This is the upshot of that whole door handle assignment. I handed it in today, after pulling an all nighter. I did the rendering on 3DSmax, and I didnt think i did too badly, considering I am a newbie to this whole thing. The teachers liked the assignment, so thats the main thing. Last weekend I went away on a church camp, which was in Mt Eliza, near where mum used to work. It was the best weekend ever.... this weekend is going to be pretty calm in comparison. Tonight I am planning on going to have some after work drinks with CJ and his mates from work. Then we are going back to CJ's place for dinner. Should be nice, then i will sleep and try and recover from my stupid all nighter i pulled for that stupid assignment. Saturday I have work in the morning, then I dont know whats happening in the afternoon, maybe in the evening we might go out clubbing with John and Jeff, but I have to work in the morning on Sunday, so I dont know if it will happen. Anyways, thats pretty much all thats happening my end of the world. Ohh... and a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Ally.. :P 

Door handles

Well, I am back at University, and everything is back into full swing.
The first design project is to design a door handle, which at first
glance seems simple enough... but don't be fooled. It is actually quite
a challenge to design a handle that can be cast out of metal so that it
can be used on both sides of the door with very little or no machining.
Concepts and a detailed drawing of the lock mechanism are due in on
Thursday, and I haven't really started! I guess that can be something
for tomorrow, I finish Uni at 11.30am on Wednesdays, and my only other
plans are to go and see a play in the evening... that should leave
plenty of time for design work.
This semester, one of our lecturers started out our first lecture
saying; "This is machine dynamics, its very easy to fail. This is a very
hard subject." I was scared, he said the f word! Fail. Not just that,
but that it was quite easy to fail. After I recovered from my initial
shock, I made a vow to keep up with all the work for this class. (I
think I promise myself this at the start of every semester, lol) I went
and bought the textbook and I did all the week 1 problems before my
tutorial (I felt square having done everything he was trying to explain)
Anyways, so far, so good, I worked on week 2 questions after Uni today,
so hopefully I will be able to spread out my workload a little bit this
semester.
No more last second lab reports and no more late nights! I am going to
be an angel and goto bed early every night. I'm trying to keep my
weekends pretty clear of homework, so that I can have a social life too. lol
Speaking of things other than Uni, a couple of days ago my computer
decided that it wanted to stop working. It was still having issues with
overheating, so I pulled the heat sink off to have a closer look at what
was happening. Mark helped diagnose the problem over the phone, my
thermal grease had dried up! I reckon its because when I moved my
computer to Kelly's house while I was house sitting, the heat sink must
have come loose a little. Without full contact with both the processor
and the heat sink, my thermal grease started to dry up and get baked
onto the CPU. I cleaned the area, and applied some new thermal grease,
which cost $20 for a grand total of 3.5 grams. I guess it could have
been worse, if I had to replace my CPU I would have forked out upwards
of $250! Anyways, the new thermal grease seems to be working even better
than the Intel supplied grease, making my PC quieter and cooler. Thats a
relief!
I cant think of any other news, ooh... Grandma on my mums side had a
fall and went to hospital, so keep her in your prayers.
There was a youth planned service at church on Sunday, which I had
worked on. It went quite well, and we even had a new member come along.
His name is Toby, and he's almost 21, his birthday is just after mine. I
also offered to take him to Glen Waverly's evening service, which he
came to, so I hope he keeps coming and gets something out of it.

Goodbye holidays, hello Uni

I haven't posted in a while, which should tell you that I have a very
boring life. Holidays from Uni always brings boredom, and I can never
get as much work at Kmart as I would like during the holiday period. Oh
well, I guess its all over now, because Uni went back today. I had two
lectures today, both are focusing on how materials can be processed to
make useful products. I'm not that worried about these subjects because
they seem to have a decent pass rate. I'm a little worried about another
of my subjects, 'machine dynamics'. Just the name is scary... I hope
they move slowly, but knowing the way the uni works, they wont move slow
enough! Anyways, it was a lot of fun to catch up with what everyone has
done over the holidays, and we went to the Hawthorn pub to hang out
between lectures.
Tonight I have work, we are doing stock take, so that means I have three
and a half hours of scanning every product on every shelf of Kmart. It's
a rather large task, and I have been rostered to help out tonight and
the next two nights. I guess the money will be good, and I don't really
have to deal with customers.
On Saturday night I went out to dinner at La Porchetta (is that how u
spell it?) and then went to see "Monster In Law" in V-max at Knox. It
was very funny! I'd highly recommend it. Tho maybe I liked it because my
family is going through the whole ordeal of planning a wedding at the
moment. That would make mu mother the monster.... thats a bit scary. LOL.
-Andrew

Chinese food

Last night the Wheatland clan visited the local Chinese restaurant. When
I say "Wheatland clan", I mean Dad, Mum, Peter, Phil, Matthew, Richard,
Shane, Uncle Mark, Aunty Belinda, Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Steve, Aunty
Sue and myself. Anyways, there was a reason we were all out and about
eating Chinese food, and that reason is because Uncle Mark turned 45! We
ate really nice food, but we forgot the cake! Instead of cake, Uncle
Mark had ice cream with a sparkler in it. After the Chinese restaurant
we went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house, and had more ice cream and
more chocolates and cookies. We all headed home at about 12:30 in the
morning. It was quite a fun night.
-Andrew

We are getting into full swing with organising the party tram. This is the first flyer I have made. If anyone is interested in going and isnt in rovers, contact me at wheaties@myrealbox.com We would love to have u come along, but be aware that you need to be 18+ at the time of the event. (at this stage that looks to be in late October) 

Well, I logged in and got my timetable for Uni today, this is what it looks like. hmm... it looks pretty full on, with one split day between the two campuses. That will be fun.  

I'm on the Bass Strait side, and Sravan is on the Southern Ocean side. This is taken near the Cape Otway lighthouse. 

One of the apostles fell down! thats that little pile of rubble there.  

The entry to Loch Ard. 

Loch Ard gorge 

Me, Yong, Tara, & Steel at Steel's farm 

There's the Round The Twist lighthouse again. 

Sravan and I, near the Aries Inlet lighthouse. This is where they used to film Round The Twist.  

Road Trip!

One of the "must see" icons of Victoria is the 12 Apostles and Loch Ard
Gorge. On Monday, I went on a road trip with Sravan and some of his
friends from Adelaide to see these huge land formations. We left at
7.00am from Sravan's house and drove via CityLink through Geelong to
Steel's place. Steel goes to uni in Adelaide with the others, and has
just come home for the holidays. We had a quick tour around the farm,
which is really more of a hobby farm. It was fun to see how 'country
like' it could be just 15 mins out of Geelong.
After our quick pit stop at the farm, we proceeded onwards through
Torquay, and onto the Great Ocean Road. We followed the Great Ocean Road
to Lorne before stopping for lunch. We had packed a lunch of sandwiches
and soup. We pressed onwards to the Cape Otway lighthouse, and climbed
to the top of the lighthouse. Cape Otway is the point where the Bass
Straight ends and the Southern Ocean begins. We've got some photos, but
I will have to post them up later. From Cape Otway to the 12 Apostles,
Sravan drove. It gave me a much needed rest from driving, because it's a
long way to go.
We arrived at the 12 Apostles around 4pm, and spent an hour or two
looking at the formations and Loch Ard.
That area of the coast has quite a colorful past, and there were several
ships that sunk off the coast. One of these ships was the Loch Ard.
There were only two survivors from the Loch Ard, they had to take
shelter overnight in one of the caves, which I imagine would have been
quite scary!
After we saw the Apostles, we headed inland, stopping at Colac to get
some pizza for dinner. We headed home after that, using CityLink again.
We arrived back at Sravan's place around 10.30pm.
It was a long trip, but well worth the effort!

Stupid Overheating PC

Well, over the last couple of weeks, some of you will have been aware
that my computer has taken a liking to randomly turning off or
restarting. This can be quite annoying, especially when you are in the
middle of something. I got David to come and take a look at it earlier
this week. He seemed to think that it was an overheating issue. After
much fiddling around in the BIOS, we managed to get it to run reasonably
stable for a while. We turned on the temperature management controls,
and put the fan speed adjustment to automatic. We also turned off the
hyper-threading, and that REALLY made my computer go slow. I think its
working pretty stable now, but I will definitely want to goto a swap
meet and get another heat sync for my CPU, then I can turn
hyper-threading back on.
Wow, that was a really nerdy post. The other things I have been doing
over the past week include going to friends places, running errands for
Dad, chatting on msn and generally killing time. Oh the holidays are so
lazy!
-Andrew

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