WarFlail's Archives - September 1999

Go to WarFlail's Archives - October 1999

Word from Gryphon is that his adopted little baby girl Eloise is going strong - the doctor in Melbourne wants her to remain in hospital for another week for observation, after which time he will make a decision on whether to go through with the open heart surgery. More news later.

Penfold has warned that RAM prices have skyrocketed to ridiculous levels here in Australia. Back in July, I bought a 128MB DIMM of Hitachi PC-100 SDRAM in Hong Kong for about A$154. Now they are on sale for over A$500 (sources: Austin Computers, Computer Market On Line (Australia), EM Computers, Trinix Computers) ! I cannot see any explanation that could possibly justify the 300%+ price leap - this is completely crazy!

Argh! I had to force my G400 card to use AGP1X again after 2X caused one of my games to crash. Bloody unstable drivers - it was working fine yesterday! :-( Oh well, no apparent loss in framerate so no worries.

Crashes galore - this just ain't my day... ICQ kept on performing illegal operations and shutting down. The culprit turned out to be ICQ Plus; after uninstalling that naughty little proggie, ICQ worked fine. Miserable software...

I took the day off from work today, to see my tax accountant, stockbroker and mortgage broker. That pretty much took up the whole day! Today was also the first day we started shelling out loads of money for the house we are buying. The first big spend of many, I fear...

Today was a public holiday in Western Australia, to celebrate the Queen's Birthday. Beats me why it differs from the rest of the Australia, where the holiday fell on 14 June this year. Of course, neither date is Queen Elizabeth's actual birthday... Go figure...

I was finding that with my overclocked Celeron, I could notice a small but constant level of jerkiness in games such as Quake II and Need For Speed III. So, I decided to clock it back from 416MHz down to 333MHz, but this time the new Matrox PowerDesk drivers (5.25) allowed me to maintain an AGP frequency setting at the same speed as the bus speed (i.e. 66MHz). That, plus now being able to run my G400 card at AGP2X (at last!) and having installed Matrox's OpenGL ICD Beta drivers and Microsoft's DirectX 7.0, means that the overall framerate hasn't suffered too much of a drop. At least the gameplay is smoother now. I was starting to worry that overclocking the bus speed to 83MHz was unhealthy for my PCI bus anyway, so I'm not sorry for the fallback in speed.

Gryphon sent me a message that they had made it safely into Melbourne last night - they arrived about half an hour before the Grand Final so there were fortunately no traffic delays in getting to the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Children's Hospital. Gryph says that although she is extremely fragile, Eloise is holding up very well - we hope she can stay strong for the operation.

Okay, I am not an footy (Australian Rules Football) fan, but this deserves some mention: tonight was the night of the AFL Grand Final, held in Melbourne. The game would have been worth watching if a West Australian team was in the final, but since the match was played by two Victorian teams (North Melbourne Kangaroos vs. Carlton Blues), all I'll say is that the Kangaroos won, well done, but this *isn't* the last AFL Premiership of the century you foolish people, or don't you think that anyone is going to organise one in 2000?

House Hunt Update: The vendor signed the official contract, so we're now locked in to start shelling out money and borrowing even more to buy this house. We had managed to overcome all our debts and stayed debt-free for most of this year, but now it's time to plunge ourselves in the biggest debt of our lives - a daunting thought...

If this week has been turbulent for us in terms of finding a house, it's been even more so in East Timor. On Monday, Australian SAS troops from Perth (here!) led an international peacekeeping force into Dili, East Timor, as Operation Stabilise began. Since then, peaceforce (now there's a contradiction!) numbers have steadily swelled to 3000 by today. At the same time, Indonesian troop withdrawals have been gathering speed, although not exactly peacefully - they had been seen roaming the streets and firing, stealing food aid trucks, etc. More up-to-date news can be found here.

I learned from Gryphon that his little adopted 10-month old baby girl Eloise has not been well and is requiring open heart surgery next week in Melbourne. Gryph and his wife have known about Eloise's heart condition since a short time after the baby was born, so this wasn't unexpected. Still, it is distressing all the same. We wish them all well and hope for a successful operation.

House Hunt Update: Tonight was the night. We had such a good feeling about this place that we placed an offer that the vendor simply couldn't refuse. And guess what, they accepted! Now the hard part: we have to go about formalising the financing, come up with some (actually, a lot of) cash as a deposit, and get a settlement agent to sort out the nitty gritty of transferring the title to us. This is so exciting - we've never bought a house before but it is so satisfying to find a place that we are so pleased with... :-)

My mate Penfold tells me that there is an interesting (if somewhat sycophantic) preview on Auran's upcoming game, Hârn: Bloodline. Check it out if you know the difference between Hârn and Harn... (hint: one is an island on the fictional planet of Kethira, the other is German for "urine"...) :-)

House Hunt Update: We had a look inside the home in Attadale today. We'd been told by the agent that the place had been on the market all year and we were very surprised at how low the price was, especially in an expensive suburb like Attadale. Our first thought was, "Why hadn't it sold - what's wrong with it?" We were bracing ourselves for the worst (maybe it was a complete dump, or the chalk outline was still on the floor or something), but believe it or not, the place is beautiful! Infinitely better than the Melville place. 138m² brick and tile home on a 399m² block, main bedroom with walk-in robe and ensuite bathroom, two additional bedrooms with wardrobes, main bathroom, open kitchen, spacious meals and family area, formal lounge, entry area, laundry, fully insulated with batts, air-conditioned, gas heating and hot water system, reticulated low-maintenance back yard, garage with roller door, even a heated outdoor spa... there isn't much we could complain about! Nice neighbour, too - that's quite important, since the property is a rear home on a two-strata title. The price was easily within our range and seemed very fair. We arranged with the agent to meet again tomorrow night, to put an offer in on the place once our parents had a look at it (it's the courteous thing to do, to let our parents at least see the place before we offered on it).

House Hunt Update: While we were still considering whether to put in a revised offer on the property, we were told by the agent today that someone else had swooped in with a cash offer to purchase at the asking price. The bastards! Oh well, back to the drawing board...

Anyway, undaunted by the setback, we decided to drive past a few more properties after work today. One place looked quite promising and was in an excellent location - it's in a very trendy suburb called Attadale, which is very close to the Swan River and the city. We called up the agent to arrange a time to go in and see the place tomorrow after work.

House Hunt Update: We heard back from the agent today that the vendor had rejected our counter offer completely. That put us in a difficult position, since we were not prepared to go above the "fair market value" of the property.

Once again, my apologies for the lack of updates - I've been away for a couple of weeks on business, this time to Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Since my wife and I have recently been looking for a house to buy, this was one trip I would have rather skipped. I've had smoother business trips, too: got caught in the middle of an earthquake in Tokyo measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale; was delayed for over 4 hours at Narita airport awaiting a replacement for a damaged component on my flight's navigation system; arrived just in time to experience the worst typhoon to hit Hong Kong in 16 years, which in turn forced me to delay my return to Perth by a day...

Update: I got my UPS back. Actually, it was replaced by a new one, since the fact that it has been blowing fuse after fuse indicated that there was something wrong with the unit itself rather than the fuses.

Update: Kuma's little daughter Madeleine seems to be getting stronger all the time, which is excellent news. She is about the equivalent of an unborn 33-week old baby by now, so she is still under careful observation for at least the next couple of weeks.

While I was travelling, my wife Scully found a house that she thought was The One. The house itself (well, actually, a villa on a triplex strata title) is in a state of disrepair even though it is less than 4 years old, but the location is excellent in an up-and-coming suburb (Melville) very close to Perth's port-city, Fremantle. I understand that the reason the place is rundown is because the previous owners defaulted on their mortgage repayments, so the bank repossessed the property. The vendor's asking price sounded outrageous, especially since the property needs about an extra ten grand's worth of repairs and improvements to take it up to a decent condition - this was confirmed by an independent valuation of the property (for which we shelled out good money!). Anyway, my wife believed that this was the best of the 25 or so places she looked at, so we decided to put in an offer not far below the valuer's "fair market value", which was nowhere near the asking price - you can imagine the stress I felt, placing an offer on a property that I hadn't even seen yet! The vendor (i.e. the bank) countered within a couple of days and brought their price down to a level much closer to our offer, but not close enough. When I arrived back in Perth this morning, my wife and I went to the property so I could have a good look at it. We then decided on a figure for our counter-offer and gave that to the real estate agent to convey to the bank. I should hear back from the agent tomorrow...

During my travels, I've been noticing that the situation in East Timor has been steadily getting uglier. Reports of a conspiracy by the Indonesian military as early as February this year to violently prevent East Timor's independence, the Indonesian army's and police's not-so-covert assistance of the pro-Indonesia militia's murderous rampages, hate propaganda aimed squarely against Australia to ensure that our peacekeeping troops will be attacked... what the hell is going on over there?!

By the way, in case you haven't been following the East Timor crisis, there are quite a few interesting articles on Australia's ABC and CNN International news sites.

I'm pleased that Kuma and his wife have at last named their little girl: Madeleine. The great news is that the tiny baby has been upgraded from Intensive Care to Special Care - proof that she is getting stronger by the day.

Since we're being evicted, my wife Scully and I spent the whole day on a house hunt. We looked in about a dozen houses, trying to find the right balance of location, design and price. By the end of the day, we had found 3 places that showed promise, but none of them was a "must-buy". Oh well, this was only Day One of our search - I'm confident we'll find something good soon enough.

Today I received an e-mail from Kuma, who related some surprising and worrying news about the premature birth of his little baby. Rather than post the message here, I put it in its proper slot of Thursday, 2 September (see below), which was the day that baby was born.

Don't you just love computers - one thing gets fixed, something else fails. This time, it's my Liebert PowerSure ProActive 350VA UPS, which has been blowing fuse after fuse. I will have to take it back to my supplier this weekend to get it sorted out, since it is still under warranty.

I just learned that my good mate Kuma's wife had given birth to a little girl. It was completely unexpected, because the baby wasn't due for another 10 weeks - the mother was alone and in transit in Changi Airport, Singapore when she suddenly went into labour! An hour and 10 minutes later (9:14pm), a tiny 1,690g baby was born; the mother is well and will probably be discharged within a few days. However, I understand that there are some complications because the baby's lungs have not yet matured and she has some breathing apnea, which means she sometimes forgets to breathe. But every day that the baby lives means that she is getting stronger.

No name has been given to the surprise baby, who is currently in intensive care at a hospital in Singapore. Kuma's flown up there from Perth (who had himself only arrived in Perth from Sydney that night expecting to pick up his wife a couple of hours later) and is busy trying to find accommodation and permission to reside in Singapore for the next 7-8 weeks.

We sincerely wish the three of them all the best and our thoughts are with them constantly. We look forward to meeting the baby soon.

At long last, Matrox has released the latest drivers (5.21) for the G400 graphics card. It took a while to download due to a highly congested server - evidently, I wasn't the only who was suffering problems with the older drivers and needed an update! Anyway, these new drivers seem to have solved the problem: no more lockups! The only thing is, it does seem to have caused a general performance hit, presumably because Vsync is enabled by default with these drivers. Nothing that a little registry hacking can't fix, I suppose... I really wonder why Matrox didn't bother to include a text file listing what changes they made in the new drivers - that would save everyone a lot of time hacking up the registry.

Go to WarFlail's Archives - August 1999

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