Fame: The Musical

The main purpose for this post is to talk about the rehearsal for fame but first i will mention x country from yesterday. Yesterday was the second last round of APS cross country which was hosted by Haileybury at Edrington. The head of cross country had put in a load of effort with a digital clock at the start/finish, 2 hay bayles as obstacles, and even had vests for all the officials. One detail he did have though which made the whole team laugh was he has written H2XC on the hill (dont ask about the origin of that its quite sad). Overall we beat caulfield and MGS and if we beat St Kevins next week we will win the premiership. The girls are also in a position to take their premiership.

Today was a rehearsal for fame in which we got alot of work done. We managed to hang the blacks which will need to be fixed with the cougar because some are hung at angles and just cant be fixed from the roof. More of the walls went up on the set. All the remaining lights from Inheritance were lowered. The 2Ks got a well deserved clean and 22/40s were hung on the side perches which was a major task. Lukes rather genious idea for the ladder worked quite well but Belly insisted that we use the harness. After a decent days work i now have some rather severe rope burn from lowering so many lights and hanging blacks. Thursday looks to be a good day because it is our major bump in which means we get all our hired lights which will be my first experience with movers so that should be good fun.

We also found why James failed his P’s the first time, indicate then turn! and yes we can flash our brake lights too. Luke on the other hand is a much safer driver.

It looks to be a short but intense time until opening night but will be worth it in the end. Only 17 days left until opening night.

Bye for now   – JD

Update!

well its been 9 days since i last updated my blog and now monkey wants me to update so just to make him happy i will, even though i dont have much to write about.

Its seems that my slack start to the term and my high hopes for it to remain that way have come to an end. Fame is coming up in the middle of August which will take a good chunk of time before opening night with rehearsals and car tasks such as hanging the blacks. I also have an outcome to prepare for history. Our teacher has set us a really strict timetable to get all the stuff done but i dont know how ill go with it because it looks as if it will take forever.

Today we had an R&S lecture (monkeys most favorite subject of course) which was pretty much a chance to catch a few Z’s.  I wasnt really paying a whole lot of attention but the general gist was bhuddist core beliefs.

In other news it seems that another interesting sport has been added to the list of house activities. Rock, paper, scissors. Yes you heard it. Today was the final in assembly and im glad to say that the mighty SHOLTO won. Rock paper scissors is right up there with lawn bowls, who wants to be a millionaire and chess.

And congratulations to James who finally got his P’s today.

Thats all for now

JD

My Stereo = All done

well as soon as i got home from cross country training tonight i completed the stereo that i have been building. there are still a few little things that need to be tidied up such as labels for the other inputs and stuff but overall i am very happy with it and it sounds great. Well here is a photo:

My tightarse stereo

These holidays i was down at Autopro with Nat and we say some car head units with speakers for sale for a mere $10. At this price is was a steal and i bought one with no intention of putting it in a car at all, i had better ideas. For ages i have had speakers sitting in the lounge that are not being used. they are medium-large and have good quality seas drivers in them (more info at http://seas.no/) this brand is generally reserved for higher end audio. So i whipped out a spare computer power supply which i modified the end of to be able to power the head unit, and hot wired it with a switch so it doesn’t need to be connected to a motherboard which worked a treat. Then since it is only a cassette head unit i have modified it to accept a CD player (old PC CD drive the ones that u can play CD’s and stuff with the buttons on the front), ipod or MP3, pair of RCA’s and i have space for another input if i need it. and if i wanted to i could even use the 5V rails off the PSU to charge an ipod or sumthing. these input are selectable via a rotary switch. As i write this i am waiting for the paint to dry because i only painted it this arvo then its back to installing everything and then its pretty much done. Total cost so far is only $15 which includes the head unit and some of the connectors and stuff, the rest i had lying round the house.  Overall the testing i have done for the sound is pretty good thanks to my good speakers i need to get a decent antenna for the radio though.

Well the holidays are almost over i guess ive done a bit seen a few movies, built a stereo, overclocked some PC’s due to boredom. all in all not too bad but im looking forward to double electrotech tomorrow mornin.

- JD

btw ill update u with pics as soon as my stereo is all together

Overclocking PIII’s, Day at FG

Over the past week or so i have been experimenting with some old hardware that i have had lying around the house. I have 4x  Pentium III 666Mhz computers which i obtained from my parents work a while ago and have pretty much collected dust over the months. So since it is almost hard rubbish time again (free stuff!!) i am trying to decide if i should get rid of them or not or possibly sell them or something. Anyway back to the point i have been trying out some overclocking and managed to get my test one from 668.2Mhz to 733.3Mhz which gives me a about a 9% increase. I would have liked to do more because it was running very stable but the motherboard i had doesnt not allow you to change much like the core voltage and the multiplier so i could only adjust the FSB from 133 to 147. maybe i will be able to get something better out of the hard rubbish

Today me and Natty spent the afternoon at Fountain Gate because we had nothing better to do really. We had a look at cash converters and pretty much proved that everything that comes from there is stolen. eg. a car amplifier with all the wiring just cut off, obviously it was pulled out in a hurry. Some stuff was overpriced and worth more than retail but other stuff was cheap as like power tools. We also saw a cheap Behringer lighting desk and there were also multiple mixers varying from shit to half decent. We then moved onto the main shopping centre for a look and then down to Bunnings, JB Hifi, Supercheap Auto (where natty bought a car batter tester which i hear broke before he could use it) and then onto Auto pro where we found you could get a tape car head unit and speakers for $10!! wot a bargain. I bet it was high quality stuff though. We then came back to my place and played Wii Play and Rayman Raving Rabbids.

So all in all not a bad day

Catchya Later

- JD