Rantage

Dangeresque is usually very calm about things, however when something shits him, it really does and he is obligated to tell the world how much it shits him.

Large Corporations

Okay, I am pretty shatted off about large corporations, and their ability to drive small buisness's to the wall and then artifically inflate the market to make more profits. Did you know that the average price of food went up 12.5% in the last two years, while the so called CPI was a mear 6% for those two years? Isn't that shit, all because fucking Woolworths and fucking Coles dominate the market so much that they can charge whatever they like and mere mortals like us have to pay, cause what are you going to do? Not eat?

Not only that, now we have shopper docket discounts on fuel from these evil empires, hence killing any small business's from selling fuel because people prefer a $2 a tank discount on fuel in order to buy all their food and petrol from these business's. Well wake up call, once they dominate the market this discounts will be gone and they will charge whatever they want for fuel and food. Cause they are large corporations and they have the power.

What is it with Large Corporations anyway, once upon a time a company was in the business of making good quality products to sell to the commuunity in general. These days they are only about one thing, Profits and making a greater return to their shareholders and they dont care if they rip off their suppliers or customers in the process. Well let me tell you, when my socialist brothers rise up in the upcoming revolution, these corporations and their boards of directors well the first put against the wall. Till then my new years resolution is to by the end of this year, free myself from the chains of depending on the Woolworths and Coles of the world.

This rant was brought to you buy J-Dawgg

Consoles

This was written for the page of wrong but it kind of blew out length wise and became a rant...

Gradually over the past few months my enthusiasm for the Wii has waned. Don't get me wrong, I'll still probably get one on launch - but only because our launch is delayed slightly so I'll be able to see reviews out of America first (I have this hopefully needless fear that people will get them home and play for an hour thinking "best thing ever" and then realise that it's actually a bit meh) The launch lineup isn't as strong as initially expected - the SNES virtual console lineup is a fucking joke as well. Zelda though - good stuff...

Anyways the reason this is on the page of wrong is the pricing:

http://au.gamespot.com/news/6160893.html?tag=topslot;action;2&om_act=convert&click=topslot

It's been known since the American price announcement that they were making a killing on the contorllers but seeing it in our own currency drives it home: the controllers cost $100!!!

Our market has always been shafted on console prices - American to Australian prices have never reflected anything other than a fantasy exchange rate (never in our favour). I don't know - it's still a cheaper proposition than either the PS3 or the 360 but it's not as attractive as expected.

Not as bad as the PS3 getting a price drop and the Australian prices not changing though - that's just evil:

http://www.cnet.com.au/games/ps3/0,239035763,339271311,00.htm

Given that the PS3 will be region free for games (not movies though) i reckon people will consider importing the units given the price differences.

This rant brought to you by Pazu

CDs

Man im angry at winamp. I have been using it since I was able to send my first internet through pipes. Until now there have been no incidents with it.

Its got everything to do with ripping cds. I bought some on thursday and by aurons advice i was going to rip them, instead of download them to save me the effort, like i ususally do. So auron makes me motivated to try, so i fire up my trusty audio program. Ive never used winamps ripping features before so im interested to know how easy it is.

Firstly I go and grab my latest lot of cds that i have not listened to (havent seen priated versions of them yet, arr) and place them in a neat pile on my desk. I grab the top one and stick it in the drive. Its been a long while since I have put an audio cd into compy, so I forget to hold down shift. Anyway, winamp cant seem to access the drive. Neither can windows (ie explorer wont recognise it). After awhile winamp decides that the cd can be read after all, windows still having troubles though. Never used it before so im setting up the options and stuff. Thats odd, winamp cant find a cddb entry for it. A couple more minutes of me trying to get it to work passes before compy bluescreens and reboots. Im pissed off.

System comes back and im trying again. Still no cddb, but it can rip. Ah whats that? bluescreen-reboot. Its not supposed to automatically reboot, confirmed by the settings when compy comes back to life. I try the next cd in the pile and get the same restart crap. I start searching for info on the drivers for my drive. Most users are tards so internet searches are largely fruitless. Security task manager isnt helping and im not running off to hax0r it to tell me registered-version-only stuff. Its getting a bit late now.

So with winamp crashign its nuts off im in the market for a new ripping solution. Auron, being the mr trendy he is thinks itunes is the best thing ever. I dont agree, but I do have it installed so i use that. cool. The muse cd rips in a minute or something. Im impressed at its speed. I look at the settings to make sure its good quality encoding and discover it rips to aac. >:( DELETED It was doing well in the impressing me stakes. Ive seen the mp3 encoder not do its tags so I give up on it.

At this point, i fire up (apparently trusty) EAC. Its got crappy encode options so I opt to use an external encoder, so I begin to look for LAME, since I used it alot back in college days to encode stuff. The projects been inactive of late, but there was a release on november 05. So I go to dl it and discover they are only releasing source these days, no binaries. So off I go on another tangent to find some projects that use LAME, only to find they all use ice age era versions. Sad panda. I go and download the source, and go hunting for a free compiler for teh windoze. I opt for mingw but find you have to download it in bits, each from sourceforge. bleh. I then decide to get visual c express, since its out of beta these days. Not wanting to wait an hour for a 400mb download i get the web install that cant seem to get installing stuff. My internet is acting a bit of a goat. Dad rings and I have to go and pick him up from a bucks party so i decide to get the bloody iso of it. I try to download it but download.microsoft.com wants me to log into a box called viking. ffs. I hit the same download page on another computer and hit the dl link, and the download begins. what gives?

So i get back home and see that the download broke. I download the thing again, and opt for trying the web install of the platform sdk (since i cbf downloading 20x25mb files that are javascripted downloads (angry ) from msdn)

Bed time.

Everythign downloaded ok the next morning. yay. So i install stuff and after a bit of fucking around with paths i get it to build.

So now i need to figure out some encoding options for the bloody thing. I get sick of it and decide to try winamp again. It works. FFS! I start out documenting the bloody thing. Whilst writing i stick in another cd to rip. bluescreen. sigh.

It decides to play nice and rip another cd. Now it has decided it cant find track info on cddb, when itunes can see it just fine.

So now im pretty fed up with the whole thing, but cbf looking on the internet for the tracks, since oz music can be a bit scarce on teh internet pipes. im not going to use itunes on teh principal of the thing. fucked if i can be bothered doing the last final step of the eac thing. but i wanna listen to my cds! I think i'll just be content in being annoyed at various record industries for making stuff hard to find.

Seriously man, give iTunes another go. It is worth having on your system for cd ripping ALONE. I know you love your winamp and things, but I have yet to find a better cd ripping solution than iTunes. You can change the encoding stuffs in the preferences menus. Also, iTunes can generally get through most copy protection systems - the only troublesome cds on my computer have ripped fine on another compy in my house with iTunes.

Hey, sounds like one of those days on the computer that things just DO NOT WORK FOR YOU AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

A program I use when I need to do something that (AWESOME, I mean it!) iTunes can't is dbPowerAmp. It has a gazillion codec's that you can download from its site and install into it. Everything you can think of. Though it only decodes .AC3 dolby audio, you can't encode it grr. But everything else you could want it will do. It comes standard with LAME mp3. I think you will need to register it to use some of its features. But use it, it will work. http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

I have uploaded LAME 3.93 encoder for EAC in case you want to go down that road instead: http://clanfgi.pbwiki.com/f/lamewin32.exe

Hiatus

I must be getting soft. I temporarily hand the baton over....

http://www.angryman.ca/rants.html

Fast(er) Intarweb

I got ADSL today. For that I am happy. I am unhappy because my little modem (albeit really fancy and red) can only push 384/256 from/to the interweb and I am paying for 1500/256. Expect an update when I hear back from them.

Update: (Man i love these updatey things) Dad ended up going under the house and playing with the telephony crap. Our monitored alarm seems to be a choke route for all our telecoms. When modem was placed upstream of teh alarm, modem synchs at 544-600 (and all our phones, regardless of filter hiss like a fucker). When the alarm was removed totally, get 1500 (booyah!). State is now back to original, although I am going to have to do some research on a central filter solution, and place the modem upstream of teh alarm to get my monies worth. Your 'central filter' is called a splitter and it's a standard thing for ADSL users with more than four phones or a monitored alarm system. We have the one installed because we have an alarm. If I'd known you had an alarm I would have thought of that but we had our ADSL originally set up same as yours and didn't notice a performance hit. We only realised because we were getting random disconnects (though it turned out that they weren't random, just whenever someone hung up the phone after finishing a call).

man pfft. what would a whitey like you know about the spiritual art of high speed interweb. I call it a spliiter because its not something that is really plugged in, and needs to be actually haxed in. =) and you are a bastard. you should have told me. excuses are not good enough. And we get disconnected on the phone being picked up too... sif only on hanging up. i hear thats for n00bs.

Remarking process

aargh! eyes out for an update on this one

Almost a month after the supposed 'marking deadline'

Hi Simon,

Update: Apparently I have gotten a raise in my mark to 70 (woo!) although this still hasnt been reflected on my faculty record (aka the 'thing that counts')

Update 2: Contacted the University, said the faculty record is cached (which is currently in a locked non updated state) the other system, the Examinations system gets its info from the same place as the faculty record place, and is not cached. So I should have my remark as 70 (still touching wood -- no not that wood you fuckers) it just needs to be updated on the web system.

Update 3: (15 march, original application date: 12 dec)

I have been advised that I was not able to see my marks updated on my faculty record, because it will be locked indefinitely. This is because only enrolled students can see updates to their marks. I mean really, why would you want to contrain the system like this? Caching? Perhaps- HOW ABOUT UNLOCKING IT WHEN A REASSESSMENT HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR?

Gah. At least its all over. They are mailing me a copy of my updated results.

End of story, hooray!

International students who dont give a fuck

Students (not from our school) who, when faced with a this computer is in use and has been locked message decide that they want to use it anyway and powercylce the computer. GRR. Losing me fucking hours of work. It nearly happened to Stephen, where he had cards up saying 'do not use' but i had to actually talk them out of using it. fucking oath. They left soon after that. I think they went into another lab to look at pron instead.

My supervisor

I have already complained about Pete, my ex-thesis supervisor. He is hells the busy, but it made me sad that he couldnt give even a little bit of time to give me a hand when i needed it the most.

Inferiority

My penis is tiny. I feel realy bad about it. Although I do feel better once i sneak into Lambeaux's house in the middle of the night and look at his. I think it's holding me back as a person. Good thing i'm not worried about my spelling though eh? (fyi: i think you were after 'really', Lambeaux)

MSN Messenger

I never have been really comfortable using this program. I think it is the inherent distrust that i have in microsoft, even though they make quality software (all things considered). Anyway I was asked to install the new version of it a few nights ago, where i declined (as i didnt want to have to dl something huge while trying to use my narrowband internet for thesis research). So last night i fire it up to talk to the blokes about the exam that is going down tomorrow, and it asks me again. SO i go 'wtf, i may as well' So i did. The thing that caught my mind is that it had already gone and downloaded it for me (which is cool, but i would like to be asked before it was done) So the install was quick. I read the licence as i am doing on a more frequent basis these days to check for spyware and usage reporting practices. (Which i find you can sortof opt out from) Long story --long-- short, whenever i try to use the bloody thing it says the network is too busy. Pigs arse it is. So i have gone back to using the (even shitter) version that ships with windows. Bleh.