Journals

I was at a hostage situation today. It was at Diageo bottling plant, just 10 mins from my house and the alarm bell went off at 10am sharp, shortly after I had arrived. There was a police armed response team, two fire engines and two ambulances on the scene within minutes and CCTV footage captured the gunman (an employee at the plant) throwing around another employee at gun-point because the other employee had allegedly slept with his wife.

Why was I there? The CCTV footage was mine, prepared last night in After Effects.

It was a big corporate training exercise - none of the staff had been told it was happening and I, along with three other camera ops were hired to film it all and I was also asked to make the aforementioned CCTV footage. The plant was evacuated and the management team were driven to an off-site location several miles away to go into action-meetings (Which I was also filming). They had liasons from all the emergency services and the entire event was treated as a real incident, so everything was by the book and entirely serious. There was something very cool about filming a meeting in which terms like "flank routes" "choke-points" and "structural integrity" were thrown around without a hint of irony.

Also there's just something awesome about filming police in full tactical gear.

The gunman was detained at 13:35 and there were no serious casualties. The hostage was treated for minor injuries sustained during the police raid.

So Mars was visible on the night sky yesterday:

uhmm... yeah, let me crop that for you:Oh, and here's a picture of the moon, since the sky was cristal clear:

The moon during the day:

And a random airplane...

It was too fast for me to catch it passing near the moon. It would have been a cool photo :(.
Archie, how about a cat on the moon?( since Scotch finds these funny...)

I went searching for this. Still cracks me up.

I got a dig bick.
You that read wrong.
You read that wrong too.

Military junkyard time!

Ok, so today i was on a private military junkyard. There is a lot of junk there, scrap metal, weapon parts, missile parts, old computers, etc.

I climbed more than 50 times up and down trough everything. There are lots of 1980s hardware components there, most of it is in no way near usable shape, but i managed to scrap some stuff.
What i found interesting out there is this Hard Disc drive from 1980s:You see, this thing is from 1982, and it weights around 20kg. It has 2 connectors on it, and a ticket. On the ticket it says:

700MB Mainframe Data drive

Imagine that! 700MB in early 1980s! And its like 20kg. Amazing if you ask me. Imagine that monster mainframe with such a hard drive in that time, pretty cool. Also it was made in Korea.
When i think about it, most of the things on that junk yard were from Korea and Chips Japan.

Ive found some IBM computers, DOS era, 1986 or so, but they were in a horrible shape, most of them were rusted and squished/smashed. What i found EXTREMELY interesting, is that an IBM with an 20MHz cpu had a PCI like card in it, and PCI was made in 1993! This is quite amazing, that IBM also had on-board EGA, memory modules + extension, an addon card with memory chips on it, and an HDD SCSI adapter card (Old SCSI).
I couldnt take pictures so i cant show you how many cool stuff is there.
Any way, take a look at these, i took these pictures for a friend of mine, electronics engineer, that i trade parts with.

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/6229/img1833uj.jpg
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/530/img1834oz.jpg
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/4280/img1835o.jpg
http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2948/img1836r.jpg
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/2679/img1837p.jpg
http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2186/img1838mr.jpg
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/2071/img1839kg.jpg
http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/5416/img1840rq.jpg
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3070/img1845xm.jpg
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/6660/img1846p.jpg
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/9959/img1847uu.jpg
http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/6200/img1849jd.jpg
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/3553/img1850y.jpg
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/4681/img1851gy.jpg
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/9544/img1852x.jpg
http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/3710/img1853u.jpg

You can see processors and addon cards, pay attention to the PCI like card.
Also, i found an Sound Blaster CT1600 PRO2, with that i have 2 PRO cards from Sound blaster ISA age, CT2230 and CT1600, only CT1500 left :>

Hope you find this journal as interesting as much as i found exploring this junk yard. Damn my hands hurt from moving all that junk :I

Went GoodWill Hunting again yesterday. Found quite a few PC games like:
Postal
Rainbow 6
Air Warrior 2
Blade Runner: The Game
And for the grand finale:
Quake 2! Awesome!

Unbelievable. I actually found some of my really old maps on an old obscure CD lost in my cupboard. Playing through them and some are so awful but there's some goodness in there.

Who thinks I should bundle them up and post them in the vault? I reckon someone will have some fun with these and I'd like to see what people think about my old stuff.

I found maps I'd completely forgotten I'd made.

I ate some trout yesterday......from Australia...

I was thinking about fish names and then I realized that "carp" is "crap" in my language.

Another terrible mod play through for you all. As requested, I played through MCPOKER again. It was worse than I remember and it is now gone from my hard drive forever.

Really boring playthrough here

Again, let me know of any awful mods (no more troll mods) and I will run through them. Cheers.

A few days ago there was this massive electric storm. A voltage peak came in and screwed up my router, and through it, the cable modem and the ethernet port on my computer.

I just happened to have a spare router (Linksys, it sucks but it'll do) and the ISP sent me a new cable modem today. So I bought a PCI Ethernet card and it all seems to work now.

While I was at it, I did some general cleanup and replaced the ANCIENT thermal paste on the processor. 8 years of continuous usage should be enough to warrant such cleanup.

Star Trek: The Original Seried - Remastered: ReviewRight. So, i'm making my way through the Original Star Trek Series now, after previously watching ST:Enterprise And ST:Voyager recently.

My first impression is for the time, i feel the physical props and sets are pretty damn good for the time, if not so much the writing and makeup, and i keep reminding myself that a show of this nature had been done/tried before not.

For those unaware, Paramount has updated all the original video/beam/viewscreen effects of the show with up-to-date CGI, which makes the shows much easier on the eyes if you've ever watched the original original series.I've obviously caught rerun episodes of Star Trek on the tube before, but not with any regularity, and i'd rarely sit through an entire episode. Watching the episodes concurrently is pretty interesting and great improvements are made very early in the series from the first episode.

Character development and the "feel" of Spock and the others is much improved for the most part by episode 3 or 4, but the writing just seems to stay pretty cheeze/bad for every episode i've watched. Again, I keep reminding myself this show was made in the late '60s, but implausible plot lines remain implausible, and over-simplified plots remain too simple.

That said, you can't help but enjoy the interplay between the original cast, as they all "click" together very well, which now makes it easy to understand how they were able to take re-purpose the original series into a very successful movie franchise with the same players.Though i'm enjoying the show for the most part, I am finding myself FF though some episodes or skipping altogether because the story is sometimes that bad. I have high hopes that seasons 2 and 3 will improve the overall believability of the show.

Verdict: The worst Star Trek series i've watched, but it's the first, so you still have to hold a place in your heart for genesis of the franchise. =P

Nextup for me after watching seasons 2 and 3, will be ST:Deep Space Nine, which i can't wait to watch. ^_^

I fucking hate dubstep.
Try to convince me that dubstep is good.
I'll listen to your songs and I'll tell you if you have converted me.
Edit: Well that was a learning experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rhQc666Sg

Nobody here speaks Russian do they?
I decided to open the little tin that came with my gas mask, and inside I found several round, clear disks and two small pieces of paper, which seemed to be instructions for use and manufacturer's info. I've heard they're supposed to be antifog lens inserts, or some kind of emergency replacement lens, but I'd prefer to know for sure. I spent some time copying the characters into Google Translate, but that didn't provide much clarification other than the fact that they were manufactured in 1972. I've made an image of the text, as I'm not sure if TWHL works with cyrillic text, and the pieces of paper were too small to get a clear enough photo with my iPod.The top paragraph is printed on one side of one sheet, the second on the other side, and the two characters at the bottom are stamped on the tin. The second piece of paper only had the number 44 on it.

I've a slight confession to make. I've no idea if Archie knows of this place , but a good few years ago this shop , the "Jolly Rodger" managed to break about every piracy law ever. The guy literally just bought games , bypassed their security systems , and then sold them for a much lower price.My confession is that this is how I acquired my first copy of Half-Life , along with opposing force and a shit ton of maps. At the time I was only about 8 so I didn't give a shit , but then some time ago - when Steam started to become prevalent - I decided I'd go out and genuinely buy the game. When I activated the game , I'd also managed to get Opposing force and Blue shift with it as well! Rewarding me for being a genuine customer for once!

I just had to give money to Valve for what they've done!