Posts (page 2)
Well, really, I was a fool. It was bound to happen. And ironicly, on the road leading to the good nice safe (well, big guard rails instead of trees) road to drift on. I was sitting behind a very slow driver, and then when I got past him, was feeling frustrated and stepped on it. Frustration and inattention caused the accident. It's stupid, really.
Very very stupid.
Friday was pretty decent. Went to the Adelaide Fringe Festival street party, piss-farted around with friends, sorta of half-broke up with my girlfriend of five months. We're taking things a bit more 'casual' now, pick things up in a few months and see where they go. We were just starting to grate on eachothers nerves and butt heads against each other in general over various things (and for various reasons). Saw The Presets live, again, which was mind blowingly awesome. I recorded a few good vids on my phone which I'll have to upload to noobtube at some point. Gotta love mobile phone recorded bootlegs.
Saturday was a bit more average. Went for a drive, which went pretty well. That was about it.
Sunday? Smashed my car. Note where tree is, and where drivers side door is. I wouldn't really put it down to speed, or even road surface so much. Well, no, I would. Sorta. I ended up in this place this time around because I turned late, had just tapped on the brakes (which shifts the weight to the front of the car and leaves you with less traction on the rear), and made a very very bad effort at recovering.
But in hindsight, my bad effort at recovering was what kept the side of the car my friend was sitting in from hitting a tree instead.
Just slow down and pay attention to absolutely every detail if you're going to drive like a nut. This crash didn't hurt so much, about on par with being tackled in the side of the chest, but I've just written off a $2600 car (Mind you, the engine bay is intact, I can rebuild the old volvo and it's busted engine), gotten a $114 fine (the policeman let me off very light), rung up a $300ish towing bill, and made myself look like a goddamn idiot.
Not to mention 2' away from being killed.
Drive safe, folks. Take every corner like it's the first time. Take nothing for granted. Don't get comfortable. Overconfidence can hurt big-time.
I suppose that n810 will have to wait a couple of weeks.
A few miniature rants running around in my head at the moment:
Low tire pressures are dangerous. Understeer is baaaad, unless you have leet skills and can use it to four-wheel-drift.
I repeat. Understeer is baaaad. *shudders*.
Nokia N810 looks awesome. Buying one very very soon (as soon as this weeks pay goes through, which happens on monday, or as early as friday afternoon).
OpenTTD for S60v3 Phones is quite amazingly awesome. The controls suck majorly, though. All things in due time, though.
800x400 on a device the size of a Palm TX is amazing. Yes. I'm ranting on about the n810 again. Be prepared for more of it when I buy the thing.
The internet really is a sad and pathetic place. Especially when the subject of 'waaah I have no girlfriend' crops up. Still, I'd get bored without intartubes.
I really need to apply myself more to finishing off uploading my photography to flickr.
I also really need to put more of an effort into my photography. Been slack lately.
---
That is all, folks. Sod off.
Actually, I kind of like the notion of responding via blog posts instead of comments. You can't really see people interacting as much on the planet unless you manually read through peoples comments.
And regarding insurance, I dunno, that £1100, does that cover you for damage done to your car? For me, it'd be around $2500 for full insurance. My 'third party' insurance only covers me for if I smash some guys brand new ferari.
I don't expect people to sign up to Vox, or any other site just to comment. Responding via blog posts will suffice :).
So, that's the new car that I've been ranting on about in #tycoon for some time. Bit of an old photo now, as that was taken half-way through a wheel change. It's a 1990 (That blue one behind is a 1989) Volvo 740 GL, in particular it's a special 20th Anniversery Edition of the 740 GL. Nothing too fancy, as GL is still the base level trim.
The old volvo started croaking pretty badly pretty quickly. It was still driving, but every so often the thing would refuse to start. It hated hot weather, and, without me really noticing, the engine started to sound progressively more and more sick. Father kept looking into it and patching it up to get it going for work, but he eventually gave the reccomendation to start looking at a new car. While sourcing out parts for the old 740, to get it limping again for a little while longer, we found that red 740 in a car yard. There as a 760 Turbo aswell, but Volvo's 6 cyllinder engines at that time (Which weren't Volvo made, btw) were piles of shite. That and the 760's had the ugliest trim imagineable on a car, and the interior was even worse. There was a white 850 out back aswell with a black leather interior, which was going to go out for $6000, the 760 was around $4000. The white 850 sounded very tempting, my dad had a look under the hood of it aswell as the 740 when he came back, and they both were in steller condition.
The 850 was very very tempting, and it would have undoubtably been the better car, but there were a few drawbacks; 1) Cost, Nearly three and a half grand more expensive. 2) Spares and parts, I already had a 740 with plenty of good working parts to interchange. 850 parts are also more expensive and complicated. 3) Front Wheel Drive. I've played enough car sims to know that understeer is the most deadly thing one could run into when cornering hard. It can be countered with left foot braking strategies, but it's not like oversteer on a rear wheel drive that can be countered with counter-steering alone. Oversteer is fun, anyway.
Overall I wasn't prepared financially, and I wasn't prepared mentally to shift to a whole new platform, and (for those that are wondering 'WHY A VOLVO FFS???'), for the price, all that was left to me was beaten up old Mitsubishi Colt's and Ford Lasers. Ehehm, I'll not drive a shitty old hatchback if I don't have to. A luxury sedan, no matter how much you jackasses hate Volvo's, is still the supperior choice for the money.
I bought the thing, all up, for $2600, and $160 for registration. $271 for insurance, and then $701 for a completely new set of KYB suspension struts, full servicing, new exhaust manifold gaskets (the gaskets on the exhaust manifold were put on backwards by the last guy who serviced it, the fool, you can clearly see they aren't a symetrical shape), and there was a bolt that had broken on the exhaust manifold. I swapped around the wheels from my old 740, as the new car had crappy stock steel wheels and HUB CAPS. Hub caps are evil. The old car had some rather swish looking alloys. Bit of dish (yet still with a rather flat, plain profile), nice chunky five-spoke design, and some scratches from molesting the curb while pulling up. Those got thrown on the night that photo was taken.
The car handled a bit odd at first, hard cornering resulted in massive ammounts of body roll, to the point it was quite unsafe to drive at higher speeds, and just downright uncomfortable to drive in the hills with...
Not that it stopped me screaming around Eagle on the Hill at around 100km/h (I wouldn't know, wasn't paying attention to the speedometer, a friend was in the passenger seat keeping an eye on my speed). And for those who don't know, Eagle on the Hill used to be part of the highway that heads off towards Melbourne from Adelaide. It's a winding, mostly two lane up and down road through the Adelaide Hills. The tarmac is in excellent condition, the road is very well built. And it's completely deserted because they dug a huge-arse tunnel under the hill this road runs over. As a result the only people who use it are Cyclists (Who have seperated bike-lanes well away from cars), and the late-night drift racers. It seems the police turn a blind eye to it completely, as it's a ghost-town, no pedestrians, and crashes are rare (and usually single-car accidents).
I was already pretty impressed with the car when I got it, but when I got it back from the mechanics with the brand new KYB shockers on it, I quickly discovered a whole new car. The thing now drives like it's on rails. Entry speeds for just about every corner I drive have increased by 10-20km/h, and that's with me driving still quite conservatively (I don't exactly want to smash the thing). I'm now starting to find that oversteering is going to rapdily become something I'll have to learn to drive with. Before long I'm going to become known as that 'crazy bastard drifting a volvo'. If I don't wrap myself around a tree first :P.
Note: I do not promote driving like a dickhead. If you're going to drive hard, find a nice deserted stretch of road in the middle of nowhere - stay out of the suburbs. People get killed every day because of the stupid shit people do on suburban roads. Drink driving, showing off to their mates with four people sitting in the car. Jackasses smoking pot, dragging people at the lights. Shit like that gives everyone who's genuinely into cars and driving a bad name. It's also why I can't afford to comprehensively insure my car aswell, and why I'll pay an extra $500 on any insurance claim I make. The stupid actions of a few undermine the reputation of everyone.
Regarding those using Firefox Live Bookmarks, shutup. I don't care. Planet TT-Forums' RSS feed works in straight Firefox, works in google Reader, and just about everything I use. I don't know what the hell is going on with other people's RSS readers when it comes to the entries from my VOX account, but Live Bookmarks is so-far the only thing that I've seen croak with my own eyes.
If you can work out what is causing it, I would like to know. Regardless of how left of centre a use case is, if something is broken, I like to fix it.
Interesting that a new bit of software (or two or three) for a phone/pc can change someones behaviors so much. Blogging has generally been something I've been successfully avoiding for the past few months. It's been a combination of Wordpress pissing me off too much, and everything just being too fucking-well awkward to really work with.
Nokia has sparked a bit of change in that regard.
I've been playing around with a bit of software lately called Nokia Photos. It started off as some silly program called Nokia Lifeblog, which, I think, they realised was a bit too wanky a name. Decent concept though. Basicly, it acts like Google Picasa, or F-Spot in Linux in that it's a photo managing software. Nice timeline view, and nice organizer. Good tagging support (although I'm yet to give it a good thrashing), good support for SixApart (TypePad, VOX, and others) services, good support for Flickr. Overall clean interface, doesn't waste too much screen real estate.
It misses out on some more advanced photo editing features, but the overall aim of the program seems to be more the 'digital scrapbook'. More about that in a seccond. However, for it's purpose, it does a pretty nice job. Photos and videos are fetched from your N series phone using the phones built-in Lifeblog software (if you're familiar with that software, then the whole post is essentially me ranting on about how much I like it. Go find something good to read, you'll get nothing of interest here) and existing synchronization conduits.
So-far, I've yet to even try RAW support. Not even going to touch it, I already keep a mirror of my photo collection in JPEG for external app support and general use/viewing. Raws are for special work. It imports in all the usual ways, for me, it's importing from a mounted SMB share (Drive Y: in Windows), without copying the files to my desktop PC). It does a good job with importation aswell. It doesn't get confused with duplicate photos either. I can do multiple full-folder (as in, import straight from Y:\Photos\) import without re-importing photos I've already imported. I can do a sync with my phone and not have it dupe earlier photos that I had saved to my photo collection on my server. It just works. F-Spot on Linux wasn't good in this regard. Special care had to be taken not to re-import a directory already scanned by it.
Now, onto the more interesting parts. In the timeline view, you also see what else Nokia Photos has been importing from your phone, and why it fills the 'Digital Scrapbook' category in my mind. It filches off all your SMS and MMS correspondence aswell. Most people are probably thinking 'Why would you want your sms' in your photo album, dickhead!' by this stage - what I also thought to begin with. However, from a blogging perspective, it all starts to come together. Being able to see your correspondance, your party photos, everything and anything inbetween from any event, all nicely timelined together, you start to build a lot of ammo for writing blogs, for letting everyone else, your friends, your family, even those weirdoes you met on IRC (Hello, #tycoon :P) know what you're getting up to.
Which really, is pretty much the whole point of blogging; Letting people know what you're up to. Anything else is more a newletter.
Now, when I pull my finger out of my arse, I'll start putting words down and getting more blog posts out (Be prepared for some hypocrisy :P, it could very well take a month or two).
Well, I'm trialing out moving over to the VOX social networking site, as apposed to using my wordpress setup on my website. Reasons for this blasphemy? Sure, plenty of them. For the most part, it's integration and ease of use that I'm concerned about. And flexibility. Vox doesn't appear to have any sort of file size limit, upload limit, or any of the like. I can upload videos, pictures, blog posts... the usual fare. I can do it from some finely crafted Nokia software as well. On both my mobile phone, and their PC software. It supports what I assume is a fairly standardized interface aswell, so it shouldn't be much of a hassle to use another external application.
Another handy feature is that it will talk nicely to Photobucket/Imageshack, Flickr, Youtube, and all that jazz. My phone aswell can already talk half decently to Flickr, although I prefer to work with flickr from a desktop/laptop of my own.
Pretty much, it's integrating better with the devices that I'm using more.
We'll see where this leads.
Nnn'dish
