed Orbost Show. Not that it’s famed. It’s basically some show jumping, some old cars, big vegetables, a couple of showbags and the most important thing: mini pancakes. I swear they’re the only thing worth going for. At least I got to see my girlfriend for the first time in a while and catch up with a few other friends. Not that there’s many left because they’ve all moved to university. That brings me to now and I’m sitting here posting on my blog with my girlfriend on the computer.

That’s it for now.