Project: Demonstration Day

Demo day is NEXT WEEK!! ...Can you come??

Demonstration day is a special annual event where project teams set up stalls with information about their project. The general public is invited to come and see what we've been doing all year. Stalls usually include computers running demonstrations of the developed software, posters, pamphlets, handouts, and all sorts of other... secret weapons! It's kinda like a trade show. We get assessed on how well we present our area and how well we explain our project to the markers as they come round.

For those of you not in the know, Software Engineering Project is a big, ah, software engineering project that I've been working on all year with my team as part of my Bachelor of Computing degree at Utas.

Our project is called Helpdesk Analyser - come along and check it out!

Demo Day
Monday 26 Sep, 11am-3pm
School of Computing
University of Tasmania, Newnham Campus

Update: I designed our slogan poster, and we printed it today! You like?

Update: I'm on duty 1-3pm.

New Oddsox Website?

Oddsox has been in need of a major revamp of its website, and I figured that Blogspot would be a pretty good place to set it up! It should make it very easy to maintain, just at the expense of being not very flexible or scalable! :S If you don't know what Oddsox is, hopefully the Oddsox Official Website BETA will shed some light on the matter! ;)

So, go check it out over at http://oddsoxband.blogspot.com/.

Also, there's been some mixed opinions over what the address for the site should be, so I'll turn it over to all you enwisened readers out there:

Where should the Oddsox Official Website live??

• http://oddsoxband.blogspot.com/
• http://oddsoxfiles.blogspot.com/
• other (please suggest!)

Leave a comment and vote!

Hugs all round

"Hugs?" you ask? "Why is he talking about hugs, then posting a screenshot of a dos box?" Well I'm glad you asked! ...unless you didn't, in which case I'm not glad at all. :P

Hugs is a Haskell interpreter which I've finally got round to installing on my machine at home. Haskell is a programming language I'm learning in Programming Paradigms. We've got quite used to learning new languages in computing (we learn a new language or two for each unit, just about) but Haskell is fundamentally different in that it's a functional language... That's prolly all you need to know! ...and at present, that's just about all I feel like I know! :P Oh well, with any luck I'll come out the other side of the 1st Assignment being a little more confident. :)

Just thought I'd share.

Anti-Pesto to the Rescue!

Today I checked out the new Wallace and Gromit movie: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit! It was awesome!! - I'm something of a Wallace and Gromit fan, and I thoroughly enjoyed this latest instalment!! :D Wallace and Gromit are long overdue for an appearance at the cinemas, and it wasn't a let-down. There was some concern that it wouldn't maintain its Britishness what with having Dreamworks in the picture, but I'm happy to say that that wasn't the case: it's still very British! :)

I especially love all the nifty (and totally excessive!) little gadgets that are all through their house and built into their car and stuff. My only criticism is that the story gets a little too far-fetched towards the end and doesn't really satisfactorily resolve one or two things that just magically fix themselves. (I won't spoil it for those that haven't seen it yet!) It's kinda like how in the Lion King, when Simba retakes his place at pride rock, the sun comes out and the grass reappears and the balance of the circle of life is suddenly magically restored! :P hmm, think I may have Lion King on the brain a bit atm what with seeing it recently in Melbourne... ;) (any excuse to link to a previous entry! :P)

Oh yeah, the other bit of excitement is that on the way home this arvo, someone didn't notice that a light was red until it was too late to stop!! :O Sorry, but I'm not at liberty to disclose the identity of the driver! :P It had been pouring with rain (as it has been the last few days on and off) and the water on the road meant that it was prolly more dangerous to try to stop than to just keep going... So yeah, luckily there wasn't any traffic going through the intersection at the time - thankyou Lord! (humf has more details - he was in the car too)

In completely unrelated news, I feel it's worth mentioning that I played Risk last night for the first time with Elly + Stu, Josh, and Elly's brothers, Will and Fred. Great game! Elly nearly won by taking out all Fred's forces in Australia, but Stu beat her to it by marching through South America, taking out all of Will's troops before Elly could finish Fred off! ...I think I'll be going back for a rematch in the near future. :)

And now, I really must get my head down and do some serious Project work before tomorrow's meeting! You're supposed to have 8hrs per week on average and I'm currently sitting on an average of 07:09. :S And when I say that you're supposed to have 8hrs, I mean that you start losing marks if you have less than that! :O

Time to vpn in to the uni through a vnc link to access the svn repository and get into some C# ASP.NET code... way too many v's and n's... :P

Melbourne Post-Mortem

ok, so I was planning to make a few posts while actually in Melbourne, but I didn't get a chance after the first night - sorry! So here's the post-mortem!

First up here's me, Amelia and Laura (L-R) at Launceston airport waiting to board the plane. :) The flight over was uneventful, but pretty exciting for some of us who hadn't been on a plane for some years!

I spent the first two nights with family. I got to see aunties and uncles and cousins and my sister, Holly. Here's Holly on the right and my cousin Josie on the left.



Here's Alex, another cousin, who's having a great time with a sparkler some guys gave her who were having a birthday party on the beach at St Kilda! :)




Alex and Gabby (yes, another cousin) found this awesome rubbish bin with a dual flip-up lid at an ice-cream shop in St Kilda. Seriously, it was worth going to this shop just so you could use this bin! :P Actually, the ice-cream at this place was beautiful!! I had Pistachio and Ferrero Rocher flavoured ice-cream! If you're ever in St Kilda check out the ice-cream at 7Apples - it's great!

We went to the zoo for the good part of a day too. We checked out everything there was to see and took heaps of photos. Holly and her boyfriend Petey came, along with the team - it was great! :) I was hoping some others might come to the zoo too, such as Elly + Stu or Amelia and her sister Ele. Or maybe even Matt and Angela. Unfortunately we weren't able to coordinate our activities much, but we all had fun doing what we did. :) Check out what Elly + Stu got up on her blog in three parts starting with Part 1 - Bendigo.

The Aquarium was awesome! About 8 years ago we lived just a few train stations away from the zoo for three years and had a yearly family pass, so I'd seen a fair bit of the zoo already. The Aquarium didn't exist back then tho, so this was the first time I'd been there. It was fantastic! They had lots of small-ish displays which were cool enough, but then downstairs we encountered the biggest fish tank in the southern hemisphere! Again, we took about ten thousand photos between us. (ok, slight exaggeration!)

Finally, on sunday night we went to the Lion King live show at the Regent Theatre. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos, so here's a shot of spencer street from the window of the room we stayed in. ;) The Lion King was definitely worth the money and the effort of organising the trip! A very well crafted show! They stuck to the original story whilst adding just the right amount of elaboration. A new song that made it to the dvd release The Morning Report was in there, as well as a song from The Lion King II, He Lives in You. What more can I say: I loved it!! :D

After a great five days holidaying in Melbourne we finally found ourselves having coffee (or orange juice!) at Melbourne airport before jumping on the plane and travelling back to good old Tassie. After arriving back in Launnie, we got off the plane, drove home, then some of us had to head straight back out to uni for lectures and meetings that lasted til 8pm! ...and it's been non-stop ever since! It's straight back to reality, I guess. :)

So there you have it! It was great to see family, hang out with friends and see some of the sights of melbourne for a few days. For more info about our trip you can check out all the pics at Humphrey's Photo Gallery, you can read Humf's take on the trip at his blog, and you can head over to Stu's blog and get a sneak preview of our special-release DVD, Melbourne Mayhem, in stores now! ;)

Ciao for now :)

I am a robot!

Well, Elly did another test following the Nerd, Geek, or Dork test, and so I did it too. :) Apparently I'm an unfeeling robot, although I'm also not far from being classed as a Hand-Raiser! :O Anyway, check out my results and follow the link below to take the test yourself! ;)

Robot You are 71% Rational, 42% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. To put it less negatively: You are more RATIONAL than intuitive. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. You are more GENTLE than brutal. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant. Compatibility: Your exact opposite is the Class Clown. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 56% on Rationality You scored higher than 44% on Extroversion You scored higher than 0% on Brutality You scored higher than 6% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Melbourne is a Go!

Yahoo! I'm in Melbourne! As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm spending the week in melbourne with some friends, including Stuart, Humphrey, Caleb, Laura, Amelia and her sister, Elly and Stu, and some ring-ins who also happen to be in Melbourne at the time, such as Matt and Ang.

We flew over on Virgin Blue, arriving at 2:30pm, caught a SkyBus into Melbourne, checked out and checked in to our accommodation, All Nations, and then wandered around looking for a bite to eat for lunch. We were pretty hungry by 4pm, so we couldn't be bothered searching very far and ended up at one of the many McDonalds in Melbourne's cbd... man, all the way to Melbourne and we go to McDonalds for lunch! :S Anyway, I then departed company with the team and caught a train out to Elsternwick to meet up with family: Liggy + co, Claire + co, and my sister Holly. :) I'm staying with Liggy's family tonight and plans for the next few days are somewhat hazy, so stay tuned!

ps. Yes, the photo above is taken from the web... Real photos to follow... promise!