I wanted to gear my units more towards Political Science/International Relations (POL) and History (HIS), but unfortunately I can’t. UNSW like students trying different things at the start to see what they like, etc, before the specialize. So I threw in Chinese, from Chinese Studies to try to work on my Chinese, and Relationships from Sociology to fill in the blanks. Altogether, that’s 24 Credits.

My going-ons in that time period has been rather mixed, sadly I’d say that it’s leaning slightly more on the negative side then the positive, but hey, life goes on, and it does get better.

But let’s focus on the good points, I’ve been accepted into University, although I messed up my preferences for the main round of offers, and listed the local university, University of Western Sydney, as my first. Since I got straight into that, it skipped the remaining preferences. I’ve since updated my preferences and hoping that they’ll be room avaliable in the Late Round Offers at University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, or perhaps Macquarie University. Time will tell — Either way, I’ll be doing a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in International Studies/Relations, and minoring in History. That’s my next few years planned, apparently I can get credits from my Diploma as well, so that’s always good.

Asides from that, I’ve been fairly active in the /local/ music scene recently, meeting musicians, and talking to them both in person and online. I miss music, and playing an instrument, so for Christmas, I go two violins, an acoustic and an electric. I need to get new strings, and then motivate myself to play and relearn the instrument. Another interesting side note derived from meeting said people, is doing a Side Project to help promote indie bands in Australia among other things, which hopefully I’ll work with Paul if he has the time.

As for me saying fairly active in music, this has been my music rostering since December:

19th Dec - The Grates
29th Dec - Brigitte Handley & The Dark Shadows

5th Jan - The Drones w/ Bridezilla
6th Jan - Amon Amarth
16th Jan - Blow Up Betty w/ Brigitte Handley & The Dark Shadows
24th Jan - BLOX (Quan + Spod) w/ Tucker
30th Jan - The Diamond Seas

1st Feb - Nightwish
2nd Feb - Halal, How Are You? (Possibly)
3rd Feb - Bridezilla
16th Feb - Brigitte Handley & The Dark Shadows
24th Feb - The Sacred Stereos
26th Feb - Stars
27th Feb - Stars
28th Feb - Broken Social Scene
29th Feb - Feist (Possibly)

2nd Mar - Laneway Festival
7th Mar - I Heart Hiroshima
9th Mar - I Heart Hiroshima
22nd Mar - New Buffalo

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I’m still exhausted, literally. But I know once I get back to Sydney and get some rest that I’ll feel better. I’ll be on DJ881, Departing Tullamarine Terminal 3, at 6:45pm and arriving in Sydney at Terminal 2 at 8:05pm. Of course, whether that actually happens within that set out time-frame is something completely different.

Annnnyway, when I get home, I might have to do a rebuild on my PC, thanks to someone stuffing it at a LAN about two weeks back, I haven’t had time to fix it, but the issue, now, is that Vista boots into an Install. I think this is related to me trying to install XP onto an external hard drive, in an attempt to backup things on the C:\ drive, the original issue was that the Vista Bootloader 2.21 wouldn’t execute properly. I’m going to look into the Boot.ini and see if I can change the startup Parameters to see if it will boot Vista normally, so I won’t need to go through a reformat.

After helping the preparation of Paul’s and Natalie’s Wedding, I was hoping that the actual wedding day would turn out fabulous — It did, far pass my expectations, it was sunny, not too hot and a cool breeze blew through out the morning. I met many of the Bride and Groom’s relatives and friends. And spent a great deal hanging around both Will and Ryan, the Best man. The wedding was the first I went to, but was absolutely beautiful thanks to the lovely work of the equally beautiful bridesmaids.

The day was fantastic, and I can only stress that I can not properly describe what I thought of the wedding, you’ll have to wait for the photographs once Will’s worked on 4GB+ worth of them. Natalie in a wedding dress was utterly stunning and Paul was quite the bridegroom. Quite the day, and I’m literally exhausted. Although I do have Natalie’s Garter due to my leet garter catching skills. (The real reason being due to only three or four of us, including Ryan, actually going to catch it, unlike the ten plus women for the bouquet catch.)

Of course, I’m still stuck with the actual wedding in my head, but besides being in Drouin since Wednesday, helping out with the wedding and sleeping in a Cabin with Paul, I was in Lilydale (Paul’s place) since Bucks Night. During that time, I did go see Mix on Campus which was an enjoyable experience.

Some of the actual presentations were long and drawn out, but overall most were enjoyable. Especially Nick Hodge’s presentation of Microsoft’s popfly, which while impractical is an interesting mash-up technology. (It was nice finally meeting you, Nick) I think the whole event has made me want to touch XNA very badly, and will be something I will do when I arrive back in Sydney.

Anyway, that’s enough of a post. Blessed be Natalie and Paul and may they enjoy their secret honeymoon, and I hope they have eternal happiness, because they make a damn good couple which only a few can dare attempt to emulate. Thanks for inviting me, and giving me honour as a groomsman. I tried to live up to the expectations as much as I could, and do as much as possible as I could to help out and make the wedding an easier one. I hope you guys had a great day. You both deserved it.

Anyway, attended Paul’s bucks night last night and was rather amused. Met Ryan again, Paul’s Best man, and another of Paul’s friends and also, Natalie’s brothers. Pretty funtime overall, makes me wish I was paid Pre-Tuesday. We ate at a Restaurant and then got unlimited credits in Timezone for an hour, and then wandered to Krispy Kreme. Overall through, an unusual night, but highly enjoyable.

On other news, Kevin Rudd wins election? Should be interesting to see a Labour leadership for the next three years, due to the high party members being more centrists then traditional labour. I don’t see Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard ruining the budget or the economy particularly, ALP as it stands should be able to manage it as strongly as the Liberals had since Howard was elected into power. Considering, neither Costello nor Howard created the current prosperous economic situation but built upon it and maintained it. (The current economy is due to Paul Keating’s term as Treasurer and Prime Minister and his neo-liberalism policies.) So it should be interesting to see what the future holds.

Since I had a spare twenty minutes, I allowed them to pitch Scientology to me, did the fabled Stress Test, and watched them them perform auditing, and there’s a ridiculuos use of psychology involved. Afterwards, it made me giggle, but hey, better understanding of how they run.

Went to Newcastle on Sunday Night with a friend as he was going home, and I was bored and curious, as I’ve never been north past Gosford in Australia previously. It was interesting in some respects, and a much more scenic area then Sydney, really gives me the jibe of a country town similar to Golburn and Albury. Thanks to Will spending his lunch break on Monday showing me around Newcastle, the tour was ace.

Got home on Monday Afternoon, 3-4 hour train trip from Civic Station to Warwick Farm, and yeah, interesting. I also went to Supernova, and it was alright, although admittingly, it wasn’t anything spectacular, which was the reason I stopped going to it years ago but hey, watching the Emperor’s Royal Guard do a striptease is rather different… Going to Atomic Live this Saturday, should be fun, seeing Will and a few others there so yeah, certainly looking forward to that.

Anyway, It was moved around the back, and stayed like that for a few months. Recently, I got the both the time and the resolve to actually do something with it, so first, I decided to dig the foundations of the Aviary.

On Tuesday, I went to Flower Power, a place which sells landscaping and Plants in Australia and purchased 4 cubic metres of Pavers and 5 cubic metres of Paving Sand (Average scoop), bundled with delivery which was actually pretty cheap. It was set to come on Wednesday Afternoon, and I managed to convince a friend in helping me put everything together on the following day.

Wednesday came, friend came over to help, and as the hours passed, there was no sign of them. They rang at 5:20PM stating that they forgot to deliver it since it was one of the last deliveries to make. This irritated me, but being the nice guy I am, I agreed for them to deliver it first thing tomorrow. My friend went home, and Wednesday grew to a close.

Thursday, I awoke at 6am with my phone continiously beeping due to having a message on my phone. I laid in bed until I got up to check it around 6:50AM, and it was from Will via Twitter. As I read the message, I looked out the window and saw a truck and made out the words Flower Power on it, not an easy feat when I wasn’t wearing glasses, I then muttered “Holy shit, aren’t they suppose to ring before they get here?!” and ran out of my room putting on a pair of pants, got out there, greeted the Truck Driver and helped unload all 152 Pavers, and the Sand while still half asleep.

As we finished, I then thought, I’m awake and I can’t be bothered going back to bed or going on my Computer, I might as well get this Aviary thing done before the heat turns on, so I spent 7:20AM to 12:30PM working non-stop to finish the Aviary, and I did so, putting in the sand, pavers, and other Bird accessories and proofing it enough that Finches couldn’t get out of any small openings.

It’s pretty good, at least I think so, but I’m glad it’s finished. I have Quails as well, but I’m waiting to take a picture of when the Finches are right next to them eating.

Upon clicking the Setup.exe, I found the installation and upgrade from my previous version of Trillian both easy and quick with it easily importing my settings from Trillian 3.1. However not everything was as smooth as I hoped. After starting up Astra, I noticed that while it managed to connect all my accounts, bar taking a while to do so, it wouldn’t connect my ICQ account, I scratched my head and checked to see what had happened and apparently it’s forgotten my ICQ account, removing all references from it in the Identities and Connections Menu.

A bit of an annoying thing due to not remembering my ICQ number. This was eventually resolved by looking into my ICQ Logs. The next issue I came across was that initially it wouldn’t send my messages, telling me that it could not send them. I restarted Astra, and this promptly resolved the issue.

The guys at Cerulean Studios have obviously been trying to close the gap between the lack of features Trillian supports of MSN and other Messenger Networks. And it shows, Trillian Astra allows for drawing, Emotiblips, Buzzing (Oh yay), and a few other features which haven’t either been used or utilized in Trillian previous versions. Sadly, however, Trillian does not have proper support for Webcam at this time — the lack of this feature is astonishing in that this is probably the most sought out feature in Trillian. There are settings for the feature, however they are greyed out, and I can only imagine that it is something Cerulean Studios are working on and will probably be implemented before actual release.

Astra’s range of skins are limited at the moment, however look quite decent with a large amount of colours to use. However using some of these skin colours will mean the Drawing feature will not appear properly and is something Cerulean need to work on.

On the bright side, Trillian’s strongest point has always been the range of plug-ins, and Astra has backward compatibility with a large quantity of them, with this and that there will undoubtedly be many plug-ins made especially for Astra, I can only imagine that the range of plug-ins will be vast. Including usage of Gtalk, MySpace and Xfire which are all currently available and work well with Astra.

All in all, if the guys at Cerulean Studios keep working hard on this, this will be undoubtedly the best Multi-Client Messenger yet with near-complete interoperability.

Pros:
+ Skins really do load faster.
+ Less memory usage.
+ Much faster redrawing time.
+ Visually attractive.
+ Backward support with older plug-ins.

Cons:
- No properly implemented webcam feature.
- Needs better compatibility for the drawing feature with it’s own skins.

Trillian Astra 4.0.0.52 was used for this review which is in fact, A closed
Alpha version.