I'm using some new bits and pieces that I haven't used before, so you may notice some small changes to some url's and stuff, but I hope that nothing is broken. If you notice anything that doesn't work as you expected then please leave a comment on this story and I'll check it out.

I'd love to embed the video here on tasweb but for some strange reason Youtube won't allow it.

I have put this story here as a bit of a place holder just in case anyone hears about this and searches for it in Google.

If you are a leaver from Queechy in 1980 or you know someone who is then please get in touch with myself or Andrea so that we can update our list to make sure that we contact you when we have some more details.

We are both on Facebook, so that's the best way to get in touch, otherwise you can send email to queechy1980@gmail.com or use the contact us link on this website.

 I've moved Tasweb back home again (my hall cupboard to be exact!).

Everything should be exactly as it was, however it may be a little bit slower than it was before as it's now on the end of my home ADSL service instead of in an ISP's server room.

TiM has kindly offered to host Tasweb on his new server in the UK but I think I'll leave it where it is for a little while. 

They weren't seeing a lot of activity and the games themselves were taking up a lot of space on the server that is very kindly provided to me by TiM.

Never fear, the ridiculously popular Asian hairdresser, hairdressing, makeover, dressup etc games are still available. Just look for the links in the "Popular Stories" section on the front page. 

 I did stumble across this picture and thought it worthy of sharing. It appeared in today's Mercury newspaper and the incident happened at Marion Bay near where the Falls Festival is held each year. You should buy a copy of the paper or at least go to their website as they have a series of photo's there starting from before he hit the wave through to the final wipeout. The guy was OK, but I think he was a tad worried when this shot was taken!

Some clown has taken ASCII art to the extreme by coding his own version of the original Star Wars movie.

To view it you need a telnet client as you have to telnet to the server that then sends the simple characters to you. If you click on this link then it should all happen for you.

You have to kinda wonder just how low the Australian share market can go. The litlle graph on the left isn't broken, the value of my portfolio really has dropped that low. If you look at the starting point and then look at where it's at now you can see that I've lost quite a bit of value. 

I used to worry every time there was a bit of a dip, but now that it's plummeted I just think it's funny. I don't actually loose any money unless I sell, and I have no intention of selling right now.

 I know I've mentioned this stuff before,  but I'm holding shares in Brockman (BRM) at the moment. They are an Iron Ore mining startup with 1.6 Billion tons of iron ore in the ground in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They havn't started to dig the stuff up yet, but they do have over 1 Billion tons of iron ore in the ground, and 110 Million dollars in the bank. The weird thing is that their share price has followed the Australian market down the gurgler to the point where the company is now worth only 65 Million dollars. That means that if someone had a spare 65 odd Million dollars available and they could convince enough people to sell their shares at the current price then they would end up buying 110 Million dollars for the bargain basement price of 65 Million dollars (that's an instant profit of 45 Million dollars) and then have over one Billion tons of iron ore to on sell to someone else.

That's why I'm not too worried. Sanity has to return to the market at some stage.

The guys had already recorded the song onto an old audio cassette by plugging a Playstation microphone into a portable cassette recorder and just sitting it in front of them as they all performed.  

 I put that cassette in my own stereo and then used a $4 cable that had a mini stereo connector on both ends to connect the headphone socket of the stereo to the line in socket on my laptop.

I left the stereo volume at the same level I had it on for listening through the speakers and then used the Sound Recorder application that comes with Windows XP to record the whole song to a file on the laptop. The result was pretty crappy. It was too hard to get the sound levels correct.

I then did a bit of Google'ing and downloaded a free trial version of a little program called LP Recorder. I'm sure there must be heaps of free sound recording programs out there, but this one was a small download, simple to use and had stereo level meters that made setting the sound level's much easier.

LP recorder saved the file in WAV format onto my laptop hardrive. That's all well and good, but it's an uncompressed file format so the song itself was way too large to be streamed off my website. A bit more Google'ing lead me to another application called winLAME. LAME is a well known Linux based audio file encoder/decoder and winLAME is a Windows version with a pretty graphical interface. Once again it's a very simple program that took the WAV file I had already recorded on my laptop and converted it to an mp3.

Just to make sure that Brad's phone displayed the right info when he played the mp3 I then used  a third free program called AudioShell to enter the artist, song name, recording date, genre etc as tags in the mp3 file.

I'm sure there must be heaps of other programs that I could have used, and many of them are probably much better than the ones that I chose. There is probably something that does everything all in one program, however this story is just to explain how I did it myself this time, next time I might do it differently.

{mosgoogle}

It seems (I could be wrong of course, don't believe everything you read on the Internet) that there are some nutter parents in Spain who think that their babies are possesed with evil and the only way to rid them of this evil is to have Elvis jump over them. 

They have been doing this weridness since 1620. I have no idea how many babies have been squashed by overweight Elvis's who didn't quite make it.

 Why is that good news now over a year later? Because this time last year I was told at the last minute that they had to cut costs and my trip was canceled. It was meant to be reward and recognition for something cool that I can't remember. Having that trip canceled didn't make me feel particularly recognised or rewarded. The good bit is that I've just been told that it's on again this year and this time I really am going.

I've booked my flights, accommodation and the conference so I'm as good as locked in this time. It's a four day event so I'm going to stay up there for a week to have a look around Brisbane. Mel and I have started to spend a bit more time together again, so she is going to fly up and spend a few days with me as well.

Now, Iron Mountain (IRM). It probably is a place, but it's also the name of an iron ore mining company that I'm holding shares in. If you click here and it's still somewhere close to August 2008 you can see that this company has dropped heaps in the past three months. This is the perfect example of how stupid the Australian stock market is at the moment. This company has over one billion tonnes of iron ore in the ground and are about to commence digging it up, and yet according to the current stock price the entire company is only valued at nine million dollars.

That's crazy in itself, but get this - they also have a heap of magnetite in Tasmania that's just pending the proper assaying results to confirm it. Is that not enough for you? Well they also have another two iron ore tenements that they don't have the resources to mine themselves, so they are selling them to another company. Guess how much they are selling them for? Ten million dollars. Yup, a company with over a billion tons of their own iron ore, an unconfirmed amount of magnetite, and a resource sale that's about to be closed for ten million dollars is only worth nine million dollars according to the stock market.

This is why I'm hanging onto the poorly performing shares that I'm currently holding and just waiting for the stupidity to end. Expect the little share graph to continue to fall before some sanity finally returns.

After Brad swore black and blue that he would never go in Tournament of Minds ever again guess what he has just gone and done? Yep, along with Louise, Noah, Josh, Ben and Katherine they entered into the Social Science section of this years event. The theme for their presentation was based around a newly formed rock band called Hidden Fate and their attempt to make it onto the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The central part of the presentation was a performance of an original song that they all wrote together in the weeks leading up to the event. They didn't have time to work out the songs name, but "Tomorrow's another day" seems to fit. Brad played lead guitar, Josh did the vocals, Ben was looking after the drums, Noah took control of bass and Louise was their number one fan!

It was always going to be too hard to setup all the gear required on the day so they decided to record the song and then mime it for the judges, but the school stage performance was on that week and all of the teachers, equipment and music rooms were busy or in use so the guys had to improvise and ended up recording it on a portable cassette player (remember them!) with a Playstation Singstar microphone in the shed at Noah's place.

It was all meant to be tied together by Katherine, their narrator, but unfortunately she didn't turn up and the phone number we had for her was incorrect so we were unable to contact her. On top of that Josh was playing in a footy final and arrived one minute before they had to go "on stage". Brad didn't have time to fit his guitar strap so he had to sit on a chair to do his piece and Ben's cardboard drums were a bit low to the ground.

To their credit they put all of that aside and went ahead anyway, but it all fell apart without the narrator being there to tie everything together and they had to pull out. The judges were great and encouraged them to perform the rest of the piece anyway, so another Kingston High guy from the audience offered to read the narrators piece from the script.

They all did an awesome job and I could tell from the comments the judges made afterward that they were very impressed. They especially liked the fact that they wrote and recorded an original song all on their own and I think they would have scored well if they had all been there.

You can listen to their song by clicking on the little play icon below. Just remember that it was done by a bunch of resourceful 12 year old's on a little portable tape player with a toy microphone in a backyard shed (isn't that how all great rock and roll bands start?), so please excuse the quality! If any of the others want a copy of the mp3 then just ask Brad as he has it on his phone.

 {mp3}hidden_fate-tomorrows_another_day{/mp3}

{youtube}SZ3SC-gVvy0&NR{/youtube} 

I purchased my Topfield TF5000PVRt standard definition personal digital video recorder about four years ago when they first came out. It's a great little box with twin SD digital tuners and an 80Gig hard drive. All that techo guff means that you can pause and rewind live TV as well as watch a pre recorded show whilst recording two different shows on different channels all at the same time.

You can also put your music on it if you want via a USB connection, but the 80Gig hard drive is the limiting factor. It's good for about 30 hours of TV. A bit later on they increased it to 120Gig, but even that's not enough. Over time I had filled mine up with movies and shows (mostly cooking shows - Food Safari rocks!) so that I was always deleting stuff to make more room.

Enter Ebay. I've purchased a brand new 400Gig drive via Ebay for the bargain basement price of $79.00 and now I'm about to go about upgrading my trusty Topfield. Read on if you would like to see how it went (with photo's!)..........

Speaking of bad, have you had a look at the little share graph over on the left hand side? It's not broken, and we haven't had a sudden increase in gravity, my shares really have dropped that low. That sort of thing used to really stress me out, but now I'm not so worried. I'm holding shares in way more companies than I should be, but they are nearly all resource sector start up's with great technicals so it's only the current "the sky is falling" mentality that's forcing their value so low. There is nothing wrong with the sector or the companies so I know that they will turn around as soon as the nutters realise that the sky is firmly bolted to whatever is above it and it ain't going to fall.