Wheaties

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Toasty by Andrew Weeks and Andrew Wheatland

Toasty will not look out of place in any modern kitchen.

This is Toasty, a toaster for the visually impaired. Designed by Andrew Weeks and Andrew Wheatland.

Forward Message:

This is very important.. a must read for you all!

WARNING

If someone comes to your front door and says they are conducting a Survey
and asks you to show them your arse, DO NOT show them your arse.

This is a scam; they just want to see your arse.

I wish I'd got this yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap .

A whole month?

Wow, reading through my last post, I find it hard to believe that was an
entire month ago! it seems like it was just yesterday. (gee I sound old)
hehe. Anyways, I'm back from house sitting now. The time away from home
was much needed and I think that it really helped me work out some stuff.
Since I last wrote, I have had exams, which all went just superly. =D I
studied enough (i think) and I felt good about sitting the exam. One of
my exams was Mechanics of Structures, and the other was Materials and
Processes. I also had a couple projects due for design after I had done
all my exams. The main project was the toaster for blind people that I
designed in conjunction with Weeksy. I should have some photos of this
up soon, it's just a matter of finding them again hehe.
While I was away, I lost my phone for a day. I thought it was lost
forever, until Evan called it and some random guy picked it up.
Apparently I had left it on the nature strip, and it had rained that
night. The guy had come past in the morning and picked it up while he
was walking his dog. Because of the rain, the keypad wasn't working, so
I got a quote on how much it would cost to repair it. Turned out it
would be cheaper to replace the handset than repair it. So I went out
and bought a LG C1100 handset. And all was right in my world again....
until my old Nokia started working again! Now I have to sell one of the
phones, so the LG is getting sold. I think my mum and dad want to buy
it, but I'm not sure. If they don't take it, Phil will. hehe.
Anyways, I'm back home now, and everything is back to normal. I'm
thinking that I should get a second casual job or perhaps volunteer
somewhere to keep me occupied over this holidays.
-Andrew

Thursday, May 19, 2005

whirlwind week

Wow! this week has been huge. Since I last wrote, I have completed
another stage of my toaster assignment. We are now up to actually
starting to design the toaster. :-D I'm quite pleased about that.
On Saturday night, my venturer leader turned 50, so Slimmo (our
assistant venturer leader) decided to surprise a surprise birthday party
for her! There was well over 100 people there, and we all managed to
stay quiet while she was about to walk into the back yard, so she was
completely surprised! There was a lot of dancing, music and catching up
with friends, so I think she enjoyed the night.
On Tuesday night, Rovers had a $10 night, the idea is if everyone brings
$10 we can have a progressive dinner of fast food outlets! It went well,
and I think we all ate too much. hehe. We ate Chinese, pizza and had way
too much ice-cream for dessert. I think everyone enjoyed it, it was
definitely worth $10 each.
Wednesday I started out my day visiting Kelly's house to pick up the
key. I'm going to be house sitting for her while she and her husband are
on holidays in England. They will be gone for a month, so I will have
the responsibility for watching the house and taking care of the cats.
They have two cats, which don't like each other too much, so I've got to
feed them separately. This could get interesting! hehe. I'm there for a
month, and will only have limited net access, so I might get a bit slack
with posting... :-! I will take plenty of photos and post them when I
get back from house sitting.
Monday was Mum and Dad's wedding anniversary, so we had a special dinner
for that. Also on Monday, we got the information about the Germany trip
for all Product Design students. It sounds so exciting, and we get to
stay right in Berlin, and goto University there! SOO EXCITING!! I'm
already making plans to stay on after all the studying is done so I can
see a bit more of Europe, but we will see how it all goes.
Anyways, I think thats about all the news I have for now. -Andrew

Friday, May 13, 2005

hehe, i look all formal. does it matter that i didnt know what camera to look at?

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Oh what a feeling...

Today I was up before the sun! Now I know how Chris must feel when he
works with the balloons... dead. Anyways, I had a good reason to be up
and about early, I was going with some students from Swinburne to visit
Toyota's car assembly plant in Altona. The tour was very comprehensive,
and I was quite surprised at the level of accuracy used during
construction. Much of the production is done by hand, and the plant
employs aver 4000 people. The plant pumps out a car every 2 minuets, and
over 60% of the cars get exported to the arab states. Quite impressive
that we do that kind of thing here in Melbourne. Every task performed on
the car must be complete in 1min 45secs!
The other thing I did today was I visited the Melbourne exhibition
center. This week is "manufacturing week" and they had a huge trade show
set up. Can you imagine the entirety of Jeff's shed filled with C&C
mills, rapid prototyping machines and a vast array of new and
experimental techniques of manufacture. The show was quite interesting,
but was focused on metals, I want to deal mainly in plastics, so I was
interested to see the rapid prototyping machines, as well as the 3d
scanner machines. They had some people demonstrating different design
software packages as well, and I managed to pick up a free trial of
Autodesk's Inventor program, which seems like a good knock off of
Solidworks. (perhaps Solidworks knocked off inventor??) Anyway, the day
was quite fun, and I plan to goto church council tonight. I am sure that
will be a thrilling meeting.

Die SPAM die!!!!

Is it just me, or has SPAM recently become a really big problem
(especially for myrealbox users) In 9 hours, i received 80 SPAM
messages!! Using MS Outlook or Outlook Express, sifting through these
junk mail items becomes a daily chore, not to mention compromises
security. But don't dismay, I have found the solution! I've decided to
leave Microsoft for open source. (Why I didn't try this earlier, I have
no idea!)
Do yourself a favor, and download a copy of MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD! It's
not worth changing just for the extra added security, or the built in
RSS reader (use that to check my blog for updates, just like checking
e-mail: http://wheaties85.blogspot.com/atom.xml) The main advantage is
it's smart junk filters. You can actually "teach" it what you consider
"Junk" and when it makes a mistake, you can teach it what you see as an
important newsletter or ezine. This is allot easier than it sounds, as
all you have to do is right click a message and click "junk".
Everyone should dump Microsoft today!

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

[Fwd: more formal photos (if you are interested)]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: more formal photos (if you are interested)
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 22:21:21 +1000
From: Andrew Wheatland <wheaties@myrealbox.com>
To: <wheaties85.post@blogger.com>

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/mr_frissy/smallgroup-jesshouse.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/mr_frissy/jessandchrisdancing2.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/mr_frissy/girls-smallgroup.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/mr_frissy/girls-largegroup.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/mr_frissy/formaldates.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0007.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0009.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0013.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0010.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0019.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0021.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0033.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0041.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/tigereye16/Year%2012%20Formal/PICT0039.jpg