Varrqnuht.net

Yaaay! We’re married!

There’s lots to say about it - so much in fact that I’ll put it all in a seperate section of the site. For now though I’ll just say that the wedding was perfect, and the honeymoon was great.

I’m going to try and collect all of the photos we get and put them in our online gallery, but until then check out the photos that Scott took. They’re quite funky.

More to come.

(Updated: 1:41 PM 23/01/2003 - new URL for photo gallery)

I had my bucks party on Saturday night. It’s now Monday afternoon, and I’m still hungover. Thankfully I will never have to get that drunk again.

I can understand all the bruises - I’m not too steady on my feet even when I’m sober. What I can’t understand is why my eyes hurt so much. They’re swollen and aching, and it’s giving me quite a headache. Or maybe it’s just a special, very localised headache?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just want to go back to bed. I also want to destroy all evidence of my night out on Saturday, but I don’t think there’s much chance of that.

Ugh.

I just thought I’d try out the Google Groups archive, and see if I could find any old posts I made to news groups. I found quite a few, but here’s my favourite - a post in which I offered to give away a free car.

The story behind it is this. I’d bought the car some time before hand jointly with an old girlfriend of mine. We bought it from friends of my parents - it was an absolute lemon, and I think we paid $500 for it. Neither of us actually had our licenses at the time, though we intended to get them.

Yeah, right. I’m still intending to get my license - any day now, I promise.

I can’t really remember why we bought the car, except that it had a cool bench seat. I’ve often thought I should have ripped it out and used it as a couch. It certainly wasn’t fun to drive. The brakes were very dodgy, and the car swung to one side when you braked. It had a column shift (which I thought would be easier to handle with my arm the way it is), and it slipped out of first gear easily. Usually as I was turning onto the highway.

The clutch was very sticky as well, and tended to be either "on" or "off" which made it hard to take off smoothly. This once caused me to smash into the corner of the drivethrough at McDonalds in Sandy Bay - that’s why the have a metal plate there. I borrowed a hammer from the manager on duty at the time, and pulled the panel back into enough shape to get it home.

Once we got home, I rang up my girlfriend to tell her I’d smashed the car. She came over and we tried to remove the bent panel to get it in better shape. We’d unscrewed and unbolted evverthing we could see, but we couldn’t get the panel off. I started using a mallet to loosen it, and after a few tries Liz asked if she could have a go. Before long she was very frustrated, and given the condition of the car she decided to let out her frustrations using the mallet. I think she caused more damage to that panel than I did in the first place.

Anyway, the car was a deathtrap, and when the rego ran out we decided it wasn’t worth the $300 to get it renewed. We parted company, and the car sat in the driveway for a long time. It still ran for quite a while, until my Dad canniblised a radiator hose for a quick fix on his own car. Without asking, of course, or replacing the hose..

I finally decided to try and get rid of it - I think my parents were annoyed at it taking up space and looking bad. I made that post to a few local newsgroups, and had two emails back within a few hours. I told them that I’d give it to the highest bidder, and in the end I got $25 for it. It was gone before I got home.

I took some sort of perverse pleasure in ringing up my then ex-girlfriend, and telling her I owed her $12.50 for her share of the car.. I guess I’m just not a nice guy.

Note: This mightn’t be interesting unless you’re a geek, but you should read it if you have a notebook computer.

I’d been using my notebook for a few weeks before I remembered that Windows XP was meant to include ClearType™, Microsoft’s implementation of sub-pixel font rendering technology.

This is basically a form of text anti-aliasing that works on LCD displays by taking advantage of the fact the the red, green and blue components of each pixel on the display can be manipulated independently.

So I had a look through the Display settings under Windows XP, and turned it on. The difference is amazing, and to my eyes text (particularly small or italicised fonts) look much better.

To see the difference, check out these screen shots of my desktop:

ClearType turned off
ClearType turned on

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how well that will show up on a CRT display. Also, the screen captures are jpegs, so some of the clarity is lost. If you’re interested, email me and I’ll put up some better examples.

If you want to know more about sub-pixel stuff, check out this site.

Who’s giving all of this candy to babies, anyway? Surely that’s not very responsible parenting.