Final Results are Out

Engineering for Sustainable Development: 81 (HD)
Optimum & Adaptive Filtering: 89 (HD)
Final Year Project: 84 (HD)
Electrical Engineering Honours: H1 (first class)

I'm an engineer!

On Our Way to a New Front Yard

Step 1 to our new front yard is now complete! The front yard was completely leveled over 3 days of digging, stump grinding, and hauling off truckloads of dirt (there's no video of the stump grinding because it was way too dusty to film it!). I was really happy with the job, so if anyone needs a similar thing done (in Perth, W.A) then let me know and I'll give you the name of an awesome guy.

The guy (Craig) actually said it was the worst front yard he'd ever seen! The previous owner had planted tens of trees all over the front yard, most of them really close to the house and directly over the telephone, power, and gas pipelines. One of these trees was a giant maple type tree (removed a while back) that was very close to the garage, and who's roots are currently destroying our driveway. Craig actually had to call in a stump grinder because he just couldn't remove it with his excavator! To make matters worse (if that's possible), the previous owner had in fact cut down a lot of trees over the years and covered the stumps with dirt, so there were a lot more stumps beneath the giant mount than were originally visible.

So thank god that's over and done with, and we can move on to the next steps of putting up a fence between the front/back yards, laying down reticulation, paving, and doing some landscaping. We have decided to put ONE TREE ONLY (we've certainly learnt the lesson of not planting giant trees) which will probably be a small frangipani, and using small flowers and shrubs for decoration.

An upside to the mess is that the whole process has been an icebreaker with the neighbours who have gone out of there way to come and congratulate us for finally getting our act together and sorting out the front yard disaster! Although it's still far from being resolved...

Summer Vacation? Pft.

During my vacation between the end of uni and the start of full time work (at L-3 Communications Nautronix where I did my final year project) I decided to put myself to use and do some things that needed doing around the house. Turns out that there was a lot that needed to be done, and it wasn't as easy as I thought it would all be!

My first job that I thought would be a quick one to ease me into the handy-man mood was to replace all the broken globes in and around our house. I picked up all the required globes from Bunnings, and replaced most of them with ease. However, I discovered that all of our down lights were not properly covered, and so insulation had built up around the connections and was being singed by the heat! I decided to get into the ceiling and see if I could clean up a bit, but quickly discovered that I didn't fit because of the strong slant of our roof, and so settled for just putting my hand in the light fitting and taking out/pushing back as much insulation as I could from around the hole. Not the most optimal solution, but it'll do for now!

Next on my list was to replace our awful kitchen sink. Everyone who sees it says how nice it looks, but it's really REALLY inconvenient. And what the hell is that little sink on the right for anyway? We bought a really nice big double sink with flat metal bits on both sides so I finally have somewhere to prepare meat. We're getting that installed tomorrow morning so I can't wait!

Another big task is the front yard disaster. Anyone who's been over our house knows that our front yard looks like a bomb has hit it. We intend to hire someone to flatten it out to ground level, since all the soil resting on the garage wall has made a lot of moisture leak through and weaken the concrete. We've found someone who will do it for a reasonable price (well... relatively for the size of the task) and so we're looking forward to getting that done so we can design our new front yard.

Something that I'd love to do, but may be a bit ambitious for the time frame, is to paint! Matt and I have been looking at some paint swatches and we've decided on a dark red feature wall for the master bedroom (with the other walls a pale beige). The other 3 bedrooms are going to be that same pale beige, with a slightly darker shade for the far walls. We tested our dark red feature wall idea with a bed sheet that was roughly the same colour, and decided that it looked good!

Some other things on my list include sorting out our shower leakage problem, overhauling our backyard (which is currently in good progress), and buying a new fridge. I've definitely been keeping busy!

Last... Exam... EVER

Today I just had my final exam ever! I officially graduate next year, but as far as units are concerned, I've completely finished. I haven't been posting lately since there hasn't been much to post about; I've mostly just been in thesis writing mode. Hopefully a lot more interesting things will be happening to me now that I actually have time to do stuff!



I really enjoyed today actually, even the exam part! I guess you can enjoy anything if you know it's the last time you'll ever have to do it. After the exam, we all went down to the tavern to celebrate. I also did the whole tourist thing and went around and took photos of all the places around uni where I spent countless hours working on labs, reports, and my thesis. I also managed to catch the male peacock showing off to the females! He's almost as tall as me when he's all puffed up like that!

So goodbye UWA, I'll miss you!

Perth Royal Show 2008

The Perth Royal Show comes around once a year. It's kind of a big fete with all sorts of things to see and do. When I was younger I went every year, but since it's usually around the end of the uni semester (which is a very busy time), I've been missing it the last couple of years.

This year I went with a couple of my girl friends and spent the day feeling young again. I decided to do some fun makeup, but I didn't wear my traditional "show hat" (which is a jesters hat fully equipped with bells) which was a good thing since the crowd seems to have matured a bit.

We saw the baby animal farm where I patted some piglets, the dog and cat shows, and a variety of other animals including one giant animal (in the bottom pic) that I don't know the name of (please do tell if you know what it is). It really was huge; they must have had him sedated because he could have done some damage with even just a tail flick!

I went on a couple of rides (the GeeWizz and the Orbitron) but they're so expensive now days ($10/ride!) that we drew the line at two. I bought heaps of lollies and chocolate, and also some dark red bed sheets which I've been wanting for ages, so that was really awesome. It was really fun to take a break from uni and have a nice relaxing day at the show. Actually I've been taking it easy lately, and will be next weekend too with the Spring in the Valley wine festival, a b'day, and a movie night. I think it's my attitude of "it's final year, I'll just enjoy it instead of stressing"!

TV Forecast is in stores NOW!

Matt has just released TV Forecast as an iPhone application at the App Store! Check out Matt's site for details and links to get it.

There's been some awesome reviews already - it's really cool to see people enjoy all the hard work that's gone into it. Keep an eye out for the Countdown view (in horizontal mode) which was my personal contribution to the project ;)

It's going for US$2.99 and AU$3.99 so check it out. And don't be shy, give Matt a review :)

Metameter

After a cease and desist email from IGN Entertainment, and much to the dismay of his fans, Matt was forced to take the Tomatometer widget down. Luckily, we've ported the functionality to the new and shiny Metameter, which uses Metacritic in place of Rotten Tomatoes. 

So check out Metacritic (available from Matt's website) for some movie rating widget goodness!

Food Tip #2

I recently discovered the joys of dipping food in chocolate when we finally used the fondu set my cousin bought for us in Switzerland. Although, this brought up the dilemma of what foods can in fact be dipped in chocolate (of course anything can be dipped in chocolate, but whether it will be tasty is another story). Some stuff is obvious (e.g. strawberries) but other stuff isn't that clear (e.g. pineapple).

So I've come up with a rule: If you can prefix the food in question with the word "milk", and it still sounds appetising, then it will taste good dipped in chocolate. 

This makes the choice a lot easier - how gross does pineapple milk sound!

Food Tip #1

Living out of home sort of forces you to optimise your life. I thought it'd be nice to share my findings as I... well, find them. Here's the first of my tips for food!

A mini liquor bottle makes an awesome container for holding salad dressing. Despite the strange looks you'll get when you pour that "vodka" on your lunch, it's much handier than having soggy lettuce by lunch time. Sure you can buy a dressing bottle and leave that at work, but I much prefer using salt, pepper, oil, and wine/balsamic vinegar than the salad dressings you buy.

Just because it's Yellow doesn't mean it tastes like Lemon

For my birthday I decided to make some cupcakes in lieu of a cake, and thought it would be cute to make them colourful. So I split up the icing mixture into 5 separate cups and added some food colouring to make some purple, green, orange, yellow and pink icing.

The funny thing is, some people managed to taste flavours that weren't there - the pink ones tasted like strawberry, and the yellow ones like lemon! I didn't get any feedback on the purple flavour, maybe because everyone avoided them because they looked grey in the outdoor light. Possibly they would taste like something grey... maybe dust?