Easton (The Quince Man Quincy) Royce

Chrnocat and I traveled to Sydney on the 28th of September for the annual Animania Festival! Needless to say we had quite the adventure. Throughout the entire visit, I was convinced The Chaser would be out somewhere causing trouble. Unfortunately for me, they were causing troubles in places that I wasn’t in.

Since I am tired and just about ready for bed, I am going to type this as fast as possible and hopefully avoid making any mistakes. I have been meaning to cover this topic and take care of this post for some time, and at this point in time, as depressed and irritated as I feel, I believe now is a good time to write.

Day One 28th of September

I had never been on a plane before, and on an air plan was our designated travel style for this trip. We boarded a “Dash 8” at the Narrabri Air Port for out what seemed to be a short 2.5 hour flight. We first had a stop over at Moree, before finally making the leg to Sydney. The flight to Moree takes roughly 30 minutes. The plane simply flies up, and then down again, without leveling off or reaching normal flight altitude. Needless to say, I was very excited about being on the plane, and when we landed in Moree for a refueling before continuing on, all I wanted was for the plane to be back in the air again. It was a very surreal experience, and reminded of all the hours I used to spend playing Sim City.

Upon arrival, we collected our luggage, and left the Sydney Airport terminal by train. After finally arriving in the city, we set out to find the hotel we had booked our accommodation at. A week before our trip, the hotel manager had contacted us and informed as that they were undergoing maintenance and were moving us to a different hotel. Not only was the different hotel completely tacky (and the coffee was nasty as), it was even further away then our original location, which was still too far away from the location the Festival was being held (Town Hall). I don’t know what Chrnocats mother was thinking when she said “Oh the hotel is in Kirribilly, it’s near everything”. Fark that! It was near nothing, and we needed to travel by ferry to get there and back again. After canceling our accommodation at both hotels and getting a refund, we ferried back to the city, found an internet cafe and book some real accommodation at they Sydney Central Travel Lodge.

Finally after checking in at the hotel, we headed to Town Hall for the evening opening ceremony and other random events that began the Animania Festival. We were hoping to get some shopping in today, but unfortunately we were unable to.

Finally late in the night, we made it back to our hotel for showers, costume preparations for the big day on Saturday, and sleep. Chrnocat realised she had lost one of her hair clips. I reassured her she would find it at the air port when we got back. I hadn’t seen it fall off, but I had a good feeling I was right.

Summary of Firsts:

• First time on a plane
• First time taking the air port train to the city
• First time on a Ferry

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written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Adventure, air, animania, Anime, aquarium, Chrnocat, Comedy, computers, excitement, food, fun, Games, Movies, pc, port, Random, Rant, sydney

My last few days looked like this:

Unfortunately, I was away on “1 Day to Go”, so I wasn’t able to get a screen grab, but I think you get the idea. My days of using Windows Live One Care, were over! Trust me, I celebrated!

The inclusion of Windows Live OneCare in my 90 day stint, was most certainly a disaster, and also the cause of most of my stress during my use of Windows Vista. Just like other Virus/Spyware detection combo software suites, it too was always scanning in the background. Scanning so much infact, that it would often make reading my email near impossible. I would sometimes wait up to 5 minutes for an email to load into view. The Windows Live OneCare firewall was a pain in the butt, not to mention that Windows Vista itself, did not even acknowledge that it had a firewall installed. For the entire 90 days, Windows Vista was bugging me to enable Windows Vista Firewall, because apparently I didn’t have one installed! For some unknown reason, Windows Live OneCare continued to disable Windows Defender. I found this to be a pain, because every few days Windows Defender would make it to the top of the pile saying “Hey! I am disabled! Enable me Again!”. Of course after enabling Windows Defender, I would then have to do a spyware scan, even if I didn’t want to! “Later” I would click, only to see my CPU usage go way up as it started scanning in the background instead.

One very irritating caveat of Windows Vista, is physical memory usage. During my 90 days, I was unable to get Windows Vista to really function the way I wanted it too. For example, I have 2GB of DDR Memory. So I figure “what do I need a swap file for”. So I disable the swap file, and immediately Windows Vista complains that it does not have enough memory! It even performed sluggishly! Now, if I were to do this in Windows XP, the system would be forced to push as much as possible into physical memory. Which in the case of my laptop with 2GB of DDR Memory, was perfectly fine! I never exceeded 2GB and my laptop never skipped a beat. Come Windows Vista, and I am able to perform the same feat! The best I could get was a compromise, which was still horrid. I was able to push the swap file down to a minimum size of 200MB (instead of the “Windows Managed” 3.5GB). However, if a program on my laptop should use more then 200MB of Memory (Firefox for example, as I am sure many of you have experienced), I would still get the memory warning errors. Sure, I can ignore them, but eventually, Windows Vista would crash Firefox altogether, or whatever offending programs were “taking up too much memory”. As I said above, this was never a problem in Windows XP. Hopefully there is a work around for this out there somewhere. I share my HDD with a Linux Partition, so 3.5GB wasted on a swap file is a lot for me, especially since Fedora 7 is quite capable of running smoothly with no swap partition at all!

Overall, my 90 days of Vista has been fun, and for the most part, I have had next to no troubles. I have swamp of applications installed, and they all work fine, including the ones I had to install in “Windows XP SP2 Compatibility Mode”. Heck, I was even able to install Command and Conquer Windows 95 Edition. With an extra piece of software, I was able to battle against my younger brother.

The slick new interface is funky, and easy to disable when it gets in the way (like when it is sucking up too much of my 200MB swap file for example!). Windows Aero is handy, but it’s not the be all of Windows Vista, it’s just the icing on the cake.

I also opted to include Microsoft Office 2007 in my 90 day stint. The latest version of the Microsoft Office Suite, and boy is it something! Most of the applications have been completely re-written, others updated. If you haven’t tried Microsoft Office 2007 yet, you should give it a shot!

I am sure that Windows Vista has far more to offer then what I have experienced so far, and for the moment, I am going to stick to using Windows Vista and Office 2007, to get the most out of both of them, and broaden my knowledge. I am somewhat established here now, and it would be a shame to just leave it all. I miss using linux, however I think I will continue my use of Windows Vista, at least until Fedora 8 is released.

I will even continue to post my findings and discoveries of Windows Vista, and hopefully at some point, I write a “Windows Vista – The Perfect Setup” guide. Actually, I have one in the works already… so stay tuned!

written by Easton Royce \\ tags: 2007, 90 Days, aero, Blog, care, fedora, live, Microsoft, office, one, Rant, Recounts, Support, Ultimate, Vista, Windows, XP

I tried out the Apple Safari browser for Windows today. Yep. Even downloaded the Windows Vista version. It sucked. I was going to write this post in Safari, and include a nice happy speech about the supposed speed improvements, stability and reliability, but it crashed before I was even able to get to a website. Apparently there is too much code to execute on my default internet explorer home page (http://www.ninemsn.com.au). So what more can I say?

I downloaded Safari. I installed Safari. I opened Safari. I went to a website. Safari crashed. I went back to Firefox. The end.

So long Safari.

written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Random, Rant

I was listening to the radio this morning, while shaving my face of unsightly hair. The radio program was “Hendo In The Morning” (the announcers last name is Henderson “Hendo”). As he does, Hendo was kicking off a competition. Basically, you had to listen to the first second or half second of a song, call in, and tell him the name of the artist and the name of the song. I often cringe at such competitions, because I am almost 100% certain, that they pick the callers to go on air, so that they sound like idiots. After a song, a competition intro and the playing of the song tidbit (which is actually Break Away by Kelly Clarkson) it went pretty much like this:

Hendo: “Caller One, What’s Your Name?”
Caller One: (might as well have been douche bag, he sounded like one) Mitchell!
Hendo: “What’s the Answer Mitchell?”
Mitchell: “Umm, err, I dunno, is it Kelly Clarkson?
Hendo: “And what is the name of the song?”
Mitchell: “Umm, err, I dunno, is it Baby One More Time?”
Me: YOU FARKING IDOT!!!!
Hendo: “Nope! Better Luck Next Time!”
Hendo: “Ok, Caller Two, What’s Your Name?”
Caller Two: (might as well have been dumb blonde, she sounded like one) Jessica!
Hendo: “What’s the Answer Jessica?”
Jessica: Umm, err, Is it Daddy Cool with Eagle Rock?!!!
Me: FOR CRYING OUT LOUD YOU IDIOT! FARKING DADDY COOL! YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME, ARE YOU AN IDIOT?!!
Hendo: “Nope! Not Even Close! Better Luck Next Time!”
Hendo: “Call Three, Our Last Caller, What’s Your Name?”
Caller Three: (Might as well have been dumb ass, he sounded like one and obviously wasn’t listening to the previous callers) John!
Hendo: “What the Answer John?”
John: Umm, err, is it called Walk Away?
Me: FOR FARK SAKE!
Hendo: Awww, Your Close! and What is the artists name!
Me: WTF! Your Accepting that Answer!
John: Umm, err, is it Kate Winslet, or Kate Cebrano?
Me: YOU IDIOT! YOU FARKING TOOL! DO YOU KNOW HOW DUMB YOU SOUND!
Hendo: “Nope! Close, But Not Close Enough! Better Luck Next Time”
Me: For Crying Out Loud!

As you can see, I was very disgusted with the three callers, from my own town, who obviously don’t know anything about music! This is why I believe the callers are hand picked before they go on air. I mean, they don’t want the competition to be over as it starts now do they? They want the bonus prize money to be huge first, while the rest of us music fans sit and cringe at the voices of the idiots that call up, thinking they got it down!

written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Comedy, Random, Rant

It never really ends. Whenever you finish with one Nitwit, another one takes its place. Since the extinction of my old blog, I guess it is kind of hard to actually know what it is that I am talking about. Let me explain …

I am a TAFE (Teaching / Training And Further Education) teacher. TAFE is something of a college, an alternate path of further education, if university is not for you. It is offered in several countries I believe, but it is biggest and best in Australia. Why? At TAFE, you can gain country wide accreditations in almost all industries, at just a pinch of the cost and time of University. I love TAFE!

In Australia, we go to university only if we want a piece of paper that says how good we are, and have tonnes of money so that we spend tonnes of years in lectures and boring class rooms. We go to TAFE, when we want REAL hands on practical training in our chosen area of interest, without getting sore ears and suffering the boredom of class rooms. TAFE rules in Australia, and the universities hate it! I love TAFE, did I mention that already? People even leave their university courses to come to TAFE instead, because it’s so great! It’s so much better then university, especially if your attention span is short!

For more information about TAFE, checkout it.

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written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Random, Rant, TAFE