wafblog v3.0

Is it just ME or is M$ Word the most annoying piece of software EVER invented?

My thesis is probably going to end up somewhere in the vicinity of 50-60 pages. But I *swear* the bigger the document/file the more cumbersome Word becomes.
It makes my styles go all funny, cos everytime I do some small thing it adds another entry to the style list. And then it doesn’t like me trying to have different page number types for different sections.
And then it doesn’t like me trying to caption all my figures/tables according to chapter. I don’t want ‘Figure 1′, I want ‘Figure 2.1′ you fucking stupid piece of SHIT.

GRAH!@#!@~$~#~@#$#@
And then, I was using OpenOffice at the office today, and it does NICE captioning! And I’m like.. why can’t those bozos over there make this bloatware do that? WHY?

Well, I’m off to tussle with the monstrosity some more. Wish me luck.

Edit:
I do however, LOVE LOVE LOVE Firefox’s ability to bookmark all tabs into a folder and then open all those tabs back up in one browser. Very nifty when Tichondrius requires a reboot.

Manda and Travis dropped by earlier tonight to give me a survival pack for the next week. Lots of thanks for the goodies ^^ I take back my previous post that there can be too much junk food, cos I fully intend to eat all these!

One ‘Thesis Survival Pack’ contains:
- one nestle kit kat
- one fry’s turkish delight
- one cadbury dairy milk caramello bar
- one nestle polywaffle
- one hubba bubba glop (no idea what that is, don’t think manda knew either :P
- one bag jelly beans
- one bag kettle chips, honey baked ham flavour
- one bag honey corn

I’m fairly sure these’ll last into stuvac when I’m studying for ELEC4605, but it is amazing how hungry you can get at 3am in the morning >.<

I didn’t know this – but Fred actually flowers! I got Fred a few years ago, when I asked my dad to buy me an indoor plant. He went to the garden show and got me some of those ‘air’ plants. They don’t need soil and you can just stick them into some rocks. Dad got bought me a small display that had two plants which I called Fred and Ted. However, I went overseas one time and gave Fred and Ted to Su to look after. I probably shouldn’t have done this as her track record with living things is pretty dismal. Suffice to say Ted died. Since then, Fred’s been moved to our kitchen and is now attended to by my mum. This morning she told me to take a look at Fred – and check it out:

The flower looks pretty damn cool doesn’t it? It’s a lovely purple colour and the tops of his leaves have gone a nice red to match. I suppose it’s to attract birds or insects.

Most of my friends graduated today! I was a little jealous :P They’re all out in the workforce, earning money, having a blast and I’m still at uni \: It was really good to see everyone though, there’s a few people that I haven’t seen since last
year I don’t think. We’ve all been busy and I’m guessing that it’s only going to get harder to keep in touch.

So yeah, met up with them and a few other people to take photos and things. For the last photo my friends decided to throw their mortarboards into the air and I was taking a photo of them doing this, except someone can’t throw and the mortarboard came crashing down on my head. Actually, it hit the top of my nose, and must have come down with quite some force because it grazed my nose and it was bleeding. Plus my glasses were knocked off my head and were totally bent out of shape ): I didn’t even really realise what had happened, cos I basically just fell to the ground with pain and was really disoriented for a bit. I’ve still got a headache \: So yes, I’ve decided that those things are lethal weapons and when it’s my turn to graduate I’ll be sure to throw it properly. But yeah, congratulations to all my friends who graduated today!!

Some of us went to yum cha afterwards, which was lots of fun. And then we went to Maloney’s to play pool. Haven’t done that in ages, and it was fairly obvious cos we weren’t playing very well :P I went back to uni after that cos I had to see my thesis supervisor. My meeting didn’t go for long, so I headed back out into the city to meet up with my friends again. They’d gone to CityHunter to LAN. I don’t really find LANing as fun as I used to. I think it’s cos I don’t really play computer games anymore (not that I have the time) and a lot of the games don’t interest me that much. I prefer hosting a LAN at my place because then we can control what games we play and it’s much easier to set things up and everyone knows their own computer. Danny and I ended up playing “Star Wars: Empire At War” because the others were playing Dawn of War and then DOTA which we weren’t interested in. Took us a good 20-30 minutes to really get the hang of the game I think. It plays like Dawn of War – you have to capture these ‘checkpoints’ that essentially determine how much of the map you’re controlling. But, you can only have 8 groups of troops on the ground, but they’re groups that are determined by the game. So you’ll be like “I want speeders” and you’ll get 3 in a group. This kind of adds another dimension to the game, because you have to work out what a good combination of units will be. Danny and I played this for about an hour before I headed home and he headed to the Graduation Dinner. Cherryl’s performing two songs at the dinner, I think, so I hope it all went well.

In other news, thesis is somewhat progressing now. I’ve learnt some PL/pgSQL and (lots) more SQL, as well some theory about indexing and other stuff. I’ve written about 2,000 words and my supervisor reckons my thesis should be about 10,000 to 12,000 words… so I’ve got some ways to go. I’ve been functioning on about 3-4 hours sleep each day for the last week and a half I think. It’s beginning to take its toll as I’m becoming forgetful and rather irritable. At times like this, I always remember reading an article about how lack of sleep contributes to weight gain because people who slept less were more likely to eat unhealthy foods. And by god, they’re RIGHT! In the last week alone I have eaten:

• 2 meat pies (one normal, one king-sized)
• 2 sausage rolls
• 1 small big mac meal
• 1 sausage & egg mcmuffin
• 1 cheese & bacon roll
• 1 bacon & egg roll
• 2 bottles of red bull
• 1 can of v
• 1 bottle of lemon ice tea
• 1 fried chicken breast

And that’s just the stuff I can remember :P Even for me, that’s pretty gross. I mean, I’m all for junky foods, but at some point you have to say “this is disgusting” and I think I’ve hit that point. Needless to say, I’ll probably do it all again next week.

Lastly, here’s something Kurt showed me from a forum he was reading:

1)Iron oxide is rust. 2)Your blood uses iron to transport oxygen. Therefore, your blood is red because it is full of rust.

Fixed the stupid thing. I worked out that when they transferred my stuff, they obviously didn’t check the tables very carefully. They forgot to make the postid field of the posts table AUTO INCREMENT in which case, the thing kept falling over when I was trying to post, because it went “oh, default value 0… but I have one of those already?”.

Yeah, take that stupid idiots. I just feel sorry for the people that say, don’t know about computers or databases and they would’ve been all upset that their thing borked.

In other news, I got my PL/pgSQL function WORKING today. YEAY!!!! It’s only a SMALL SMALL part of my thesis, but it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something and that’s heaps good :D Hopefully this weekend will be filled with lots of writing of technical jargon and showing off cool pictures. I LOVE pgAdmin III’s “Explain” function. I mean, I know other programs have it, but I just like the way it visualises the query and makes this cool picture out of it. Very useful for seeing what’s going on, although the ’subquery’ icon isn’t useful – would be good if the subquery would also be explained and expanded to show the little graphics thing.

Two Harry Potter related things today, and also a test to see if all the DNS changes have gone through so my site is actually being hosted at the new place.

First off, a new dinosaur has been discovered, and the paleontologists have named is Dracorex Hogwartsia, The Dragon King of Hogwarts which is pretty cool huh! I actually read about this in the mX on the way home this afternoon. The article I linked to has pictures, which I thought was good, cos sometimes it’s hard to imagine what a dinosaur looks like if they’re just like “it has spikes on it head”.

Second thing, in my LJ clickage, I stumbled upon this abomination: Harry and the Potters. First you’ll notice that their site is hosted at MySpace which leads to all sorts of interesting questions. Anyways, the particular place where I read about them, that person actually went to a show by these people and said they were good. So I thought, let’s check them out. Needless to say, I was horrified when I heard the music start to stream and now I’m just going to have to find something decent to erase the memory.