It’s rather annoying that, when I have exams, I always seem to put everything else on hold. ‘Tis a strange feeling to emerge from that … particularly since I discover all sorts of things I’d missed, like Firefox hitting 1.0 and ICANN being stupid again by changing domain registration rules. Thank goodness Go Daddy let me lock my domains for free. Oh wait, was that a plug?

In other amazing news, I took a natural-gas-powered bus today, which was cool, except that the interior is an ugly over-designed version of the earlier model. Also I wonder whether it really is more environmentally friendly, since the natural gas engine has less grunt than a diesel engine. This is fine once the bus picks up speed, but Perth bus drivers are crazy, so my driver kept gunning the engine. So much for putting out less carbon dioxide …

Heh, now I’m ranting about buses. Man, I should listen to myself more often. Maybe I can just blame all the above randomness on the fact that my brain is presently more than a bit messed up, this being because I’ve had to switch from cramming about the International Criminal Court and international non-governmental organisations on one day, to polynomial rings and the RSA cryptosystem the next day, to the isozymes of lactate dehydrogenase on the next day. It’s times like this, I wonder whether it was wise to have chosen a double degree …

Strange things happen to your brain when you spend too long cramming 3rd-year pure maths in a tute room. Strange, strange things …

So yesterday I was preparing to leave home in the morning, along with my parents (all in the same car, no less), when we suddenly discovered that leaving our own garage wasn’t going to be as simple as we’d thought. A City of Cockburn truck had parked on the verge, opposite our house. Right in front of our driveway. We started moving out, and the guys in the truck just stared. I really wonder about council workers sometimes …

P.S. if any ex-Self.netters are reading this, I shall just remind you of the new group blog that I set up.

So I’ve just been playing with blosxom, and have finally set up the comments plugin, fixed the time display, and tweaked the backend to make it less unpleasant on my server’s filesystem. At some point I’ll get around to making the page appear slightly less … er, plain!

But I have to study instead! Hence I am now reading for biochem, even though the exam is a whole week away. However I’m not going to pull a Cara and procrastinate on LJ

In other news, I went wardriving yesterday – well, sort of. I was sitting on the bus, feeling quite bored, until I remembered that I had my laptop in my bag, and I was on the CircleRoute, and therefore passing through several of Perth’s richest suburbs. Surely, I thought, if there are wireless APs to be found, they’ll be in the homes of well-off Peppermint Grove and Dalkeith residents?

So I busted out my Mac and opened iStumbler (not as good as Kismet, but it does the job). This was in Claremont. By the time I got to North Fremantle, I’d passed almost twenty access points. From there until Fremantle train station, I picked up another ten. From inside a bus. With no special hardware.

I was quite impressed, and also quite amused that only two-thirds of the APs had encryption enabled …

Note to self: never underestimate the ability of the Melbourne Cup to deliver an insane result. That run by Makybe Diva was awesome! And it means my sister wins her quinella, which hopefully means a free lunch for me

Meanwhile, stupid ol’ channel 7 insists on playing exactly the same music track four times over after every race. Sheesh.

I’m not sure which is sillier: Centrelink, for asking me to provide information and documents that I’ve already given to them twice over, or the perlfunc manpage, which is oh so very annoyingly obtuse. All I wanted to do was find out how to change some measly metadata in a file …!