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?