I'm Back!

I'm back! And it's good news!

Due to CFS, Mathieu's Update hasn't been very up to date. I haven't regularly blogged in about 3 years.
For the next 3 months, I will run a trial and see what pace I can keep up with.
Please subscribe to my RSS or Atom feed so you can be notified whenever I update. It's easy to set up, but let me know if you want help doing it anyway, or if you want emails from my blog instead (although I don't recommend that option at all). I recommend using the Opera browser above all others. One reason among many, is that it can notify you of new posts itself without the need of any additional newsreading software or having to check any website. Still put me into your bookmarks though.

And then please comment as often as you can. This will help me a lot! Thanks.

At first, to get me into a blogging routine, I'll probably just start listing the things which happened in my day, but then I'll quickly branch out into actual blogging, and getting more and more interesting.

So what have I been up to?

Well, I'm still writing my book, preparing my Bible studies, memorizing Hebrew and Greek scripture, designing the perfect operating system and programming language, playing the flute, piano and sometimes the violin.

I'm still studying Physics and Maths at QUT. Hopefully I'll be there a few years yet. I'm part time now. This semester, I've finally been doing QUT's only subject on Discrete Mathematics. That's the kind of maths I wanted to do from the start, but I'm obviously at the wrong university.

I've decided that my degree might be usefull to me after all, and that teaching is the way to go for me. Whether that's primary, secondary, uni or something else entirely, I don't know yet. Hey, I've only been at uni seven years, and it took me six of those to work out teaching has something to do with it!

I live alone happily in the same place I've been living the last 8 years.

I spend most of my weekends with The Baby and The Boy Brother. We play lots of games and read lots of books. I'm also teaching them Bible stories, music, maths, spelling, etc. We love it! I'm writing some educational computer games to help.

A couple of weeks ago, my moustache was trimmed for the first time, along with my hair, for my cousin's wedding where I was a groomsman and wore a kilt. Pictures are coming. Don't worry, the beard is still safe.

Schoolies is coming up soon, and I'm hoping to blog about it every day that I'm on project like I did in 2005, but this time it might be on a new blog devoted to Schoolies. So during those days I may not blog here, but I'll link to the other blog or something. We'll see how it works later.

I get to help with the apologetics training this year! I don't know anything about what's happening yet, so I'm just trying to get all my apologetics together into one interactive program for answering questions. I have apologetics on the brain, so you'll hopefully get me posting a lot of apologetics throughout the next month.

There are also some surprise posts coming!

As you might have noticed, I've made some little changes to my blog. There are many more to come. I'm very excited about what I have planned!

I used to host my files on my old website at Geocities, but Geocities is closing down on October 26, 2009. This is a good thing. I never took Geocities seriously, as you may have guessed if you ever visited my site there and found it hardly ever changed in 7 years. My new website is with a marvalous free webhosting service called HelioHost. My motto is, "If it seems too good to be true, check it out!"

At the time I'm writing this, my new website has less on it than the old one. In fact, nothing. So far it's just hosting some of the old files for my blog like my Da Vinci Code artical so that the links will still work when Geocities dies, but I will add to my new site regularly, so it will soon have far more than the old one, and eventually be a proper site I can be proud of.

You may have noticed I've updated the the HTML version of my Hebrew Calendar. It's now a JavaScript which generates the HTML itself so I don't have to keep posting it. I haven't finished it yet. I have plans to make it interactive and have each day link to the appropriate post on my blog, and each Feast icon link to information about the Feast, etc.

Here's a hint you might like pointed out. In the past, when I've used a word without explaining it, I turned it into a link to a page explaining it. I'll still be doing that, but from now on I'll give it a title with a little more information for those people who don't have the time to read a whole other page. Just move your mouse over a link to find out a little more information. For example, if move your mouse over the word KGP, a message saying, "A booklet called Knowing God Personally." should pop up. If it doesn't work for you, please comment and tell me, because from now on, I won't be putting bracketed explanations beside acronyms either. If you click on the link, it will still go to the whole other page.

If you want to know more about what's been happening up until now, I'm sure you'll hear more about my past adventures as time goes on. That's if there aren't too many new ones.

8th Month 5769

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7th Month 5769

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6th Month 5769

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Webmail Madness

QUT has it's own webmail service for enrolled students. It's called Webmail.

The last time I checked my Webmail account was 324 emails ago, apparently in March or April.

One minor reason for this, is that my Webmail account is hard to check.

It's 2751.7% over quota!
I have 2924 emails!
Click the censored snapshot below to see:



Until I'm back under quota, I'm not allowed to use Webmail to save sent emails.
It also means that my received emails are not being automatically organised into the folders I've made for them. I hope this restriction isn't somehow intended to motivate me to delete emails, because this just makes it harder to sort out which ones to delete!

I used to use Webmail as my main personal email address, and I used Yahoo for everything else.

I used to check Webmail at least once every day!

So what went wrong?

Well the last straw was when I began to be showered with messages like the one in the picture (but usually offensive) every day: "Waht Are The Best Love Making Positionss?". And QUT's Webmail is so primitive, that it only lets me filter one message at a time. Does anyone else at QUT have this problem? I've never used my Webmail address for anything on the internet. I use my Yahoo and Gmail addresses to sign up for things, and I hardly ever get spam to those.
Then in 2006... well you already know / don't want to know what happened then... and in 2007 I wasn't at QUT, and at some point before that I discovered Gmail. Yay!

But now I've been back at QUT for a while, and I've already missed some important emails. So now I need to save all my emails and delete them from Webmail.

It's hard to save Webmail emails from a browser. You need to open each email one at a time and save it as a HTML file, and then you need to download each attachment individually. It takes ages!

How long would it take to save 2924 emails? Even when I used this address every day, 100 emails was far too tedious for me, so in 2003 or 2004, I actually wrote a program to do most of this work for me. It scrawled through all the HTML files, and their links, and neatly saved all my emails into folders based on the ones I'd set up in Webmail.
I was quite proud, because I wrote this program in QBasic, and... let's just say you're not supposed to be able to do things like that with QBasic, which is a very ancient semi-interpreted language. Besides the fact that it "can't" access the internet, it also "can't" read or write files with file names longer than the old 8 characters plus 3 characters for the suffix and it can't recognise case.
Nevertheless, I managed to make it access and save each email as a file using the subject (sometimes greater than 30 characters long) as the file name. The QBasic program would actually write another QBasic program and write and run a batch file which would change all the file names, do other things, and execute the other program, which would in turn do the same thing until there were 5 programs. I won't share the rest of my secrets because... it would probably bore you.

This was working quite well until QUT changed the format of Webmail a little bit, and I couldn't be bothered tweaking the program, especially when they've now got an alternative "Advanced" system which I'm afraid they'll phase out the old one for at any time.

Another problem with my program is that it didn't yet save attachments. I still had to painstakingly download those one at a time, and there are about as many of those as emails. It also got a little huffy when I received an email while it was doing it's stuff. Well, no, actually, that was me.

These days I'm probably too old to play such insane games with programming. I would probably just write it in Java. No wait! I would do what I just did today. I went to the IT Helpdesk and asked them if there was a quick fix. There is (there didn't used to be, because I did ask them before. I'm not that proud). It's called Outlook Express.

Even though I'd rather rewrite my program in QBasic than use a Microsoft program I hate even more than most other Microsoft programs, if I keep reminding myself that QBasic itself is a Microsoft product, and that desperate times call for sensible measures, I might be able to do this quickly enough to forget it ever happened... Or I could use it as an excuse to play with Opera Mail...

My Mad Meal 1

15-2-5769

Today, after her first music lesson (well, she raced through the first 8 lessons which I had been up until 3AM in the morning designing), and after playing lots of other new games, including an obstacle course, The Baby (now 6 years old) and I decided to make me some breakfast (The Baby had already eaten).

So the first thing we put in my bowl was an egg (without the shell). We knew that eggs come from chickens which lay them, but today we remembered that chickens hatch from eggs as well, and don't just come from the farm. We soon realised that there is a vicious cycle of chickens hatching and laying! But which came first? The chicken or the egg? We discovered that God made chickens first on the fifth day of creation, along with everything else that flies, and all the sea creatures.

We then put a jam biscuit and a big cookie in with the egg. After that, we put in four big marshmallows! I couldn't help but alternate the two pink ones and two white ones symmetrically into the four corners of my bowl.

Then we found some sort of fruit bar that was apparently meant to go into lunchboxes. Not today! Today it got torn into four pieces which were then inserted in between the four marshmallows.

The Baby then pealed me a mandarin, and we balanced four pieces of that on top of the pieces of fruit bar. The Baby suggested we put another one in the middle, and maybe she was right, but I felt it was time to put a piece of Weet-Bix Fruity cereal there instead. But then, what the hay! Let's just pour a whole lot more of that cereal in, but not before pouring in a heap of Coco Pops! Then we added one of my favourite cereals - popcorn!

It was starting to look a little dry, so we went to the fridge and found some orange fruit-juice, which we half-drowned the rest of the food in.

I thought we weren't going to be able to fit anything more in, but I was wrong! The Baby crammed in three Arnott's biscuits (a Nice, Milk Coffee, and Milk Arrowroot).

I put an upside-down plate on top of the bowel and put the lot in the microwave. We set it for three minutes. Once the countdown started, we ran out of the kitchen so no limbs would be lost in the explosion when the egg blew up. Because that would just ruin breakfast!

Once we were sure it was safe to take my breakfast out of the microwave and placed it on the table, we felt it was missing something... Oh yes! Tomato sauce, BBQ sauce, maple syrup, jam, a dash of lemon juice, caramel topping, lots of mayonnaise, and lots of baby marshmallows!

Contrary to The Baby's predictions, it was... delicious! I must admit that the mandarin turned just a little sour in the microwave, but there were only four little pieces and it's better than my unfounded fear that they would be too hot and burn my tongue. I don't think I'll use a mandarin next time. Other than that, we should be on one of those cooking shows on TV!

Oh yeah, and I discovered the egg wasn't cooked properly at the bottom, which explains why it didn't explode. I didn't want to eat raw egg white, because it contains active avidin, which inhibits your absorption of biotin by binding to it. Biotin is also called vitamin B₇ and vitamin H. Willy Wonka claims that he doesn't use vitamin H in his Supervitamin Chocolate because it makes you grow horns, but a biotin deficiency causes your hair to fall out, and I don't want to start going bald!

So I put my breakfast back in the microwave for another two minutes, and when it was done, the biscuits turned into cake! I'm not making this up! The whole thing was like eating trifle. Mmmm! I love trifle!

I know what I forgot! The herbs and spices! I knew there was something!

1st Month 5769

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Happy New Year 5769!

Happy New Year!

Today (being from Friday the 27th of March at sunset until Saturday the 28th of March at sunset, 2009) is the first day of the Biblical new year according to the Karaite Jews.

I have decided not to shave my hair this year. I sometimes shave my hair at the start of the year to keep track of how fast it grows. One of my resolutions for the new year is to blog almost every week from now on.

5769AM is supposed to be the year anno mundi (Latin for "Year of the World"), but I think it's probably out by a few hundred years. It's not important to know which year you are in to celebrate the feasts, though. The Bible didn't keep count of the years that way either. What's important is what time of the year it is.

The Bible says that the first month of the year is the month of Abib (Exodus 12:2, 13:4). That is, the month when the barley is harvested. That's this month.

The month itself is simply from one new moon to the next. Today is the new moon.

A day, as originally and consistantly defined in the Bible, is from sunset to sunset (Genesis 1:5, Leviticus 23:32).

Happy new year!

3rd Month 5768

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