tatey.com

Whenever you mention ICQ people always think of its crazy sounds. How can you forget the infamous UH-OH whenever someone messaged you or DING DING DING DING BLING when you were typing messages. Lastly, what about the KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK when a contact signed in? If you’re an old school ICQ user such as myself, you probably miss the UH-OH and KNOCK KNOCK sounds. On my quest to debloat MSN7, I was also seeking the orignal ICQ sounds. After a bit of googling, I managed to find them. For your convenience, I’ve stuck them on shoebox and you can grab them here. Close down MSN Messenger, copy the two files over to C:\Program Files\MSN Messenger. Start the client again, and you’re done! Have Fun UH-OH!

UPDATE (17/04/2007): I’ve received numerous requests for these sounds. I’ve seen recovered them and they’re now available from the above link. Enjoy.

Saturday night was a great success! Almost everyone that I invited showed up, there was a total of about 22 people. I found myself mostly running backwards and forwards ensuring that everyone was alright, that is, constantly offering food and drink. I wish I had more time to just sit and socialise, and this happened later on when everyone had settled down. In the afternoon, David came over early and we left to pick up Tamieka. When I arrived home again, most of the balloons had been blown up. About 5 minutes later, Adrian showed up with Cat and everyone helped me move the food to the table, tie the balloons and setup the streamers. Cat decorated the clothes line in pink and white with random balloons. Tamieka and David tied balloons up and hang them around. Eventually, Monica showed up and she also helped with the balloons. Everyone did a great job, and I really appreciate your assistance. The actual shindig began at 7pm, and most of the invites had showed up before 7pm with the exclusion of walker and jeff. My Grandma and Dad were my big helpers for the night, and they even joined in too :D. The night would of been increasingly stressful without their contribution.

At one end of the backyard, we had a projector setup with Bodan’s PS2 and my Laptop. This was utilised by the KFC boys who were playing NFSU:2. Father also setup two big outdoor lights at the bottom of the palm trees and shot them up. It looked spectacular! Adrian and David’s iPod served much of the music for the night, cheers for that fella’s. My dad was the designated Cook, I had never seen the BBQ so full of meat before! It was a glorious view.

The best prize is a surprise, and I was in a for a huge one. I gather it had been a few hours, when all the guys were running upstairs. Apparently, they were organising the “Cake”. To my astonishment, they had hired me a stripper! Roffles, it was pretty awesome. The ladies were banned from watching the event, sux2bThem rof rof, not that they might of enjoyed it anyway. Overall, it was a fun experience!

Back to downstairs, I just consumed more and more beer and I found myself able to sit down longer socialise more. Fgt was pinching, kicking and hurting me all night, rof2her2. Some time later, the #n00b crew presented me with a present. After much anticipation, it was a laserpod. OMG, they’re so colourful! They’re like the new lava lamp. Definitely cool, and we experimented with different liquids and combinations of pieces. I had insisted that I did not open any presents until the following the day, and for that reason, that was the only present opened.

After about midnight, I think most folks started to leave. Flora was proud of her leet driving skillz, after crunching it in 2nd taking off in Adam’s onevia, rof rof. Ashley got stuck into the Bundy and coke, and by this point, he had consumed 13 in total. Nic was going crazy, he just kept drinking and drinking until he wasn’t feeling so good Cat put up with my content “Laura is Hot”, which I *so* did not say. Walker, Dom and Jeff watched Advent Children in the lounge. I’m sure I’ve missed bits and pieces of my story, but it was a great night! Cheers to everyone who came.

I’ve recently implemented avatar support into the comment system via a free service called ‘Gravatar’. What exactly is gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80�80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

It’s important to note that on this site, I’ve opted for 64×64 (OCAU Standard) pixel avatar images, rather than the Gravatar standard of 80×80. I just feel that 80×80 is too big and ugly. At least, if they’re being sized down, it wont look as bad as being scaled up. What are you waiting for? Sign up for Gravatar!

Update: The gravatar service appears to be operational. I signed up, and received the activation email within a few minutes. Three cheers for Gravatar!

A little delayed, but none the less, here are the final details for the birthday bash!

Date: 24.09.05
Time: 19:00
Where: Beinvenue en Backyard, Eh?

In a nutshell, it’s a going to be a BBQ with beer. I’ll be supplying the meat, couple cartons of beer and soft drink. If you’d like to cook something in particular, feel free to bring it. That said, if you want to drink anything that isn’t beer, soft drink or muddy water (I.E. Spirits) it’s BYO. I’m sure there will be some sort of braiser… maybe even two? ;). For those who are drinking, you’re welcome to stay the night (You’re welcome to stay, even if you dont drink!). I’m cleaning the lounge out, but you’ll *NEED* to bring you’re own sleeping gear! I only have so many blankets and pillows. In Addition, the lounge comprises of fluffy, comfortable carpet. The weather is suppose to be “Mostly Sunny” that day, so I’m not expecting any rain… much :). I’m relatively close to the 130 Bus Route, which is, the bus that goes straight to the city and runs into the early hours of the morning, IIRC. There’s plenty of parking in our street for those of you who are driving. PLEASE, no presents. Kthx! Oh yea, RSVP before Wednesday the 21st. You’ve known about it for weeks, so NO EXCUSES! Any questions or comments, contact me - Cheers.

Presenting, Tatey.com version3! You can see signifigant changes over the original and version2. While the colour scheme has been consistent along with much of the basic layout, the latest revision adds a ‘modern touch’. Additionally, it’s scalable from 800×600 rather than a fixed-width such as my traditional XHTML/CSS layouts. On an interesting note, all my sites were scalable when I *was* using nasty tables. This is great for people running high resolutions or wide-screen monitors, infact, Adrian would always complain about this aspect. To maintain cross-browser integrity, I’ve had to write a total of 3 style sheets. One for standard-rendering browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konq), one for IE6 and again for IE5/5.5 for Windows. I’m not even going to attempt to ensure that it works in IE5 on Mac. Those people should not be allowed to use the internet! Especially now with Safari and Firefox. The only exception is for OS9 users, and even then, it’s strongly encouraged to invest in OS X.

I’ve been working on and off ‘Tatey.com v3′ for the past couple of weeks whilst juggling uni, work and my apparent social life. This is the primary reason why I have been slow to repair the front page and the rest of the site. That said, I’m currently sticking with Wordpress until the holidays, when I’ll have enough time to teach myself PHP. I’m planning, in collaboration with Ashley, to write Bolognaise with a MySQL backend.

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve setup a HTPC named Shoebox. It lives a double life as a webserver as well as a HTPC. Infact, this page is being served from there :). In comparison, I’ve also setup server stats. Here, you can fetch phpSysInfo as well as IRC statistics for #hash and #flora. It runs no other than Gentoo Linux, which is undoubtedly, the best flavour of linux you can get your hands on.

As for a short update on life in general. It’s Week9 of Semester 2 at Uni for me, things this semester have been a lot better than last. Primarily because I’m actually studying and gathering appropriate research for assignments. Next week is my Birthday and I’m hosting a party. I still need to write details up for that, and I will later this evening. The motorbike is going great, actually it *could* do with a tune-up. At least I know that the oil is fine. It’s very windy in Brisbane, close to gale force winds in some parts. On Thursday, I purchased two CMV CT-720D 17″ 8ms LCD Monitors for my boxen. I had spare money from my tax return and I decided to treat myself to an early birthday present ;). On a completely unrelated note, I love IRSSI and Screen ^_^. END!

It’s good to be back, after a few months of nothingness. A lot of stuff has changed, and I’ll explain more later. For now, I’m going to try and fix up this styling. On a site note, none of the other content exists at the current time. Sorry!

Cheers,
Tate