WarFlail's Archives - April 1999

Go to WarFlail's Archives - May 1999

It annoys the hell out of me that the Australian Federal Government is seeking to censor the Internet, under the flimsy rhetoric that it wants to "protect the children". Crap! Only the most naive can't see what the government really wants to do: cut off our freedom to access and publish information on the Internet.

On 21 April, legislation was tabled by the government proposing across-the-board Internet censorship. For the sake of our basic freedom, this legislation must not be permitted to pass as law. Please help protest against it by signing the senate petition at the Electronic Frontiers Australia Anti-Censorship Campaign site.

I've posted an update to the Miscellaneous Combat House Rules. If you are a Hârniac, check it out at the House Rules page.

Anzac Day. A day of remembrance for those Australian and New Zealand soldiers who lost their lives in all the wars in which ANZAC forces participated. For more information on Anzac Day, click here.

I have returned from a whirlwind trip with over 40 hours of flight time in just two weeks! I hope I don't do that on a regular basis - after flying so much, even Business Class seats feel uncomfortable.

Soon after managing to get my PC back "on its feet" again, I have to go away for a couple of weeks on business. There won't be any updates to this site until I return (25 April at the earliest - Anzac Day). Until then, stay cool. :-)

Just to prove that I haven't been idle with my HârnMaster House Rules, for the past couple of months I have been working hard on a complete overhaul of GunMaster II, inspired by Charlie Heckman, a fellow Hârn fan and an ex-marine. This time, there were no "sacred cows" as I cast a critical eye over the entire document, leaving no rule unexamined. There have been so many changes (a lot of them fundamental) that rather than calling it GunMaster II v3.0, it seemed more logical to call this piece of work GunMaster III. Head on over to the House Rules page and check it out.

Finally, the monitor's fuse has been replaced, so everything is ready to go (after an Easter weekend of installing gigabytes of software!). I hope that's the end of my run of bad luck - they do say it comes in threes, so the (1) crashed hard disk, (2) long wait for a replacement drive and (3) blown fuse in the monitor should be the lot.

I took my faulty monitor to the vendor (EM Computers) and explained the problem: there's no power going through it. I was informed that this was a Known Problem, as apparently several units of the CTX PR711 monitors were shipped from Taiwan with the wrong fuse and were blowing out under Australian voltage. The vendor promised that replacing the fuse is extremely simple but I would need to wait until Tuesday (after Easter Monday) to pick up the monitor - in the meantime, he offered me a short-term replacement monitor for me to get by for a couple of days.

Okay, first the good news: my replacement hard disk arrived today, after an agonising wait of two and a half weeks. The drive was fitted into the PC without any trouble.

Now the bad news: my monitor - which I only bought in February - inexplicably died when I turned everything on for the first time this evening. It couldn't have been some freak power overload because both the monitor and the PC were safely connected to my UPS. What is this, some dark conspiracy designed to keep me from using my computer?! So now I will have to wait until Saturday (tomorrow being Good Friday and hence all the shops being shut) to take my monitor back to the vendor and see what can be done about it. Perplexing and infuriating. :-(

Go to WarFlail's Archives - March 1999

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