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So I finished the current series of Lost about a month ago, and I spent today theorising in art about where the next season is going to go. Right now season two is being advertised for release in 'Fall 2005', meaning that it'll only be another 3 to 4 months until it's released in America. Knowing channel 7, it's going to be a very long time until they air it here, so i'll be doing the whole download-when-aired-in-America thing again.

There's a website for the fake airline the lost survivors were flying on. It's already scored 4 million individual hits - pretty impressive for a fake airline. Lot's of nice hidden features.

Now if you go travellers section down the bottom of the front page and enter Hurley's numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) you're presented with a seating overview of Oceanic's 777 aircraft. Using Hurley's numbers again, clicking on the rows will load up a preview of the next season.

Looks rather impressive, and the news that Michelle Rodriguez has been signed full time on the next season makes you think even more about where the creators are taking the series. A website has been set up for fans of the series including a 'Theory Board' where there are all manner of crack ideas are floating around.

I've been trying to find any information on whether a soundtrack is being released for the series, but nothing seems to be available. The Theory Board also has a nice loop from the main Lost theme, but that's about the closest i've come to finding an officially released piece of music.

Clues anyone?

Ok, so everything's not as bad as what it may have appeared from my last post. I've spent the last week back at school working out whether I want to be there or not. For now i've decided that i'll stick it out until the bitter end. And I mean bitter.

Worked out a lot of stuff in the last week though. Planned my way through music and maths for the next 10 weeks, so hopefully i'll be able to pull off a decent result at the end of it. Time will tell.

I've been been playing my recorder a lot more as of late. I'm aiming to memorize all my pieces for my assessments, and it's coming along rather well. I'm able to play the pieces without a metronome, however whenever I play with one I can't manage to get to the end of the peice without a mistake. More practice.

Speaking of a metronome, I came across a neat little one for OSX called MetroGnome. Discontinued, but effective.

So the server room's air conditioning has gone today at work. 50 degrees in there.

Unsane.

Things are starting to fail... nice to be working on a segregated network!

Walked out of school yesterday. Don't know whether i'll be going back.

Had enough of being treated like dirt.

Tafe looks like a really good option.

So something that i've come across in Mac OS X is that the keyboard shortcuts are totally mangled if you set your keyboard layout to Dvorak US from Qwerty US. OS X likes to keep the physical locations of the shortcut keys in the same place on the keyboard between layouts.

This is total crack, because you spend half the time trying to figure out why your keyboard shortcuts aren't working. Never mind that they make the shortcuts completely unintuitive.

Nothing like having to hit ^D to hide my windows in the Meta-Tab dialog. D on Dvorak is in the same place as H in Qwerty. H for Hide. HIDE DAMMIT. Not D for Disappear, Dissolve, or totally Demented.

BAH!

I find it a bit odd that the CIA's World Factbook has Australia's population marked in at 20,090,437 as of July 2005. This has to be some sort of prediction, right? Either that or they've mastered time travel and are using it to do all sorts of evils things such as overthrowing foreign governments (while still managing to collect statistics in their spare time).

I'm being kidnapped by school for the next few days and sent to a religious retreat (yeah, exactly what I need in my HSC year), so if you're trying to contact me don't worry if i'm not available for a few days!

This blog's title brought to you by the 'od' command. Dumping files in octal and other formats since 1973.

Best. Recorder. Site. Ever.

It's got all the fingering for all the notes that you would ever want on the recorder, as well as a piano to select the note that you want.

Most excellent.

Human blood for electrical power.

I even have a port installed to withdraw the blood from, courtesy of cancer treatment.

Never ending laptop power - sign me up!

So yesterday I was helping out Linux Australia at the Education Expo and I was talking to this woman about how Linux can be a replacement for Windows, and she gave me this shocked look like i'd just burnt a thousand babies at the stake. She thought i'd said that Linux can be a replacement for women. If only. :-)

The expo was totally awesome though. We had too many helpers at the LA booth so we decided to fan out and talk to anyone we came across. It was a really good idea, because we got to go out and speak to people who normally wouldn't come and speak to us at the booth.

We handed out close to 400 Ubuntu CD's on the Saturday, and I personally must have spoken to at least 100 people about what Linux is and how they can use it in their educational institution or business.

Craig Warner was an absolute machine. He'd just go up to anybody who he could find and give them CD's and start chatting like there was no tomorrow. Top effort!

What was interesting was the number of people in education who'd actually heard about Linux but didn't actually know what it is. It was great explaining the advantages of using Live CD's in classes to teach subjects that'd be difficult to under Windows, as well as how Open Source means no vendor lock in. That really caught people's attention.

It was also really cool how when we'd go around to booths of companies to give them CD's and have a bit of a chat the first thing they'd say when we started talking to them was "Oh, that Linux thing? We're using it everywhere!".

At one of the booths I rocked up to they said that they had moved their entire internal and external infrastructure (including client services) over to Linux in 18 months and only had one Solaris box left. From the info up in their booths I could see that they had a lot of schools onboard their programme. It turned out that one of their clients was my school! I knew that some of our school's web services was running on Linux, but I hadn't realised the extent until then. The transition and dependence on Linux sounded massive though - i'm suprised there wasn't much press on it.

There was some great literature up in the LA booth too, and thanks to Redhat for giving some swag to Pia at the last minute for giveaways. Ditto with ELX.

Rocking work to everyone who helped out! Special thanks to Mohammed and Sarah Kahn for pulling the whole LA effort together - without your work our presence would have only been a shadow of what it was.

Photos can be found here.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the second day of the expo as I had a performance with an Orchestra i'm in. So much wasted time at the perfomance though! I'm currently writing this in a (completely unneeded) extended break at the rehersal/concert. Maybe i'm just impatient. :-)

One of the cool things that came out of the lift home (thanks Pia and Jeff!) was an idea for a "Tux Camp". The idea is that technologically gifted students of all ages from different schools come together for a day of workshops to do with Linux and FOSS.

It won't be a boring teaching thing, more of a "this is what we want you to acheive by the end of the day, here are your tools - go forth and create!". I'm really enthused about running something like this - it gives students who would normally be bored in their computing classes a new area of interest to grab their attention. Young blood. :-)