I have been busier than a bee last week. The english MIS has been completed, and should be up within a few days at this address.

Good News.
My Media Studies Production from last term has finally been uploaded to this address. It is available in Realmedia (952 Kb) or Bink! video (2600Kb). Bink is higher quality, albeit a bit blockier.
I got the TOP mark in the class for this. I’m soo happy.

I’m baaack from Mt Buller, and guess what?
I earnt myself a silver medal in the SA Interschools Slalom Race for Division 1 Boys Team Snowboarding! Our 1st div. team only comprised of two snowboarders, Troy and I. The first place winners had five. We had two runs down the course. On my first run I got 1 min 8 sec because I lost balance halfway down and fell down. My second run was 55 seconds, considerably faster. The results I can be found here for Individuals and Teams.
Glenunga won the best overall boys I think it was. We got a big ‘trophy’, previously owned by such schools as scotch college etc.
Most of the week was foggy and wintery (precipitation of some sort almost constantly everyday, except wednesday, or was it thursday? probably both), but so I couldn’t take many photos or video, but Friday was bloody wonderful, blue skies, sun shining, and blinding snow. You could easily hurt your eyes if you don’t have eyewear.
So on the last day (Friday) I got footage of going up the ski lifts on Bourke St. and snowboarding down Little Buller Spur, and took some photos every now and again. It was very amazing to see how steep LBS actually is when there is no fog. All week visibility was down to around 100m or less. I have started converting the video to MPEG files for VCD production.
I had 4 lessons of snowboarding.
After the first lesson, I could go down the steeper bits of Bourke St. ’sideways’ (facing forwards). After the second lesson, we started learning how to turn. In my third lesson we learnt how to jump, and do 180 and 360+ degree turns. On my fourth lesson, we just fine tuned everything together, and I found myself in control of speed and direction. fun fun fun!
Every morning started with bacon and eggs, and every evening ended at the Pancake Parlour. Every meal there at the PP was served on a pancake except for 3 dishes. Even the Chicken Curry was served on a pancake.
It has to have been the most physically demanding week I’ve ever been through. I only got 4 hours sleep on the bus on the way there and on the way back.

Tonight I’m off to Mt Buller for a week, I won’t be back ’til Sunday.

I reformatted and installing win2k yesterday.

The folder layout sucks. I should have partitioned my hdd beforehand.
Anyways I’m back to win98.

The night before the night before last last I encoded Titan AE from DivX to mpeg-1 for a VCD. The encoded file took up 947 Mb, just a bit more than a cd. Yesterday I tried encoding it with the audio bitrate at 128 Kbps and video bitrate at 920 Kbps (by calculation), expecting it to be less than 800 Mb. To my surprise, it ended up being 947 Mb, the same as having an audio bitrate of 224 Kbps, and a video bitrate of 1150 Kbps!

The night before last, I encoded and successfully burnt Unbreakable as a VCD. I watched it while the comp was installing stuff.

Here’s a blog I didn’t have time to log (ages ago)

Thursday 9th July

I went on an english excursion today. It was to a play at the festival theatre called ‘Art”. It was meant to be a full day thing, and we were meant to personally meet the actors and director afterwards, but that was cancelled so we were dismissed at ~ 12.20. It was a little entertaining, but I found it a little boring. It was just about 3 people arguing about whether a painting one of them bought for $200,000 is just plain white or if it is actually worthy of it’s price tag. A whole 1 1/2 hours of that. The set was cool though, well designed.

Yup, I failed the Maths 2 exam =[. Mr Marino thought it was only slightly harder than the other Maths 2 class, but both classes think Marino’s was way harder.
To my amazement I failed Physics. Oh my god.
I passed Maths 1 and English.
English was my best exam amazingly.

Mum and I saw Moulin Rouge 2 weeks ago. It is a very visual and musical film. Great comic gags that unfortunately less than a third of the full house audience got. The quote “Ooh! Look my dear! There’s a frog!” just pops up in the middle of a song. Watch the moon (but not too much). The editing is superb. The first few scenes are reminisient of the beginning of ‘Romeo + Juliet’, but is not as quickly cut.
Going to see it again this weekend we are (we loved it so much).

Last Friday I saw Tomb Raider. The special effects, stunts, and Lara Croft were great, but the screenplay was utterly full of holes.

Here’s a quick thought. If there’s such a word as alphabet, is there such a word as betabet and gammabet? ..that’s any Greek letter with bet on the end you know..
I was just searching for omegabet, and check out this site I came across. Seems to be an archive of Chaos Cliches.

Exams have finished today.

Maths 2 on tuesday was hell, hell, hell. I probably failed it. The exam was full of the hardest questions you can think of for the semester. Dunno what Mr Marino is doing. Josh and my other friends who are doing maths 2 in another class got given a different exam than

The next day was English, which was a bugger, because the criteria for the actual thing was different from what we were told (we were told only being marked on spelling and grammer, that kind of stuff, but the cover sheet we were given minutes before the exam also said ideas and creativity). Also, the time limit for the exam changed from 2 hours to 1 (without any warning). That really got me stuffed. I had just written an outstanding (I think) creative story days beforehand, so my mind wasn’t being quite as creative. I couldn’t think, and so I ended up writing about picking at my jumper, staring at my hands, and the pain of not being able to think. Ended with a story about a superhero inspired by Red Dwarf’s Ace Rimmer (’Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.’ - ‘What a guy’). Dunno what I’ll get for it. B and I’ll be over the moon.

Maths 1 followed after English. MY GOD this exam was 100 times easier than the Maths 2 exam. Easily got a C for this, possible B. I Doubt an A because I didn’t answer all the questions in section 2. I was happy happy happy that I got all the questions in section 1 out.

Today I had Physics, which would have had to be my best exam. I understood every question, but the only thing is that I ran out of time =[, only got to halfway through the last section. This might be my best exam result for the semester.

My favourite song for this week was Dido - Worthless.

Here’s an update on what has been happening in Media Studies in the past week.

My Media Studies project has been finished editing, right on time of the due date. I will have to convert it to various web formats, for obvious reasons (interstate viewing).

Four Media Studies students (one of which I am) have been chosen by our Media Studies teacher to be a production team (mainly shooting footage) and document a group of teenagers trying to make their own business (in the fujitsu building). Once done, the footage will be edited by the ABC (yes, the television station), and 2-3 three minute ‘documentries/reports’ will be broadcast on the program BTN (Behind The News). On Tuesday of this week (19/6), we visited the producer, got to know what kind of style he wants, and started shooting at the Fujitsu building. They currently are just sitting around, voting what roles everybody has.

On Wednesday (20/06) in homegroup, I recieved a notice asking for me to see the principal @ 9.00am. So I went, but his secretary told me he still was in town and was better for me to see him at recess. Anyways, I poped in at recess, had a little meeting with him. He said that he’s going to a (sister?) school in Thailand I think, and he wants a slide show to show them what our school’s like, and it seems as though I am the chosen one (recommended by my Media Studies teacher) to be the photographer. He told me that he wants around 2-4 photos of the buildings (which I have plenty of experience at now), and the rest of students and subjects. I got 2 weeks (one of which includes exam week, next week) to do it in. Probably in my free lessons.

Anyways I had better get on to my English Creative Storywriting, it’s due end of next lesson.

Well, My comps working again, miracle again.. just plain weird
Here’s a post I couldn’t update for a while..

Saturday 2/06/01
Bad News.
All week my computer has not been restarting correctly (halting as the windows GUI is meant to show up), and I’ve been having to either run in 640×480x16 (which is totally unworkable, photoshop and dreamweaver don’t run), and I can’t work on video production for media studies at home. It is being a total twit. I may have to reformat after I’ve burnt my ONE cd full of ALL my main setup programs, which means quicker reformating! yay! yay! yay!

It’s cold, chilly, and freezing in Adelaide (no, not peckish), oh I hate the cold!

things have been pretty busy in the last few weeks

I’ve been mucking around with Litestep
Check out these screenshots:
plain desktop start menu etc

I’m wanting to buy this game LeadFoot (by Adelaide game developers Ratbag), it was released on tuesday (22 may).

We got the dvd system setup working last sunday. The TV hue we were getting was due to the left speaker not being magnetically shielded. We came to this conclusion because when the other speaker was put beside, the whole bottom was a different hue. Now the TV is above the speakers, and is not all that bad. We just need a new VCR. The DVD player is wikked, it plays VCDs also, so I just got Nero Burning Rom 5.5 to be able to hopefully convert all my downloaded music videos and other stuff to VCD. A lot of fun I am going to have in the holidays. This website is going to need a huge upgrade, esp the dark blue lettering, links page, and portfolio.

School is ok, Physics was getting boring with electric fields and stuff, but now we’re on to magnetic fields and stuff, eg loudspeakers. In English we aren’t doing much, we started poetry this week. Maths is Maths, as usual. Media Studies is still my favourite subject. I finished a 1355 word essay on ‘Violence in the Media, Whether Real or Simulated, Should Be Totally Banned’ today, and I hope I get at least a B for it. That will also be uploaded to my site when i get around to getting my articles online. Our Production for Violence (Josh and I) has been put on hold until we get to record the Viper Racing Scene. It is quite a task, but what fun it is.