I’m currently bidding on my first auction on Ebay. I’m bidding for a RAM only video camera. It supposedly records MPEG-2 onto an SD-Card. It doesn’t have any moving parts so it can be used for recording some snowboarding or downhill mountain biking. It also has a video-input for external video sources, such as a head mounted bullet cam. I’ll have to buy a very big SD-card for it though, I think you can get 4gig cards now. I went climbing with Devo on Sunday. We soloed a new climb at Camels Hump, a little harder than the normal climbs we do there. I’ll have to see if my dad and sister can make it up this one. I was happy to discover that Dale Begg-Smith, Australias gold medal winner at the Winter Olympics, is a really dodgey bastard. Apparantly his company is into Spam and Spyware, and his company’s webste has been currently removed from the internet. Check out this blog

here for some Dale Begg-Smith ear bashing. Awesome.

Went climbing this morning with Katrina and Dad, nice and early. We climbed the “Crazy Overhang Chimney Climb”, which is one of the three climbs at the Camels hump we do without ropes. Checkout the photos Here. Mel went out last night to a Hens night in South Melbourne, so I went and hung out with Steve, Danni and Erin at the Town Hall Pub in North Melbourne, where I consumed a large Beef Burger. We were also graced with the presence of Julie, from The Cyclones, whom Steve and I went to school with. She is back from London with Simon for a friends wedding. Her and Simon make up two-thirds of the band The Cyclones who are currently looking for a record deal in London. It was good to see her.

TPG couldn’t sustain there $49.99 1500/256 ADSL plan. Apparantly it was below the wholesale price offered by Telstra. Maybe TPG thought they could sustain the loss until they got their own DSLAMs into a majority of Australian exchanges. Anyway they couldn’t sustain it, and the plan rose 40% in price per month. So I decided to Churn. I churned to Internode. The churn process was fairly harmless, even though theres only supposed to be a maximum of 4 hours downtime while the DSLAM port is assigned to another ISP, and my connection was down for two days. Anyway its back and its all good. TPG were even nice enough to give me 2 days extra access past the end of my billed month. I might swap back to TPG later in the year, depending on who gets as ADSL2 DSLAM into the Sunbury exchange first. Sunbury should get a ADSL2 DSLAM fairly quickly I imagine, just because 1 exchange supplies connections to a population of over 25,000. You think they’d be demand.

On Saturday, it was about 23 here in Sunbury. Paulius and I were planning on going Kayaking at 7:30 in the morning, but of course he went to the attic the night before and was to drunk to go kayaking in the morning. However we decided to go kayaking at about 1. We drove the kayaks down to the wetlands reserve down at Emu Bottom, and carried them about 500 metres across a paddock to the creek. This took a while cause Paulius had to keep on stopping cause he was drunk. We finally got to the creek, only to find that it was pretty much empty. So we had a look a round, and then carried the kayaks back across the paddock and went home. I also got very bad sunburn on my Neck, which still hurts. Saturday night was Justins and Kates engagment party in Eltham. It was a good party, it was a pity the whole crew couldn’t be there, cause everyone had a great time.

I added a 200 gig hard drive to my computer the other day, I was replacing another 200 gig harddrive which I had very stupidly formatted to FAT32 – for some reason I thought I might someday have to use this drive in a windows box. Any way FAT32 was annoying me – I couldn’t have files larger that 4 gig, I couldn’t use symbolic links and I had issues with filename case. Any way I successfully duplicated the disk in my Fedora box, but i accidently copied it up one directory. That was ok, cause I could just move the whole structure down one directory with “mv”. However, cause I have the bad habit of running everything as “root” and for some reason I wasn’t in the directory I thought I was in (I was in the / directory), I managed to totally corrupt my operating system. which was great. I had nicely stuffed my boot and etc directories so Grub, my boot loader was also totally destoryed. Anyway I tried restoring my boot and etc directories using a Live Gentoo CD, but to no avail. So I was able to back the stuff up that I needed using the Gentoo CD (it also took me ages to work out how to mount a LVM partition), but I had to reinstall Fedora. The Fedora installer was so crap. I have a full set of 4 Fedora CDs, 1 Fedora DVD and a whole backup of the Fedora OS on another HTTP server on my other Fedora box, but I couldn’t get it to work. It was so tempremental. On the 20th attempt at installing Fedora, I tried doing a net installation straight of the Fedora website. That worked. I read a little later on that some mirrors were corrupted and had rendered some net installations failures. So I dont know what it is, even though I downloaded complete ISOs, the CDs I had burnt were still “not good enough” to get through the installation. Any way… its all up and running again, but the whole process did take me about 5 days to get happening.