Radio!

I was on the radio yesterday morning, as a special guest of the 'Vitreous China' show on Southern Fm.

I was the designated weather girl/community announcement goon for the show, which was pretty good fun! I've seen radio live, but not been on the mike.

Thanks to Anthony and Alwyn for having me!

The big match

Has been run, and won.. Not by Australia either!


As the umpire for the day said, we looked great, and we were all there on time - but we ended up giving too many runs away.

The Indians ended up making 7/260 off their 40 overs - And after a fast and furious start, we ended up capitulating for just over 100.

I was extremely rusty with the bat, making a scratchy 18 (in many balls!), and dropping a couple of catches.

A good day was had by all, and the game was played in fantastic spirit - especially the sledging of the Indian captain Amol.

Now I just need a good massage, and about 20 neurofen anti-inflammitory tablets, and I'll be able to walk like a normal person, rather than a skinny kid who spent the night in the lockup being the bitch of a big man called 'Bubba'.

After dinner adventures

Now that I've had time to digest what happened at last nights dinner - here are the highlights:

Dad is now working, doing retail sales - he seems to be pretty happy to be out of the IT game.

My sister is still living at home.

Otherwise, sounds like everything is pretty much as normal. I guess dad was a bit surprised that we'd had another baby, and he had not heard about Jude's leukaemia either. We did invite him to christmas day, but it doesn't sound like he will be coming. Probably a good thing anyway.

We left the restaurant, went to the car, and Rach couldn't find the keys. The car was open, but I didn't see the keys anywhere in the car. A couple of calls to RACV indicated that the most they could do was pay for a cab for us, Rach called Ryan for a lift home, while I waited with the car.

I was happily listening to all my banked up podcasts, when I looked over at the sun visor, noticed it was not fully up, dropped it down - and the keys landed in my lap. I managed to get home about 11:30, which wasn't exactly the time I'd wanted to be back.

Food and other adventures..

Had dinner at Red Emperor - an Age Good Food Guide 2 hat restaurant.



First impressions were that it was a pretty standard chinese restaurant - white linen tablecloths, soy sauce on the table - although it did have a fantastic view.



We got there pretty early (7pm), and I thought the early service was pretty patchy - although it did improve markedly the later the night went on. We plumped for the $68 banquet - which was bloody fantastic. Started with fried chili calamari, and dim sum (which was beautiful!). This was then followed by Peking duck. We tend to use this as a real benchmarking dish for chinese restaurant - and this was sublime. Perfect little pancakes with the most succulent duck, beautifully crispy skin and rich hoi-sin sauce. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.



The stuffed scallops were divine, and the beet fillet was a bit hit and miss - a couple of bits that I had were pretty gristly. After being completely stuffed, we went for fried ice cream, which was gave the meal a delightful finish.



I think we will have to go there for Yum Cha and see what it's like.



Red Emperor Chinese Restaurant: citysearch



I will post later about the rest of the (long) night...

Windows Tail

I have been trolling logs and logs from WAS for a few days now - trying to ensure that the UAT effort doesn't get derailed. Found a really really useful tool!



Bare Metal Software BareTail - Free tail for Windows

Windows - Vista RC1

I've had some fun installing that on my t41 laptop.



I tried the upgrade path a couple of times, once just straight out of the box - which failed miserably. Taking about 90 minutes and getting to around 80% completed before rolling back to XP. Thankfully, XP seemed to be working fine after the rollback.



I searched around, found a site where they reviewed their experiences with the same laptop - and they did a BIOS upgrade. I did same, but saw the same error message as the first time around.



I then decided to move to Vista as a clean install - this worked beautifully, although there were a few irritations;

- No wireless networking out of the box - I had to use a cable to connect to my router - but the windows vista update picked up a new driver for my network card, and whammo - worked perfectly.

- No support for the old virus checker I had installed.



On the upside, Vista saved my 'documents and settings', 'windows' and 'program files' directories from XP (and moved them to windows.old), which at least allowed me to see what I had installed previously. I'm not sure if I'm looking in the right place, but I can't seem to find my Firefox 2 bookmarks. Apparently they should be located here.



Otherwise, it's running fine - I have yet to see how all the power management options that Joel Sposky was talking about here.

Do you want to play some football!

I played in the Australian Corporate Games today.

I don't know if I have ever been as sore before. Really nice pitches up in Thornbury, right near Guyman's house - unfortunately he was out fishing this weekend, otherwise I'd have visited.

Unfortunately I thought we were signed up for 6-a-side - which is pretty easy - as it turns out, we were playing on a full pitch - with essentially no training. Amazingly, we won the first match 4-0 - and I did a couple of really good things.

From there, the fitness factor started to show, and my shoes became tighter and tighter - I've rubbed a 20c piece of skin off my ankle.

We managed to lose the second game 8-0 - to the team who ended up winning the pool (they scored 8-0, 8-0 and 16-0 - and were the champions from last year apparently - And the last game was a heart breaker - a 2-1 loss.

I'm sore, but had a good time - and met some of the guys from the business section of our department.

Testing testing, 123

Just installed the full 1.3.5 version of performancing from here:



https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=1730

Blog migration, and other bits and pieces

I'm migrating the other 4 blogs that I post in to my main one - now that Blogger beta has labels!

I can see that I've not really posted about either of the kids for about 5 months - I have really been distracted with school, and trying to get stuff done at work too. Anyway, I will rectify, as these are the times that I want to really record well for the kids, so that they can have some kind record of their early life - something that I don't really have, or have access to any more.

Merger..

My company has been involved in a takeover.. :)

Well, it's all been announced to the ASX, so it looks like it's all going ahead. Hopefully we will here something around early December.

Bill seems pretty excited by it (no kidding, he who stands to make the most amount of cash!), but it sounds like all staff members are going to get a decent whack out of the merger too.

Cricket Training...

I don't know if I have experienced pain like it - I was totally incapacitated after having a 2.5 hour cricket training session yesterday.

I was just about unable to get out of bed. I am seriously going to have to get some fitness going before we have our match on the 16th December.

Fishing, Bowling and Dinner...

Well, yesterday was a fun day - I was a little concerned about the planned boat trip for fishing, after I saw the horizontal rain and hail on Friday night - but luckily for everyone the boat was canceled - this left us with bowling or go Karts - I love kart action, but not when it's 15 drive the other side of the city!

So bowling was it - I was pretty terrible, not cracking 100 (again!) for both of the games - although I did try a really nice beer - Leffe.

We scooted down to the Stokehouse, which was pretty fantastic - and promptly devoured dinner - starting with calamari, which was average - followed by Snapper, which was also average - and finished with profiteroles, which were pretty extraordinary! Along with that, there were at least a dozen or so bottles of red, and probably 5-6 bottles of white too. After the port came out, I left - as Jude was sick and hospital was awaiting!

I had a great time with the work guys, although it did kind of feel like a work day - except with jeans and t-shirts.

Vista Upgrade - Part II

Ok - it has not gone so well.

In hindsight, probably should have gone for the clean install - and get a hold of RC 2 rather than the much more unstable RC1.

Everything started out ok, and then the machine just randomly re-started itself... and then it was happening multiple times a day - and not when you were doing anything, just randomly, whenever. Tried turning on and off a bunch of different things, but no help.

Also, learned that the in-build graphics card looks like it's not going to be sufficient to run anything nice with the Vista OS. bugger!

Windows Vista Upgrade

Ok - here is the skinny. I decided to upgrade to Vista RC 1, and see what all the fuss is about. I did it on the home pc that we bought a couple of months ago. I have to say, I wasn't particularly hopeful, and spent some time checking I had downloaded installs of our most used applications.



I chose to upgrade from XP SP2 in place, with the fall back position being a clean install - but surprisingly, it all went really well. It started about 11:45am, and didn't finish until about 2pm. The major loss was my McAfee virus scanner, but was replaced with the Trend Micro product (which is a beta for the Vista beta!). Although, during the installation I did see a BSOD, the machine rebooted, and Trend Micro did it's thing. All worked well.



First major check was iTunes (7.0.1), and this performed fantastically. Like for like functionality, no problems with the existing music - although I have yet to connect to ITMS and download anything.



I also activated the Vista download, and that went through fine - I was slightly concerned after the problems we had with trying to activate the XP which was installed at purchase.



Anyway, I'm giving it the thumbs up - And Rach did to, which is a much bigger tick in my book - While I'm normally not too bothered by stuff not working perfectly, or things crashing every now and then (I'm looking at you FireFox 1.5), everything seems to be working great.





Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review, Part 3: Upgrading from Windows XP



Oh - a minor thing - The machine's built in video card is not capable of enabling the funky Aero style interface, which is touted as the big improvement in Vista - I might have to nick a donor card from the old machine we have floating around here, and see whether that video card has the grunt required.

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Ruby!

Spent the day at Reuben's place today - It was great to see him (and Jodie!) - but I was mainly there for 'technical support' - I sorted out some issues with the wireless (added a few new computers!), sorted out some licensing/installation/uninstallation stuff - and organised the scanner to be used through Irfanview - man, that's a bloody good application.

We also watched some of the horsies going around, before I had to dash off home.

The evening was all about impro - Mike's wife Kylie was performing with a group up in Emerald, which is a long way away, but I really enjoyed the night - the performances were a little patchy, but they seemed to be getting warmed up by the third act! :)

Firefox RC3

Upgrade to FF RC3. Checking that the performancing tool still works! :)



What is cool though, is the inline spell checker - which picked up 'performancing' in the first line.



So far, looks pretty funky.

powered by performancing firefox

Tomcat

How good is it?



Installed and running in about 5 minutes, new application deployed on to it in about 30 seconds. Tiny amount of tweaking of Java memory required, but otherwise, so fast and easy to use it makes WAS look like a joke.



Deployed and modified my Cruise Control web app so that it now picks up both the JUnit tests, and the Emma coverage tool into the automated build.



Awesome.

The Dukes of Hazzard

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005)



So, there wasn't really much to do this afternoon, after I'd decided that I'm going to forget about this study period's subjects. I'll go into that a bit more later.



I'd been curious how hollywood were going to do another 80's tv series movie, and this was pretty thin. Clearly with Johnny Knoxville and Sean William Scott it was not going to be a cinematic masterpiece - After seeing blanket media for it last year, and having it being soley focused on Jessica Simpson - I was not terribly suprised that it was shithouse.



And really, which self respecting aussie says 'chunder'?



3/10

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Performancing

Ok - I've managed to get myself on the Performancing for Firefox dev list - I'm using the 1.3.5 build, so see how we go.



Anyway, I'll chuck some photos up here to test.

powered by performancing firefox

Open command prompt here

Ok - this might be old news, but something useful that I've not had access to for a while: A context sensitive way to open a command prompt window.

http://www.petri.co.il/add_command_prompt_here_shortcut_to_windows_explorer.htm

I took the first (idiot proof!) option, and it works a treat. Mostly useful for all the crappy assembler that I have to write for my Computer Systems subject.

Playlist

I tend to get new albums and then listen to them once, rate them and then never hear them again (unless a 5 star song make it to my 'not recently listened' playlist). I need to build a playlist which is made up of recently added songs which I've only listened to once or twice. Normally I need to give an album about 5-6 listens over a few weeks to really come to grips with it. Luckily I was jogged by an Angels & Airwaves track that happened in the aforementioned playlist.

Could I think of anything else to distract me from getting my assignment done? I don't think so.

Nerd stuff..

I did a presentation/rundown of how I implemented Cruise Control for the rest of my team. I think it went well, but I wonder whether a lot of the information really gets through - I suspect a lot of people just vague out when the projector comes on. Again, the usual suspect decided to be negative about it - and not suprisingly, this person has worked at the bank for about 12 years.

Anyway, I will put the text of the presentation here.

Continuous Integration

What is it?
- A methodology for helping developers - Standard caveats apply.
- A way to keep the source as clean as possible
- Gives developers constant feedback

It is not:
- A blame-o-meter.
- A methodology for not documenting requirements thoroughly
- The be all and end all - Refer to point above about being a tool.

Why do it?
- Benefits
- Teaches developers to use Source Control properly
- Adds discipline to development teams
- Increases communication between team members
- Improves visibility of progress for TL/PM
- Improves source quality
- Reduced risk
- Quicker to produce something the client can see
- Removes hack-y work around for build and deployments (SoX!)
- Identification/fixing of bugs is quicker (small changes!)
- Drawbacks
- None! (Kidding)
- Some maintenance overhead, although once done, self maintaining
- False sense of security (no emails sent due to other problems, not broken build)
- Changes to existing working practices

How?
Build Cycle
- Build Server which is production-like
- Automated/Manual Build
- Short/Long builds
- Automated Deployment

Cruise Control
- Download
- Build CC
- Configure (simple XML)
- Multiple Projects
- Can use existing ANT scripts
- Notification emails
- Build CC Web App
- Deploy on any Servlet Container (Tomcat, WAS, etc)
- View in a dashboard like structure

Further Information:
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Integration

Recruiter

I met with an IT recruiter yesterday - Interesting to get his view on what's happening where I work. There are at least two more people who are leaving to go where I interviewed. I did mention that I'd be happy going there, but only for the right price - I also asked for feedback about why I wasn't suitable for the first position. He told me he has a few other positions going, so I'll just wait and see. Hopefully I can cherry pick a good place.

Assignment still continuing..

All going ok so far, I've re-read the article for Task 2 (which is a 500 word summary of said article). I should have that finished by today, but you never know.

Task 1 however is quite a bit harder - I think it requires some time spent at work surfing around the Microsoft site to see what's happening at the moment. I had thought of proposing something similar to iTunes - a store which allows sale of individual music files for their new Zune music player. I have to put together 1500 words on a marketing presentation, so we will see how that all pans out.

Assignment Hell

I've got a 1500 Word essay and 500 word summary to write, by this weekend. I'm currently writing this on the train, so that might give you some indication of how close the deadline is getting. How much have I already done? Well, this morning's work is the first. That being said, I've done all of the reading, so that's ok - Unfortunately (or fortunately), this subject is totally assignment based for marking - So this piece of work that I'm chucking together in about 3-4 days is going to make up half of my total mark. Bugger. I don't know why, but I really thought that I had another week to get this assignment done.

BTC Podcast Ideas

1. Interview with PG
- History of BTC
- Champions League
- How does it work? (Stats, calculating results etc)
- What's happening in the future?

2. Interview 2006 Premiership Captains
- Introduction
- Results of GF
- Pseudo B&F for your team
- Attend Draft night?
- Tips for other coaches

Structure for during the season:
- Introduction
- Rundown of all results in all leagues
- 7 leagues, 6 games - Probably about 20-30 minutes
- Interview(s)
- Preview of big matches
- Coach Rivalry/History

I've asked some other podcasters for their feedback about hardware and that kind of thing. I think I'm a little behind the 8-ball trying to put together a podcast on a PC, rather than a Mac, which has all of the software required built in! I wonder if there is anything on Linux which might help? Hmm.. Mp3 is a proprietary format - scratch that thought.

BTC Podcast

Having a chat with Pat on Saturday night, it looks like he's keen to put together a Podcast (or netcast if you like!). Sounds like it would be the kind of thing where I'd be talking to a coach, doing a rundown of the week's results, etc.. Probably need to talk to Pat about some other ideas too.

I've been really interested in producing one, but obviously it's a bit hard for me to do something on my own - So this might be a good chance. I've been having a bit of a think about what I need to do, but there are a few things;
1. Software to record/produce the podcast
2. Rundown of segments
3. iTunes/Jellycast site
4. other bits and pieces.

Also, there's still the rss feeds to put into the BTC site itself too. :)

Your in...

I got the call that I've been waiting for so long for - to play cricket for Australia. Not the test team, the one day team or the 20/20 team.

This Australian team is made up largely of RMIT computer science people, and is a follow up match to the last Australia vs India match played a couple of summers ago.

As soon as I got the call, I was off home to check the kit, have a run and get my hands on a cricket ball again! :)

Results are in...

I ended up with a DI (75%), which is good and bad - I actually thought I'd got a slightly higher score than that. Oh well, what can you do.

I really thought I nailed that exam, given that there was none of that shit database language garbage in it (and i'm not talking about SQL!) :)

Interesting Article

Recovering from Catastrophes

:)

Grand Final Day

Went to Phil's place for GF day - a crackingly good match too. Turned out to be a really 'interesting' day though. Seems like lots of people are pretty fucked up - Stuart, who lives up in Shep seems to be pretty depressed - and the 12 beers he had that day didn't really help him. Aparently he was so down that he was sitting around with a shotgun in his mouth (!). I told him that he needed to go and talk to someone, quick smart, but that was rejected totally. I think it's that whole 'i'm a man, i don't need to see a doctor' mentality kicking in, and I'm sure that it's 10 times worse up in the country, where men are men.

Roy has been having some interesting times also, with John leaving about 3 weeks ago - he just walked out, leaving Roy's whole family. That's really bloody sucky. There are a couple of other things that happened to his family that I don't really want to go into here. It's no suprise that he's not been blogging very much lately. I also learned that Roy is on the Zoloft's too. At least he is doing something about what's going on in his life, and he seems to be pretty good with everything at the moment. It's a shame that he lives so far away, otherwise I'm sure we'd be spending a lot more time together.

We also heard from Adam, who's been over in London for the past 10 months - He is going gangbusters, and good luck to him - He was working at Sensis, and seeming not to really enjoy what he was doing - He managed to go to the World Cup, and took a bunch of really good photos. It happened that it was about 4 in the morning when the grand final was on over there, and he had to explain to half the pub how the game works! :)

Also - Don't talk to me about taxi's. A 2.5 hour wait is a bit much, even on Grand

Grand Final

Went to Phil's place for GF day - a crackingly good match too. Turned out to be a really 'interesting' day though. Seems like lots of people are pretty fucked up - Stuart, who lives up in Shep seems to be pretty depressed - and the 12 beers he had that day didn't really help him. Aparently he was so down that he was sitting around with a shotgun in his mouth (!). I told him that he needed to go and talk to someone, quick smart, but that was rejected totally. I think it's that whole 'i'm a man, i don't need to see a doctor' mentality kicking in, and I'm sure that it's 10 times worse up in the country, where men are men.

Roy has been having some interesting times also, with John leaving about 3 weeks ago - he just walked out, leaving Roy's whole family. That's really bloody sucky. There are a couple of other things that happened to his family that I don't really want to go into here. It's no suprise that he's not been blogging very much lately. I also learned that Roy is on the Zoloft's too. At least he is doing something about what's going on in his life, and he seems to be pretty good with everything at the moment. It's a shame that he lives so far away, otherwise I'm sure we'd be spending a lot more time together.

We also heard from Adam, who's been over in London for the past 10 months - He is going gangbusters, and good luck to him - He was working at Sensis, and seeming not to really enjoy what he was doing - He managed to go to the World Cup, and took a bunch of really good photos. It happened that it was about 4 in the morning when the grand final was on over there, and he had to explain to half the pub how the game works! :)

Also - Don't talk to me about taxi's. A 2.5 hour wait is a bit much, even on Grand Final night.

Weird Al

I am doing my assignment at the moment, so I've got Channel V on the telly - otherwise I'd be glued to the tv watching repeats of Simpsons.

Anyway, saw the new Weird Al song called 'White and Nerdy'... very funny - and even more so when I see the original - Chamillionaire - Ridin'.

Awesome stuff.

iTunes 7.01

Finally - It's here.

The most frustrating thing I've found about the new iTunes is that I can't add more than one file at a time! Grrr..

Fingers crossed this will address that, although I'm glad I didn't come across some of the problems listed here.

Ben Folds ReCap

Awesome concert.

He played mostly songs from his 'Songs for Silverman' album (to be expected, I guess), as most of the arrangements for the Orchestra were done about 3 years ago.

I was really blown away by the richness of the sound coming from the orchestra, it's totally different to listening on headphones, or even a properly set up stereo. Hamer Hall is a pretty intimate venue, with super comfortable seats.

I thought it was interesting that there was not a lot of 'concert' type behaviour - Lighters going during ballads, standing.. from what I could see, it was nearly all people just sitting and appreciating the music - which is great - OMG - How old am I?!

Ben Folds

Righto - I'm going to Ben Folds on Saturday night - He's playing with the MSO at the arts centre, so that should be interesting! :)

I'm looking forward to it, not having seen live music since Metallica about 18 months ago.

No go..

I didn't get the job. I thought the interview went pretty well, and the indications were that I was going to sit down with another team leader and see what the go was - unfortunately not a winner though. Oh well, maybe another time.

Bugger it. I was looking forward to the new environment and large pay rise.

There are plenty of other jobs out there, I'll just have to get my certifications done and then do some more study, and whammo! :)

SQL Decode

Ah, useful.

http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/sql/decode.html

Beta migration

Ok - I was hoping that there was some kind of way to migrate posts from the other 4 blogs that I've got into this one - it's not looking hopeful at the moment! :(

A few Jack things..

Little Jack is growing up fast! :)
Since the last blog post he is;
- Drinking from a cup, mostly with success! ;)
- more aware of what's going on around him
- he looks up automatically when planes/helicopters go past outside.
- saying a few words - mostly 'Gone' and 'Ta'
- Has 3 new teeth, with at least 1 more coming through.

He is developing a real personality now - although he's still very much attached to mum - whenever she goes out without him, he just cries. Poor little fella.

He is also starting to assert himself with Jude - Jude is a little bit of a bully (older brother syndrome! ;) ), and now Jack is starting to grab back things that Jude takes from him.

Sickness

Jude had a little bit of a cold/cough thing going on when we went to Queensland, but we decided that he wasn't so sick he needed to go to hospital. We've been back for 4 days now, and Jude changed treatments on Thursday just gone - and he had a raging (40.5) temperature while I was over getting the bits and pieces from Reuben's place.

The hospital have asked us to bring him in, so Rach has gone with him, and it's me and Jack for tonight.

Poor little guy.

Edit (9:00PM): He is eating now, which is great

Stools...

Not the brown smelly kind - more like the 4-legged ones you sit on.

Our new place has a very long breakfast bench, so we decided we needed some stools - and Reuben happens to have 4 high stools - perfect for our bench. I'm actually sitting at one right now - and it's the perfect height for our bench! :)

I also got a 400 cd case, a washing machine and a chest of drawers, which should go really nicely in our bedroom - and give us enough space to actually have everything away, rather than sitting in piles everywhere! :)

Tuesday is d-day!

Interview has been scheduled. Tuesday at 12pm. Brilliant stuff. I'm very excited.

Headhunted

While on holidays, I got a call from a headhunter - So I decided to send him my resume.

I managed to get a phone interview, which I finished about an hour ago - And I'm now waiting for my face-to-face interview to be scheduled.

:)

Yeee ha!

I've also teed up 2 fantastic referees, so that's great.

Beta Blogger

Looks pretty good - Some new template editing pages, which are pretty cool.

Also added labels - Now I just have to migrate the other blogs back into this one. Joy.

Assignment 1 Released

Ok - 1500 words on Microsoft. :)

Due October 16. Shouldn't be too much of a drama, I don't think. Wonder whether I'll have the text book by then, although a post from the tutor indicated that you probably don't need to have it. I might go with that method!

Also great is that the whole course is based on Assignment assessments, so no Exam! :)

Week 2

Payment Systems, Security, Risk Management

Sounds pretty boring to me! :)

BTC Wrap 2006

Ok, this year was an interesting one. Eugene and I made it to the new champions league - which is coaches from random other leagues, based on their performances in the past year. I lost the 2005 grand final, so I got a place.

We had the CL draft night before the work league, which was a real eye opener - The way that other coaches chose their teams was really different to the way I had been. Anyway, I took a very different approach for the Work league - Choosing to look at stat categories, and pick strong players in different categories, rather than using the generic calcuation method.

I have to say, it was pretty successful, culminating in a 9 point grand final win. I will also now get another crack at the Champions League, and hopefully do a bit better. Luckily John Barker has retired, so I wont be tempted to pick him! Doh!

CPT 21 - Week 2

• Addition and subtraction in different number systems.
• 2's complement, for representing negative numbers in binary.

test message

Blah!

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Holidays! :)

I've taken the next 2 weeks off work - and we are all going up to the Sunshine Coast for some restful warm weather.

:) I know that I've just jinxed us, but what can you do?

Database Exam

Went suprisingly well actually - I was concerned that they were going to ask a few questions in areas where I wasn't so strong - specifically the algebra stuff.

Anyway, I blitzed the whole exam, so I'm confident that I've passed it - Hopefully I can keep up my 75% average for marks on the rest of the assessments.

CPT 21 - Week 1

Number systems - Octal, Decimal, Binary and Hexadecimal.

How numbers in all of those systems are represented. New times tables for alternativenumber systems.

CPN 101 - Week 1

Essentially it is an introduction to e-business concepts. Why, benefits, drawbacks etc.

Seems pretty straighforward, I just have to get around to printing the 250 page PDF of all the lecture notes. Joy.

Angst

I seem to be always caught - The work that I'm doing at the moment is really enjoyable, although sometimes it drives me a little nuts, I'm dealing ok with that most of the time.

I had a review recently, which was quite strange - I was never actually assessed by my manager, no one spoke to my last two project managers, so I'm not too sure what happened there. Anyway, I got a 5% pay rise - And it appears as though I could have been doing a shit job, and still had the same outcome.

I had a suspicion that it was basically a token gesture to keep me on board, which now has been all but confirmed. A good friend and colleague of mine is leaving the company - He is a guru, and has personally been a mentor to me - and I'm now seriously considering what I'm going to do.

Although the meeting seemed positive, I think that I was really caught off guard with the fact that I didn't have to fight (although, you can bet that I wouldn't have been fighting for 5%!). I get the feeling from all the discussions that there is concern at the management level that people are just leaving left right and centre. Obviously that is a worrying sign for them, so I guess this is trying to stem that flow.

My angst mostly comes from seeing job ads, and having my skills and experience listed under $90-100k roles. It might well be time to start applying for those jobs.

Resetting WSAD to Prompt for a Workspace

God-Damned useful! :)

TLCC Developer tip for WebSphere, Notes and Domino - Multiple WebSphere Studio Workspaces

iPod and Linux

well, the sad thing is - there really isn't an effective way to do it, which is a little frustrating.

I have done some research, but other than installing wine and loading iTunes onto that, it's no dice. There are some plug-in libraries for the iPod, but apparently not to be trusted, unless that program is the only one you will be using. I might just wait until our new home machine arrives, and then use that.

all the while, my podcasts are building up.

Drink!

is Jack's new world! :)

Jersey Girl

I think I had some strange expectations for this movie.

From one of my favourite directors, Kevin Smith, this is his first film which is not part of the 'View Askewniverse', and wasn't really well recieved - probably what gave me those strange expectations.

Given that this film is a real change in direction, I was pleasantly suprised.

I'm a bit of a fan of most of the people in the movie, so didn't terribly mind the movie. Lucky it was on Foxtel, so I didn't really pay for it! :)

5.5/10

Words

Little Jacko has started saying words:
- Up
- Gone, and
- Cat.

So cute. :)

Manners

Jude is now learning how to use manners.

Along with learning how to use 'thank you' and 'please', he is also learning how to get peoples attention, without hitting, smacking or poking them.

He is being a lot more active since the last round of chemo. Unfortunately he is still all bound up, and he says that he is 'ipated', or constipated.

Hopefully that will pass after the chemo has all completed.

Irritations

Ok, we lost the home pc the other day. It's now gone too god. As far as I can work out, it's a problem with the version of the BIOS and XP SP2. Aparently we are not the only ones who are going through this, but most people have seen this problem quite a while ago.

This now means that I lost my iTunes settings for my iPod, which is rather irritating. Because I lost the library, I've had to go through and re-rate about 2500 songs. I will get onto that in another blog post.

Anyway, we are using my Suse 10.0 laptop as our main pc for the time being.

Small Guy

Not too many photos floating around at the moment, we have had a mega crash on our home pc.

Jack has been sleeping through now for about 6 weeks or so.

He starting having showers with me in the mornings recently, while Rach and Jude were in the hospital.

He is dancing, walking backwards, and his new thing is to run around the house with his yellow blankie over his head, crashing into things (hard!)

He has started getting himself jammed in the corner of his cot, and crying out to be rescued. Seems to be more of an attention thing.

Otherwise he is going really good, although his hair is strange - he's got an undercut, even though we are yet to give him his first hair cut! :P

You know there are some tru-isms in life...

Well, this is one of them - Very very funny for anyone who has a co-worker who insists on sitting on a ball instead of a chair.

Having a ball at work - Opinion - theage.com.au

Cars

This is a really cool film - Jude loves it! :) Another animated film.

I quite enjoyed it, although the quality of the version that I saw was not great, it was a really fun film. Good for kids, except for all of the associated toys we how have to buy! ;)

6.5/10

Robots

Continuing on the animated film fest we have been through recently, I saw Robots on the weekend - Robin Williams comes through with another manic performance, and Ewan McGregor as the main character who chases his dreams.

Lots of funny bits and pieces, and a reasonable story. See it for the animation if nothing else.

6/10

Headphones

I used to have a pair of awesome Sony street style headphones, but after 3 good years of use, the ear muff thingies wore out!

After having the iPod for about 6 months, and already going through 1 pair of the white ear bud headphones, I have been hanging out to get another pair of decent quality headphones, and my request was fulfilled recently, with these: SONY - Australia

It makes a huge difference to the music, adding bass and allowing me to run the volume level on the ipod a lot lower - it also keeps my ears warm during winter! :P

$75 well spent.

CSS - Cool as!

Ok, I must admit, I'm the last programmer who is really interested in making my web sites look great - Normally we have a bunch of user interface standards to adhere to, which makes life easy as a programmer - you know exactly what is expected to be produced.

The current client has no idea about it. Well, they do, but there's not a big interest to get it right. Although this is frustrating, it allows a certain freedom to try things. We are currently in 'screen mock up' mode, so I'm putting all formatting of my screens through CSS. It's pretty bloody cool. I'd not really though about it too much before, but there is a lot of formatting information in web pages, which really clouds the information and the formatting.

After trying to find a css formatter tool (there are a couple, but I don't really want to have to install dreamweaver to use it!), I stumbled across the page below:

http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/lesson1.asp

I'm a noob in css, so reading through that was a real eye opener!

You never know, I might just end up being a usability expert, NOT!

Hope is Emo

A Funny Podcast About A Sad Girl. | Hope Is Emo

I heard about this video-podcast from the Twit podcast, who talked to the Ask a Ninja guys - they are putting this new one together, and it's bloody awesome.

I am still yet to rescue the home windows box, so I've not been able to download this podcast, but you can watch it through you-tube on the website above.  Do it.  Now.

Birth

Birth (2004)

A controversial movie, starring Nicole Kidman, who plays a woman convinced that a 10 year old boy is the reincarnation of her dead husband.

Rach and I managed to see only half of this movie, for one reason or another - but it certainly looked like an interesting one.  Next time it comes up on the movie channel, it's on the list! :)

Madagascar

Madagascar (2005)

This is a really enjoyable film - another animated film which is watchable for adults as well as kids.

This is Jude's current favourite movie, as judged by the fact that every night when I come home, he walks over to me and says 'watch madagascar', and the other fact that he's already watched it twice while I've been at work.

Chemo

Jude is just about finished the most hardcore phase of his treatment. We are really hopeful that it will all finish successfully, and then he can just go to monthly blood tests and lumbar punctures.

He lost all his hair about 3 weeks ago, Rach put him in the shower, and literally washed his hair off!

He had a huge day of chemo today, along with a lumbar puncture - and Rach has to give him some injections for the next 4-5 days. They gave us the chemo to take home in a little polystyrene box - just like a mini esky - although the nurses didn't recommend we use it for our food on the way home. ;)

Suse 10

Ok - I had to return my laptop to work the other day, after my company got audited by Microsoft. After uninstalling a bunch of Office software, the machine was returned to me - with a clean image of Windows XP.

I decided to try and dual-boot it, with Suse 10. Unfortunately Grub couldn't handle the configuration of the partitions - which made life a little interesting. Looks like I've lost my XP now. Well, it didn't, until I formatted the bastard a couple of hours ago and decided to just go the hog and just live with Suse. :)

So far so good, it's going nicely, thanks very much. Had some interesting fun with the ethernet configs, but as soon as I set my own one up - no problemo.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

I really think Steve Carrell could be a serial killer. Just kidding. He is spectacularly funny, and he does a great job as the title character of this film.

I laughed, a lot - ok, which isn't really that high a bar, but some of the jokes were just too much.

See it - 8/10.

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

This is an interesting movie. It chronicles the last 3 years of Enron.


There was quite a bit of it that I didn't know, and some of the things were just amazing. The amount of rorting that went on was just unbelievable. And the accountants (Arthur Andersen) who went and shredded 1 tonne of paper when Enron went pear shaped.

I really enjoyed this film, it's not so much a cinematic experience, as a documentary chronicling the demise of a once amazing company. Worth a watch.

7/10

Very Big Kev...

I'm excited.

I just got my hands on a copy of the new Keane album, Under the Iron Sea. For those of you who care, I will be downloading it from the iTunes music store when it is released here in Australia.

I've already heard two songs off the album, and feel comfortable enough to give them some feedback. I will listen to the rest of the album over the next week or so and continue to update as I go along. I've found that most of their work needs about 5 or so listens before it really makes me think about a week later 'Now, what was that Keane song I was listening to the other day.'

I'm not helped that this frigging keyboard space bar is working intermittently. ARGH!

Backlog.

I've had not a lot of time on the train recently, with Jude going to hospital every day for the past 2 weeks, but when I stayed at the hospital on Wednesday and Thursday night, I managed to get a bunch of listening done. 

I'm still waiting for quiet un-interrupted time for the more challenging ones (Ockhams Razor and The Science Show), and I managed to get through the Nova 969 ones on Friday night.

Hold that thought, got to put Jude to bed.

Happy Birthday Little Man

Dear Jack,
It is your first birthday today, and you have brought both Rachael and I much joy.

You have had a big year, and we all have as a family.

With much love, we wish that this is the first of many great years ahead for you, little mandingo.

Mum, Dad and Jude.

The Da Vinci Code - Part II

Ok - Having not read the book, I thought that it might be good to go and see the movie without any pre-conceived ideas about what should be in or out of the movie adaptation.

I enjoyed the movie, although I did think it was a bit long at 138 minutes - probably at around 2 hours I started getting restless, as did many of my theatre going colleagues - that being said, we were in an older cinema, which was not quite as comfortable as the latest cinema seating.

Audrey Tatou is great, as is Tom Hanks - And Ian McKellen was really well cast also.

If you have read the book, you may as well see the film - And I think that was pretty much the pitch to the studios.

Producers: "Ok, get this - a movie version of the 'Da Vinci Code'..."
Movie Exec: "The one that's been on the best seller list for about 2 years?"
P: "Yes"
M.E: "Here's $100 million, go and do it."

The managed about a 6/10 for mine.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Trains, again..

We all went to Mornington this weekend, as Jude was fired up about seeing trains after watching his normal Sunday morning Discovery show on trains in Britain.

It was really bloody cold, and of course it started drizzling as soon as we got out of the car!  After initially deciding not to come, Rach and Jack ended up coming on the train with us - Which turned out to be the T class diesel again.  Unfortunately the steam driver didn't show up, and a replacement wasn't due until after lunchtime.  We rode the train, and when we got back, the steam driver was there - and we watched the steam train go around and get hooked up.

Jude

He is going really well at the moment, coping pretty well with his treatment.

I will probably not be putting too many entries in here, but you can go to leukaemia.blogspot.com to see what the latest is with his treatment.

The Da Vinci Code - Part I

Ok - I'm going to see it this Thursday night, so a review to come.

I think that I'm about the only person on the globe who hasn't read the book - but I'm not too phased about that - It's probably better, because I'm not going to be constantly thinking 'oh, they left that critical part of the plot out' the whole time.

Awesome!

Listening!

I've got such a backlog of listening to do on my iPod, it's unbelieveable.

So far, I've got about 300 songs that I've not listened to, and about 15 podcasts.

I've managed to get through:

• All ABC Science Show episodes
• All Diggnation video podcasts
• All Nerds FC video podcasts
  

And still have to watch/listen to:

• Cranky Geeks video podcasts
• 2 weeks of 'This Sporting Life'
• Nova 100 & 969 podcasts
• a TWiT

And a bunch of ASOT radio music shows too!  Too much to listen to, and not enough hours.

Fro!

Little Jacko, he's growing up so quickly.

He's starting to talk now, saying a few of those 'da-da' and 'na-na' type words. He also says 'cha', short for Jack. :) Probably because we keep saying 'Jack' to him! :)

We had some one on one time on Sunday, when Rach took Jude to a Mothers day walk in the city. He was choofing around the house, being my little shadow. He also like the pussy cat. :)

He loves the cat so much he gives her half of his nuggets, although she tried to bite his fingers when he dangled them over the side of his high chair.

iPod

We got a $50 myer voucher from Foxtel, as an apology for stuffing up our original booking for installation! 

I promptly took it down to Frankston, and went on a spending spree (of sorts!).  I bought a Gecko case for my iPod, which came with a plastic screen cover too!  It's just brilliant.  I put it on yesterday afternoon, and this morning it has stuck itself down perfectly, and you cant even see the scratches underneath.  I'm very very happy with this!  Also good is the rubber case that comes with it, to stop errant drops (which I seem to do quite regularly!) from damaging the iPod.

Good to see the English Cricket team...

is back to old habits - Lots of players who aren't really poms.

Cricinfo - Mahmood and Pietersen leave Sri Lanka in tatters

Good traditional English name, that Mahmood.  Also his bowling colleage Panesar. 

And their best batsman is a South African.  Back to the days of Robin Smith and Graeme Hick! :)

Cheap Containers

Cardboard and colour printer required.  How cool is that?

IGS Hansa -Tips und Tricks-

Hard-Fi

Fast track to success - Music - Entertainment - theage.com.au

Neil is going to grab the album for me! :)  Awesome

New toy!

iMobile.com.au - Motorola V3


Guess what Rach bought me!  A new Motorola V3!  Yeah baby!  This is the coolest ass phone ever, and at just 14mm thick, easily the thinnest mobile phone ever.   It sure beats the Motorola brick that I've got now (the v620).

Bastard!

Top Hawks grounded by injury - News - www.realfooty.com.au

Not only have Hawthorn lost 2 of their key players for at least a couple of weeks, I've got both of them in my BTC teams.  I can ill afford to lose Croad for my CL team, which is langishing at the bottom of the ladder with a 0-6 record so far.

Awesome time wasting site.

but piss funny!

Flickr: The Stick Figures in Peril Pool

Do it.  Now.

Google Desktop

Killed the home pc.

I thought it might be a good idea to put it on, given that we don't have any anti-virus software running on it - That being said, there is a hardware and software firewall protecting the machine.

Anyway, Rach installed it, I updated the NAV 2005 software (requiring about 3 reboots!), and now it's just about unusable. I had my favourite bittorrent client running, and it didn't download a thing last night.

It's time for a re-build anyway.

Mornington Railway

Today Jude and I went to Mornington Tourist railway, which is an interesting little operation.

Running on the now disconnected Mornington spur line, it runs between the Peninsula Freeway and Nepean Highway, about 6 k's long, with a station at each end - Mornington and Mooroduc, and a middle station (can't remember what the name is!)

We were being pulled by T411, a beautiful little diesel engine. Painted in the original VR blue and gold colour scheme.

Jude really loved the ride, and playing around on the platform at Mooroduc. 

World's Greatest Shave

I had my head shaved today at lunchtime!

As you can see, it's pretty bloody short - and a bit breezy!

I've collected about $100 from my work colleagues out on site, and hoping for at least that much from my company colleagues. 

Before Shave

This is a photo of Jude and I on the night before the Shave - Pics will be up tomorrow! :) 

Cat shennanigans

The cat is destroying all of my electronic device cables.

She is systematically working through the house, and munching through those dc converer cables!

First it was the Wireless Router, which spent a while playing up, I couldnt work out what the problem was, patches a whole bunch of stuff, but it was still dropping out!  I now know why!

Then it was my mobile phone charger which suffered the brunt of her chewing requirements.

Oh well, at least I've got a soldering iron out in the shed for the trains, so I've been able to fix up the (much shorter!) cables! :P

Insight

Insight

Rach is off to Sydney next week, for a taping of an SBS current affairs show Insight.

This show is about the Labor party, and how it's travelling at the moment (not well!).  Hopefully we can get some action at the federal level to see if they can get government back again.

All American Rejects

I got a hot tip about this band, so I got a hold of their latest album, Move Along.

I'm pretty impressed so far, sounds really good.  I guess it's one of those things, where you don't really expect a lot, so you are pleasantly suprised.

Come on Bomber, get fired up!

Voters don't believe PM on AWB - National - theage.com.au

Surely the Labor party hacks can't screw up an opportunity like this?

It's strange that we haven't really seen the Labor party getting any traction over this issue.  Are they choosing not to get stuck in?  Or are some of their mates involved?

Well, certainly his physical health is fine...

Beazley 'perfectly healthy' - National - theage.com.au

.... but politically he's really a lame duck.

He needs to get it together, and stand for something that differentiates him from the Libs. Otherwise we will be destined for another 4 years of Howard. yay.

Trains will be getting squashy...

Petrol to hit $1.45 a litre - National - theage.com.au

and

Oil shock: what's in store? - Business - Business - theage.com.au

The first article actually recommends that we leave the car at home and take public transport to work.

a bit of a concern for those of us who regularly do that already. It might be time to start putting pressure on the government to urgently review the current public transport levels. If we managed to increase train frequency over the Commonwealth Games, why not more permenantly?

New Project

Ok. I've been out on a new project for the past month or so, and have been a bit busy to update.

Anyway, it's essentially a 5 month Design phase for significant changes to an existing J2EE project.

Unfortunately, it was coded pretty badly, seeing as only 1 person has been able to log in and use the site at a time. I thought it might have been something to do with WAS configurations, but ruled that out. Interestingly, I did see that two sessions were pointing at the same struts Form instance. Not good. It turned out to be instantiated in an Action class, not the one that was being called, but it's parent.

I found that was also done on another parent Action, which was causing quite a few problems also. Anyway, that should be pretty straightforward to resolve, although it would need a bit of testing to confirm the fix.

There are a couple of things that have left me scratching my head, including:
No Business Layer
No real 'Logical Unit of Work'
No database referential integrity(!)
Business logic living in Stored Procedures
Uses OJB for it's persistence layer.

I'm really not too sure how the thing passed the original suite of tests (well, one person clicking on a few screens!), which is a bit scary.

Hopefully I can get it all sorted out, it seems as though both business units who have a stake in the project can get themselves sorted out, and we can deliver a good outcome.

Growing Up..

Little Jack is growing up.

He started free standing about 3 weeks ago, after pulling himself up on a couch or wall or anything at a convenient height.

About 2 weeks ago, he started just standing up from a sitting position, with no assistance.

Then about a week ago, after stading up, he would take a couple of steps... Soon will come the time when he will be running after Jude.

His fourth tooth came through about a week or so ago too - which was good, because he was very very unsettled for about 3-4 nights when the tooth was trying to break through.

Monster-In-Law

Monster-in-Law (2005)

This was a suprisingly funny film - I really quite enjoyed it. Directed by aussie Robert Luketic (of Legally Blonde fame). Lighhearted comedy, and you suspect that it wasn't too much hard work for any of the actors.

Don't go out of your way to see it, unless your a J.Lo fan.

6/10

V-Line

Uncle Mike and I took Jude to Hobsons Bay Model Railway show today.

Lots and lots of good stuff to see. Jude had a ball playing with the Thomas set.

He even managed to skip his mid-day sleep. Little guy. :) 

Assault on Precinct 13

IMDB: Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

Good value. Really enjoyed it, although I'd like to see the original to get a good benchmark.

Quite suspenseful, interesting idea (cops on the outside trying to break in!).

Watch it. 7/10

Train World

Went to Train World today. Luckily for me (and Jude), Rach won some money on the horses last night - which means we had $70 to spend today on train stuff.

I bought a couple of flat wagon kits, a 40ft container and a packet of KD no5's. Also bought Jude the chinese Dragon from Thomas the Tank Engine.

Spent most of the afternoon finishing the clothes washing, while starting the flat wagons that I'd bought.

I have a few movies to update on, but I'll have to remember what they are first! :)

Formula 1 Day

Challenge was good enough to let me come along to their Formula 1 Corporate box day today. It was fantastic!

Free entry, free drinks (including spirits!), free lunch, free program, free stubbie holder - Did I mention that it was all free!

Met a few funny guys, and had a really really good time watching lots of cars go around a track.

I have been to about 6 grand prix in Melbourne before, but never had a corporate box. It was bloody brilliant. As far as I can work out, it's basically just a company's normal corporate box (Kleins), and they donated use of it for the Thursday. Unreal stuff. 

Stubbie Holder

I'm not a big drinker, but I can certainly appreciate a fantastic stubbie holder when I see one.

Example, the one left, which is from the Formula 1, and is a stack of tyres. Awesome! 

You never know who you might meet..

While consulting.

Ran into Ben F, who just left my work. I knew he had a job with the group I used to work with, what I didn't know when he left was that I was going to be out there 2 days later.

Whlie I was chatting to him, I saw Felix - who was there doing some private consulting! I hadn't seen him for ages and ages! We had a good catch up though. I'm sure there will be many dumplings days coming up now!

It's also the last day for me to work with Kevin, from the client that I work for. He was the BA for a while on the project, and helped get a lot of things sorted out. He's a truly stand up guy, and he's just got his home wireless going (on my recommendation!), so I'm expecting a call any day now! :P
We had a good brekky chat, and he's going to be BA at Citibank. He's not too far from Chinatown either, which is great.

Surreal

It's funny being back out on site, getting together with the same group that I'd been working with for about 6 months, just before Jude got sick.

Everyone was asking how he was (of course!), and then just seeing how I have been, and what I've been up to in the two months I'd been away.

My access card was still working, it's just the computer accounts and email that I'd expect to take some time.. quite some time infact..

Beach Brekky

Rach decided we should go to the beach for breakfast. I was a bit skeptical (i'm not a fan of the beach at all!) but was convinced when we got down there. It was all but deserted, and I got to see the house where Rach grew up!

Jude loved it, after this pic was taken, Jude and I went walking... just checking things out, there were a few junior sailors out on the water (we were at the Chelsea Yacht Club), so he was pretty keen to check out the boats.

We were there super early, so no problems with sunburn - a really nice way to spend the morning. I think it's going to be pretty hot and uncomfortable today. 

Back out on site!

Had a meeting at work at 4:30, with the new J2EE Practice Manager. He has some really good ideas for getting this group sorted. Many of us are undertrained, and probably underpaid also. Some of these things will help with that, tying training into what the pre-sales people are selling.

Time will tell if that works out ok.

On the upside, I was late for that meeting - after Chris told me that my last client wants me back again, for a 6 month scoping exercise. Sounds like a really great job!

Awesome.

IE 7 Beta 2

First thoughts - Blogger edit window works fine, no need to Preview, then un-Preview. Bonus!

The Feeds window is a hell of a lot better, giving you a little refresh icon next to each feed, rather than having to right click, then find 'refresh'. I wouldn't mind a 'refresh all' option though.

I managed to lose the 'view all tabs' window, but it's back again. Actually, maybe I was trying to use it with just one window open. That would make a lot of sense. Infact, I've just tried it, and that's what it was. PEBCAK.

Firefox 1.5

Can be found here.

It's interesting, I'm getting IE 7 at the same time - That's 11mb - Firefox 1.5 is only 4.5mb.

IE 7 - Beta 2

Thank God. It can be found here. I am currently downloading, and will let you know how it flies.

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview - released on March 20th - checklists

Fingers crossed it addresses some of the problems that I've had with crashes. Others have seen problems with AJAX sites they have been using also.

Internet Explorer 7

Righty-o. Other than the problems with crashing, and the Blogger window not working properly, this isn't too bad.

I've hooked up the Feeds page pretty thoroughly now, with about 25 pages listed - One nice thing about the feeds is that you are able to modify the regularity with which the browser checks for new feed articles. Another nice thing is the auto enabling of the 'Add Feeds' button on the browser.

I spent some time working through the help, but it's riddled with missing entries. Bugger. I guess it is a beta, after all.

SWAT

One of the upsides of having Foxtel is the movies, one of the downsides is that some of the movies are shite - so I've been watching a few recently:

SWAT
Colin Farrell and Samuel L Jackson in this average movie about .. um.. about something - I didn't really get what it was all about, to tell you the truth. Just lots of montage action, the 'hell' of training, and getting a tight team together - which is then ripped apart when some drug dealer bloke offers $100 million to get him out of jail.

Bah - 5/10

National Treasure

This I thought might be an interesting movie. Turned out to be reasonably good - Aparently in the mould of 'The DaVinci Code', which I'm still yet to read (I must be the only person in Australia not to have read it!).

Story of the Gates family, a bunch of freemasons who believe that there is a massive treasure hidden somewhere. Using a number of clues found in increasingly interesting places (Declaration of Independence, Liberty Bell, Letters from George Washington), Nicholas Cage manages to deciper the clues. With Sean Bean and Jon Voight supporting, this movie uses things we see all around us in a way that we never would have thought.

7/10 - Get it on video, worth a watch.

Steamrail

We went to steamrail today - and it was fantastic! :)

Got to see a bunch of dismantled trains (3 R's, and one running one!), and a bunch of other bits and pieces. Photos will follow shortly - they have been downloaded, but I need to put them up somewhere! :)

St Patrick's Day

In homage to St Patrick, we held a bbq in his honour last night. Guyman and myself had several drinks, an unusual occurrence.

Also good was Jude and Jack staying with Rach's mum, so many drinks were imbibed, in deference to the great St Patrick. 

Busy, catchup post.

Ok. It's been quite a while now since the last post. Probably something like 2 weeks!

Updates:
Jude - He is going pretty well at the moment. Recovered from his infusaport operation last monday.

Foxtel - We got Foxtel installed last Thursday. Been very busy catching up on a whole bunch of crap TV. Hopefully some decent watching to be had while the Commonwealth Games invade our fair city.

Work - Still studying for my cert, I am going to just have to bite the bullet and set the exam for this Friday. I seem to work better to a defined deadline! :) Also done some linux installation, and playing around with WAS on Linux at the moment.

Trains - Went to the Box Hill AMRA exhibition on the weekend, it was fantastic. Jude loved it.

BTC - Had the draft night last night for Champions League - Email banter is very funny, I am not confident about my list though. Hopefull there will be some improvement on last seasons numbers for my players. Will John Barker be my dud pick? Time will tell.

Otherwise, spending most of my time around home, playing with trains. :)

AMRA Open Day

AMRA (Australian Model Railway Assoc) had it's annual exhibition this weekend.

Lots of good stuff - Picked up some bits and pieces - C Class coupler kit for Kadee's, some little lead shot for weighting down models.

I've got a list of bits and pieces that need to be purchased though:

- Kadee Couplers
- Styrene Sheet for model mods
- Track Cleaning kit

and the most important thing - Time.

Jude had a ball watching all of the trains going around too, which was great. :)

 

Three Teeth

Little Jack now has 3 teeth. He had been a little cranky for about a week, and then one of his top teeth popped through! :)

Linux, Part Deux

Righty-o.

I installed Ubuntu yesterday afternoon. Very easy installation. I think I had to intervene about 3-4 times throughout the whole install process. This is running on quite an old desktop machine (P2, 512mb, 20Gb), and I'm very impressed with the performance.

My Fedora box is humming along, I've got Eclipse 3.1 running on it, checked out a project and build ear files on it. Brilliant.

Linux Installation-o-rama!

Ok - Here is the deal:

In order to try and learn something, and get some productive use out of the time I'm back in the office, I've decided that I'll do some Linux Installations. Now, I've had Debian (potato, around 2002) on my old dual boot laptop, but haven't played with Linux for quite some time.

I've got 3 flavours of Linux lined up:

1. Fedora
   
2. Ubuntu
3. Red Hat

I (fortunately!) stumbled upon the fact that the company I work for is now an official Red Hat partner, and seeing as we are also and IBM partner, I thought I'd get a hold of the software and see what is going on. This should be lobbing onto my desk tomorrow. I imagine that it's not going to be too dissimilar from Fedora.

So far, I've installed Fedora Core 4 (FC4), thought that it wasn't working (it was!), and blasted over the top of it with the slightly older Fedora Core 3 (FC3). This showed the same behaviour as FC4, but it did end up working. I'm not too phased, because I would have had to uninstall JDK and Eclipse which ships with FC4 - there is a problem which stops you from saving files (!) in Eclipse.

I'm in the middle of the Ubuntu installation, and it's all going pretty smoothly so far. Further updates as required.

IE7

Ok - First thoughts:
I've been on it for about a week, and it seems to not have tracked any of my browsing history. That's not such a bad thing, but I do go to places that I forget to bookmark, and dont particularly enjoy navigating my way from where I first found it.

It seems to not be saving cookies for things like forums/websites (including blogger).

And also had some problems with Flash pages, although when I tried to show Alan, this worked perfectly. :)

I've still not really found a good use for the multiple window window yet, but I think it's more of a sexy little thing than an actual useful feature. Otherwise, it's good - I mean it has tabbed browsing, which is great, and a popup blocker, which kind of works on The Age website (but not really, strange!).

I am sure that they will get it right before the full release... I just wonder how many sites they will actually test this browser on?

Busy.

Recap of last weekend:
Jude's Birthday - Saturday Afternoon
Lou's Birthday Cruise (with terrible dj!) - Saturday Night
Teddy Bears Picnic - Sunday


More detailed responses to follow.

Jude's Birthday

It was Jude's 2nd birthday on Saturday.

He ended up with a bunch of pressies:

• Thomas Trains
• Thomas Jacket
• Wiggles Puzzle
• Hot Wheels Cars
• Large Model car
• Spinning thing
• T Shirts
• Books

I think that's about it - well, everything that I can remember anyway.

We took him to the Teddy Bears Picnic on Sunday too, which he really seemed to enjoy.

Footy

is back! :)

NAB cup is go tonight, with 2 matches, then 3 tomorrow and 3 on Sunday (I think!) .

It's been a while since the footy was on telly, so it's exciting again. We are getting Foxtel, so we wont miss a minute of the footy this year! Wooo!

Crunch time...

Ok - I'm starting to get irritated by work now. Not so much that I have to go to work (because I know that I do!), but mostly by what I'm doing at the moment.

Having done my handover of the project I last worked at, I'm kind of at the point where I'm wondering what to do, career path wise.

1. Continue down the path that I'm on, for which I'm studying the certifications right now. This would move me up to a Senior Consultant, but would that mean a pay rise? Not too sure. It's not like passing this exam will instantly make me a better programmer, or one which you could sell more easily. This would mean at least 1 more exam, and that could take some time.

2. Move to being a 'content management' specialist. Staying at the same employer, but bring tied to one specific product which we sell. Seems like a lot of the web stuff is going this way, which means I'd have a bit of on site work, but would really stop my programming.

3. Leave the company - Leaving opens a whole wide world of opportunities - Documentum, Senior Java developer (and 30k pay rise!), I could do a bunch of things.. maybe Oracle DBA. I guess it's the old thing - you have a comfort factor where you are, so why change?

Firefox Extensions

Ok - I'm a convert to Firefox. Avant was giving me too many headaches with locking up and taking all system resources. Opera is a nice quick browser, but it's not extendable like Firefox.

I'm going to list my favourite extensions:

1. Performancing - Brilliant for Bloggers.
2. LinkedIn - Useful for maintaining your professional contacts.
3. AdBlock - Zaps those pesky Pop-Ups.
4. StumbleUpon - Great for time wasting (not that I'd ever do that!)
5. TabBrowser Preferences - Excellent for customising your tabbed browser settings.
6. SessionSaver - Means you dont lose your windows you have open when you close.
   

There are probably others, and I haven't really used FF in anger, and there are a couple of developer specific extensions that I've got, but it's not fair to give them a rave before I've been through them.

New Words...

1. Calais (Calalais)
2. Love You
3. Nigh Nigh
4. Please
5. No (although he doesn't really understand what it means!)
   
6. Hurties, better

Also, due to the side effects of chemo, lots of food related ones:

1. Stras
2. Sausage Roll
3. Milk
4. Chicken Schnizel
   
5. Choccie Milk
6. Bickies

Ed: And from Rach -

more words you left out..
naughty nitzel
naughty word
bideo (video)
chemo
port
retties (resties)
ooo oo and choccie milk & b-line (supposed to be v-line)

BTC

is back baby! :)

Time again to launch for another season of fantasy football. Hopefully I can go one better than last year, and take the premiership. I will again be writing lots of articles throughout the year, but we will see how much time uni takes.

Puffing...

Mike and I took Jude to Puffing Billy on Saturday. He loved it! :)

Well, mostly. I think he likes to watch trains, rather than ride on them, although he was really keen to stand at the end of the carriage with the wind is his (short!) hair....

We rode on 1NB and 21NBD - 1NB has been beautifully restored, and we were the only passengers on the whole carriage. We ran from Belgrave to Menzies creek behind 6A and 7A, and 7A took us to Emerald Station. We also saw the cute little fire spotter which follows the main train.

Headphones..

I've really missed my old headphones - A really nice pair of Sony street style phones, which fold up - I've had them for at least 3 years, and they have lasted fantastically well - until I let Jude get to them! :P

I did get some replacement ones (here), but they just don't do it for me. I think I'll be looking for pretty much a replacement of the ones that I did have - similar to these. Don't get me wrong, I dont particularly mind the apple iPod ones, but I'd rather not look like an iPod wanker. Well, any more than I need to anyway.

Waiting...

I have been at the office for the past week, doing some cleanup work on an old project that I had been responsible for a couple of years.

I've done pretty much all of the updates now, but have found out that the new client is delaying me going back out on site. Bugger.

At least I will be able to get some certification study done though.

BMW Drivers...

I'm looking over a carpark at the moment, being back in the office.

Anyway, it turns out that there is a BMW X5 across in the carpark - out in the open. From what I can see, the drivers side window is down (smashed?) - Now, this wouldnt normally be a problem during summer, except that we are having a cold snap - with the associated pounding rain. Oooops!

Wedding Crashers

Ok, so I'm a Vince Vaughan fan.

And Owen Wilson sometimes tickles my funny bone.

Put the two of them together, and what have you got? Well, I thought it would be a very funny movie, but aparently not. I guess it was always going to get schmalzy, given that the word 'Wedding' is in the title.

Some funny bits, like the meeting on the stairs - You motorboating motherfucker!

But overall, pretty average movie.

6/10

ergh...

Ok - I've been a bit slack with the updating of this blog - there are more important things to concentrate on that the moment.

We had Guyman's 30th Birthday the other day, which was great fun! :) He's the baby of the group, so he's the last one to enter the 30s! :) I think we are all doing pretty good for a bunch of old blokes! :)

Solids baby!

Jack is onto the solids now - Well, when I say solids, I mean mostly mush, with some lumps in it. We have been trying to train that gag reflex out of him, and it seems to be getting a lot better - He wolfed down the kids spaghetti last night, and although the pasta was soft as buggery, he managed to nearly bring it all back up! :)

He also wolfed down a bunch of yoghurt - I'm not surprised that he slept from 8pm to 7am! :)

Little tacker, unfortunately due to Jude's sickness, he's having to spend a lot of time over at Rach's mum's place, which I think he likes (the attention!), but he's moving around a lot now, which means it's a bit harder to just plonk him down and expect him to be there when you get back.

The Onion

Has always been one of my favourite sites, but I saw recently that they have stared a daily podcast of the latest news.

Only a minute per episode, but extremely funny.

Go get it!

Home | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Crawling

Jack started crawling today! :)

He has been threatening to get about, and he's been kinda working his way around the lounge, but he actually got both arms and legs synchronised into an offical crawl today. :)

Little Fella

Is now starting to shake his head for no! :)

I went to visit him while Jude was in hospital, and he was shaking his head when Jen said no.. :) Very cute.

Poor little man had to have a Hep A shot this morning, so his little thigh is all sore.

Reading...

Amongst other things recently, I've had a chance to read while on the train. Normally I'd be spending most of the 2 hours a day on the train studying (technology, or Uni stuff), or listening to podcasts.

I read a couple of books, Seven Ancient Wonders, and Hover Car Racer. Both books by Matthew Riley, and both are really good fun reading. I will warn everyone now, dont read these books if you are after a literary epipaphany(sp?), but they are just good fun reading. Especially the fact that the guy is an Aussie, and therefore a lot of his references are so very australian. On this Australia Day, let me just say, go Matthew Riley.

Go out and read it, don't be too hard on the guy, just read them as pure escapism, and you will enjoy the pace at which his books move.

Bad News...

Poor little Jude.

Now all of the recent sickness is explained, due to the fact that he has Leukaemia. Probably the worst day of my life, and no doubt of Rach's. He has ALL, which is the most common form of the cancer, and he has an excellent prognosis (around 90% of his age group go into full remission). A more detailed explanation is available here.

Jude is a little trooper, he just wants to go home, and have the canula in his arm removed, although he's getting used to it now. He had a terrible night's sleep on the first night, as they were giving him a blood transfusion. He managed to get a few good hours last night, after Rach came home for a couple of hours rest, and went back in about 2:30 this morning.

I'm heading in to hospital shortly too.

Classic

http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/australia.shtml

One of my faves of all time.. :)

Sickies Lamb...

Poor little man.. he's been a sickies, had a 40.8 degree temperature.. so he's on the antibiotics too.

I've got a photo to upload of him at puffing billy too.

Browsers

Ok.. I spend all of my working life working on browsers, now - unfortunately, its a given that most of the time we work on IE. Most companies that I work with use IE as the SOE browser, and as the obvious market leader, it's the most used in the Internet (as opposed to a company Intranet site).

I've played with a few browsers over my time, but have not really used much other than IE in anger. Just recently, I have been sussing out other browsers, and have got a few thoughts:

Avant Browser:
Really interesting browser - it's essentially a skin for IE, but gives you really nice add ons like tabbed browsing and popup blocker. I reckon it's pretty good - although it doesn't show the javascript errors like IE does. I also found that it just chews through the memory - it stays in the task bar. This is not too bad, but it sometimes just goes awol. Totally unrecoverable. Very frustrating, because I want to love it. Also has 3rd party password manager.

Opera:
I had used this a few years ago, I think it was around 7/7.5, but recently heard they had started making moneyt from the mobile phone version of their browser - so had decided to release 8 without ads. This was enough for me to try it again. I really really like this browser, although there are a few frustrations: No plugins being the main one. Oh, and it doesn't really work that well with the Blogger.com edit window.

Mozilla Firefox:
I had previously been turned off version 1.0 of this browser, because a number of my colleagues (Peter!) had been so rabidly in support of it. I installed it when it went to 1.5, and I'm really glad that I did. Excellent range of extensions and plugins (StumbleUpon, Bit Torrent, LinkedIn and my fave, Performancing). Performancing gives you pretty much full blogger support in the browser. Really really good. Only gripe is that you cant seem to backdate posts.

FF seems to be getting a bit of traction, latest indications are that it's up to 15-20% of the overall market, but I think it's probably higher in those 'hard-core' of users who are serious web browser users, and that most 'mom and pop' users will still use IE (why download something that I already have out of the box).

I really want to love Avant, but it's freezing up irritates me, I like Opera, but it lacks penetration, so is much less supported, so I guess it's between IE and FF - No competition really, FF wins this battle hands down.

First Tooth

Jack has his first tooth coming through. Such a cute little guy. He was chewing on my thumb, and I felt a sharp bit. :)

He has been pretty sick too, he's on the amoxycilin now.

Trains..

Did I mention that Jude loves trains? And especially steam trains.. :)

Happy bloke..

Smiley! :)

WitScale's SCJP (java certification) study notes

WitScale's SCJP (java certification) study notes - Contents.

For later reference

Coffee

Coffee is a pretty important part of my diet - I'm a creature of habit - so having my favourite coffee shop has been a bit of a shock to the system. I'd hoped that they were open today, but no such luck! :( Hopefully next Monday.

I have to make sure that I dont go to the same place I went to this morning - it was terrible. Hudsons looks like the go to me.

Certifiable!

Righto - I've booked my SCJP programmers course for 6th/7th Feb. I'll be finishing out on site on 20th Jan, so that should give me a good couple of weeks to bone up on the exam. I'm pretty comfortable that I'll pass it! :)

After that i'll be starting on the RAD programmers cert, interestingly enough, the recommended reading is 1400 pages. Thanks IBM.

Top 50 singles of this year

My god, it was a pretty shocking year for music really. I cant find an e-version of the list, but I assure you it was full of shit songs.

NYE

Had a great night at Mike and Kylie's place - but bloody hell it was hot! Rach decided to stay home and look after the boys, I think she was going to look after her cousins too, but I dont think they came over.

She's still 'resting' at the moment, nursing a sore head!

I will take a pic of the drawing they did on the wall in chalk too! :)

p.s - Posting this from 'Performancing' plugin for Mozilla Firefox. I finally cracked it with Avant browser, so I'm off the IE bandwagon until version 7 comes out with tabbed browsing.