Mar 09

In recent times, I’ve noticed that things are changing.

Now I notice that this might be the most obvious statement in the history of man, but it’s true.

You’d do well to note that these changes aren’t necessarily good – increasingly, I’ve found that these changes are usually for the worse.

I think it’s indicative of our current society that we’re always focussed on the bad – rarely do we come together and focus on the good in our lives.

To provide a real-world example, at youth group this sunday afternoon we went around and said some positive things about the sunday school ministry that I’m (just/somewhat) involved in. I think what prompted this was the fact that we were finding ourselves (for want of a better word) bitching about what goes wrong, and what the negatives are of this thing they call sunday school on an increasing basis.

I’ve thought long and hard about saying something personal here, but I know that I’ll probably regret it in the future. If I feel that something personal needs to be said, I’ll say it on my personal blog.

So the question is, why don’t people have a grip on reality? Why don’t they realise that what they’re thinking/doing isn’t necessarily indicative of their environment? Why do people become increasingly bitter about mundane things, and turn into pedantic, obnoxious fools?
Well?
Don’t look at me for the answer – I don’t have one for you.
Maybe it’s because they’ve lost that loving feeling. Maybe it’s because they are having problems at home, or at school/Uni.
Maybe they realise that their friends are just there to have arguments with, or to antagonise them in their efforts for world supremacy. (Just kidding).
Seriously, though – if you’ve lost your grip on reality, how do you get it back? I’ve got a couple of suggestions:
Get back to basics. Do the things you enjoy. Turn off the computer, and go outside and read a book. Take those earphones out, and speak to real people, face to face.
Discuss things, get heated, but have a beer together afterwards. (Please note that freshbytes does not condone underage drinking, and believes that adults should drink in moderation).
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to get your grip on reality. Take a break, and take it easy.
Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , ,

Feb 15

Thankfully, this isn’t a post about the abomination of a movie, All Quiet On The Western Front. I will gladly tip my hat to it for the title, though, and offer this advice: unless you’re a war-movie/history fanatic, stay away!

Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, we can get into some real business…

Right, so Calvin has, in the past, had some pretty wacky forums. For those of you that don’t know, forums are a place for people to share thoughts and ideas via posts, in things called threads, under headings of topics. (I’m using MacTalk Forums as my primary linkage for this post – they certainly don’t mind the extra attention, and it’s the only active forum I participate in these days… Whirlpool is better known for their alternate name, “Whingepool”, and OverClockers AUstralia have a funny registration system, and I just haven’t bothered. *sigh*)

Firstly, the one that started it all was the one and only, Calvin Spam. Started as somewhat of a joke by some geeky year 8’s at the time, (If you graduated Calvin in 2008, you would have been in year 7), it spread quickly due to the nature of the content that was on there. No porn or anything bad like that, just slightly dubious polls like “Do you prefer legs or breasts? And I’m not talking about chicken.” For some year 7s, it was all too much and the IT crowd from our grade were quickly sucked in…
Calvin Spam was open for all at Calvin to join – no exceptions. In hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best option considering the material that was posted there – but hey, I wasn’t the administrator of that particular forum.
From there, it was all downhill. Calvin Spam used to exist at calvinspam.tk – the island of tukelau is renowned for their free domain name service. Efforts to find this forum by our most experienced Google-users have proved unfruitful – for all we know, it could have been a website hosted at home…
Calvin Spam came and went, however. Due to the aforementioned nature of the content, it was quickly shut down.

Years passed. The same Year 7s when the original Calvin Spam were around were now in year 8, and their 1337 (leet, or elite) skills had greatly increased. It was definitely time for another forum, and thus, BWSonline was born. Originally standing for Blair, Weed and Smarty, it was formed by the then-IT contingent of the class of 2008.
Sporting a custom phpBB theme, in terms of popularity, BWS was quite exclusive – only a small, select group of students even knew it existed, and then, only several students were active participants in the discussions that happened there – everything ranging from the geekiest of geek-speak, to computer recommendations, the multiple *-FESK saga, epic posts by yours truly, huge Mac/PC flame wars, and more.
In terms of longevity, though – BWS lasted for quite a while. It wasn’t until one of the original creators fled the country to go to Indonesia that it well and truly died.
It still exists on the internet to this day – at the original address – bwsonline.awardspace.com. The orignal creators are massively thankful for awardspace for their free hosting, I’m sure. One of these days, I’ll make a copy of bwsonline and stick it on freshbytes – when I get around to it. Procrastination for the win.

BWSonline was the precursor to a couple of things… one of which was calvinspamII. By this time, the class of 2008 was in year 10, and calvinspamII, designed as the second iteration of the great Calvin Spam, was created by yours truly in an attempt to revive the forum fever at Calvin. By this time, BWS was dying a slow death – the number of posts per day were slowly dwindling, as was the number of active users.
By all accounts, calvinspamII was seen as a competitor to the exclusive BWSonline – like the original Calvin Spam, calvinspamII was open to pretty much everyone, although only full privileges were granted to registered members. Guests could only read parts of the forum – and the more controversial sections were sealed from prying eyes.
Also like the original Calvin Spam, calvinspamII was based of the free phpBB forum software, and if memory serves me correctly, was served by whoever was the first result in Google after I searched “free phpbb hosting”… Oh, the shame! One click was all it took to take down the infamous BWSonline, and within weeks, usage soared – in terms of popularity, calvinspamII eclipsed both the original Calvin Spam and BWSonline in a matter of weeks, thanks largely in part to threads with such names as “BLING & KV”, “Pick Up Lines”, and “BAG OUT ALL GINGERS HERE” – as well as the diverse range of other topics – school, subjects, sports, movies, music – calvinspamII had it all.
Thanks once again to the island of toukelau – their free domain name service made calvinspamii.tk far easier to type than calvinspamii.s1.bizhat.com – which now does not exist.
Unfortunately, by the time we reached metric forum fever had died at Calvin again – it was clear that the users had had enough. Even more unfortunately was the fact that I didn’t get a backup of the calvinspamII database for posterity – I would have loved to read that epic “BLING & KV” thread again… :P

Finally, finally, finally, came the Freshbytes Forum. It has been more than quiet over there – due in part to a lack of plugging. I haven’t been telling people about it enough. It’s not entirely my fault, though – I think that general forums have had their day. Unless you have a very specific target audience that are the kind of people that like to discuss their interests online, then you’re so outta luck if you think you’re going to make it big with a forum. Sure, when I was at school calvinspamII worked because in Computing, I would plug calvinspamII away, and people would log on, post some random images of ginger kids, and when Computing was over, they would log off again. No one bothers to go online and actually discuss stuff on calvinspamII when they’re not at school, and yeah – that’s pretty much how it died…

So, where to from here? I’ll leave Freshbytes Forum open over at forums.freshbytes.com.au in case you have a burning desire to discuss something, but you have no idea where to say it? Make a thread over at Freshbytes Forum, and give the link out to everyone you know.

For now, though – the message is loud and clear:

All quiet on the forum front.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 09

Wow.

One year has passed since the introduction of freshbytes.

What a year it’s been: an absolutely huge learning curve for me, but I’ve loved every moment of it. The Web is a huge place, and I’ve just dipped my toes into it.

We’ve had our highs. We’ve had our lows (it’s all quiet on the forum front – more on that later). Most of all, though – it’s you, the readers that make this place what it is.

This isn’t just some place to come and read words on a webpage – hopefully, it’s a place where you’ll find moral guidance, some words of wisdom (speaking completely from experience counts as wisdom, no?), laughs, as well as food for thought. Hopefully, you’ve experienced all four from here this past year, but if you haven’t, drop me a line telling me what you think, and what could be improved, and I’ll endeavour to try and encompass your needs.

That goes for pretty much anything, by the way… If you think there should be more games, shoot me a line, or comment on the miscpage.

Speaking of games, some of you have noticed the lack of games on freshbytes. Previously, I would have said something like: “Never fear, the games are still there, you just need to look in the right places!”, but being far wiser than I was a year ago, I now realise that not all of you are geeks and look in the source code for links to obscure pages. No really – I’m kidding. There really is no secret – if you clicked on a particular paragraph of the post where I mentioned that the games where taking a leave of absence, then you would have got some funky pop-up saying “You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. The page you are looking for cannot be found”, or something to that effect.

I’ll stop blabbling now, and just give you the link to the games page: here. Oh, and it’s also at misc.freshbytes.com.au – so remember either one, because they both go to the same place.

Well, I hope you’re loving the new look freshbytes. Unless I find something horribly wrong with this theme, or I just don’t like it, it’ll probably stay this way for a while – and by that, I mean at least a month. If you think the new theme is cool, try dragging the sidebar widgets around. They move! Insane! The only thing they don’t do is drag from one sidebar to another – so you can’t move the Wall from the right to the left, for example. Yeah, I know. Some stuff is broken, or looks horrible. I’ll have to fix these over the coming days – mmm, more fun. /sarcasm.

Now even though I use a Mac, I’m not a designer person. While I can write CSS, I could never do as good a job as the people over at Blog-Oh-Blog! (for Limau Orange, the previous theme) have, or even the people at MangoOrange, for the current i3Theme. There are a whole host of awesome three-column themes that I’m currently experimenting with as well, so if you visit freshbytes and it the theme has changed or something has broken, don’t worry. I’m just messing about, which will happen late at night because apparently, that’s the best time to get things done!!

Right, so that’s about it, then.

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 03

Yes, yes, I know.

I haven’t had a post on here in a while. For those who have absolutely no idea of what I’ve been up to…well, I’ve been on holidays.
No, not the same kind of holidays that most of ‘us’ are on now. A genuine holiday away from home.
Last week, I enjoyed myself in Scamander while it was nice and warm (borderline friggin hot). I quite enjoyed it, mind you we got out of there just before the hottest temperature was recorded there ;-) .42.2 degrees C, I couldn’t think of a better place to be in hot weather, mind you!

So, now I am up here (Ulverstone) with broadband access, unlike the free dial-up we got at Scamander (SLOW). And this would be the worst location to fry in the heat. Ok, maybe that’s not true, there is air conditioning here.

But anyway, on Saturday I went to watch my older cousin play 2nd grade cricket for Ulverstone in Burnie. 3 caught-behinds and some fantastic cricket shots by the better batsmen in the team, nothing better to watch. If only….if only the canteen was open all day and it wasn’t so bloody hot. That day, Burnie recorded a temperature in the 30’s which was higher than most of the temp’s in the state! Overall, a good days spectating.

Sunday was a little different. Cooler temps were a nice change, but the Ulverstone cricket ground is no more than 800m from the house at which I am staying. This time I was watching my younger cousin play 3rd grade. 1 caught-behind, plenty of ‘chirping’ and a steady 22n.o. with the bat later, it was a good day.  Mind you, for the group of which I hang out with, it would be a very different experience. These cricketing guys are fairly social beings, their friends hang around the club rooms to watch their mates and their mates’ mates play cricket. A little different to what I’m used to, that’s for sure. Offtopic for a second, but a good beer afterwards went down really well, I kid you not :-) !

Boag’s Classic Blonde, or something like that. Very nice. Even better when you don’t pay for it :D .

A good weekend of spectating cricket, and then to head home to watch the Aussies play cricket and Federer and Nadal in the Tennis…a really great day to watch sport. YUM!

Depending on what happens this week, I may not be able to publish another post. I’m away until Saturday, unless something changes. Hey, this looks like my shortest post in a while, WOW! Less than 450wds, wow.

Catcha later,

/weed

written by Chris Jacques \\ tags: , , , , , ,

Jan 18

What a day. I’m starting to sound like Benny (apologies in advance :) ).

Wednesday, 14th of January. The ‘Acceptance session’ day for the University of Tasmania. Students-running-around-with-parents-day.

Basically, a day where you go and the Uni reps talk to a whole group of people interested in enrolling in Uni for this year. This day was specifically for the previous years’ grade 12’s (like me).  The main lecture theatre wasn’t exactly full, but there were enough people to feel ’surrounded’. Having at least 4 sessions throughout the day accounts of the apparent ‘lack’ of people. The Uni guys talked about the usual stuff, and then split us into groups based on degree areas. For example, the group whom I was a part of was one surrounding the computing department, and this included computing/info systems/game development and most likely others.

This was the spot where things got a little interesting. See, I had organised the day with my friend James to make things easier for the both of us. Now, once we were split into the computing group,James and myself were the only ones in it! SCORE! That, personally, made me more comfortable in the various wanderings around the department buildings. Dells and Macs. Meh.

The second ‘score‘ was the quick visit to the office of the degree coordinators’ office. Various thick textbooks on stuff like XML, but the one that really stood out was the textbook on UNIX! And this was after she mentioned that she teaches Computer Security!

Oh yeah, and for Benny’s sake, she has a mac laptop.

Then was the supposed final part of the session, the so-called E-tour (basically an online guide on how to enrol and do bits and pieces). After initially going into one wrong location, and then being given a location that had previously had the tours earlier (the signs pointed to it), we were finally told the final location of the tour. At this point, James decided to leave, and we were informed that the staff that directed persons to the specific areas (the guys out front) were misinformed about the location of the E-tours in the first place!

At least I (and my father) got a good tour of the Uni. I no longer feel like a ant on approach to a hay bale, if anything a human now on approach to the said hay bale.

During the session, I saw something on the computer in front of me to make me think of this day as weird in every sense of the word. Where , on the Uni site, they would usually have a picture of a student to ’sure-up’ the reality of going to Uni (or something like that), I saw a picture of a person familiar to myself and one of my good friends, Martin P. It was his (this is not confirmed, I am assuming this by previous data sent to me) sister-in-law. WOW, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And thus did the E-tour begin.

Now I thought that after this had finished, we had finished up for the day. How wrong I was. The most important meeting was about to begin.

On my way out from the computer room in which the E-tour was being conducted, who should I see at the entrance but two of the Calvin 2008 leavers, Ellen and Amber. They had a quick chat with me, and then we parted ways.  It took about 10 mins after we parted ways for me to finally realise something that was mentioned in great depth to me before I graduated from Calvin.  “You’ll miss them, You’ll miss the leavers”. The first time I actually realised this, was this day, the UTAS day. Was I really that close to the students in my grade that I’ll actually miss their presence?

That left me in a state of thought that I did not escape from for at least 2 hours afterwards. I still think about it to the present day. I must have been blind that day, ’cause I know I was the day I last saw the leavers.

And that was my day, the UTAS day, Wednesday 14th January ;-) .

/weed

written by Chris Jacques \\ tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 28

I’m a little disappointed with my TCE results 2008. It’s entirely my fault, because I just managed to do really, really badly on my external exams, the mythical places where careers are made and extinguished…

In my case, the flames were pretty much put out permanently. Okay – so maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was ridiculously worse than I was expecting.

After having a bit of a mull-over for a couple of days/weeks/months (years, even) I’ve come to the realisation that your TER/ENTER/UAI (Tertiary Entrance Rank [SA, TAS, NT], Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank [Vic] Universities Admission Index [NSW]), while important to what courses you want to do at Uni, isn’t a definite sign of who you are, or what you want to be.

As a side note, Queensland also use something else, but it’s called the OP (Overall Position) and it’s really weird compared to the TER/ENTER/UAI. Instead of being a percentage-based score, the OP is a number from 1 to 25, where 1 is “You’re awesome at academics”, and 25 is “You’re not-so-awesome at academics”. Multiple inter- and intra- school scalings are taken into consideration, but in this blogger’s opinion, it Just Doesn’t WorkTM.

The TER isn’t a measure of how intelligent you are (that’s your IQ, folks), or how “street smart” you are. Far from it, it’s more a measure of how well you did compared to your peers. If you take that literally, it’s a measure of how you stack up against your fellow students – which is something that can be influenced by heaps and heaps of different factors like subject choices, aptitudes, and a whole lots of other stuff I won’t bother to name here.

I think my main cause of concern was that I wasn’t in the top 10% of the state. Yeah, that was probably it – NOT! I care not whether I was in the top 10% of the state or not. I’m heaps glad for those select few who are in the top 100, so congrats to Ellen and Elise, but really – that doesn’t matter.

I guess I’m just disappointed about my whole performance overall. I know I completely screwed up my exams, and that just really sucks!

If I tell you the truth (I do always try to), then I guess that arrogance played a part in this. Either I had the arrogance to think that I was going to do spectacularly in the exam (and I had reason to think so, with one B internally and the rest As), or I was just arrogant enough to think that I would do well without adequete study. Neither are particularly pleasant options, but hey, I guess that’s life…

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , ,