Michael Wheeler

img_3111 – TheSkorm

Last weekend I went to a secret location to spend some time away from home, and celebrate finishing school. I should mumble on how awesome is was, or I could just leave you with a few pictures of a National Park we went to on the way home. flickr.com/photos/theskorm

Car crash 02 – It’s just Jack

Being the last few days of our schooling life the school has gladly provided us with some useful talks on Sex, Drugs, Alcohol and Driving. In the three talks we had for the day they used a technique that I was first introduced to in English, and researched a little more about. It’s hard sell. Think of the smoking packets that contain the bad teeth or ads that contain gore. This is hard sell and it differs from soft sell because of they way the message is conveyed.

First I would like to thank the speakers for taking the time to come and talk to us, and it does help us. Although the problem I found with all three talks is that it was hard sell. The problem is, it is shown that hard sell does not work for our age group (15 through to 30) as effectively as soft sell.

We were shown car crashes, statistics and the works, however in the afternoon when it was time to go, a large number of people still left the school speeding, music blaring or driving dangerously.

It’s a shame to see all the effort of the talks being wasted, and no message being conveyed, so I think they need to work on their act a bit. If I had to make a clear judgement, I think the hard sell technique made a negative effect.

Wireless/Mindless Internet Point – NaOH

So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right?

Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good.

Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I’ve decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it’s pretty damn good.

Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.

Other than that, I’m starting the last week of school, so I’m basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.

Zenoss + gnokii – TheSkorm

Zenoss is a wonderful piece of software (once installed) that allows you to monitor devices and programs. It’s really nice at keeping a history of events and the like.

It grabs data via snmp (or a few other methods) and monitors them, creating graphs and status reports. It’ll even map out your network for you. It’s fairly basic software, but it does wonderful things.

So I’ve wanted to do this for awhile, but now I’ve got all the bits together. A friend has given me a Nokia phone with a broken screen, and another a sim card. I was able to “borrow” dads bluetooth dongle that he never uses, and hook up gnokii up to my zenoss.

Now whenever a device dies, I can get a sms alert about it. Pretty nice stuff :>.

My APS-13 Antenna and Triband vertical – mts83

On Monday night I went to my first amateur radio meet up. It was really good to see some of the gear, and read a few books on amateur radioing.

I really want to get into amateur radio, however the cost seems kinda high. I’m strongly interested in packet radio which is basically like using the radio as a 56K modem. In some places they have routers, that route data between the radios and the internet, which is really cool.

John showed me IRLP, which links repeaters with internet voip, allowing you to basically call anyone around the world.

First I have to get my foundation lic. and then I have to get some gear. Seems like a very lengthy process, but I’m sure it’ll be fun.

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