Thanks for the cat steve.

This last weekend I went four wheel driving with my sister and her friend Nam. He was fairly experience and gave me some good pointers. It was also very wet and we managed to slide the Defender down some tracks sideways… which was a bit scary. I got a new battery for my laptop off ebay.. not sure how good it is yet.. I let it discharge before and it jumped from 30% to 1% and stayed on 1% for about an hour. I’ve been charging it now.. and its been on 99% for a while now.. Hopefully it becomes conditioned soon, and gives me the correct reading. My AJAX remote desktop application has been put on sourceforge now. The project is called AJAX VNC. Some guy is adding remote control to it. From what I’ve seen of the code it looks like it was pretty easy to implement.. maybe I could have put it into by initial release. There seems to be heaps of snow falling here in Victoria, and its seeming a lot cooler than last winter. I got my snowboard back from a service. Looks like they waxed it, but it doesn’t feel like they’ve sharpened the edges..ah well, it was a freebee anyway. I think me and Snowy are planning on going boarding next weekend. Sweet.

You know you love it.

My new favourite file-system mapped linux device.

Time for a new host. Steve, Dani and I are now sharing a plan on Quadrahosting.com; Going well so far. Took me a while to change hosts because my stupid registrar.. DnBuy.com was down. I had to wait 4 days for their site to become available before I could login and modify the DNS settings.

Last Sunday was my second 4WDing expedition in the Defender. The week before I had gone for a quick drive through some pine forests west of Macedon. This time I ventured out with Mark and Al. We found some pretty hardcore tracks. We found a very wide and steep track that we went down a few times. (Check out the video here ). On our way home we found ourselves heading along a track. We were just driving, having no idea of how advanced the track might get. We ended up going through some large muddy patches. I made sure I locked the diff before driving through. It wasn’t too bad. About a foot deep. Our map didn’t have all the tracks that we were on, so we were a bit confused of where we actually were. We came to a part in the track where we descending some very steep areas. I was kind of glad we didn’t have to ascend anything like this. We came to the bottom and had to traverse some very deep mud.. well it might have been two feet deep. Once we got out of the mud we came to a very steep rocky ascent. We kind of got a little worried here, that we might not be able to ascend this hill. We got out.. had a look at the map, used Mark’s porno GPS to work out where we were. We concluded that we were not far from the road we were heading for. I tried ascending in high-ratio. I made it up about 5 metres, but the I stalled. Al chocked up the wheels with rocks, and I started the Defender again, and put it into low-ratio. It all worked well, and we were able to get to the top of the hill without getting the winch out.  I think we were all glad to get out of there though… but it was good fun..