Connex

Is making sure that i'll get home late again - we haven't gone faster than about 30km/h since we left Caulfield - we must be operating under caution orders or something like that. It's taken nearly an hour to get to cheltenham from the city. how's my day going? Oh yeah - I still have to get myassignment done for Reasoning. I have the equivalent of about 15 a4 pages to read, and then construct an argument of about 12-20 points of out that. excellent. NOT.

BTC - Grand Final

I got flogged. What a bastard. I only lost 3 games all year, and one of them was the grand final.I was really hurt by Primus hurting himself after the first 2 minutes of the game, and peter bellplayed, even though he wasn't named in the 25 players on Thursday night. ARGH! Oh well, I stillwin $50, which is not to be sneezed at. I'll collect that on Wednesday.

Ashes - Day 4

We Lost! In an amazing show, we managed to set them 130 odd runs, and had them 7 down before they gotthe total. Warnie made 45 odd with the bat, and took another 4 wickets in the second innings, whichis really helping us out. Anyway, there is just one more test to, starting late next week - we needto win it to keep the ashes, and england only need a draw.

Swimming

Little man loves swimming - so we enrolled him in water awareness classes - which he starts next week. :) So cute.

Ashes - 4th Test, 1st Session

What a disaster. 1-130 odd. Trescothick bowled off a no-ball.

Shaun Tait was pretty good, but hard to expect much from the kid.

Glenn McGrath out with a dodgy elbow.

The Ashes

The 4th Ashes test starts tomorrow night. It's a new thing to be excited about the Aussie's playing England. Ever since I can remember, it's been an easy tour for us. Go over there, drink some beer on the plane over, and smash the english cricket team.

It's now a real challenge, with the English batsmen performing pretty well against our aging bowling attack. Glenn McGrath has been heroic, coming back from his torn ankle ligaments only 8 days before the 3rd test. Shane Warne has put his marriage problems behind him and has been fantastic batting with the tail. His bowling has been useful, but not what I would call lethal. Then comes Jason Gillespie. He's struggled all tour, and thankfully has been dropped for the 4th test.

Then comes the decision about who to replace him with: Kaspa or Tait.
Kaspa is definately a more consistent bowler, and actually has been great bowling for us over the past year.
Tait has not played a test for Australia yet, but why would you take a bloke to England to not give him a game? After a spirited net bowling performance yesterday, it looks as though the selectors are going with Tait. 22 years old, fast and agressive - just what we need to punish those poms! :)

argh.

Getting hassled by spammers on my movie review site. irritating.

Been a bit busy lately. Let me do the rundown:

• 30th Birthday on Monday
• Party coming up this weekend
• Work has been crazy, more on that here.
• Made the Grand Final of BTC, coming up this weekend
• Assignment due on Monday

So there are a few things going on at the moment! :)

Giggles

We got some giggles out of him today - not exactly laughs, but more like a giggle. It took a fair bit of tickling to get it out of him though - he had a little red belly! ;)

Pool

We went to Waves down in Cheltenham today - it was fantastic.

Huge pool, wave pool, kiddie pool and a small pool for playing around. Jude had a good time, he didn't really go for the wave pool though! He really likes playing in the water though!

Texas Hold'em

I won the Texas Hold'em tournament that my work had tonight! :) How good is that?

I came a bit late, and my boss was leaving, so I took his chips - and kept growing them and got to the last 3 with 50% of the 1000 chips. Awesome.

I took out the 2nd chip leader, with a couple of great hands, and then it was me with about 2/3 chips vs the other guy - with only 1/3 chips.

A couple of good hands, and he was toasted! :) yeah baby!

I won a $150 voucher for dinner too!

New Words

I mentioned the other day that Jude has started saying more stuff. Well, just to add to the list:

Bum
Chester
Baby
Nanny
Oh, and Car. :)

He also loves shaking hands too!

BTC - Qualifying Final

I had a huge win, 185 - 153.

Mostly off the back of 3 great performances by my WB players, Gilbee, Cross and Brad Johnson. I actually had 11 players over 100, and another 3 in the 90's - Can't ask for more than that.

Unfortunately Brad Ottens hurt his groin, and is unlikely to play again this year. I have a couple of other players to bring in for the Grand Final, Steve Johnson, and Ben Holland having played well recently. Injury cloud over Primus (who didnt play this last weekend), and McPhee doesn't look likely to play again this year either.

Eugene is playing Mike for the other place in the Grand Final, but if I can get the same strong performances out of my players that I had this week, it should be a win for me this season.

Dodgeball

This is a funny escapist movie. I thought it was worth watching, after seeing all the coverage for VV's newest movie - Wedding Crashers.

Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller are really great in this film, playing bookends in the gymnasium game. When Stiller's gym decides to take over Vaughan's gym for a parking garage, the only way to raise the money is to win the American Dodgeball Championships.

Stiller is great in the evil role in this film.

7.5/10

Garden State

Fantastic movie - From what I can work out, it's largely biographical, written and directed by lead actor Zach Braff. Known mostly for his work on Scrubs, this is a breakout film for him.

Natalie Portman shines as quirky girl next door, playing of Braff's Andrew Largeman. Largeman returns home after being estranged from his family for 10 years, after the death of his mother. He has been medicated by his psychiatrist father, and struggles to feel anything.

ZB's blog here.

Get it on dvd! Now!

8.5/10

Ashes - Third Test, Day 1

Unbelieveable. Glenn McGrath plays, 8 days after tearing ligaments on his ankle.

Dropped catches, and good batting - I'm talking about Australia, not England too!

Gilly went at a catch one handed, and dropped it - Trescothick on 13 too. He's now just got his 50.

Gilly then dropped Vaughan on 49, McGrath bowled him next ball - off a no-ball. SHIT!

Looks like the rub of the green is going with the poms, but it will be good to see how the aussie's respond to this pressure.

Happy Birthday

To Roy!

go to hell, you old bastard!

;)

BTC

Results:
Eugene 150 v Tamera 137
Mike H 158 v Neil H 98

So, this week:
Keat v Eugene
Tamera v Mike

I had a good week, with a big score of 168. Hopefully that should be enough to beat ET.

Edgbaston test

What a stunning match. This is one of those test matches that will be talked about for a long long time - Lucky that SBS decided to telecast it live.

Warnie, Lee and Kaspa got us to within 2 runs of a famous victory, and I cant help but wonder what would have happened if we had got Flintoff earlier yesterday. He and Jones made 50+ for the last wicket, and we had no problem getting to 230 - well, we were 9 down, but just those extra 50 runs was the difference really.

As I had hoped, Punter wasn't too disappointed with the outcome of the match, there are a hell of a lot of positives to come out of it - although the continued average form of Matty Hayden is a concern. Marto has been a bit hot and cold also. Hopefully the inclusion of MacGill will get us back on track, with most of the poms seeming to struggle to read Warnie.

Bring on Old Trafford!

Big Smiles

Little Jack is giving smiles now. He is a funny baby, with a very expressive face - showing his displeasure at the first sight of adversity.

He seems to be a bit of a sensitive soul. :)

The Ashes

Are game on!

Looks like the Aussies are going to lose tonight, 2 wickets left and 107 runs to go.

Great effort by Andrew Flintoff, coming out and smashing our attack around the park, after hurting his shoulder batting! He then came out and ripped into us with the ball, and it looks like he's taken the game away from us.

Warnie has been brilliant again, taking 10 wickets, but he needs to do a job with the bat now - he's 20 not out, and batting with Gillespie, so they might be able to get at least some of those runs we need.

The next match starts on Thursday, which doesn't give us much of a chance to get ourselves sorted out. A couple of key areas:
1. The toss - Have a bat Ricky!
2. Glenn McGrath - missing him badly.
3. Brett Lee - Good come back last night, after being pole-axed on Friday night.

C'mon Aussies! C'mon!

Car!

Is his new thing to say! :) clear as a bell. You dont realise how many car ads there are on tv, until Jude points them out every time there is a car on the telly.

We took him up to Puffing Billy last weekend, to see the trains. He's been obsessed with his Thomas toys, and goes around the house pulling on the whistle, and going woo-woo! :)

He got a bit of a fright, we were standing right next to the locomotives when they left, and they blew the whistle, which scared him. I think it was a bit loud for him. Poor little lamb.

Jasper Reports

We have to implement Jasper Reports to product xls and pdf file reports.

I learnt that Jasper has moved to v1.0, and is now fully supported. I'm pretty sure that it's still open source, but a company has decided to take on it's support (like with JBoss).

I also found a nice looking Eclipse plugin for building the reports visually. Hopefully we can get the formats of the reports together pretty soon, and start building them. I will go into more detail once I've got my teeth into it, and implemented it in the application.

BTC

I've been a bit flat out recently, so I will re-cap the BTC season so far.

I finished on top of the ladder, going 16-2 through the regular season. Amol missed out, with Eugene, Tamera, Neil and Mike Hodder getting through to finals.

This weekend's games are:
Me - Bye
Eugene vs Tamera
Neil vs Mike

The winner of Neil v Mike will play the loser of Euge v Tamera, and I will play the winner next week.

I've got a few injury worries, with Adam McPhee and Matty Primus missing again this weekend, hopefully they will get up this week, i could really use them! My Bulldogs players were brilliant again, with Gilbee the pick so far. Brent Harvey had 37 odd posessions today, which he can hopefully maintain through to next week.

Madness!

What's going on with this project? Sketchy requirements are leading to much consternation from the development team. i.e me!

Ah yes, this is how it goes.

Been busy, but haven't got much done. Still have 45 pages of reading to do for the last assignment, and the channel deepening test is going ahead soon - the ship sailed into the bay yesterday.

War room meeting this afternoon, with a new PM. This will be interesting to see how it flies.

Busy

Sorry about the lack of posting - i've been flat out! :)

Rach and I bought a camera yesterday - Sony DSCW7 I think. Very nice unit. No shutter lag, and a really nice clean 5 megapixel image.

Some shots will be up shortly, once I can get them downloaded and uploaded.

I think I won my btc match, which means i'll have the first week of finals off.

I have spent most of this morning looking for a Web Services Unit test tool. Once I find one, I will let eveyone know how it goes.