Monthly Archives: August 2004

I have the best friends in the world

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Thanks to everyone who wished me well on my birthday yesterday. It was really touching to receive all the phone calls, sms’s, emails and personal greetings yesterday.

I had a truly fantastic day, starting with breakfast out at Lido’s on Racecourse Road with Gerrod and Michelle and ending with dinner at Aspley Lonestar with some great friends.

A “Big Up” to Karl who also celebrated his birthday recently and enjoyed a famous Lonestar staff humiliation with me last night.

I just wished my lovely girlfriend Michelle wasn’t sick so that she too could have enjoyed the day as much as I did.

Lessons learned

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I learnt many lessons today as I set out to complete some lingering tasks that have been on my plate for a while.

My first task today was to install a simple PC-DIMM-133 256 Mb ram chip into Cathy and Grant’s computer. I had purchased the chip for them 3 weeks ago and all I had to do was slot it in. Well it wasn’t quite as easy as that. It didn’t work. Obviously incompatible with their mother board (even though I checked all this when I purchased it). So I have to go back to gamedude on Monday and replace it. Yay!! Can’t wait.

My second task was to take 3 powerpoint presentations and convert them to a photo album dvd for Louisa and Steve. I knew this one would be a bit of a challenge. Below is a list of problems I had and how I got around them.

  • How do you convert a .pps file to a .ppt so I can edit the presentation in power point? Quite simple. Just rename the file to have the .ppt extension
  • How do you convert every slide in a powerpoint presentation to a jpeg file? After much searching, it was quite simple. Save As -> Jpg -> It then saves every slide as Slide01.jpg, Slide02.jpg, etc…
  • Okay now is where it got real frustrating. I had to find some software (free/cracked) that I could use to author the photos along with a backing soundtrack into a DVD compatible movie file. Man I tried every freaking program out there. They all had limits on the number of files I could convert or the program just sucked ass. I eventually found one called DVD PixPlay that was pretty cool.
  • Created the 3 mpg files that were needed. Now I had to go use another program DVD MovieMaker from Ulead to create the necessary DVD complete with menu’s and stuff.
  • All up this one task took me 7 hours. Holy Moly. The good thing is the next time it should only take me a couple of hours.

My third task for the day was to create a blogger.com account and blog for Jaimee. This was super easy and had it up and running in minutes. Check it out at http://jaimeeonline.blogspot.com

Only 3 more tasks to complete before I can further develop stickfly.com.

Nude calendar

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Last night the Uno Gang met up at Pane-e-Vino’s in the city for our last gathering before Jaimee heads o/s tomorrow. The evening was reminescent of the Uni Gang farewell for David that we had back in March this year. We all arrived promptly at 7pm and were seated at “our” table, the one up the back near the plates signed by minor celebrities. Much of the conversation was about how sad we were going to be when Jaimee left us for cloudier pastures. I soon became aware that 8pm was approaching so we had to give Jaimee her farewell present before David called from the UK.

Now, for those of you who didn’t know, the Uni gang decided to make a nude calendar of ourselves as Jaimee’s farewell present. Over the last 6-8 weeks we had all taken photos of places around Brisbane that had some meaning to Jaimee and then taken nude photos of ourselves which were to be photochopped/superimposed onto the background photos. The end result looked fantastic and it was finally time to hand it over to her at 7:45pm last night.

Jaimee received the present and it took her about 10 seconds of perusal before she realised that we had made her a nude calendar of ourselves. It was priceless, she laughed and laughed and then cried. She’s such a little trooper.

David called on the blower at precisely 8pm and had a great chat to Jaimee and everyone else. It was great to hear Davo’s voice. As the evening progressed other gifts were given and really appreciated (yes, even Gareth). Jaimee even informed us of a brand new secret that she had told no one about before.

Before long it was time to head home but not before Jaimee said her last goodbye to Jen and Tony. The goodbye isn’t for long though as they are meeting up in New York next year to have a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Michelle and I dropped off Jaimee and Meg and headed home for some sleep, ready now to head over to her house for one last visit before Jaimee heads to the airport at 6am tomorrow.