The Boxing Day Test 2010

I'm on my phone during a rain break.

This summer I managed to make it to the holy grail of cricket in Australia: Day 1 of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG in Melbourne.

Along with my good friend Chris Neugebauer, I sat through a morning of threatening weather and Australian wickets being taken. Not pleasant. In the afternoon (after lunch and a sizeable rain delay) the English continued to pummel the Australian team, this time with the bat.

Without a doubt the highlights of the day all involved the 84 000+ strong crowd in attendance that day. Cricket matches (and sporting events of all manner in Australia, really) are just an excuse to get drunk, and the crowd in Melbourne that day did not disappoint.

Although I didn’t drink, others did, and the resulting beer cup snakes were very impressive. One was sighted at 6 rows long, which some maths tells me must be at least 1200 cups, which represents around 500 litres of mid-strength beer. Which is a lot for the couple of hundred people who contributed to that particular snake.

Being at the MCG is an awe-inspiring thing. When you first enter the ground and are completely surrounded by the stands, which tower over you, I doubt it’s possible to say anything other than “wow”.

Being an avid enthusiast of public transport (read: train freak), I had a great day in Melbourne, which has a very impressive system, with trams, trains, and buses galore. Although I only caught a couple of buses, it’s great to see that a city can actually get public transport right!

All up, a fantastic day. Even if it did mean getting up at six o’clock in the morning.

The Beer Snake
The Beer Snake

30 Days of Geek #16: First computer you’ve ever owned & your favourite ever.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

The first computer I co-owned (with my brother):

  • MSI MS-6161 Motherboard
  • Intel Celeron 366MHz CPU
  • 64MB 100Mhz SD-RAM
  • 4GB IDE Hard Drive
  • Floppy drive
  • CD drive
  • RTL8139B network card
  • And my first hardware modification ever: adding in a Creative Soundblaster (some 16-bit ISA model).

And my favourite combination ever:

  • MSI MS-6198 Motherboard
  • Intel Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz CPU
  • 1GB 133MHz SD-RAM (2x 512MB sticks)
  • 40GB IDE drive + 250GB SATA drive (which is still going strong as a backup drive)
  • Floppy drive
  • CD+RW drive
  • RTL8139D network card
  • This motherboard, as far as I can recall, had onboard sound

Note that these computers really are one and the same, since there’s a direct ancestry between them. I’ve never ever built a computer that hasn’t shared at least one major component with a previous computer (excluding laptop purchases).

30 Days of Geek #15: Earliest geek experience

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

This is a tricky one indeed. I’ve previously written about how I became a geek and pretty much everything I could say there has been covered here. So, um… yeah. Here are a couple more anecdotes, off the top of my head:

  • My uncle gave me an old broken 286 motherboard, back when 486s were all the rage. I took it to pieces and observed every part, even though I had no idea what any of them did. I was probably only 6 or 7 years old.
  • I found an old Commodore 64 in my grandparent’s backyard shed (probably belonging to that same uncle). Unfortunately it was broken… so I took it to pieces!
  • Really, just lots of ‘Obtain geeky object XYZ, disassemble into component pieces X, Y and Z. Put back together again, building an XZY.’

30 Days of Geek #14: Favourite computer conference?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Seeing as I’ve never been to one (yet) I can’t really have a favourite. However, I’ve been to the National Computer Science School (ie computer camp) and it was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. A week of writing scripts in Python, having access to powerful computers and a fast Internet connection, and most importantly, making friends.

During the week we had to write a search engine spider as part of a website we built for a charity. My fondest memory of the week is, along with my good friend Michael Wheeler, modifying the spider and setting it to work downloading as much of the Internet as we could before Python crashed. It took a while.

I’m looking forward to attending linux.conf.au (named after its domain name) in Brisbane in January 2011. It should be a blast.

30 Days of Geek #13: How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here. Apologies for the lateness of today’s post, I was busy yesterday.

It was such a long time ago that I became a geek that I’ve sort of forgotten how it came to be.

Back when I was around 14 or so my stepfather bought me and my brother a computer, to stop us using his office computer to play games. As well as playing countless hours of Age of Empires and Grand Theft Auto, I spent quite a lot of time ‘making my computer better’, which really involved breaking it and having to reinstall Windows every few months.

Even before that though, I was messing around with a BASIC interpreter (QBASIC on MS-DOS) on the office computer… it must have been back in 1998-1999. I thought “Hello, world!” was a masterpiece. For a 9 or 10-year old, I guess it was. At that stage, anyway. I’ve met 13-year olds writing operating systems now. Kids these days.

It’s definitely personal interest, but I hope to make it into a career.