Tue, 31 Oct 2006
The hard drive in my home computer fell in a big screaming heap last weekend. The first I noticed was when I started the computer during the week and it failed to find the drive.
Unfortunately, the drive was the one that held most of the important things on the computer - including the MP3 directory, which contained the 100 or so CDs that I'd converted to digital format. Ouch.
The pain increased when I found that none of the programs I had were able to read the drive (yes, and that includes all the Linux utilities).
Luckily Steph was able to dig up something that was able to at least recover all the data, so I could back it all up to DVD - 12 DVDs worth, or 50Gb of stuff that could conceivably have been lost.
That was lucky. And after years of reading in computer magazines about poor people who've written in for help, unlucky enough to lose their digital life - music, photos, documents - and been chastised by the resident expert, I've now joined their number.
Sun, 29 Oct 2006
We just got back from doing the 7 Bridges Walk, which was a 22 kilometre walk around the greater Sydney Harbour for charity.
We ended up crossing the Pyrmont, Anzac, Gladesville, Tarban Creek and Fig Tree bridges, the last two of which I had no idea even existed.
The walk went right outside our front door, which was handy, especially since we could just finish there, walk in the front door and collapse into a comfortable chair and watch the rest of the poor suckers trudge up Shirley Rd.
Since we've walked around Wollstonecraft, North Sydney and Milsons Point before, we gave that leg, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a miss and started in the city instead.
That was still 4/5ths of the route, and no mean feat considering it was 22C, bright and sunny on the day. Plus, the route went along the north shore, up and down the ridges and gullies that pour down to the water. That hill at Riverside was intense!
I ended up getting sunburnt on the backs of my legs - the only place I didn't put sunscreen on - while Kathleen, Ms. I-Never-Get-Burnt, got her forearms toasted!
One of our friends, Rowena, had drinks last night in Bondi Junction to celebrate submitting her final assessment for her PhD. To think that, in just a few short months, she'll be able to insist that people refer to her as "Dr Rowena", rather than "Oi You".
Even though I'd like to go back to uni at some stage to do another degree, I couldn't imagine sticking with it long enough to earn a doctorate. That's pretty impressive dedication, to continue working at something so long, and doing paid work concurrently, and finally have it all work out.
Sun, 22 Oct 2006
While Kathleen got all energetic, walking from the Spit Bridge to Manly with some work colleagues, I went for a ride this morning, to shake out some cobwebs on the bike. I headed out towards Chatswood, since there are some decent hills along the way.
I was sitting at the corner of Willoughby Road and Mowbray Road, waiting for the lights to change, when, suddenly,
*click*
What was that? Wait, there it is again.
*click*
Huh?
I look up, and there, bearing down at me and flapping its wings like an aggressive jet, is a MASSIVE F*CKING MAGPIE THE SIZE OF A HOUSE! The click I'm hearing is it hovering over my head and pecking at my helmet!!
Jesus H Christ! I grab the bike and jump on to the footpath, right next to a power pole that I'm hoping will at least shield me from the magpie swooping at me. The bloody thing flies up to the lines, directly above me, and glares down at me.
This is Not Good. And the intersection is a pretty busy one, cars turning, so I can't just run across the road to get away. I check my options, and glance up to see what my attacker is doing.
Just at that moment, he lifts his tail feather, and drops a massive, milky-white shit not two feet from where I am standing.
The little bastard!
At last, the lights change, and I dart across the road, bike over my shoulder. And the fucking magpie fucking swoops at me. Dead set. I'm turning my head to see where it is, and it flies by so close it's not funny. A foot further to the left, and I reckon I'd be short one eye. I've never been swooped before, and I decide that it is not a fun experience.
I'm hugging the building as I continue running up the road, looking for cover, deciding that discretion is the better part of valour, and the shop awnings are giving me no shelter. The bloody thing shows no fear, and I get a fly-by twice more before it decides that it has seen off the threat, and retires victoriously to the top of the power pole, waiting for it's next unlucky victim.
Bloody hell. And to think I was more worried about cars than the native wildlife. I only had one car pull out from a side street in front of me, in Chatswood, but I saw her, and I knew that she wasn't really looking, so had plenty of time to slow down. She gave an apologetic wave, so that's all right.
I had to have a coffee to calm down. And I rode home via Artarmon instead of the way I came.
Sat, 21 Oct 2006
While Kathleen was cleaning out some of the junk in the cupboards yesterday, she started to go through one of the boxes we brought back with us from Japan. And she found this cutting from a magazine:
The konnichiwa aka-chan at the top translates to "Hello, baby!" How cute are these kids?! Especially Mr. Tanaka on the lower left!
One of the girls I was working with when I was in Malaysia is in Sydney for a week with her husband and baby daughter on holiday. We went out for Vietnamese at Pasteur on George St (criteria - close to hotel for child convenience, they haven't eaten there yet, not too noisy), but must have caught them on a bad night. The male staff at dinner aren't quite so customer-friendly as the women who normally work at lunch.
But the one thing that Madelaine and Quan noticed about Sydney was that it was really quiet at night compared to Kuala Lumpur. Which is sort of true, since most people tend to go home after work and the city (especially down around Central, where they are staying) shuts up shop. Apart from Chinatown, which seems to be busy every night of the week, the rest of the area is dark and a little eerie.
Sometimes I wish Australia had more of an active night life, like Jakarta and KL and Singapore and Hong Kong and Tokyo. While everyone just goes back to their suburban bolthole at the end of the working day, though, that's not going to happen.
Sun, 15 Oct 2006
We went out with a group of friends on Saturday night for Kathleen's birthday. Had dinner at Blackbird Cafe in Cockle Bay, then drinks at one of the bars downstairs. It was 37C that day, but by the time we were outside, the cool southerly had come in, so it was perfect outside weather - although just this side of a bit cold.
And afterwards, a small hard-core group proceeded on to the Four Points hotel for a nightcap.
It was a lot of fun
We ate lots of food
And we were full
The end
The previous weekend, we headed out to the Hawkesbury for a bit of a getaway. It's a lovely area, even if it feels hotter and drier than suburban Sydney in hot weather. The place we were staying had six weekends over the two days we were staying there.
Fri, 13 Oct 2006
Dad sent me a couple of photos that have been sent around via email in Hobart. It's actually quite distressing to look at the photos and see the hills behind Lindisfarne and Geilston Bay, the place where I grew up, alight.
Dad went home around lunchtime yesterday - most people around the hills in those suburbs were advised to return home and keep an eye out. He reckons that the winds were pushing the fires away from where he is up on Begonia St, but it sounds like it was close, too close for comfort. Fire was even at the sides of the road down near Flagstaff Gully Rd.
Luckily, the fires stopped just short of Troy's place, too - apparently reached the back fences of the people across the road.
The larger picture is here.
The Muckury has coverage here:
The Tasmania Fire Service said today’s moderate weather may give firefighters a chance to establish control lines around the fire, but warned it could extend into the Mt Rumney area, where there are many homes in bushland.
Should this occur, firefighting crews will provide property protection to properties that are defendable as the firefront progresses, leaving residents to deal with remaining embers once the fire has passed.
The fire burnt about 800 hectares behind Geilston Bay, Lindisfarne and Warrane.
No house losses have been reported.
They've already caught one of the little bastards lighting these fires:
A TEENAGE boy has been charged with setting fire to vegetation in the northern Hobart suburb of Glenorchy.
The 14-year-old, who cannot be named, was charged by police after receiving a report last night of a youth starting a fire.
The fire was lit in Chapel St and was put out by firefighters.
Police searched the area and discovered the youth.
The boy will be dealt with through the youth justice system.
Meanwhile police are interviewing witnesses in relation to the Mt Nelson fire on Wednesday and the eastern shore fire yesterday.
Thu, 12 Oct 2006
Okay, so one of the technical problems I've been having at work is largely self-inflicted. You know how you stare at something so intensely and for so long, and it gets more and more frustrating, to the point where you swear that black is white and white is black? That is how I was today.
I was trying to connect to a JNDI interface for access to a JMS queue, using a programming language that I last used 5+ years ago from a client application that doesn't natively support Java and which I had to shoehorn in using gaffer tape and rubber bands and the sweat from my own brow. I was this close to getting it right, I swear.
After about two hours of cursing and wondering just why the server was not accepting connections, it turned out that I was trying to connect to the wrong IP address. That's so absolutely and utterly dumb that I had to leave and go home immediately. When you're making those sort of mistakes, you can guarantee that you're not going to do anything else remotely useful for the rest of the day.
Bring on the weekend.
PS The worst bit about my job is having to learning all this stuff just to be effective. The best bit about my job is learning all this stuff, which makes me an even better technical tester. I'm just not a Java person.
PPS Next week I have to expand the above monstrosity to work with XML. I can't wait!:
try
{
Document document = ...
StringWriter result = new StringWriter();
TransformerFactory transformerFactory =
TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
DomSource domSource = new DomSource(document);
StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(result));
transformer.transform(domSource, streamResult);
String xml = result.toString();
}
catch(TransformerException e)
{
...
}
Wed, 11 Oct 2006
Sometimes work is frustrating to the point of distraction.
I've spent virtually the entire last two weeks trying to resolve technical issues with the programming tools and environment at work, rather than doing what I get paid to do, which is testing.
Most software projects have a couple of annoying 'issues' that need to be managed or fixed, but this one, seems like everything is happening at once, and right now. I have three or four different tasks to work on at the moment, and each single one has a problem that requires dedicated time and effort to fix. I'm short of both.
And because none of these things can be resolved immediately, they're there, hanging over my head from the moment when I leave for the day until the moment I get in the next morning, like a great big black cloud of sheer pain in the neck.
It's not a major stress/worry situation, but just a slow burning, nagging feeling, like I'm going to forget about something that's then going to come back and bite me at an even more inconvenient time.
I hate that feeling.
I'm glad I stocked up on that weekend of rest, because I've needed it this week!
Mon, 09 Oct 2006
We got up to a lot over the weekend, but before I post any of that (that's now tomorrow night's homework!) I wanted to get the following off my chest:
"My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short."
...
My perceptions were far from unique. Over the next few months, I made it a point to ask iPod owners if their beloved little units were judicious in distributing the songs among various artists or whether they played favourites. People would generally respond with a sigh of relief. Yes! Someone else has noticed! From the results of this admittedly nonscientific survey, it appeared that nearly everybody's iPod seemed to have a favourite artist, or two, or three. Or, they believed, when their iPod performed a shuffle, it would decide which artist it was in the mood for and then flood the listening session with that performer's works.
IT'S SO TRUE!!
I had a week where virtually every second song that came up was Gomez - just two albums out of the stacks that I have on my iPod accounted for most of the music. I updated and suddenly then it thought I hadn't been listening to enough Cantopop, so it got all editorial on me. For whatever reason over the last week, it's decided that I really need to hear all the secretly embarrassing iPod songs I have. And since you can hear the music of just about every person who wears an iPod on the train leaking out from their ears, I'm desperately worried someone will hear and make all sorts of value judgments on me based on the fact that I'm listening to The Lemon Song or Oh Yeah or something worse.
Luckily, I seem to be the only iPod user on public transport in Sydney who actually listens to his music at a volume the next carriage can't hear, so I'm safe from public embarrassment.
In the end, I've switched to playing albums, rather than playing in shuffle mode. That way, I can guarantee that the right listening tempo is maintained - at the moment, the beauty of the randomness is ruined when a fantastic song is followed up by something that just doesn't fit the mood, and ends up ruining it completely.
I hate that.
Mon, 02 Oct 2006
Cool! We got tickets for the stage show of Little Britain which will be in Sydney next Feb.
The internet pre-sale tickets must have sold like hot cakes - there were no gold or silver tickets left for the extra show that was put on due to demand. They officially go on sale to the public tomorrow. I reckon you'd struggle to get any now.
Sun, 01 Oct 2006
We spent Grand Final day at Steph and Eva's having a BBQ - amazing sunny day, cold beer, great food, excellent footy.
Afterwards, Steph, Trev and I headed out for a kick of the footy at Alan Davidson Oval over the road, which only served to prove three things:
- We're not as young and fit as we think we are anymore
- Trying to kick the footy with a skinful is a tad tricky
- None of us can kick to save our lives
Roy and HG's commentary of the game was excellent, as per. HG got stuck into Barry Hall all day, since he had an absolute Barry Crocker of a game. "Good one, Baaarrry!" was said an awful lot. "Don't give it to him (O'Loughlin) - he can't kick!" a close second.
I gave Troy a call just before the start to make sure he'd managed to find a pub or mate's house in Geneva that was showing the game. The call connected just as the opening strains of Holy Grail started - which I'm not sure he appreciated given that he sounded like I'd woken him up. He was obviously unsuccessful.
