freshbytes

So it’s Christmas once again… that time of year when we will never have a white Christmas, tans are in, and short shorts and mini’s are the flavour of the month…

Here at freshbytes, we thank you for an excellent 2008 and wish you nothing but the utmost joy as you celebrate this time of year with your friends and family.

Have a good one, and we’ll see you back in 2009 with even more awesome stuff planned!!

In the meantime, watch this Youtube of “Wizards in Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra – it features some mind-blowing Christmas lights, probably the best you’ll ever see this year.

It’s available in iTunes as a video if you want it, but otherwise it’s here for you to enjoy. Cheers!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: christmas, lights, merry, mini's, orchestra, short shorts, trans-siberian, winter, wizards

No, you can’t have an iPhone 3G.

Why? Because Telstra in Tassie don’t have any more in stock; they only received something like 200 of these units, and they sold out sometime on Saturday afternoon.

No really, why can’t I have an iPhone on a different carrier? Well, because you can’t get Optus 3G reception in Tassie, as demonstrated by the following picture:

…does anyone else see my problem?! So even though Optus offer the best data plans out of all the three carriers who are selling the iPhone 3G, I can’t go with them because their 3G coverage in Tassie is non-existent.

So, dear reader, I find myself in a precarious position:

1. Go with Telstra’s $30/month plan, which gives me: 22 minutes of calls, 2.5MB of data (yeah, 2.5 MEGABYTES of data, on a 3G phone), and on top of that, I have to pay $399 upfront for my iPhone! To be fair, I do get free Wi-Fi at all Telstra’s Wi-Fi hotspots which equates to pretty much any Maccas, and some places in town…
2. Buy iPhone 3G outright for $847 (16GB) and just use it with my current pre-paid SIM. I won’t have any data this way, but at least I’ll have 1c text to all Telstra mobiles!
3. Buy iPhone 3G outright for $847 (16GB) and upgrade my current SIM to NextG pre-paid. Data costs are completely ridiculous, far more than the equivalent Optus ($14.95 for 200MB compared to $59 for 200MB with Telstra) or Vodafone data packs, but I’ll have the best coverage…

Choices, choices. I hate it how being Tassie makes us disadvantaged though lack of technology. When a telecommunications has no 3G coverage in an Australian state, that’s just not on. Intelligent Island? Give me a break. Mark my works, while Telstra has the monopoly that it has over the telecommunications industry like it has currently, Tassie will continue to remain the most un-intelligent island. For example, it currently costs Internode (an Internet Service Provider) SIX times as much to ship data (through Basslink) from Melbourne to Tassie than it does for them to ship data from Melbourne to New York. Again, corporate Telstra screws the small guy.

Telstra really is the epitome of a bloated telecommunications company. The things they do well – coverage – are more than offset by the things they do badly – price, service, value for money.

But enough of Telstra and their corporate monopoly. Now, how about we talk about something else not-funny? Something, say like the so-not-funny Year 12 funny photo? Picture after the jump – click on the link, if you don’t know what “after the jump” means.

Here at freshbytes, I personally respect Facebook over MySpace any of the day, as I’ve outlined previously. So it’s not a big surprise, then, that we have built, brick by brick, the Freshbytes Wall. It’s that little piece of ajax-love in the top right hand corner of every page, that sweet widget that allows you to post your comments about the site, do shout-outs, and all that kind of funky stuff. You can additionally view all the comments on the Freshbytes Wall page, where you can also add comments – and they’ll show up on the Freshbytes Wall (and consequently, on every page)! Cool, huh?

Speaking of freshbytes, the Freshbytes Forums are looking a little unloved. Why not register today? You’ll be able to chat with us supergeeks over teh interwebs, and discuss anything that comes to mind…

Radi8: We had the St Vinnies Ball this friday, and it was actually really good! Besides yours truly not making any effort what-so-ever to dress up, there were people there that looked fantastic in their St. Vinnies clothes, and then there was Adam… But really, it was a fun-filled night with the Life Dancers dancing to Greased Lightning, the Macarena, and many other great hits. It was excellent to see a few faces that I hadn’t seen before/had never seen before – I hope you continue to come to Radi8. There was one thing that was pretty amusing, though, and it was that with the exception of <8 people, the whole crowd was exclusively Calvin. I mean, really! Where are all you other teens going? Maybe to CrossEyed Youth?

Anyways, as we Calvin-ers in Years 11 & 12 prep for mid-years, I encourage to tell one person about freshbytes, provided they don’t already know about it.

freshbytes – the freshest bytes on the web, MUCH more than random zeroes and ones!

One last thing, before you get too bored: The Radi8 Digital Scavenger Hunt video for the week! This week, it’s Dean T, Paul C, Emily L, Blair T, Simon J and Danny T in a fun-filled adventure where they sing in Kingston Town, scale tall buildings, do the leap-frog in Franklin Square, and where boys try on girl’s dresses… Enjoy!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: 3g, apple, calvin, digital, hunt, internode, iphone 3g, monopoly, optus, radi8, scavenger, telstra

Last Thursday, I went to a Documentary Drama preformed by the Year 9/10 Drama class. The docu-drama was entitled “The Cult of Celebrity”, and it investigated how celebrities affect our lives today.

Besides featuring a song by Britney Spears herself (to their credit, it was well choreographed – thank goodness), it was actually very entertaining and though-provoking. For those of you that weren’t there, (“It’s too cold”, “It’s raining”, “I have homework to do” – slackers, all of you) there was a scene where a couple of guys were doing a court session, where they argued the for and against points of having celebrities influencing popular culture. What they said was largely lost on me, but the ‘court case’ was eventually dismissed. We like our celebrities just as they are, thank you.

Anyways, the main storyline revolved around the preview that the class showed in assembly earlier that day – a “My child’s a star” contest between two child stars (forget their screen names, apologies), Megan Hopper and Emily Jansen. Emily won with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and the rest of the story revolves around from there…they meet years later in a bar (with a hilarious bouncer), their friends comment on them behind their backs, while meanwhile fan-sites get a straight-A student seeing a shrink because she just isn’t coping…

If you weren’t there, you missed out. Luckily for you, there’s another Drama presentation on this Thursday 3rd July – this time, it’s a comedy by the Student Theatre Company, the excellent Drama class that runs after-hours. It should be excellent – please make an effort to be there!

On the freshbytes news front, you can now post comments in pages. Apologies this took so long to implement – I never realised it was so simple! So, if you’ve been wanting to comment on The Merchant of Venice, the Virtual Game, or even the funky Garageband tunes, you now can! In fact, I encourage you to do so.

One last thing – Radi8 on the weekend was awesome as usual, with an upsized Radi8. I am a little disappointed that the Radi8 website is now a MySpace page, but I do understand why it was done that way. Don’t worry, dear reader, freshbytes will remain WordPress powered for a good period of time – we will reach our target audience eventually

Anyway, in lieu of the Radi8 static-to-myspace downgrade, I’ve got a video for you all… The Radi8 Digital Scavenger Hunt videos from November 2007! This video is Tim’s team which included Tim P, Gemma V, Brendan J, Billy T and Callum M, but fear not – I’ll be posting the other videos each week, so if this isn’t your team – one of these weeks, it will be!

A little background: similar to the Wild Animal Safari held a fortnight ago, we were sent out in teams to do crazy things in Kingston/Hobart – things that included having your whole team in a tree, kissing chickens, singing YMCA with a whole bunch of strangers, getting strangers to spell weird words, walking out of an elevator backwards… the list went on forever. Enough from me, I’m dead tired from the Physics practical write-up, so I’ll shut up and let you watch the video. Comments below, as usual

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Blog, calvin, celebrity, cult, digital, documentary, drama, Freshbytes, hunt, myspace, radi8, scavenger, School

Hello and welcome to another freshbytes post, where you, dear reader, will be catapulted into a world of total and utter chaos

We’ve had some changes (again) to the website, the most notable being that if you click on an image, you get this cool javascript effect – a little old, but still a cool effect nonetheless! Try it out with any post on here that has a picture and you’ll know what I mean.

You could even try it out on the new -=(NoSpoon)=- page here. This page is constantly updated with all the latest and greatest NoSpoon information, including where to find us on Friday nights, who to contact if you want to be a part of a LAN, and pretty much anything on gaming in CZ. You can check out the page with the photos from DEETS 07 (the LAN before NoSpoon) at Calvin here – why not try out the cool javascript effect there, its as good a place as any to have a go!

One last thing – The Radi8 Report. Since Radi8 (my Youth group, every Friday night [before the weekly NoSpoon LAN]) is a pretty Calvin-related (but not exclusively so), it’ll also by definition get a lot of attention on freshbytes.

So – Wild Animal Safari was a huge heap of fun – for those of you that weren’t there, imagine some people getting dressed in animal suits and running amok in Kingston. Youth in teams of about 5 or 6 then run around, trying to ‘catch’ them and earning a heap of points everytime they do. That’s the Wild Animal Safari in 25 words or less, and man, it was AWESOME!

I was a little disappointed at the teams (you can probably guess why) but pfft – they go broken up anyway. The team I had was still really good – Paul C, Emily L, Daniel P, Nathan dH, Neil O (you guys rock!) and as a result of our excellent intuition and superior animal-tracking skills (it’s called a phone, guys) we managed to take out the 6th Radi8tion Cup, not in a row, but still… I’ve now been on the team that has pretty much won the Radi8tion Cup everytime – even if it’s not with the same people… Lets see…

1. Radi8tion One – “Tribal Wars” – Black Team won.
2. Radi8tion Two – Unknown – No idea what this one was about, but I’m pretty sure we won
3. Radi8tion Three – “Academy Awards” – Yep, we won again.
4. Radi8tion Four – “Beach Olympics” – This one went to either the Blue or Yellow team, unfortunately.
5. Radi8tion Five – “Messive” – No idea who won. It was messy.
6. Radi8tion Six – “Wild Animal Safari” – Blue Team. Ooh yeah!

I’m sure that there have been some others as well – “GamesMania” was where yes, Black Team won, but we played this game that involved basketballs and milk crates, it was one of the Radi8s that started straight after school, before the school holidays. Thank goodness for freshbytes – you can read about GamesMania here. Yeah – Black Team won, I was right!

I think that’s about it for tonight – I’ll catch you all tomorrow. As usual, comments below. Benny, out.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: NoSpoon, radi8, radi8tion, report

So there’s been a few changes around here…

For all those who don’t register for the blog, you can do so here. Why register? Well, apart from giving us people something new to look at, you also won’t have to type in your details everytime you go to submit a comment on a post. Besides, we like to know how many people actually read this stuff!

Secondly, if for whatever reason you don’t want to sign up (which is totally understandable), and you haven an OpenID, I”m proud to announce that you can now sign into freshbytes using your OpenID. As I’m sure, the introduction of OpenID will suit all you geeks out there. If you don’t have an OpenID, or don’t know what an OpenID even is, for that matter – to start you off, here’s the wikipedia link.

Here at freshbytes, we don’t like to leave you in the dark in regards to information (after all, it is free!), so here’s the official website, as well as the page on where/how to get an OpenID. I personally recommend VeriSign if you’re going to sign up for a new OpenID account, as VeriSign are pretty reputable round the interwebs for being trusted within the larger security community!

You’ll now be able to sign in using your OpenID to sing in to any sites with the “OpenID Enabled” text next to a text field, including this one.

Lastly – we need recruits! If you are the kind of person who would appreciate somewhere to put some thoughts, maybe have some D&M’s with the wider community, then we’d love to hear from you! In short – if you want to write for freshbytes (we don’t really care about what topic, you can choose), please, PLEASE contact us! School is usually the best option, but you can always see the contact page for alternate ways of contacting us…

That’s it!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Freshbytes, housekeeping, openid, write-for-freshbytes

Stargate Atlantis is awesome.

I’d go so far as to say that out of all the Stargate series, Atlantis is by far the best. Maybe it’s the charisma of Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, the witty responses of Dr Rodney McKay, or the awesome storyline and plot that just sucks you right in.

Whatever it is, it’s awesome.

Anyway, if you’ve been paying attention, you would have seen that the theme around these parts of the interwebs has been changing frequently. By frequently, I mean, changing-so-fast-you-hit-refresh-and-the-theme-changes kind of thing. But you get the picture. Anyway, the current theme is how freshbytes will stay for a while, so get used to it. As usual, if you hate it, make your thoughts heard in the forums where one of us admins will hear your call and try and answer…

You might also have noticed the new “Message of the Day” section on the left sidebar… If you want to submit your own “Message of the Day’, you can do so at the Quote Submission page.

On another note: for you Chemistry people, ALWAYS remember to put your anodes on the left of your electrochemical cell diagrams. I don’t know why we do this, we just do.

Benny, out.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: anode, Freshbytes, staragate atlantis