...of having extremely few friends, no girlfriend (and no hope of finding one), absolutely zero social life and of having an apparently abrasive personality?
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...first, I'd get a muzzle for the damn howler monkey neighbours' dog. Not because of the barking, but because of the dog being one of the root causes for the everlasting bloody aggravation: see, he's got some Doberman in the mix, and his owners are total assholes, so he's decent-sized, frisky and badly educated. That makes him pinch the damn kids when they yell and scream too much, eliciting more screaming and howling, which generates more pinching and screaming and tantrums...Oh Joy.

Next, I'd cut all the howler monkeys' vocal cords, and thus earn the everlasting gratitude from the other neighbours around - who are all fairly quiet denizens.

And finally, I'd shoot all the monkey neighbours for good measure - 'it's the only way to be sure'.

No, I'm not angry, not at all. Why do you think so?

From the bottom of my heart I wish the plague and a quick, quiet death on these neighbours.

The first day of the trimester at work, and I've got an 0800 lecture... for the one (inherited) subject I dislike teaching the most. Bah. And the projector in the room is squirrely. Aaaaaargh! And the room is generallylousy. Double-bah. And my brain is fogged up enough so that I'm quite sure I'm making more of a hash of the subject material than necessary. Sorry dear students! My best efforts at 0800 today weren't really quite good enough.

What a lovely way to begin the week!

*drumroll*

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Two days ago was the eigth anniversary of my arrival in Australia. Sometimes that feels like yesterday, sometimes more like three lives ago.

Today is also the sixth anniversary of moving into this house. For lots of Australians six years in one place is three lives ago; many deal with houses like crab shells: too small, ugly, whatever? then let's molt^Wmove and forget the old carcass. The housing industry obliges by mainly offering shoddily built disposables. *sigh*.

To round out a fairly crappy weekend, this afternoon my washing machine decided to eat its drive belt - of course while spinning at full speed, so as to maximize the damage. Picture me sitting peacefully in the toilet (which is adjacent to the laundry), *bang* and lotsa thumping and crashing and the lights are out.

Suppose I'm sorta lucky, the wiring loom is ripped apart but not totally wrecked, and the motor bearings seem to have survived their chewing exercise without damage.

I'm not "normal" - and I like it that way!
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...seeing seven round ice lumps floating tightly packed in your drink glass makes you pick up pencil and paper to determine if this tight packing is possible only when all balls have the same radius.

(Yes it is. Trigonometry is fun.)

You know that you live in a Banana...well, non-Republic if the exchange rates between your lifeblood and real money looks like this: Source: Werner Antweiler's Exchange Rate stats

Last Thursday Conny, Rob and I went for a day trip to Nth Stradbroke island, with a bit of fun (of all kinds) in the preceding afternoon.

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We're back, connected once again: some techie must have been in the neighbourhood saturday night, because Saturday 2138 line-sync suddenly reappeared, and today I finished setting up the remaining bits (e.g. inbound POTS-to-VOIP etc.) and verified that Internode didn't make a mess of their part of the service conversion.

Looks all mostly good, except line attenuation has jumped up 10dB (without the previously required inline filter), which makes little sense, and sits now at 50dB downstream. This sucks as it severly limits the achievable sync speeds and makes things a tad more brittle. Ticket open, we'll see.

When Conny went to brush her teeth tonight before bedtime, I suddenly got a fairly urgent/distressed Request for Assistance: she stood mesmerized at the bathroom door, and a meter from her sat an (equally mesmerized) huntsman spider of less that minimal size (maybe 10x10cm with the legs). She strongly dislikes spiders.

And so do I. Usually, smaller specimens I don't bother; they eat bugs and thus are not exactly welcome but tolerated household members (if they stay hidden and out of the geckos' way). But this one was too large for my liking, so it got the bucket-on-top-and-then-poison-inside treatment (huntsmen are very fast). Sorry fella!

Conny asked for this note to any future spider visitors to be posted on the web (maybe spiders use google? dunno): Small and tiny spiders tolerated, large ones very unwelcome. May be dealt with harshly!

Oi, get your minds out of the gutter!
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Yesterday was lots of fun.
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Conny has pretty much settled in, but my brain is close to pastel overload already.

I've had to move just about all my stuff from her room so that she can make it into her den. She brought three fat and one slim suitcases full of things, and her room is unrecognizable.

The only remainder of my things are my Tektronix scope, the HP function generator and a bench vise on the desk. Cognitive dissonance: the shelf above the TEK and the HP now contains mainly pink boxes, makeup, dolls and other girly gear (instead of soldering station, multimeters, charger, bench PSU and other tools).

School seems to be fine and fun; she has gotten lost (slightly) between home and there twice so far.

Whenever I am optimistic and not expecting trouble, this state of oblivion usually gets cut short, badly, when it rains problems. On the other hand, if I expect bad things and worry, a lot less trouble finds its way to me. This sucks.
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Juhuuuuh! Heute hat die Post endlich mein Weihnachtsgeschenk aus Ö vorbei gebracht: Alle 19 Kottan-Folgen, auf 8 DVDs.

Ah, Nostalgie pur. Böse Wiener Gfrasta. Inspektor gibt's kan. 70er Jahre Schädelweh-Tapeten. Danzer-Gstanzln. Ambros. Wunderbar.

Danke, liebe Frau Mutter!

Next Wednesday my daughter Cornelia is arriving in Oz, to spend a fun and action-packed year 2008 with me. Well, let's hope the action is of the Good Type...either way, there goes my independence.

In other non-news the weather still sucks completely, it's been so wet and humid over the last weeks that some of my leather gear (bike suit and mountain boots; what did YOU think?) started to get mouldy on the surface. This sucks.

Work sucks, too, with disorganized chaos worse than usual, even factoring in that it's the first week of the semester. But numbers are up, I have about 13 for the networking subject and about 7 for the Silly Subject. What I don't have is a correct timetable, exact enrolment figures, and fun. What I also won't have in two weeks' time is a clueful unix-savvy counterpart in the central it services dept, because that fellow is throwing in the towel.

Not that I can fault him at all; the management and marketing hordes have grown like mushrooms in the wet, while we peons are being kept like mushrooms.

Apropos mushrooms, it's been wet enough for quite some mushrooms to grow in my backyard. Some look very similar to small Parasol but I won't try them.

Having two credit cards is fine. Paying them off in total every month is even better. Using them for big payments every now and then is convenient. But having done just that and transferring the (large) amount you owe on one to the other account hurts.

The hassle to get your money back out of the overpaid account is...priceless.

Toasting bread conducts more than 30mA.
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...bank, that is. I just bought this mobile contraption. Should get it around Wednesday. Test-driving it was fine except for the noncooling aircon which will be fixed before I get the car.

A bit over a week ago I mentioned that my washing machine has decided to die - well, to forget how to spin-dry, which amounts to the same. The off-balance detection was stuffed: it would start the motor in high-speed mode but switch off after <1s, repeat 3x, give up and hand me soaking clothes. (Same behaviour with an empty tub.)

The two-year warranty ran out a year ago (no surprise here). So I dismantled the machine and checked sundry other things (like inspecting/reseating the motor brushes) but couldn't find any mercury switch or other obvious means of detecting a bouncing tub. Accordingly, I couldn't fix it directly.

I have no precise idea how they detect an out-of-balance tub, except that the motor has a hall-effect rpm sensor which I think could work (assuming that the tub slows down and speeds up asymmetrically if it's wobbling). Net result of X hours of ripping apart, tracing wires and so on: all inspectables are fine but it still won't work. The only remaining part was the part-mechanical-part-electronic control board, and these things usually aren't cheap.

After a long search I figured out the proper part number (the fact that the machine is a rebadged Electrolux didn't make that search any easier), and would have been able to buy it online at various overseas retailers...for about $150-200..

Luckily ebay came to the rescue: somebody sold one as new-old-stock locally for $50. Add $26 for express postage, 10min for installation and I have a washing washer again. Very nice.

This is not my month.
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If you have a laminate floor, solidly installed skirting boards and a computer with rattly fans nearby, then a microwave termite detector may indicate movement where there is none (or at least nothing critter-caused).

I had the annual inspection and general spray today, and that reading made for a few interesting moments; I immediately ripped the skirting boards off in the relevant spot and as hoped we didn't find any indication of trouble.

My daughter complained last week about the lack of updates on my website; she's checking it every so often but there's nothing new. So, do more, daddy! Ok, I'll try, but much of it will be rambling, unhappy blah.
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(And gargoyles are great.)
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Mine started even worse than the last one ended.
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Yesterday my car decided to celebrate the coming of the merry month of May.

While driving home in the evening, the horn started hooting uncontrollably, on and off and more on and more on and maybe off... Very annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that the horn is not coupled to the ignition, so it kept on randomly hooting after I switched off the engine.

It took me about five frantic minutes to determine that no, I won't find the correct fuse (if there even is one for the horn) anytime soon, yes, hitting the horn pad on the steering wheel has a 50% chance of shutting the sucker up for a few seconds, and finally...blissful silence, when I disconnected the horn. Fortunately on this Fart Falcon the horn is easily accessible once you open the bonnet and even has a convenient quick-disconnect plug close by.

Looks like the foam in the switch pad has rotten away. *sigh*. Well, at least it didn't fail when I wasn't around; my neighbours would have been real happy with a randomly braying horn during the night...until the battery would have died.

Upgrading a sparc64 SMP box from 2.4.32 (solid but doesn't have a number of features the newer libc needs) to 2.6.20.7 has taken me since 18:00, Wednesday.

2.6 on UltraSparcs is...painful. The iptables recent module kernel oopses immediately on load, some other iptables mods are simply not available and still others have been buggy for years, the md subsystem doesn't properly deal with the older meta info, the LVM subsystem definitely fucks up the older lvm metainfo badly (in the end I had to nix one vg hard, via dd across its pvs, and restore it from backup), booting into a ripped-apart mirror doesn't work anymore unless lots of extra kernel params are given etc. etc.

fuck Fuck FUCK! damn all-the-world's-an-intel weenies.

sleep now.

why are there days when nothing seems to work out? When you end up in the arvo/evening with a big fat zero on the day's tally? And why do I have oh so many of these days? I'm so sick of this...

I can't break eggs cleanly; always end up with some mess outside the pan and/or some eggshell shards in the food.

That's annoying, and maybe one day some genetics wiz might find a way to preprogram a break line into chicken eggs. Maybe. (BTW, the German Sollbruchstelle sounds better and more precise)

Why do I bother with undead not-even-proto-chickens? The last four weeks I've had loads of them, in a (successful) attempt at a low-carb diet (Quite easy in a country like this were meat is good and cheap). This is to get my waistline back in shape and the weight down by a few kilos.

After some startup time it has worked fine, I'm down about 6 kgs (now at 83, 186cm and genetically not meant to look slim) and the flotation ring around the hips is mostly gone. That's the same weight I had a good 12 years ago, and I'm happy.

I've also changed my eating habits substantially, and that way the weight level should be ok to hold. My dad might be proud that his (then un-appreciated) admonitions work Just Fine -- with a delay of almost 30 years: when we were small, he tended to gruffly remind us to chew every bite 30+ times and to put the fork down between bites. My sisters and I were never badly wolfing down our food, but still he felt that he had to rebuke us gruffly. Didn't work then, works fine now.

Finally, I'm about to graduate with a (hard-earned) PhD; but as expected I'm boycotting/avoiding the ceremony on the 3.2. because neither do I want to wear a dumbo hat and a batman cape in public, nor do I value speeches by our First Apes; such political shenanigans are only good for frothing rage, brain rot and stomach ulcers and are avoided by hardcore technologists like me for ood reasons.

But nevertheless I'm done! The Shiny Paper will be in the (internal) mail soon post-ceremony and thus I've got another title to add to my name.

But I'm hardly proud of that or the title. I am, however, semi-proud of the achievement: I had a totally original idea of my own, I built it into something that works (idea+code) and I showed that and how it works. I'm also somewhat proud of the fact that I managed to convince Manfred Hauswirth, Stefan Conrad and Warren Toomey that what I did was worth a doctorate (as they were my examiners).

But enough drunken rambling. Time to go back to layer zero and fix the pergola on the house and install the whirlybird ventilator and do the committee-mandated painting in ugly colours and...you know, all this other "life" stuff.

This was a really shitty year, started crappy and ends the same. And guess what? the next one looks just as bleak as this one, and the one before and so on.

Seven more, then she's 18 and I've fulfilled my parental obligations and can check out without feeling guilty. I hope that she gets rid of her buoyancy aid around the belly before that, and that she can enjoy her life more than I do mine.

This weekend illustrates this, um, nicely.
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The weather was...suboptimal this weekend, so I mostly lazed it away. I fixed the over-sensitive smoke detector (recipe before: start toaster, get jolted by the klaxon, run into hallway, unplug the detector's battery...). Soldering a switch in to disconnect the horn was easy, and better than disconnecting the battery (because on replug the beast emits a number of loud screeches so that you know you're not deaf just yet).

Also started working on my latest home improvement project (ha!), which is replacing the sliding cupboard doors in the bedroom and office. The frame has been doctored (because it had a bulkhead in the way), and I've started some woodworking to make Shoji-style door frames; got a new backsaw and a vise, made me a bench hook etc.

But I'm not any good at woodworkingy yet, unfortunately: my level of perfection is mostly on the screw-butt or (at best) half-lap joint level. Yesterday I tried a bridle joint, but it got fucked up pretty badly: too imprecise, mortise too wide, tenon too thin and the cuts/chiselled bits have lousy edges. The reasons are that I have little experience, no table saw, no router (yet...), and that I'm a bit impatient with the tenon saw. Net result: get more (cheap) timber, and ponder the cheap ($80 or so) plunge router kits out there.

But, all in all making sawdust can be quite a bit of fun :-)

While life in general is very much on the crap side right now, at least in some things I do prevail against the odds.

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Some photos taken while Conny and Barbara were visiting me (End of July - End of August).
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I've submitted my PhD thesis today. I'm reasonably confident that the examiners won't absolutely destroy it, so normal life (FSVO normal) can now continue.

But why am I not super-elated? Because while my problems have gone down in number with this event, my exwife (and thus our kid) are wading through serious shit at this moment :-(

Their vacation here was pretty good, busy but we've had a lot of fun (and I'll post some pictures in a few days), but now their life in the US is blowing up into their faces big time. First they bought a house in Philadelphia, which was expected to be a renovation job, but it turned out that the renovation required was way beyond their expectations. Of course they ran out of money badly with this discovery. Then they had to move out of their old apartment, but not being able to use the house yet as it's a construction desaster zone right now. So they moved to a place outside town which belongs to relatives of the ex's partner. And latest news as of this morning was that that partner is losing it badly, and has chucked them out onto the street in the middle of the night 8-(

Now I can't do anything to help them from here. But worry I can and do... (There must be some reasonable people out there, but the ex apparently always picks the wrong guys...like me, a long time ago).

Sigh. *thumbs crossed for B. and C.*

...merely really busy, so here's a short heads-up. I just gave the second draft of my PhD thesis to my supervisor, final submission is on the 31st; the (ex-)family is currently visiting me and we'll drive to Fraser Island or Sydney tomorrow (not clear yet which first), and things are generally jam-packed. Not a bad situation, mind you, just a bit...much so I don't think I'll be writing anything for this website before the end of the month.

Nothing ever changes, it seems. I miss my dummy.

Yesterday was my birthday. It rained.
Quite a few people sent their wishes, and I'm happy about that.

My kid didn't and I'm not happy about that.

Looks like the gods in charge of the weather also don't believe in queens, or rather believe in first soaking and then blow-drying.

Saturday it rained/drizzled/rained/blew, and Sunday it simply howled. Nevertheless we had a nice weekend - just a camping weekend without flying.

I believe neither in god nor any sodding queen, but whatever it takes to get a public holiday! (coming Monday)

I and a group of Like-Minded Loonies are going out to Killarney tomorrow afternoon, for a nice cold, maybe flyable long weekend. Unfortunately the forecast is dreary enough that the invocation above seems justified...unless god also doesn't believe in queens.

...I wouldn't write anything for the blog anymore, but it seems I can't help sending out those superfluous, uninteresting, nondescript ramblings.

Ah well.

Off to Killarney in a few minutes, for a weekend of camping, flying and Glühwein. More when I'm back.

Tomorrow I'll fly to Austria, for just under two weeks. Updates will be even more sparse than usual. Half of me is looking forward to the visit (but certainly not the trip), half of me wants to be back and done with it already. *Sigh*.

The last few weeks were character forming in Calvin's sense. I have a new desktop at work: our boxes are leased, and every two years I have to move everything to a new box with new problems - as it's always the cheapest Dell crap you can buy. The assorted annoyances one has to put up with until the thing works reliably make me really hate the new hardware... this time it only needed one home-soldered Y power splitter, one ethernet card without slot bracket, a full move to the X.org X11 suite, a new kernel with loads of "new improved" shite enabled, and about two very long evenings to get things working (and I even convinced the crap i965 "graphics" chip on board to display at 1504x1128 on my 20" Sun CRT...).

My serverhousing box is still dead, the spare Ultra1 here has dumped its PSU, and I'm very much looking forward to the hardware twiddling in three weeks in Vienna. This is unfortunately not my serverhousing box:

This is my^Wthe Unix Guerilla's new backup-and-assorted-stuff-of-our-choice server. (That's my group of weirdos at work.) I've called the box "pachyderm", as it's got a nice thick-skinned case (and it replaces "elephant"). rho has already threatened me over the name, but I prefer it over his usual theme of female music artists. Getting debian installed and working on that fellow took some work, though: the sarge netinstall cd doesn't have a proper fdisk, only bloody partman, and that has a bug that makes it impossible to produce raid or lvm partitions - which I wanted, TYVM, given the 6x18gb discs. Also, partman is a menu-in-a-menu-after-other-menus-in-various-menus-and-menus-after-menus-followed-by-menus-piece-of-menu-SHITE, which sucks especially when you're working on a 9k6 serial console. I wgot an fdisk binary onto the ramdisk and got cracking (and totally circumvented partman and 50% of the installation procedure, but hey, it worked).

The last two weekends were so-so, the earlier one had a cyclone keep us from flying and this weekend I felt shitty and not in any mood for aerial fun. Rob told me that I didn't miss much, though.

In other news, some dimwit politicians are currently pondering a plan to require ISPs to provide only a violence-and-obscenity filtered Internet. Fortunately, there's voices of reason.

In still other news, I had a very bad day a few days ago, blew my cool in a mail to the flying club people I do infrastructure for, and also bought a few cool/nasty/elitist/geeky tshirts, among others the first one over there.

Just finished watching Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Dark. Superb. Bleak. Precise. Heavy. Brilliant.

Polish winters must have a hell of a suicide rate.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday: rain and storms. The fence behind my house blew over. Monday morning: clear sunny weather.

Bah.

My last few weeks have been pretty much all like this.
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So what's happened in the last few weeks? Not exactly a lot, I think. The Killarney comp was quite good overall, except that the two days that I had to spend working were the best two...Thursday and Friday we spent at the village pool and one of the local water holes, and on Saturday we got one last task in which was cut short by a thunderstorm on track. I did just a short hop of 7km or so, as I didn't really feel "with it" on that day. The reception night was pretty good fun, and the cleanup the day after wasn't too bad.

So the net result of that week? Poorer by $375, richer by a pair of Crispi Airborne boots (as my old ones had desintegrated irreparably) and richer by a few flights. I now also have a problem, but one that I can easily blame Rhett Rockman for: he and the rest of the MacPara crew did their usual thing and gave away a Local Derby/Young Gun award. And I got it this time (but not exactly for my shiny performance during this comp): a $1000 off a new MacPara wing, good for the next 6 months.

Thanks! and Dammit! at the same time; my current wing is not due for replacement yet, but the new Eden III is really tempting: Tim gave me one for a bit of test flying which I did on the way back from Killarney; I liked it a lot...

Apart from that? the weather has been pretty lousy, I got just an hour of airtime last weekend (now at 129hrs) and the forecast for this weekend isn't promising either. The news all over the world are depressing and indicative of this world not exactly improving. I managed to forget ringing my mother on her birthday (but not my father, for no good reason; their birthdays are just 7 days apart), and nothing has changed regarding my lack of social life.

Apropos social life, flying friends of mine have invited me to a birthday party in Brisbane next weekend; unfortunately it requires dressing up and worse, dressing up following a theme: Dressed To Kill/007. Choices are a) literal interpretation: dress to Kill 007, so I find the crummiest-looking Bond villain and dress down, be grungy and feel out of place, or b) I buy clothes. Both options suck.

I hate buying clothes. I hate dressing up. Dammit.

Apart from that I've got a new wireless access point, which even works mostly (a story on its suckitude is forthcoming, however), and if I'm lucky then tomorrow will see the serverhousing box resurrected; the PSU of the Ultra2 blew, so &rw will plop the disk into a spare Ultra1 until I can scrounge up a PSU...the cheapest source (US$36) becomes painful after factoring in shipping so I'm looking for better options, maybe even a full U2 chassis...I've until the end of April, so no need to hurry just yet.

the weather these last few weeks sucked and continues to under-impress: rain, some storms, overcast on the weekends and drizzling. i'm feeling less than chirpy.

this morning my serverhousing box vanished off the net. as the setup with serial consoles will become active in a few days, i can't even find out what happened; let's see how long it takes the isp to power-toggle the thing.

i should do loads of extra work but mostly am too tired after coming home in the evenings with the usual sore throat (4 hours lecturing in freezing labs and lecture rooms). must go buy some clothes but don't want to...must do this and that but don't want to. february is halfway gone and i'm still mentally stuck somewhere in 2005.

i hate all this shit.

Watched Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy recently; what great movies they are! My favourite is Bleu in part because of its music score that I just absolutely adore. Time to find a shop selling the soundtrack cd... Red I found not as interesting, while White is nasty and fun.

Today I helped Richard resurrect his dead computer: the connection to the memory modules must have gone bad (occasionally beepbeepbeep on boot, random crashes during the startup sequence). I had scrounged up some spares (old motherboard, some graphics cards, a known-good power supply) and on return home had to put the power supply back to its normal purpose which is to drive my wireless access point (in a somewhat messy setup).

Now I have a wireless non-access point. Because I plugged the fucker in with the polarity reversed, the silly thing is misdesigned to draw 2A at 5V, the leads can sustain that and there is no over-current or polarity protection. Beyond the components going frzzz*pop*, that is.

And now I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side...

Spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Killarney flying in the comp: the days wer blown-out, too strong for my liking, and good, respectively. Monday I managed to get a late thermal on a refly five minutes before the launch window closed at 1500 and did 32km (of a task of 75km). Had a big scare some 15 klicks out, with thermal bullets of 6+m/s up throwing me around, then a big full frontal collapse with a stomach-lifting plunge, reinflated fine but violently, and on I went getting chucked around a bit more in 4-5m/s up...I didn't enjoy that at all.

Then either the air got very squirrely overall or I lost my nerves totally, (still don't know which) and things felt going rough and rougher to me. After a screeching eagle close by, another few big whackers and wobbling around in rough crap for another 40 minutes I decided that it's enough and landed. Pretty scared I was...

Tuesday and today I worked. Bah. Planned to drive out to the comp for the remaining three days tonight but I'm too beat: will leave at 0530 tomorrow. Let's see if I enjoy the remaining days better (I very much hope so) and I'll try to give some update on life, the universe and everything when I come back on Sunday.

Quote from the windows helldesk droids today at work, in response to my complaint about the "preferred browser" registry entry being locked:

"Firefox should not have been installed onto your citrix session. Unfortunately for various reasons we do not support any other browser other than IE within the citrix environment."

Well, thanks for nothing fellows. Massive brain atrophy is clearly involved here...like with the guy at the supermarket yesterday, who needed about 2-3 seconds per item to scan and bag; I was wondering whether his brain had actually died from lack of oxygen between his very...slow...and.....slower.....breaths.

In other painful news, my luck currently sucks somewhat: somebody cheated me on ebay (for the first time ever), took my $50 and vanished; one of my xmas presents seems to have been lost by the Austrian or the Australian postal services and another xmas present seems to have been lost by the American or the Australian post.

The first week of the teaching semester is over, without major gotchas. 2x2 hours of lecturing on Tuesday left me somewhat stunned (and with a throat getting sore) as usual. The weather sucks, rain and/or storms almost every day in the last week or so. My recent switch to wired ethernet at home still produces some TV/FM antenna trouble (unshielded TP), my hiking boots are about to give in (the foam/rubber sole is desintegrating) just before the Killarney comp, my car is about to die as well and I should do a lot of things I've got absolutely no impetus for.

On the positive side I've managed to shed almost three kilos which gets me back closer to the preferred weight level that I left sometime around the trip to .at last September.

Just got the word yesterday that my paper for the ARES 2006 conference in Vienna in late April was accepted, and it looks like the bosses will properly pay my registration and airfare. Great!

Less wonderful news is that tomorrow the teaching semester starts again, with me having both my main lectures tomorrow. Ah well. At least I had a good weekend with a fair bit of flying, a short XC flight on Sunday (short due to my own stupid tactical mistake) and a tally of 122.7 hours of airtime. I managed to reach the 120 hours on the very last day of 2005, and roughly kept up my average of 1 hour a week since then.

@pantheon, this whole "my life"-thing sucks at the moment.

At work the cluons are leaching away even faster than usual, the "Management by Magazine" (aka "if it's written in CIO, it must be good/true") gets worse and worse and the climate sucks. One of the head dimbulbs saw need to remind everybody in one of those all-staff spams that one of the last new rule-inventions was to be Followed By Rote...never mind that it makes no sense, is counterproductive and as stupid as the idiots behind it.

Writing up the PhD thesis sucks and consequently I'm having a hard time motivating myself. Got a paper in for a conference in Vienna in early 2006, mebbe for once I've produced bullshit shiny enough for academentia. But I doubt it: too honest and inept at waffling.

The Jolly Season is upon us yet again, and I hate it. Also, the weather currently sucks, it's very stormy with thunder and downpours every 2-3 days and lots of humid heat inbetween.

Drank too much yesterday, didn't go to bed until 0300 because White Squall ran as late night film and I liked it; didn't get up until late, weather looked stormy (but it hasn't rained yet) and I didn't drive up into the hills for flying. Felt sufficiently anti-social to not attend the club's christmas party (didn't even pick up the phone for the same reasons). Ah, Fuck It, I would only have hung around depressed anyway.

But there is nothing new about that, so I guess I should shut up now....

I'm sure &rw has been thinking about holding me over open flames in the last few weeks. My current/old colo at the company-that-was-cool-once is to be scrapped: the last oldschool techie has recently thrown the towel and the people running the show do not deserve any nostalgia or loyalty anymore.

The plan was that I'd get a cast-off ultra1 when he exchanges that for an ultra2 when my box joins his at the colo facility in Austria, and he'd be doing the actual installation as I'm geographically challenged.

Trouble is that his colo box is in a doomed building and mine will have to go somewhere else, and moving his to the new building means a new address: migrating his current ip address is a nogo. Fun! as his is a nameserver for lots of domains. So the decision was that the ultra2 goes in there first as my box, takes over dns duties with his new ip address in order to migrate his system, then his u1 is moved and the hardware gets swapped, done.

The disk I had sent him didn't boot on the ultra2, lots of tinkering later things work for a while only to have the PSU go *boom*. Next Friday the box needs to be installed, and I'm not going to be around between Sunday and Thursday (going to MEL) so anything that needs a console must happen before or 4-6 weeks later when the machines join each other finally.

But good friend that he is, he managed yesterday to scrounge up another complete ultra2 for me and set up remote access for me (console and net). Whoopee and Thank You! Lots of Beers I solemnly promise for the next time I'm visiting Austria...

(Anybody got a 170MHz ultrasparc CPU and 4x64-or-more Sun memory for cheap/sale?)

First I slept like a stone, couldn't get out of bed. Then it became obvious that the living room ceiling needs another coat of paint. Bah. Then the weather was good, but westerly - with the forecast being as usual totally wrong, saying nice easterlies.

So I drive up to Tambo, and have a shocker of a lousy flight: rough, got tossed around and shouted at by a hangie (something about getting out of the way - buddy, you can fly circles around me if you need! at that time I was happy to keep my glider roughly above my head and you don't want me put that thing anywhere close to you when things are as roller-coaster as I felt it...). After ending in the bombout, cursing myself for being a bit unstable today and chicken, Phil gets on the radio how ecstatically beautiful conditions he's having up over there where he is. Waaaaaah!

I get back up top with Geoff and another few ground grovelers but don't like the looks of the air: still looks rough. Quite a few people launch eventually, and I still don't like the looks (but start to get pissed at myself for being undecisive). Eventually most of us give up and drive down to Canungra for a cold drink; I'm pretty annoyed at myself and everything. The wind changes to the NE (but a bit strong according to the windtalker).

So I decide to give Beechmont another quick try, Richard and Jessica do so too. Get there, almost no wind. Stupid windtalker has been enthusiastically exaggerating the wind strenght as so often. But it looks just about doable... So I set up, launch in a bit of a puff and somewhat laboriously work myself up to about 75m above launch in light lift. Quite nice! Jessica was still sweating at launch with not a breeze there, but after she did finally launch she joined me superquickly at altitude (doing her usual feather-flying imitation). After half an hour the lift gets a bit lighter and we do perfect facelandings, with Richard taking pictures. I'm a lot happier now!

A small chat shows that the undecisiveness and annoyance aimed at yourself that plagues me a lot is common for the Cancer starsign. I'm still happy about having had a good flight.

Back at home, I find out that I forgot the sunscreen today and look like a silly owl in the face and like a jackass elsewhere (white torso, dark lower legs and arms). I then destroyed two screws while fitting new door locks and knobs in both my external doors (don't ask - all I can say is "cheap construction") but eventually manage to fix the problem (hammers, brute force, swearing, repeat). One key only everywhere now! (Never mind the cheap locks. Nothing hereabouts is crowbar-safe, so any intruder diddling with the locks is an absolute idiot.)

Finally I topped the day off with hitting myself hard in the face while closing a cupboard door. How clumsy can you get...

I've been spending all of today fixing the ceiling plasterboard in my house to stick to the ceiling trusses again. The boards in the living room were bulging down by about 7-8cm... About 300 screws later I've got two (small and unproblematic) rooms left completely undone, and the rest waiting for one more run with spatula and sanding block and, of course, loads of fun painting all over those spots. Bah.

More on this when I'm finished and when I can lift my arms again.

Sage advice. To enjoy crap rainy weather: come to sunny Queensland.
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This week we had the Canungra Cup comp on, but the weather sucked big time. Saturday and Sunday were sunny but blown out. Monday we flew the first task, but I didn't do too well in that: only got into the next valley (Flying Fox), 6km. Tuesday we started a task at Tambo, but it got a bit very windy; so the comp director canned the day. Wednesday was interesting: thunderstorms were developing but we flew from Tambo. I got to Gleneagle, north of Beaudesert, 19km. Shortly after I landed the wind started howling though and the task got stopped; Shane threw his reserve (it worked) and a few pilots landed going backwards at 20+ km/h. Marble-sized hail in Canungra. Thursday we flew off Beechmont again, but I bombed (together with almost a third of the field). Friday it was raining but with the top guns desperate for a fourth task (to make the comp count towards world ranking points) we sat around, and even drove up to Tambo later: This is how a AAA-grade competition field rarely looks like. The weather was crap, windy and drizzling; behind the stands it was more comfy. Saturday we spent hoping at Hinchcliffe's launch, but the low clouds didn't lift enough for a task. Some people then went for a free ridgesoar / galehanging flight but I was too lazy for that. Nevertheless I made it into 3rd position in my class (DHV 1-2 gliders). Not too bad for my first AAA competition I'd say :-)

...something starts failing intermittently. Over the last few weeks my wireless access point has started acting up: the clients got more and more disconnections during the night and things like that. I suspected a dead client card at first or a bad antenna connection, but today that prove wrong.

The thing stopped working about every 25 seconds for 5-10 seconds, repeat a few times and then it would work again for the next hour or so. I tried everything on the logical level, even investigated if somebody was playing silly tricks with the thing remotely...nothing helped. Resync, connect, a few seconds of activity, bang. It looked like the thing reset itself continuously.

Eventually I ripped it apart to see if it had blown any capacitors, nope. Switching it on again, the LEDs looked weird...kind of spastic. Trying the AP on a different power supply: it works. The original one: nope. The multimeter told me that the wall-wart PSU would produce +5V unloaded but under load it had less than 3.2V to give. No surprise the AP fell flat on its face whenever there was a bit of activity. Ripping the (dinky) dead PSU apart I found a voltage regulator looking very much cooked on a circuit board that also looked quite fried. I didn't have a matching PSU around that would meet the old specs (+5V but up to 2A), so I took an old ATX PSU and soldered a connector. Ugly But Works.

What I also hate is hearing about flying accidents. We had one today at my favourite flying site. I know not a lot of the specifics, but it must have been very ugly. Truly confidence-inspiring for next week's competition. Not.

Smoke detectors are useful. Mine usually tells me that eating toast is unhealthy by scaring years off my life expectancy with a Big Bad Jolt just few minutes after I take the toast out of the toaster.

Today, however, it was useful. After coming home from flying I wanted some food - quickly. So I got the microwave to heat up a meat pie straight from the freezer. Mmmmm, Pie! But it incinerated the pie. Pie tastes of donkeypoop!

Picture dark clouds of smoke billowing from my microwave....and the resulting mess. The microwave is now white(outside) and dark yellow(inside). My google-fu tells me that acetone will help, but as I'm not a nail-polish freak and without girlfriend I have no acetone at home. Monday then.

I realised on Friday that this week I had spoken only about 50 words to people personally, maybe another 200 words on the phone. This can't be healthy! (I also sent 37 emails. Some of which the suckers on the other side totally ignored. I hate that.)

The weekend was blown out, with a few of us being hopeful and spending most of Sunday parawaiting at Mt. Tamborine. To no avail, of course, but it allowed me to catch up with last month's rumours and flying news.

Monday was better, I had one short but nice flight from Tambo: while I got to cloudbase without major troubles, I didn't make the transition across the valley to Mt. Misery and thus didn't go XC; only Richard and Ben did. A second try later in the arvo didn't work out as the sea breeze came in over the back of the hill just as I was waiting ready on launch, and rushing to Beechmont, the easterly site, was in vain as there was not enough wind over there.

Given that I'll compete(hah!) in the Canungra Cup in a few weeks, I decided finally to replace my old Garmin 12 with a mapping GPS, a 76CS. After long deliberations I ordered it in the USA, but made a mistake with the expiry date of my credit card. Got an email from the shop asking for correction (not surprising), and also a call from the credit card company for confirmation of "recent account activity". A nice feature, actually, given the fact that I'm using the cheapest company there is hereabouts, which doesnt't earn any interest from me.

Saw Mullet on disc yesterday, enjoyed it very much. I'll have to hunt for a soundtrack or some stuff by the featured bands soon.

In other news I've got a motivation problem: I urgently need to finish a paper (about my PhD stuff) I'll be presenting at the Open Source Developer's Conference in Melbourne in December but the writing just doesn't flow...

...time for some recap/wrap-up.
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This week didn't work out the way it was expected to.
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I do not miss at all in Oz. One of them: the Viennese weather.
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Bloody goddamn fucking flying around - and I'm not even in the air yet, let alone done with the three flights it'll take me to VIE.
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...and I'm off for a few weeks in Austria. The schedules for meeting people are firming up already :-)
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"Satisfaction guaranteed - or your rubbish back"
Now that's going to make an unsatisfied customer happy...

The Sarah Blasko gig tonight was so-so: the two support bands were ok, nothing special, and unfortunately Sarah had a bad case of the flu and had to stop the gig after a few songs. Bummer. But (little consolation that it is) her voice is really as good and beautifully haunting as on her CD.

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yesterday i watched the element of crime again, for the first time in at least 6 or 7 years: still as sick and intriguing and haunted a film as in my first impression. (lars von trier is a weird person.)

today i felt the need for speed and saw sin city - and it rocked! a blood opera of epic film-noir dimensions, done comicky and really cool. i loved it. that's one dvd i'll have to get when it comes out.

...include the fact that a broken headlight glass sets you back $35. This is the beast in question (which by now looks a lot more bent and used up). Apparently I caught a stone the other week: the driver side headlight has a small hole, tiny on the outside but big on the inside. The deluges on thursday made it into the casing, and I saw the water beads on the inside yesterday. Went to one of the cheap spares shops today, and they got the thing in this arvo. Tomorrow I'll have some fun replacing the lens.

The "joys" of driving an old car of course also include the creakiness and general decrepitude of the thing. And with its worth estimated at about $2000, spending more than a few hundred bucks on fixes isn't real bright. Time to look for a replacement in the next few months...

Flooding everywhere. Couldn't even drive through to work: too much water on the roads around here. Uni has cancelled all classes today. The Pacific Fair shopping centre is closed. No mail. About 7000 people on the GC without power. 300mm of rain in the last 24 hours... This here is not a lake but my back yard. I'm somewhat lucky to be on reasonably high ground, but I get all the crap flowing down from the hill and one of the storm drains (of course the most crucial one!) is blocked. The neighbours down the creek, a meter lower than me, are not in an enviable position.

I don't know when before (if ever) I slept as badly as tonight; got up and out at about 0200 to clear two storm drains of leaves clogging the covering grid, then dozed until about 0830. My attempt at getting to work at 0915 wasn't successful: after driving around a bit trying to avoid the worst obstructions, I gave up: the water was just a bit too deep for my Falcon. At least I made it back home without getting the car flooded, and my net connectivity works still fine :-)

Last sunday was pretty crap - (this weekend, too, but in a different way): rain, rain, rain, drizzle, rain.
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Today was my birthday.

This is how I felt today: Today was an absolutely shitty day and bloody tomorrow is about as promising. And I hate all of you bastards who do not have to work for a living!
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Well, they may need this capability in my care. But more on the plants later.
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The EU-constitution is going dead and the Oz dollar surges against the Euro (but of course two months too late for my most recent transfer). ATS 8.50 per AU$ is the highest in a few years... And of course there's these rumours of the Euro zone breaking apart.

Some of the newly planted shrubs around the house are dying rapidly. Others thrive. No pattern; my non-green thumb strikes again. I've got a new toy, a standalone DVD/DIVX player. And I'm done with the kitchen tiles, just did the silicone around the joints. Photos when I'm finished rubbing off the remaining grout haze and the silicone is cleaned.

The usual global stupidity abounds, the Murkins now make laws worthy of bad old Stalin: be as stool pigeon - or be a jailbird for 2 years. Samizdata has a nice discussion on that.

In local breaking news, the Tenterfield Shire (about 250km SW from here) has noted that hanging dead dogs from trees offends the tourists and that people therefore shouldn't do this anymore. What a surprise.

Over The Hedge, one of my favourite comics is no longer readable via RSS stream. dailystrips comes to the rescue.

And, to really top off the Interesting Times stuff there's lousy news at work: group A has just borged group B. I'm a part of group B. Uni council favoured group A's appetite for power. Council via group A may or may not want us to run any of the Group B stuff anymore in the medium future. Which would make the place smaller by a good third or so, and us minus jobs. Which obviously sucks.
Stephan Pastis ran the career counselling theme recently in Pearls Before Swine. That strip (a/v up to a month) fits a bit too closely for comfort.

Had a lecture before noon today, not too bad. On my way back to the office I'm very much ready for a mug of coffee and a trip to the toilet.
*click*
Great. Now I'm stuck in the elevator and there is no power (just the emergency dimbulb). Campus security tells me everything is out and just wait a bit. About 10 minutes later the diesels kick in and the elevators wheeze back into action. A trip to the dark potty later and I'm ready for the rest of the day. Most of the campus is without juice, as are some of the surrounding suburbs. I'm doing some stuff on paper, because dead trees do not fail.

The plan for the rest of the day? Another lecture, supposed to happen at 1400. In a lab which is pitch-black right now. With no more than an extremely vague idea of what I was supposed to talk about, because my notes are on my desktop box. Which is power-less. (And on the web, which I can't access banging rocks together - maybe I need to learn to whistle V.34?)

About 15 minutes before the lecture is supposed to start the power comes back. Everybody rushes to the kitchen - think coffee deprivation in a place with electric kettles without electricity.

Back at my office, my desktop refuses to turn on. Fritzed PSU in the Dell piece-of-shite. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKIHATETHISTDAY. Ok, no lecture preparation then. I'll get my slides off the web (as all the students do, too) and start talking, seats of the pants operation.

The lab (which we were stuck with as Central Services are a bunch of headless chickens) is a lightless dungeon (therefore disliked for lectures; lab-work is fine). At least that lab is under my full control (including wiring cabinet and firewall).

The firewall is dead. Everything else blinkenlights fine, but not that box. And without it, no login (LDAP) and no net. Having had enough go wrong already, I had such premonitions and did bring the key to the cabinet where the firewall resides - and it does turn on (not a given; two weeks ago its mainboard had gone fritz and the Dell idiots took 3 days to come up with a spare - despite everything being on 24hrs support contracts...SEP).

I survive the lecture, with (as usual) lots of content uncovered.

My desktop is still dead, Dell promises some sod coming on-site tomorrow (as if that promise was worth a damn) to replace the PSU (not as if we couldn't do it, but the gear is leased so we're supposed to keep our grubby fingers off it). In the meantime I can't do any prep work for tomorrow which is - of course - the busiest day of the week. Great.

On a more positive note: I've finished tiling and grouting my kitchen tiles yesterday night. More on that later.

Last week my two mailservers collected these silly Sober.P/Q thingies by the hundreds. Not that I need to care much: I don't do Microsoft crap.

Now, however, the bloody thing has started its operation on all those subverted wankstations and blasts the world with bad German Nazi propaganda. With addresses belonging to me as sender. Gee, thanks for all those bounces!

Death is too good for both Nazis and virus spreaders. And, of course, for the idiots responsible for the lousy vulnerable software in the first place...

The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category magic: weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took out heffalump a few times as reported earlier. So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour. Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having much hope for the thing, and....it works.

The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at 1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants 0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better "explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)

Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.

Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.

Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.

The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.

Spent the last few days fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the source doesn't immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the font settings everywhere" did).

...which presently sucks big time.
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says the Definite Guide to Aussies. I'm going flying+camping to Killarney over the weekend, and I'll bring salad and beer with me. Sausages, too - a balanced feed, you know ;-)
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Already the 19th. *sigh* Some updates regarding what I've been doing lately: I've been tinkering a fair bit.
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The easter weekend was nice, but not too good for flying at Killarney.
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Off to Killarney for some flying (hopefully) and some camping fun (certainly) until Monday. Religious holidays are good for something I suppose...

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This is what I had to look at while walking to work...such nice clouds, very promising for flying. I had to go to work, hold an exam, do a lab in the evening, wrangle with jigdo and sarge...
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Let's see what happened in the last few weeks. Not very organised today; did too much code wrangling.
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I'm convinced of that. Aspirin is also the only medicament I use. (Paracetamol OTOH doesn't seem to do much for me, weird.)

Had a molar extracted earlier today. It took a couple of oversized anaesthetic injections until the jaw was sufficiently numb, and the doc had to cut the tooth in halves to get it out, with the usual pulling, ripping and assorted other jaw-wrenching niceties.

There is now a deep hole. The dentist had suggested I get some serious painkiller into my system before the anaesthetic wears off but as usual I'm too toug^Wstupid^Wstubborn to do that.

So the numbing anaesthetic wore off after 1hr45, and a few hours later I took 2x 250mg aspirin just to get rid of the slightly annoying soreness of the jaw and (unrelated) headache. That was 8 hours ago.

Then I made the mistake of eating salami: *of course* some of the tasty dead meat had to lodge in the hole I shouldn't touch, shouldn't suck or poke a toothpick into...*aggrrr*. Ah well, at least none of the salty chips ended up in there, that might have hurt.

Gah, I hate heisenbugs. &rw is currently on a crusade...against poor old exmh. Not a single of the problems that pester him are reproducible here, and I haven't seen anything resembling that level of problems on the exmh-{users,workers} lists. ASS, AHS etc.

On a more positive note: I'm a sucker for obscure technical documentation, like the SR-71 Flight Manual or this collection of car (service/owners) manuals. I must have wasted at least a day reading the SR-71 book (what for? pure technical curiosity) and yesterday spent a few hours reading this 41 chevrolet shop manual: the amount of marketing-speak about the company's "new, improved, better" manufacture was hilarious. What was also pretty much fun was the amount of pictures of people using heavy hammers on delicate gear. I suppose you can get away with things like that when a 4.1 liter engine is expected to produce a stunning 29hp....

January is gone, with little recollection of where the 31 days went. Bugger.
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Yesterday the new semester started, with me teaching Computer Security. As always in the first lecture I wore my special shirt, see below. Got the usual appreciating grins from people, fellow staff congratulating me on my wacky collection of shirts etc.

The lecture went well, didn't scare off too many students & may have even kept them interested a bit.

But today the first lab was way less than shiny. I had prepared nicely, exercises for them to try ready and so forth, but just about everything went pear-shaped. The main proxy didn't want to spit out one of the texts I wanted to use mainly, had to invent a storyline from scratch and lost my thread of thought a bit at times.

Which is very bad for this particular lab as it's supposed to be a Unix survival session for those students without prior experience in Unixy matters...and $deity knows there's more than enough Unixish stuff I could tell them if we had time, but instead I have to cram exactly the items of utmost vital importance in this single 2hr session.

Likely concentrating on working on a paper submission related to my PhD project in the hours before the lab wasn't that good an idea...got me on a totally different track and captured me quite a bit (especially as work was flowing, which is rare for me when cobbling together academic paper things...doing stuff I like, bug braggi^Wwriting papers about it...). And this paper must be submitted by friday (and I should do a second related one also by friday - learned of the submission deadline for this conference on monday....). This Sucks.

So I was less than lucid in that lab. I hate it when I don't deliver quality. Bugger!

Finally, after quite a lot of to-and-fro I've managed to get a grip and book an appointment with a dentist next week. I'm sure it'll hurt - naturally more than now, which is about not at all.

Contrary to common belief, this is not a blessing: my second-to-last dentist expressed some incredulity when he quickly did a root canal treatment without anaestethic: it didn't hurt very badly. Which was good there and then, but: if I actually felt my teeth developing problems, I wouldn't have needed that treatment.

So I'm as anxious and scared of all them butchers as usual, but I'm certain that as before my usual stoicism in the face of inevitables will resurface. I'm also certain that after the body manglers are done things will stop hurting again.

Apropos new year. Oz is weird: fireworks are verboten, as in totally absolutely off-limits to the average person. Except in Canberra, home of the big gutter swi^W^Wpoliticians - where consumer fireworks are still allowed but only on the queen's birthday weekend (not that this makes any sense). The Aussies must harbour a semi-suppressed wish for somebody to blow up all the pollies in one big bang, I think.

'Twas the night before Christmas
and all 'round my belt,
Not an item was squarking
or beeping for help.

The pager was silent,
the cellphone as well.
The email was empty,
the situation was swell.
 
The lusers were happy,
and due to my hack,
The PHB was currently
detained in Iraq.
 
The servers were humming,
the errorlogs clear,
The building was locked,
I'm full of good cheer.

I with my Guiness,
from a pint glass I sucked,
if a luser wanted a password reset,
they can go get fscked,

Murphey be damned,
The Iron's been sated.
The goat has been slaughtered
And the pr0n-feed's gold plated.

Ma's dressed in a kerchief,
A bow on her neck,
Something nice to unwrap
For this tired old tech. 

So I sip on my brandy
While server fans whine.
Her lips taste of candy
The machines will be fine.

Mike Raeder, the Magrathean Jim and AJS of the monastery are responsible for this beauty.

First shower was a normal warm one, to get the body started and ready for work (yawn). At the moment I'm often super-tired and depressed. The wet weather of the last few days doesn't help and keeps me from flying.

Then the weather got worse. The second shower was a cold one, dancing around in the pouring rain to remove the leaves and all the other crap from the storm drains again. The one down the footpath is blocked fully right now, which means my most important one (at the corner of the house closest to the hill) is also stuffed.

Terrific! How I love that.

Classifying the situation not overly problematic, I got my third shower. Warm again, because I was soaked and cold. At least the temperature here is high enough so that one can go out into the rain with a short, shirt and birkenstocks/thongs and not freeze immediately. Then I went to work, around noon.

In the evening the rain radar showed again "heavy" rains, and boy did it pour the last two hours. I just unblocked the drains the umpteenth time today (wearing headlamp, goretex and a short) and the next fucking storm front is already on the radar. And the important drain is still down, and will stay so until at least tomorrow arvo. Bugger.

Last week my last grandma and Cornelia's hamster died. Both were fairly old, grandma at 90+, and the hamster was an Elder Hamster, too.

Grandma surely didn't mind finally dying; the last few years she didn't really enjoy herself very much anymore - eyesight pretty much gone, too frail to do anything, breaking bones every couple of months and so on - but she still was lucid and happy about my (infrequent) postcards and even more infrequent calls.

The hamster never received any phonecalls from me, but I'm sure it had a good life in Cornelia's care nevertheless.

I wish both of them a happy next life, or happy sansara or whatever they may feel appropriate.

The weather today was mostly lousy, so I didn't go flying. didn't do anything useful as a matter of fact, just went looking for tiles for the kitchen splashbacks (unsuccessfully) and picked up four new used sf books in Coolangatta.

There's days like this one when about everything sucks. I feel like Gestra Ishmethit, the place is a mess but I don't feel like cleaning up (beyond the bare necessities), the laundry is waiting but I don't switch on the washing machine, a lot of code is waiting to be developed but I don't like to code and so on. I'd like to sublime away now. (But I'm 350 pages into John Varley's Demon.)

...you wake up in the morning only to discover that your house has turned into an island overnight.
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Well, that sure fucked up this Saturday; it's still thunderstormy and raining.

At the moment reality is in overdrive, blog-writeups lag behind. I have discovered truly marvelous things but they don't fit into the margin of this website. So stay tuned.

Tomorrow I'm off for a week of Killarney Comp Flying, hopefully a lot of fun. More info when I come back.

This is something of a bulk update; I've accumulated some stuff in the last ten days but never got around to write it up properly and didn't post anything.
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If you read this in a catalogue, what would you expect?
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The last two days it's been raining here. Lousy for flying, lousy for my mood but good for the land. The grass in the backyard is growing nicely. Still, for me it's a good thing that those grey days are very rare here.

I am. However, I've been a wee bit busy and stuff has been piling up that was of way higher importance than doing blog posts...

So, on to a quick recap.
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today i went shopping - after work. the weather was lousy, and i had to check kitchen appliance prices anyway. but i didn't buy any new kitchen gear - yet: i've been in dire need of new chucks for months, both old pairs having gaping holes by now, and the mainstream shops hereabouts wanted $80 for a pair.

so i drove to the harbour town shopping centre, a conglomerate of mostly factory outlet type shops, to visit 'authentic - converse'.

the name is the program, and they sell. converse. only. good. and they had a sale on, with 20% off everything. even better! i paid $79 alltogether and now i have two new pairs of high chucks, and Life is Good again.

...

why the silly title, then? you might ask.

well, one of the pairs is sky blue (not navy, much lighter), and the other is a really flash neon orange! *silly cackle*

a big "boo-boo" to all those suckers trying to portscan my systems. the tarpit flypaper works perfectly well, as can be seen on these graphs of packets going to the tarpit. currently i've got no packet logging on as that does produce a nasty amount of logs, but for simple test purposes tcpdump is fully sufficient: tcpdump -n "tcp[14:2] = 0" shows exactly the zero-window-tarpitted stuff.

the next thing i'm doing just now ist to add the random patch to make these boxes look a little less well connected so that the intake of crap goes down a bit.

The weekend was a long one (by me taking monday off work), and was spent at Killarney, cleaning up one new launch and cutting another. Good work, lotsa blisters though. Sunday we had one flight, not too bad but very much too short at about 35 minutes. I got to 1600m (from 900 or so), but then hit sink so bad that I couldn't even make it into town (only Andrew did) and landed just on the outskirts of Killarney.

Tuesday was the big disappointment; work was horrible with me spending all day long beating a recalcitrant FAI installation to work with the new linux lab machines (new Dulls with bleeding-edge lousy hardware that require a mixture of Debian stable and testing to run at all...gah), without full success so far. I went home at 2130.

Just before that I had to learn that Paul flew from Tamborine over the Border Ranges into NSW to Tyalgum, a good 40km...I'm soooo envious, especially given the fact that today I'm stuck at work, too, and tomorrow I'll have the annual Pest control visit....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Talk about missed opportunities.

Just blew AU$ 150 on cds, mostly Kiwi stuff from smoke CDs and another AU$ 20 on a new mobile phone battery for my trusty (ha!) old S35.

The Kiwis are only 4 million strong, but have a real lot of good alternative bands; either some of the 40 million sheep moonlight as musos or the human contingent is really inspired.

This week saw me flying on tuesday arvo, in the rain and everything, working on wednesday and being sick with a cold on thursday. Tomorrow I'll head out to Killarney for 3 days of working and flying; Andrew said that there's two new launches opened so that we have something for every wind direction.

Just learned today that my daughter and exwife won't be visiting me this christmas: airfare from the US to Oz is too dear at the moment. Bummer, I would have liked to see them. Hmm. Will have to hope for next year then...

...I came to Oz for the first time, and one year ago I moved into my house here (well, mine and the bank's). And, guess what, I still like the place! Amazing ;-)
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And this weekend is over.
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Today I had the choice between being a Good Working Drone or a Happy Flying Bum. Based on the stack of work awaiting and the info the windtalker gave me, I chose the former (reasoning that with that amount of wind I wouldn't enjoy flying anyway).

Silly me. The arvo was apparently very good and a friend of mine had a very good flight from Flying Fox into Canungra...argh. Envy. Regret. I'm feeling super-stupid now.

So what did happen in those last couple weeks since I posted anything personal?

I managed to convince the ANZ webbanking to work again. Bloody javascriptshite. Tricking it by observing the urls, the steps and form contents I concocted a 3 liner standalone HTML form that sends the collected rubbish directly to the webbanking application and thus bypasses all the sill javashite that crashed my firebird in exactly half the cases.

I also had to transfer some money back to EUland so that I can keep paying alimony for Conny. Bandits, hoodlums and extortionists! Those banks... Of course the conversion rate was lousy (after it had been really good for almost half a year - when I didn't realise that I'd have to act RSN) and on top of that the fees and charges and bloodmoney you have to give is quite high: AU$22 here and EUR18 on the other side. Bastards.

More positive than the banking was the flying, but just so. After the tree-retrieval on 6.7. the weather turned not-so-suitable; The following weekend I had one short hop of a flight, out of utter desparation. The week after that was so-so and no good on the days I could have taken arvos off, but on friday evening the forecast looked good. I, however, decided to be stupid: had way too many homebrew beers friday evening, and subsequently spent of the following 24hrs 17hrs sleeping, sick, tired and drunk (a lovely combination). The weather was quite ok, but I didn't even leave the bed until 19:40 in the evening...

But I've discovered something new: namely that Paracetamol doesn't work well for me; Aspirin works a lot better for my occasional cold and head or tooth aches. A toast to the discoverers of acetylsalicylic acid! Three hoorays!

On Sunday I was sober, keen and the sun was out, too. But there was a bad storm-wind warning which stayed in effect until the following friday so there was no flying whatsoever (up to 40kts of wind may be good for seagulls but not for us).

Wednesday my heater packed it in (or I thought so); in fact it was only the temperature safety switch, but nevertheless I decided to use the late-winter-bargain opportunity to buy a small oil radiator ($29 for a 5-fin 1kW unit). These things work a lot better than all the fan or radiation heaters IMO. Fixing the old one I ran across these annoying things.

And as we're talking about hardware: my silly U1 HME occasionally decides to be deaf-mute for no apparent good reason (other than having to talk to a POS alcadreck on the other side of an Xover cable). heffalump was thus n/a for almost a whole workday, but a quick&dirty half-liner cronjob now takes care of minimising this problem.

Last Saturday I had at least a short flight again, at a site called Flying Fox (where one of the new students recently had an accident and broke her foot badly). The conditions were too light, though, so I ended up in the bombout very soon from where I took this picture of Jessica joining us in the bombout :-)

Sunday there was another short flight to be had: Tamborine, but in bumpy conditions. Andrew (who is currently ranked nr.4 worldwide!) had a full frontal collapse just above the trees, and scared everybody off pretty badly. I had just landed, after rough conditions with not exactly a lot of forward speed, so I hadn't stuck around the ridge any longer - fortunately! Andrew later told us that he and Richard weren't certain at some stage whether they would make it to the bombout - and them with performance gliders! In the arvo I got busy and did a lot of cleanup at home, fixed some stuff, did the laundry, did some programming, some repairs on the Fart Falcon and the 2003/4 tax declaration (which is a simple thing in AU anyway, minimal fuss and little paperwork to be sent in: you claim your claims, and keep the evidence in case they check on you. But initially the authorities trust you. A novel feeling for somebody coming from Austria.) feeling for somebody coming from

And finally in the evening I watched "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai": ah, what a cool film. It's time to read the Hagakure for myself.

Conny has just flown over to my parents for a stay of a couple of weeks. She flew from NY to VIE (with a stop in London, AFAIK), alone (modulo stewardess keeping an eye on her). Amazing: she's now 9 years old and has seen more of the world than I did until I was 25+. I hope she enjoys her life.

Apropos flying: winter flying here seems to be more hazardous than the wilder conditions in summer. One of my friends recently tested how well a paraglider flies through high-tension power lines (It doesn't.). Apart from causing a power outage for some country folks, a big scare for his wife and children and a black hole vortex in his wallet he's fine.

And on tuesday another friend of mine decided to decorate a tree with her glider; nil damage in that case (except to her pride) and not even overly much work to retrieve the flying machine from its lofty position. Amazing. I just hope that I don't joing the "Hug the Koala" club anytime soon.

Got a late birthday present from my sisters today: a mix CD with 1972's wor^Wgreatest hits. Boy, some of them are so bad that they're actually fun to listen to :-)

The Fog of War is a great film, a documentary about R.S. Mcnamara and his role in the post-WW2 America. Brilliant, and the Philip Glass soundtrack makes it even better. Of course, living in the cultural wasteland way south of Brisvegas, means that no cinema ran it. Zip, zilch, zero, naught, none of the chain cinemas and no for the one "artsy" cinema on the GC. But if the viewer can't come to the movie, the movie has to come to the viewer. And it did.

Anything else? hmm, nothing of real importance. Austria is now short one top pollie bastard, but it's not the bastard. Pity. But at least it's one less polly crook. Der Blitz soll sie alle beim Scheißen derschlagen.

Some asshole stole my bicycle. Walked to the rear of my house, took the bike, vanished. I wish he/she breaks his/her wretched neck while using it!

Sigh. It wasn't worth too much (got it for $500 second hand three years ago) but still...callous bastard! Ah well, so I don't have to think about fixing all the minor annoyances the bike started to suffer from.

Having a cold sucks. Having a sore, runny and blocked nose sucks. Going through tissues by the crate sucks. Having to lecture despite that sucks.

But, I've got network access again. That doesn't suck :-)

I've also taken the time to start a new pot of homebrew; the water heater is the only convenient spot where it's warm enough for proper sustained fermentation.

It's been a while since the last diary updates, mostly due to the lack of network access at home. Boy, this sucks so badly...
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So this is The Day and I'm roughly halfway down my life track. But somehow this half does not exactly inspire any sense of expectation for the next half.

no net: the dial up @ work has finally been scrapped; i can only hope that the guys at telstra/dart get my adsl connection setup RSN....

been sick all day long, slept until 15:30, fewerish and gifted with a great headache.

But since 1.5. I've got no net (almost; dialup works intermittent and unreliably) because I'm switching adsl providers. Grrrrrrrr, doesn't exactly make me *want* to update things. Anyway.

The weekend before this (ie. 1.-3.5.) we spent at Killarney, cutting a new launch site into the forest. Saturday and sunday was chainsaw-time, with the wind being strong and westerly anyway. lesson learned: work up, not down the slope. Crawling across fallen trees to get to the ones that are still to cut was Not Fun. Next time we know.

Monday was a public holiday (worker's day or somesuch) and we flew from the new launch. It was quite cold, so I landed a bit earlier than necessary; only Ivan got "away" - he landed just beyond town.

The hardware gremlins are still around: two pairs of shoes are about dead, and I hate buying clothes. The stupid cows at Killarney licked all my car (bonnet, windows, everything - now it's really dirty) and they also broke the antenna. So I wedged the broken antenna rod back in for the drive home, but then a flock of birds hit the car @90km/h: the flock scores 1, antenna 0, but they've got one player out dead. Since then I've replaced the antenna with a mangled indoor tv rod, works. Ah yes, and I've cleaned some windows; not the whole car as it's not worth my time.

That was the weekend, the week was soso with some work getting done but me getting more and more cold and sickish. Yes, winter is here: nights go down to +16°. Saturday I bought a couple of SF books, a toaster and triggered the cold, finally. Sunday and monday I spent in bed, feverish and feeling lousy.

Yesterday evening I decided to install Civilization: Call To Power again, and 6 hours later it was 01:00 and I was sleepy and wide awake at the same time. Today I spent 11 hours on the bloody game. Horrible, just like 15(?) years ago when I sacrificed whole nights to the original Civilization game...

The hardware gremlins are still at work, the Ultra 1 I ebayed recently and got delivered today has a dead PSU. Great! Tomorrow I'm off to Killarney again, for the extended weekend: monday is one of the communist public holidays (workers' day or so, the Aussies moved the holiday from 1 May to 3 May cause the 1st is a saturday, and nobody needs publich holidays on the weekend. Makes sense, doesn't it?) and I'll spend the weekend either working on the launch sites (chainsaw, brushcutter etc.) or flying, depending on the weather.

played around with rss to make robert happy. rss aggregators/viewers? not many, but the small mozilla-firebird extension (38kb xpi) works pretty nicely.

spent today being bored silly on the hills, as the wind wasn't right but the weather itself was great.

Not that I care a whit about religion but the public holidays come handy. The semester is almost over, the next one already casts its dark shadow but I don't care on this weekend: I'm going flying and camping at Killarney. Hope the weather stays ok and the wind turns a bit...

Ants are fairly annoying creatures; even more than cats they take your place as their place. But I'm striking back.

The silly proxy at work made me miss the end of an ebay auction for a nice ultra 1 with creator 3d card by about 3 seconds; of course that one was the first and only one of a batch of 3 that went at a reasonable price. arrrgh. But then somebody is offering a fully populated E3000 and an SSA112 with 30x4G for AU$ 500 alltogether. Ah, the temptation...

Now off preparing my flying and camping gear.

Fscking spamassassin cost me hours today; it wouldn't expire an overfull Bayes database but happily waste CPU hours trying it over and over again...

At least my car has 4 working shocks again. But the laundry is unhung, the floors not vaccuumed and I've still got to complete marking of a lab assignment before tomorrow morning. It rains. Lovely.

Yesterday I asked myself "What's next?". Now I know, dammit.
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Hardware appreciation week was followed very soon by Transportation Appreciation weekend.
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monday: evening lectures, DNF. friends told me it was great.
tuesday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
wednesday: late lectures, DNF.
thursday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
friday: weather looks lousy, rain all around the ridge. DNF. of course a friend had to call me right now, saying that they just flew an hour, between rain.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

sunday i ripped off my car's front bumper partially; got it hooked on a log at the carpark. couldn't find out how that bloody thing actually should be attached, so currently it's fixed with a bit of string. didn't find the time yet to fix it, as today arvo was wasted on the hill waiting for some wind to come up.

mark, darryl, nigel and i spent the waiting exchanging stories. but of course those hours i'm missing now, so i'm fixing tomorrow's lab stuff just now...yawn.

user-mode-linux rocks, but not when started from init. gah, that took hours to debug but eventually i found it...

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...must have been Hardware Appreciation Week.
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i got my new harness today. new, shiny (well a bit dusty in fact; it's three weeks used), comfortable, cool. can't wait to fly it.

...I wouldn't have internet access right now.
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The weekend was lousy, no flying as the weather wasn't good. Friday brought a really strong storm (50+kts winds and lots of rain), quite some damage in QLD and thousands of households without energy. My take was only a little wetness beneath one exposed window.

Some ants have decided that my house would make an ideal place to live for them. I have decided otherwise and started chemical warfare.

My car seems about to become sick; either the aircon belt, the belt idler pulley or the aircon compressor are about to go titsup and the bloody things squeals a lot and loudly. Also the front end suspension needs a major overhaul (definitely new shocks, maybe bearings) and four new tyres are called for. So, lets throw good money after the bad...

It's 2355 and I've spent until 1945 at work then another two hours here prepping the lab tasks for tomoroow and trying to decide on the second assignment for the hopelessly overwhelmed Unix Programming students; in the end I settled for writing a simple shell, but actually I would have liked them to play with MegaHAL instead...

And I can't find the time to do any proper cycling or running in the evenings; mostly I've been working flat-out those last couple of days... I will leave for Melbourne on Thursday arvo, must complete the presentation slides before that, mark 15 programming assignments, finish marking 35 security assignments, and orchestrate two midterm tests. Ah fuck it, this week sucks.

But at least I managed to go to the movies on sunday: One Perfect Day. Australian film, pretty good.

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The weekend in Hobart was fun (especially as SAGE-AU came up with the airfare, so all I had to pay was the one extra night at the hotel), but today's flights back with a lecture half an hour later was pretty heavy.

Got up at 0420, left the hotel at 0500, flight to melbourne at 0625, then two hours to kill there and finally the flight back to the Gold Coast arriving at 1030 local time. The luggage unloading didn't work out properly, apparently they lost a loader during ops so we had to wait around for another extra 20 minutes. Then a 2hr lecture, a bit of sifting through my email (the private stack is at 1100 now, work about 60...no joke), and then home-sweet-home. Hobart, while cold was at least sunny, but the weather on the Gold Coast has been and is lousy: strong rains, warm and wet.

Got my first dvd today, a used 2 disc set of final fantasy. Great film, took a while to convince ogle or mplayer to display it but then it was marvellous. A pity that my lapdog with its lousy mach mobility graphics card can't really keep up with full screen movie display...

Life is going by, way too fast.
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...airconditioners would be setup properly. You'd be amazed. The Rainbow trip over the weekend didn't happen, because I had caught a nice little cold in the freezing lecture theatres and labs last week; spent friday and half of saturday sick in bed. Bummer. Saturday arvo I had at least a flight, 45min, but I bombed out and the walk up the hill with the heavy gear was worse than usual. Anyway, a flight's a flight.

Worked most of the day on XSLT and Xpath nastinesses, and, oh boy, XML sucks; people should use m4 again and life would be better. What a selection of kludges, one more expensive and complex than the other...

Tried the linux bootable business card today, but my lapdog hangs during boot; the usual framebuffer video gotchas?

Couple of days ago I realised that there was suspiciously little email reaching my desktop, while the server was properly logging things. Turns out that an dpkg -P clamav-milter had cleared the clamav cron file, which on my system was responsible to move the goodies from an inbound queue to the real mailqueue (post-clamav of course)....grrr. 700 mails, the input of two days...

The week, how was the week? not especially pleasant; work went along so-so, but the prep of the upcoming talk at the tas04 conference is to be done urgently and the usual xml and xslt kludges for james took up too much time already. I'm suffering from a bit of a cold (damn airconditioning) and am constantly tired. Also my car just came back from service but somehow that doesn't seem to have bettered the minor and major annoyances much.

At least, if nothing major happens, I'll get out a bit: tomorrow I'll drive up to Rainbow Beach for the weekend (couple of hundred km in the north), flying on the beach (hopefully). So let's hope for a nice refreshing weekend.

This past month has gone by way too fast, and the last three days were lousy.
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...at least not for sewing. Spent at least an hour and a bit yesterday sewing two curtains with a borrowed sewing machine, but in the end things worked out ok.

Weather was lousy today so I wasn't flying. In fact, I could have slept in and actually tried to, but - luck of the day - the complex manager chose this morning to mow the lawn outside my house. That's a wee bit too loud for enjoying sleeping in.

At work I got the cvs-to-topicmapdb plug working yesterday and a couple of minor fixes and things, too. TinyCA is nice, but as it wants libgnome-perl an bloated hog space- and requirement-wise.

sunday was ok; after mucho parawaiting i got the last thermal of the day and climbed straight out to 1000m (450m above launch) in otherwise not-so-flash conditions (for the others who didn't get in the air). that was the first time in two years that i didn't have to fear a tree landing at mt. tamborine, and the view over the gold coast was beautiful. i didn't take any photos, should have. did reset the harness, now it works better but i nevertheless committed to buying the new one.

there was a big thunderstorm in the evening, and as i had the new radio set up properly it was fun listening to BNE airspace control and airplanes talking about bad weather and diversions. monday OTOH wasn't anything to write home about; while i deployed the ldap environment for the lab and started devising nasty tasks for the unix programming assignment, in the lecture in the evening i wasn't very lucid and couldn't capture the audience well. ah well another day...

Today I got a spam with this subject: Az, How I became Mr. King DongUcMbcVrw4oWy? Weird. Do they read this blog?

Spent friday morning working then fixing the radio. A bit of desolder braid, patience and stable hands and now the ham rig transmits mostly everywhere (which I don't care about or use) and in the UHF CB range (which I need). The Sparcstation5 at home got an extra fan as it's currently a bit hot (30° C) and the fans in the PSU had been screaming away.

Had a bit of flying in the afternoon, but got cramped up totally after 35 minutes of ridge soaring in rough conditions: my harness (Supair evo modular) doesn't work well for flying prone with a stirrup, but that's my favourite position (for flying. you fools.). Things are especially bad when I've got heavy junk in the back pocket, like the two liters of water on top. My stomach muscles ache.

Today we had a bit of an XC (cross-country) forum at Phil's shop and I tried on a new Gin Genie XO harness. I shouldn't have done that. Now I'll have to spend the $1200 or so on it, bummer. There's really a major difference in comfort and feel...ah well, could have gone for a top-of-the range harness two years ago, but then: what looks sillier than a novice barely being able to control his wing but adorned with a flashy XC harness? Right, nothing.

Apart from the forum a DNF day (did not fly) for me; I got lots of sun exposure but the wind situation didn't feel inviting enough and I was still tired from yesterday.

Too much work, as I'm being too perfectionist as usual. Spent quite some time fixing portal issues, writing labnotes and so on. Last couple of days never got to bed before 00:45, mostly doing last-minute shite. bummer, and the airconditioning at work has left me a nice cold once again - despite me wearing a sweater in all lectures and labs. Imaging that, it's just under 30° C outside but I need a sweater inside and still catch a damn cold...silly.

Yesterday I started thinking about a replacement for mozilla firebird: saving data handed out by scripts is borked to the max, see bugzilla bugs 160454, 84106 and 177329. Bloody piece of shit. I found out about the broken behaviour while tcpdumping when I couldn't save the output of a portal-related script that I needed in a lecture about 15 minutes later. (Then I resorted to ie within citrix in my desperation...apparently I suffer from bogon-emitters at work).

spamassassin wasn't cooperative recently, apparently it had entered a tightening spiral wrt. bayes ratings as my autolearn-as-spam threshold was set too low. fixed that by forcefeeding it the last couple hundred emails (about 5 days worth or so) as ham.

This morning the post person was here, got me my new radio (a multiband Yaesu VX-5r) and a CF-based mp3 player (a Nex IIe). The mp3 player does what it's supposed to, the radio not yet - while I did go to jaycar I forgot to buy the desolder braid I'll need to mod it for the UHF CB frequencies I actually need it for (me no ham). Yaesu must employ mostly Space Cadets, the keypad is a wee bit overloaded (3 modes for each of 20 buttons plus a rotator-selector)

i've had about 8 hours of work with openldap, ssl, libnss-ldap and libpam-ldap to build a fully-fledged, completely centralised auth environment for the linux lab at work, without having to upgrade the boxes to unstable or testing (that's the main rub, as stable's openldap does not have tls enabled... lots a minor and major niggling nasties) but i got it work eventually. the first system security lecture today did also work out well, but the lab tomorrow would benefit from me having another 48hrs to look for good things to show. bummer. dead-tired, so not looking forward to dealing with more administrative junk tomorrow.

went by fairly organised; the weather was lousy but work did progress reasonably. i got fai to DWIM without too much hassle (hmm, if i find the time i should make a simple real-world example demo setup; the docs that come with it are not good). the first lecture (unix programming) was also relatively fun; a bit small a class. i even almost managed to cover all i had planned/hoped for.

bought a couple of books yesterday, "adiamante" by modesitt, "nimbus" by jablokov and something by octavia butler. the modesitt i've already devoured, that was pretty cool. nimbus is also quite captivating but will take two or three more days, there's too much work on the stack.

...as this little bloggish diary begins.
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