You've probably heard on the news that Christchurch (my hometown) was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The magnitude was less than the 7.1 quake during September, but the epicentre was shallower and much closer to the city center than last time.

The damage is far greater that the last quake, and there are 65 reported deaths, with many more likely. I've been keeping an eye on facebook for posts from friends and family, and many have checked in. Since net and phone lines are down in a lot of places, I won't get too worried about silence from the rest of them for a few days.

It's crazy to think that I was there only a few weeks ago, and aside from the numerous demolition sites, everything looked quite normal. I even felt a 5.1 quake when I was there, which was slightly surreal when the bed shook me awake, but there was pretty much no damage from that.

And you're probably noticed in my gallery, I took a photo of a bridge that was damaged by the September quake. - [link]

I guess now I'll go back to monitoring the various channels to find out how everyone is holding up.

Minecraft is about to enter beta, which means two important things.

- The price goes up 5 euros to a total of 15 euros.
- Anyone who buys during the beta or later will probably have to pay for major updates, while alpha buyers get everything free.

So if you've been thinking about buying it, you have until the 20th to take advantage of this deal.

It arrived in the mail today. Add me on autolog! My username is TheRealWazzar. When you add me, let me know in the comments who you are

I think I finished uni, so I bought Minecraft. I lost a week of my life.

Now you too can lose a week of your life for free at Minecraft.net!

I logged in friday night, saw 500 messages in my inbox. I thought some club had done a deviation dump, but when I saw that a lot of them were faves on stormrider, I knew exactly what I was in for.

I got my second daily deviation This time, it was on my photo Stormrider. Thanks to *revois for suggesting it, and to ^Kaz-D for selecting it!

It's my last week of university (possibly ever), so unfortunately I'll have to ignore most of the (2400) messages until all the assessments are handed in. And until I get through all the messages, I'll only give llamas to people who sent me one in the first place.

There have been a lot of questions about the photo, and I've updated the description to hopefully answer a few of them. As for the rest of the questions, I'll make a solid effort to answer them next week.

Finally, thanks to everyone who faved, commented, flamed (lulwut), and a bigger thanks to whoever visited the rest of my gallery (probably you, if you're reading this).

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Update: If you're going to post a lot of comments on a lot of userpages in a short amount of time, be careful. The system might think you're a spammer

I've had my Nikon D50 for a little over 4 years now, and it's served me well over that time. But just recently, it's been doing some strange stuff, like frequently forgetting the date/time on restart, occasionally freezing up (it even ignores the power switch), and it even gave me the dreaded "Err" once.

Those problems started a few weeks after something came loose on the inside of the camera.

Luckily I bought a 5 year extended warranty, so I have just over 10 months to find out how to reproduce the problems, as well as what is rattling around in there (it's definitely not the orientation sensor). All without voiding the warranty...

In the best case scenario, I'll end up with a new camera of equal or lesser value (possibly a Nikon D3000 or D60), or get repairs to my current camera.

In the worst case scenario, at least I'll be able to attempt repairs on the camera myself without worrying about voiding a warranty.


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In other news, I recently spent the weekend in Adelaide. For the first time, I managed to get some good photos of the sun setting over the sea. I'll put them up when I've processed them, which will probably be next year judging by the size of my backlog.

Update:
~nordynz posted a cool link showing the earthquake activity. I didn't realise it was that constant.

And on another note, Australia has a government. It's the labor party.

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You may or may not have heard in the news recently, but the city of Christchurch in New Zealand has been hit with an earthquake of magnitude 7.1. Remarkably, of the 370,000 people that live in the city, none have died as a result of the quake, but almost everything else is damaged in some way.

I spent the first 12 years of my life in this city, and still have friends and family there. We have managed to make contact with most of them, and so far they're all okay. Some of our friends who live in Kaipoi (A suburb/town to the north) have told us a bit about the damage around their area.

- The streets became flooded with a shallow layer of silt and water during/after the quake.
- Many of the houses in their street have been condemned.
- There is a rather nasty looking crack in their back lawn.
- There are cracks all throughout the house.

Also, there are a number of pics all over the net of nasty damage. Here are a few recent ones:

[link] (A rather nasty case of damage), just a block away from the iconic cathedral in the city center.
[link] (Same corner again)
[link] (Google Street view of the same corner)

[link] (One of the many bridges over the Avon river)
[link] (The Empty CBD)
[link] (One of the historic buildings that was badly damaged)
[link] (Kiwi Humour)
[link] (A ruined building)
[link] (A building marked as unsafe)
[link] (Building facades that have crumbled into the street)
[link] (A street blocked by rubble)
[link] (Another street blocked by rubble)
[link] (Silt by the road)
[link] (Cracks in the road)

And a somewhat unrelated pic of Christchurch from space:
[link] (View of Christchurch from the ISS taken in May this year)

So keep the people of Christchurch in your thoughts and prayers as they rebuild their lives and their city.

It's a hung vote, although it looks like the Liberal/National coalition (right wing) will win. Note that the country is currently governed by Labor (left wing, and Americanized spelling).

This is the first national election I've had to vote in, and I'm really annoyed, because the major parties are particularly crappy this year.

Well, maybe the parties aren't crappy, but their advertising campaigns definitely are. All their ads follow the same forumla: "The other party is dodgy, vote for us". That's normally a reasonable, though frowned on, strategy for advertising. But when both parties are constantly dissing their opponents on TV, people tend to get spiteful and vote for someone with better taste in advertisements (like beer companies).


PS: I ignored the ads and voted for a major party, but I really felt like spiting those bickering fools and voting for an independent.

Post a comment with a number to cast your vote.

Google Wave is being shut down. You are:
1 - Sad to see it go.
2 - Indifferent. You can live without it.
3 - Glad to see it go.
4 - Aware of its existence, but haven't used it.
5 - Not even sure what Google Wave is.

If someone could display these in a poll, that would be awesome.

[link]

It's on sale now, and will be until the 12th of August.

It's a seriously beautiful game with great music (which is part of the package), so $5 is an awesome deal!

Happy 10th Birthday deviantART

As for the badge, go [link] (Here), solve the puzzle, and submit your score. The badge should appear on your page soon enough.

I've been dealing in Llamas since mid april, and I've made a few findings.

- I've turned it into a science. I don't really find it surprising though, because I usually do this with anything involving numbers. For example, I had an excel spreadsheet to track my BF2142 FAV kills. After covering this point, the rest of this journal entry should make a lot more sense.

- There are accounts dedicated to giving out Llamas, like ~llamawhore. They probably use code to randomly pick deviants and give out llamas, because seriously, who has the time to personally give out 1.2 million llamas?

- If you want lots of llamas, you usually need to give lots of them first. Using [link] (Random Deviant) to find people is good, but you'll find that a lot won't return any. As a general rule, any deviant with an albino llama or higher will most likely return a llama. But if you want higher returns, check their badge page to see if they've sent more than they've received.

- [link] (Random Deviant) is good, but there is a more efficient way to find people likely to return a llama. Look on badge page of any deviant ([link] (like mine)), and search for any deviants that give llama badges. If that deviant gives llamas to other people, they will most likely give one to you.

- Once you reach a certain number of llamas, random people start finding YOU and giving you llamas. They probably use the same method that I mentioned in the step above.

- And finally, some people have way too much money. If you go to ~llamatrade and see some names constantly returning, then you know that they should probably put their money to better use, like buying subscriptions, or playing WoW. I calculate that it costs 1.25 US cents per llama to use llamatrade, which doesn't seem like much. But if take the number of llamas and divide it by 80, that's how many $US they spent getting there. So in the case of ~IAMSORRY87, it's probably around $1200US.

I've been looking through my photo archives again, and have been doing some sorting and choosing. I guess that I've viewed at least a gigabyte worth of photos, and have deleted at least another gigabyte more.

I've also got a feel for what most of my archives consist of:

30% rubbish
30% deliberately non-artistic
25% alternate angles/exposures
10% experimental
5% promising

But one realisation stood out for me. My camera has been to Uluru, and I haven't!

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And on a sidenote, I won a copy of ARMA II Operation Arrowhead from [link] (games.on.net).

So can you buy me cake?

Alternatively, if you'd rather not spend $1us of your own money on some random lurker, I can give you 80 points to buy me a slice of cake

And apparently it's ~B3N0's birthday today, if his myspace page is to be believed.

New stuff:
[link] (Live Gameplay Demo)
[link] (Developer Interview)

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[link]

And it's looking sweet, with it's beautiful scenery and awesome cars.

It also looks like they've ditched any attempts at realism (which I'm fine with), and they've also ditched free-roam with it (which I'm not fine with). It just seems strange driving around in circles with cops. However, I'm assuming about the lack of free roam, so that doesn't mean it's won't be in the game.

Criterion is behind it, so the damage engine is sure to be good I'm just hoping the driving physics are more fluid than Burnout.

Either way, it will be good to see if they can pull it off. If they stay too true to the original, they'll only please the old fans, and everyone that started since Underground will most likely be unimpressed.

So don't mess it up guys, you're dealing with some strong nostalgia here.

Afterthought: It's probably worth noting that I traded my copy of NFS Hot Pursuit for Counter Strike:CZ. I've still got my copy of High Stakes though

DON'T PANIC

Happy Towel day everyone

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A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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I've been reading the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker trilogy of five in the following order...

1 - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
4 - So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
5 - Mostly Harmless
3 - Life, the Universe and Everything
2 - (unread) The Restaurant at the end of the Universe

Such is the nature of the books that they still make sense in that order, even though they're remotely chronological

Either way they're a humorous read that'll do your head in at the same time.

Portal is free, but not for long. When I say "not for long", in this case I mean less than a day.

[link] (Click here for details)

That was unexpected.

I knew it was in the works, but I had no idea when it was coming out. I was even trying to find info about it.

Well, now I'll need to get a new message center notifier extension for Google Chrome.

[link] (Oh, and here's something from the archives.) I find it rather amusing

I just clocked over the 44,444 mark for pageviews, but I missed it. And I'm not in the mood for photoshopping a screenshot either.

And out of all the crazy things deviantArt tried, I think the Llama badges just might work. They're a bizarre way of mixing deviants as well as a handy source of income from the particularly dedicated.

I like it.

Is the new record for the number of deviations I managed to view and clear in one day. So I've officially caught up.
Also, if you send me a llama, I'll send you one, ok?

Anyways, I'm making myself a portfolio website. It's for Uni, so it actually has to get done on time. I still haven't decided if I'll put it up here or not. If you hear about it, I've decided I will, and if you hear nothing, I've decided otherwise.

And does anyone know why CoD4 Multiplayer is harder than CoD6MP? I'm talking about a KD ratio of 0.5 in CoD4 and a 1.1 in CoD6. I don't get it...