Welcome

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

To be honest, i'm not really sure what this place is. Its not really a blog (and i've been thinking about setting up a blog) but its kinda more of a place for me to post random little rants.

Why I'm leaving Adelaide

People always ask why I'm wanting to leave Adelaide (or Adefail as I like to call it.) Like its some kind of surprise. I think people that live in Adelaide are mostly blind.

Main reasons include:

• Adelaide is a stagnant hole. Read the AdelaideNow story Why we hate our own city. (The comments Adelaidians have posted on that story are truly classic. Seriously, give them a read, its definitely worth the time.)
• Nothing ever happens here. Ever. EVER.
• Adelaide's growth is stunted. Most of the younger Y-Generation is leaving Adelaide, me included. Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth are all happening places.
• Adelaide is thus rapidly turning into a "retirement village".
• There is a strong "Adelaide is a Country Town" mentality that persists all the way through council and the state government that retards any sort of development.
• We talk and talk and talk, but never do anything. What is happening with the RAH? Are we building it or not? Have we even settled on a fucking name yet?! What about the new Stadium? Grandstands? Do something useful with the Torrens lake?
• The SA plastic bag ban has really made me mad.
• Constructing things like the Bakewell Underpass, South Road Underpass, and Tram Extensions takes FOREVER. Why is it that any sort of construction project takes 10x longer in Adelaide compared to interstate or overseas? Are we really so slow?
• If you want a career in anything other than working at maccas or professional whinging you need to get out of here.
• And the final, big, personal problem for me is Adelaide is very geek unfriendly. I don't know if you noticed. Geek is in now. (Just not in Adelaide?) Generation-Y is a generation of kids brought up in the computer and internet age. Oh yeah. Generation-Y is leaving Adelaide in droves.

Personally, I'm just sick of it and can't be bothered caring anymore. Auckland, here I come!

Here's another update to my list: (it just keeps getting longer, hey?)

• I can't stand stobie poles. They're fucking UGLY.
• Car Rego is INSANELY expensive here. $249 per quarter now? What the?! Its $62 a quarter in NZ, and they substantially discount it if you register the full year; ie. $211. And that's NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS! And if you're whining that NZ isn't Australia, well, other states are cheaper too. SA is out of fucking control.
• The foglight ban. WTF. The number of people who have blindingly bright foglights was VERY low and the police could have dealt with them on a case by case basis; its the same as having your high beams on. There is NO reason to make a state-wide blanket ban on all fog lights. I checked and mine are the same wattage as my headlights, so boo fucking hoo. They aren't bright and don't blind anyone and furthermore I've never had an issue with any other car's foglights blinding me. And yet cops will sit and catch people with their fog lights on all fucking day. (They were doing this on South Road by the tram works the other weekend, they caught literally dozens and dozens of people I was told by one of the friendly tramline construction workers there.) This was brought in for no reason other than to have an additional revenue stream as others were drying up... total BS. Seriously, there's far more important things the cops should be doing than sitting on their fat fucking asses in their fucking cars catching people with their lights on. That is such a sad pathetic state I don't even know what to say.
• The 50km/h speed limit is a joke and drives me nuts. I've gotten dozens of speeding fines for doing 60 in 50km zones, and well, I rather just leave and go live somewhere where they have sane speeding limits, kthxbai.

At the end of the day, I do like SA and it is still a beautiful place but the people that run this state need to be fucking shot. They're doining nothing but trying their damnest to ruin the place. Lord Mayor Robert Doyle of Melbourne is right. Fix it, or just shut down Adelaide.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I now live in Auckland, New Zealand, as of January 2010.

Work

I work as a Network Engineer for a Utilities company in Auckland, New Zealand.

Other Places

Other places you can find me on the web include:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• LJ - long since obsoleted.

Travel

I like to travel. I haven't gotten to travel much thus far, but am planning to travel extensively in the coming years.

Places I've visited:

• Los Angeles, USA and Victoria, Canada in 1992.
• Auckland, New Zealand in 2008.
• San Francisco, USA in 2009.
• Auckland, New Zealand in 2010. (now live here.)

Interests

• IRC, Bots, Developing Bots
• Programming, both Traditional (C, Perl, PHP) as well as Object Oriented (C++, C#, Java)
• Astronomy
• Astrobiology
• Space Technology
• Physics and Quantum Mechanics
• Anything UNIX (FreeBSD, Solaris, & OSX)
  

Forex

I've been interested in Foreign Exchange trading ever since Economics class in Year 11 & 12 highschool as well as University.

Yes, I actually have a real trading account. I am currently shorting the AUD.

Being a programmer my entire life, I am greatly interested in mathematical analysis of historic Forex data as well as writing my own automated (or robot) trader.

I have a database on my Solaris box that is currently many gigabytes in size containing historic tick data of numerous currency pairs. I'm working on writing some algorithms to see how effective they are at automatically trading historic data. Then I will test them on live data in a game account.

Gaming

I was always an avid PC gamer. I never got into console gaming. (My only console I ever purchased was an xbox, and even then it was to run Linux on it.)

Blizard Games

• Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness
• Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal
• Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos
• Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne)
• Diablo 1
• Diablo 2
• Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction
• Starcraft
• Starcraft: Broodwar

Other Games

• Quake 1, 2, 3
• Unreal Tournament, 2003, 2004

World of Warcraft

WoW was my first MMORPG and I quickly turned into an addict. :(

• Played Original from release until expansion came out on Illidan. Had three level 60s.
• Played The Burning Crusade until expansiom came out on Kirin Tor. Had four level 70s.
• Quit at the imminent release of Wrath of the Lich King. :D

My main was Leela (a cute adorable pink haired female gnome) and Sal (my female white haired nightelf rogue).

I still use Leela as my online persona. For example, I now hang out on nonoba (mostly to chat) and go by Leela.

Update: I am now playing wow again, sigh. Playing Horde for the first time on a new Realm, though.

New Zealand Stuff

Random things about New Zealand

• Why New Zealand did not become an Australian State. (original on geocities, local mirrored copy because geocities is going offline soon.)
• A Yahoo answers question with some good responses on why NZ chose to go it alone and not join the Commonwealth of Australia
• An article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a push for a union between Australia and New Zealand, and talk of a common currency.

FWIW, I am in full support of New Zealand becoming a member of the Commonwealth but to be honest I don't ever see it happening. A common currency would be very nice too, but I would be sad to see the kiwi disappear. But it would certainly make life easier for us.

Quotes that i love :)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or villafy them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
-- Unknown

Space Shuttle Columbia...

These were taken from a space.com forum post many years back.

I really hate loosing that piece of space history that should have had its right place in the Smithsonian or some other museum one day.

A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
- William Shedd

This is often quoted, and I think it sums up Columbia. If I can be anthropomorphic for a while, I think she would have taken museum duty and done it well - just as she handled every other mission she was given. Much like you I would have liked to be able to walk up and touch her, and I shed a tear for the fact that I never will. But in a way I am happy with how she went out: she was an aerospace plane. She bridged the gap from air to space, and that's where she left us - she was flying, fighting, doing what she was built to do. And then she was gone in a blaze of glory. A Viking funeral. If I can quote Robert Crippen:

"I'm sure that Columbia, which had traveled millions of miles and made that fiery re-entry 27 times before, struggled mightily in those last moments to bring her crew home safely once again. She wasn't successful."

(C) Leela teh gnome, 2010