Stu's Rusty Bucket

Friday, May 30, 2003

The boro

Off to middlesbrough today, then up to scotland (Fort William). Feeling like utter shit. having anxiety attacks already. this is a great start to my weekend.

packed all my flu + cold crap. all the pills and liquid I need to survive this flu out in the wilderness…

aaaugh. i hate being sick!!!

hope to get some photos to add to the gallery…

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

ergh

The Stu still feels crook. not up to typing much.
off to scotland this weekend with Stu (kiwi) and Helen, hopefully I will be feeling better.

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Hmm

Not much to say today, still fee ratshit..
and..
The Stu De-Bearded… well its, I guess, respectable. It looks like a 3 day growth. kinda jimmy barnesish..
no beard, no goatee, just a blonde shadow… sigh…

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

FLU

stu sick. flu. incoherate. irratable. cant sleep. gunked up throat. loaded nose.
siiiiiiiick.
siiiiickness.
my room is a room of pathogens. its like that movie with dustin hoffman, outbreak. only this time there was no monkey.
i’ve also discovered a new law of the universe. You cant do snot rockets if you have a beard. Theres no ‘clearance’… cleanup is a bitch.
i’m gonna have to shave :(
(stu, with beard, pre beard threatening FLU)

Sweetner strikes back

So I go to the chemist today to get some advice, the woman says, get Night Nurse, it helps you sleep (something I havnt had in 3 days) and helps get rid of flu…

sweeet. I check the box.. ingrediants looks ok.. I buy it.

I get home.. I open it.. I read the little paper that comes with it… riiiiiiiiiight at the bloody bottom, “Contains Acesulfame K” AAAAAAAAARGH fucking sweetner strikes back :(

There is another thing to add to my avoid allergy list..
(Oh, and Lemsip tablets are ok, but Lemsip sachets have Phenylalanine”

bloody shit arse sweetner…

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Optimists

“No one wants to be a pessamist. Everyone wants to be an optimist, Optimists make poor people as they lack imaginative power - they cant imagine all of the things that can go wrong. Whats important is how you deal with the problem.  See it as an opportunity to do something new without arriving purposely into danger, as this tends to be a generally much more productive angle to view a particular problem rathern than to just say “Fine, I see it as such” and run the other way. By doing that you will have missed the opportunity to streatch your mind”

Friday, May 16, 2003

Chicken flavoured chips amm Crisps (without chicken)

I keep forgetting the english call chips crisps. (cold = crisps, hot = chips… its all CHIPS to me).

anyway..

I dont eat meat.. and I’m looking at these chicken flavoured crisps.. and it says “Suitable for Vegetarians”.. ooohkaay..

hmm the ingrediants is lotsof salt, and ‘chicken flavouring’ which is apparently onion, paprika and assorted herbs and spices…

no meat.. in these CHICKEN flavoured chips… I guess a lot of things taste like chicken but can actually not include chicken.. strange…

AAAAAND!! and and! I found yet more crisps that include sweetner.. Since I’m alergic to sweetner I have to be very very carefull, and whislt cruising the snacks in the shop I thought mm they look tasty.. only to find they were loaded with aspartame. yuk.

its fun to be projectile-vomit-immediate-alergic-reaction to sweetner.. no chewing gum, no diet anything, no lots of crisps, no cordial, no lots of fruit juices, no lots of EVERYTHING dammit

Drinks, sceners

My mate Shock (Rajesh) has been in london for two weeks but doesnt contact me till yesterdayish. So tonight I’m going drinking…

Spence (Spencer) arrived a week ago, so I’m going drinking tomorow with him..

Jester (Sam) is here too now, so I need to hook up with him for a drink…

all this drinking and I’ve 100quid to my name until pay day (2 weeks)…

aaah well.. drinks all around, df (stu, me), is shouting…

then shock and jester are off to a demo party in sweeden… good luck in the compo guys

-df

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Nappies

What f%&^*ing imbeciles flush nappies down toilets??
More to the point, what f%&^*ing imbeciles who live upstairs from you flush f%&^*ing nappies down the toilet and block things up???
hello! its a nappie! its not a tissue. Its big, bigger than a grapefruit.
They dont biodegrade in the rubbish tip so what f%&^*ing hope is there of them breaking down in the damn waterworks pipe that the entire council housing block is attached to!!
aaaaargh. stupid bastards. I just cant believe people flush frigging nappies down the toilet.

Sunday, May 11, 2003

New handheld gaming device

I got my GamePark 32 yesterday (GP32).. wow is it cool or what?? This is awesome..

It takes smart-media cards as storage, and there is lots of homegrown games and stuff. I have xRick (Rick Dangerous) which is driving me mad!!! (I will defeat it!).

Also got a Sega GameGear/Master System emulator on it… which is really cool. I’m again playing Xenon2 on it…

The screen is bigger than the GBA, its 1/2 VGA (320x240). Stereo Sound, etc. very cool

Also trying to setup the dev-kit so I can program it too…

I’m really chuffed about it. Now I want to sell my GameBoy Colour and Game Boy Advance and get rid of them… The GP32 rocks.. Next week my extra memory card turns up, I will install my C64 emulator on it and be in heaven!!

Thursday, May 08, 2003

Policital Philosophy

According to the quiz

Centrist
Centrists favor selective government intervention and emphasize practical solutions to current problems. They tend to keep an open mind on new issues. Many centrists feel that government serves as a check on excessive liberty

Your Personal Self-Government Score is 60%.
Your Economic Self-Government Score is 50%.

Scores falling on the centrist border are counted as centrist.

1,854,119 users have taken the quiz so far. Results are renewed after each submission

35.82 %—Libertarian
18.53 %—Left-liberal
30.10 %—Centrist
7.15 %—Right-Conservative
8.41 %—Authoritarian

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

Tea

Well, this weekend has been designated tea weekend.. I love a good cuppa.. and the next best thing to growing your own tea , is mixing your own.

The last batch of Stus-Special-Brew is all but gone. So, time once again to create Stu’s-Special-Blend.

I want to remove some of the sweetness from Indian Chai and create something well not so sweet.

I think I’ll start with some Chai, add a little Darjeeling, some red indian peach and maybe some chamomile or some dried lemon zest..

Another batch, I want to mix some Lotus with some Darjeeling, in small amounts…

Stu in Turkey

I never managed to finish writing this, and never got around to posting it anywhere..

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Trip to Turkey…

Day 0 : “The Night Before”

The plane out was at 6am in the morning… Meaning you have to be there two hours before, at 4am… Which would mean roughly one hour and a half travel time to get there, which would make leaving home at about 2:30am… And since no trains run at that time, it was deemed fair cop to just sleep the night at the airport… We were doomed from the begining.

The Europe terminal of Heathrow’s four terminals is the domestic terminal, and naturally, all of europe is asleep at the same time as England, so it was all shutdown..

So there we were, Stu and Stu, two big arse backpacks trying to get some sleep in the airport, me on the floor on my foam mat, stu on the seats. Workers doing work stuff and making hell of a racket, and the floor waxer comnig along and buffing the floor around you.  It was a hard sleep and I got about 1 hours worth, and managed to wake up with a nice mat print on my face from doing it hard on the cold floor.

Day 1 : “Damn that Orange Juice”

Grumpy and sleepless, we trudged through the empty airport to our checkin terminal.. to find a crowd of people queing up. We still dont know where they all came from.

After checking in, we hit the breakfast. Aussie-Stu’s mistake number 2. Kiwi-Stu tucked right in. Me, I had some orange juice and eggs. We make our way to the gateway, and I’m walking along doubled over producing some foul smelling gas. All I was thinking, was thank god I brought the imodium tablets with me!

Were on the plane, about to take off, Kiwi stu is out like a light, snoring away, tounge hanging out. Me? well I’m clutching the sickbag taking deep breaths, waiting for the worst.

Twenty minutes after take off, the orange juice made an appearance. Great stuff, the best way to start a holiday off with…

We land in Turkey four hourse later and its a very new and modern looking airport. If your a kiwi, you pay no ‘tax’ on entry. If your on an Aussie passport, its 20us, if your on a UK passport, its 10pound. I chose the 10pounds. I feel sorry for the yanks, its 45us dollars.

So we clear customs, strap on the backpacks and wander outside the airport, the heat is fantastic. With no idea where we are going or how we are going to get there, we stand like muppets in front of the turkish bus route sign when a taxi bloke rolls over jabbers on about the bus, says we cant get one here for another hour, but tells us for the bus fare price, will taxi us right into istanbul.

sweeet. only 5 million per person for a 10minute hair raising ride.

You ever play those games in school, where you have to count the marbles in the jar? Thats what the bus station was like. Buses everywhere. It seems to be the main transport for gettnig around the large expanse of turkey.

The bus ride is cheap, (16 million, which is about 8 pounds) for a 5 hour ride up along the coast to Eceabat and Canakkale.

The Turks have an odd tax law, that you pay little housing tax if your house is only half built, so as the bus meanders along the coast, you see all these houses, that have concrete girders and pipes all jutting from the roof of the first floor, all very unfinished, but fully inhabited.

It gives the imperssion of landing in Beirut, as you see the same in places in instanbul, it looks like a war has ripped through and all the buildings are in a state of destruction.

On the bus down, we met up with two others going independant, Steve and Stephanie, from PErth but living ni Manchester.

The bus rolled into Eceabat at about 8:30ish at night. We were now faced with the problem of finding accomodation that the 20thousand other aussies and kiwis had not taken. ..

The bloke in the Ece Hotel was full up, until we were approached by a bloke with a rehearsed speach. “You come see my house. Very cheap”. Suddenly the Ece had rooms to spare at 20us a night. (about 15quid), This blokes house was going for 5 million a night (about 2.50 quid).

We got the whole top floor of this blokes house, the floorings covered in thick turkish throw down rugs, cardboard insulation all over the roof and about 6 other backpackers. Plenty of space and even a western toilet!

(I think that last bit needs an explanation. A toilet in turkey is a hole in the ground, literally. Its a ceramic rectangle with a hole in it, flat down on the ground)

Now that we had established our base, our posse of four proceeded out onto the town to the local bar to partake of the refreshing drinks. The local bar provided a band, who sang English but couldnt speak it. A shot of anything, was a standard beer mug glass with 50% spirit and 50% whatever. You didnt get a 35ml shot, you got half a glass!  and all three kinds of local beer (Efes, Troy and Turgid) were foul brew.

Day 2 : “Anzac Sunset”

It was a late rising that greeted us with a home cooked Turkish breakfast.
Three slices of tomato, three slices of cucumber and a boiled egg.

Organising our gear, we headed off to raid the local bread shop, stocking up on fresh hot turkish bread (good stuff!) and some bottles of water, we flagged down the local horse and jinker (these things are everywhere in Turkey), which proceeded to take us to the outskirts of town, to the local Boomerang Bar.

hmm.. not Anzac Cove… the local aussie who runs the place gave us a bit of advice, and we ambled our way back to town to score a minibus out to Anzac Cove.. Ohwell, we did get a ride on the jinker for two million lira.

We arrived at Anzac Cove and dumped our gear on the lawn, there were about 15 other independants (ppl not on a tour) milling around. Cameras were whipped out, and were firing left and right, as we stood on the official podium and the beach.

A friendly game of cricket was instigated on the dawn service lawn, when someone turned up a tennis ball, forcing steve to rummage through the bush and return with a fence pailing for a bat. Channel 7 and ABC with nothing better to do, filmed us playing.

Leaving the cricketers I meandered off with another bloke up to Simpsons grave, Lone Pine and Shrapnel Valley taking lotsa photos. There are plenty of unmarked graves, and plenty still marked.

Day 3 : “Anzac Day”

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I never wrote the rest of my report…

Sunday, May 04, 2003

Cups of Tea and Flat Tyres

I’ve been on a Chai overdose today. Drank about 6 cups of the stuff.. which is unusual for me. I mostly drink red tea or plain ole green jasmin tea… But not today.. nosiree.. been drinking this spicy sweet indian tea, its loaded with ginger and cinamon and stuff… Its a bit too sweat for my liking so I’m trying to find out a way to bitter it up.. I might add a little red tea (thats plain black tea to most of you) to even the taste out a bit…

Had a puncture too. Just greeeeeeeeat. :( Those glueless patches are pretty cool tho.. still I dobbed some glue around it just to be safe…

I still want to get my hands on them Time Z-Control Freeride pedals… I played with some in the Evans cycle shop.. mmmmmmm ME WANTS!!!

mm drinking another cup of chai.. again.. its too sweet…

sparc-emulators

well.. Its as if I have nothing better to do, but I have started thinking and plotting out a sparc-v8 emulator (thats sun4m architecture).. As if I didnt have any other projects on the go, or that..

Time will tell if I do anything with it, but I am reading the sparc-v8 manual and knocking up some guidelines on how I will tackle this…