Andrew's Inner Sanctum

Time to post again. A big sorry for my lack of posting during the school term, I decided to concentrate on other things so this blog kind of got forgotten. I’ll now give you a brief update of the last 9 weeks. Year 12 started off really well. I’ve posted 2 articles to my website in the last 9 weeks. One of them because I was annoyed at all the Vista bagging going on at school when I returned, and the other was my IPT assignment. The task was to write an argumentative  essay on whether or not Stephen Conroy’s internet filter was a good policy. I wrote a strongly worded essay arguing heavily against the policy and for that I got an A.

The rest of the term was just the standard types of assessments for year 12 students: reports, essays, exams and orals. I also have been keeping the minutes and agendas for the after school prefect meetings all under control and up to date. The term has turned out really tiring actually. It finished off with the QCS practise test, to see how much the in school tuition has improved our results. Personally I do not think setting an all day test on the last day of school is such a wonderful idea, but that’s what occurred. I also think that the Queensland education system and the way we examine and assess senior students across the state is fundamentally broken, because what everyone else in my subject or my school scores in a test, should not affect what my exit score should be. That gives schools with more resources and a better socioeconomic area a better advantage over schools who don’t have these positive factors, but that’s another story for another time. I also finished uploading all 419 podcasts to the Spoonman Fan Club. The Spoonman was an awesome late night talkback announcer on Triple M from 2005-2008  and when his show finished, KG and I decided to set up a central tribute/info website for him. It’s taken me nearly 1 and 1/2 years to upload all the podcasts, but they’re all there now.

I’ve also been following the developments in the tech industry, most of them by Microsoft. The Windows Phone looks absolutely fantastic and I cannot wait to get one next year. Good on Microsoft for starting afresh with their phones and trying something different, instead of just being an iPhone clone. The other big one for me is Windows Live Wave 4. I obtained a leaked copy of the Live Essentials for Wave 4 and so I may be writing an article about them soon. Here’s a sneak peak of  Windows Live Messenger 2010.

Windows Live Messenger 2010 Beta Milestone 2

These holidays I have a few things planned. It will be mainly relaxing, but I have a few tasks and little jobs to do that will keep me busy and also Sam and I plan to visit The Bryan Madigan of SeaFM 91.9 on the Sunshine Coast. He’s the guy who used to take the callers on the Spoonman show and also was one of the 3 announcers of the ATFS podcast. Lastly – on Wednesday when Windows Live Messenger had a bug in in when people were appearing offline when they were really online, I posted here the instructions on how you could get around that. I thank all of you who came here and read the post, I had nearly 3000 viewers in one night and so I’m really grateful and I hope you all stick around to see what I post and also for updates on my main website, which you can find at the top of this page.

Thanks for reading, leave comments as you wish and I’ll hopefully have holidays content to write here for you!!

Well, it’s Australia Day 2010, the last day of holidays before school properly resumes tomorrow and year 12 begins. It will be a busy year but on that day November 19th 2010, it will be worth it because school will be officially over. I hope to have time to keep blogging here, but school work might get in the way of that, I also hope school work doesn’t interrupt my Andrew Tech Help news and how to articles.

Today I had a number of different things happen. Sadly my digital TV will be off for a couple of weeks as the small adapter for the aerial broke off, so it will take at least a week to buy one off ebay I suspect. So that’s a bit disappointing, but not much you can do.

I did play with Microsoft’s Windows Virtual PC today. I had some terrible trouble getting it going though. Microsoft software was giving me some contradicting messages. One Microsoft utility said it was all working perfectly and another one said it was not working at all. I had to do a BIOS update and now it works perfectly. I can run applications designed for XP like Macromedia Fireworks 8 in a virtual XP mode which acts like a Windows 7 application. I shall hopefully write about it on my website soon.

I have a new sleep time of between 11:30pm-12:00am EST on school nights for the next 10 months and then I’m finally free from bed times! Thanks for reading this blog and yea – 10 months of school left :O

Tomorrow, the Last First Day of School!

I haven’t updated this for a few weeks because I’ve been very busy with a number of different things. Firstly I have TV on my computer now, which I mentioned in last blog post. I’m using a Pinnacle Dazzle 71e USB stick with Windows Media Center on Windows 7. Windows Media Center is a great piece of software. Thankfully it now has a nearly complete channel guide. Channel 9 is the stick in the mud here, not properly categorising programs into genres and not always labeling programs properly on 9 Digital, 9 HD and Go!

I’ve found Go! to be the best Channel on Digital TV at the moment, because it keeps showing episodes of Get Smart,  Seinfeld, Hogan’s Heros, The Flintstones and Frasier. It works just like a TiVo except the recordings aren’t encypted, I can burn them to DVD, copy them to USB or do anything I like with them. I also have a great program installed which lets me automatically cut out the commercials out of recordings! There is series recording available which means I can automatically record any show I like for an entire season automatically, as long as the computer is on. Doesn’t matter what Channel or Time it’s on, it will be recorded. The only 2 issues I have is that I only bought 1 tuner, which means I can only watch the channel I’m recording and only record 1 channel at a time. I’ll eventually fix this problem by buying either another tuner or a more expensive dual tuner. The other issue is that networks in this country don’t have to stick to the times they put on the EPG, so shows will always run late which is really annoying. Other than that, a TV tuner and Windows Media Center is a cheap way to record digital TV!

So other than spending my time watching TV, the computer which I’ve set up to be my TV computer is also my data server, because I bought 2 x 500GB hard drives for it, giving me 1TB of storage now. My laptop now is just a computer which reads and write the data from the server computer, while also caching a copy so I can use the important files while I’m away from the server.

Lastly I also turned 17, and I’d like to just share 2 gifts that I received on my birthday from some very awesome friends Ashleigh, Ashlee and Caitlin (but then again, all my friends are awesome ) Just the pictures will explain all that’s needed to know.

Painting By Ashlee and Caitlin

Shirt By Ashleigh

Well that’s all for this blog post. Next week I’m back at school for my final year of school. I’ve achieved a lot of things I’d like to do during the holidays and so am ready to polish off my schooling life with a good OP hopefully to get me started in University in 2011.