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?