Support Fun
Today the support team had one of the best customer complaints in a while. They complained that the load on the proxy server was too low. :)

Work
Another week over. Many changes. Dancer is leaving the end of next week, and I've rather surprisingly decided to take the role of designing and helping to implement a new stats system. I'm also really going to be moving to a nine-day fortnight this time.

House
The nice house near Ian and Sofie is subject to flooding, but we're not sure what type of flooding. Checking up with Melbourne water and looking for signs of flood damage tomorrow.

Games
Gamma on my S3 Virge is very low, and there seems to be NO way to change it. This makes playing X-COM very dark. Too dark. Not happy.

Bicycles
The Victoria police will be stamping identification numbers into bicycle frames at University, in order to assist with recovering your bike should it ever get stolen. The mail I have says "bring your driver's license". I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this ironic?

Weekend
Gwen's left back for Ballarat, and shall not be returning. She's going to be spending a bit of time there before heading off to Perth.

Replaced ai-chan's hard-drive with one that doesn't make noises like it's about to fall apart. The old drive is due to be placed in the proxy box to relieve the growing shortage of space there.

Spent lots of time fiddling with hardware. I normally play X-COM on Gwen's machine, but since she's taken it with I've had to re-install Windows on ai-chan. I've never actually noticed that my (fairly cheap) monitor has lost so much brightness over the years until now. At least it doesn't lose colours like Gwen's one did.

Windows did something to my SCSI card so that it can no longer be used under Linux. I wish I knew what, I miss my SCSI CD-ROM.

Finance::Quote
No time for open-source this weekend, unfortunately. Going to have to see if I can squeeze it into a weeknight somewhere.

Bike
Biscuit has a flat tyre. Must fix.

CVS
If at first it looks like it's broken, make sure you have the correct version checked out of the repository. It saves lots of time bug-hunting.

Hardware
Sucks. My faithful home workstation, ai-chan (a mighty P133) is showing clear signs that the hard-drive does not have much life left in it. It made quite loud and alarming whirr, clunk, pling, bzzzzt, clunk, zap, bzzt, bzzzt, clunk, whirr sounds, which in my book translate to "Backup immediately, I'm going to blow smoke." An immediate backup is what I'm intending on doing. I can't say that I'm at all interested in buying new computer hardware, but having my hard-drive die is not going to be fun. Stupid junk. I hate hardware.

New hard-drive probably means a long and boring time waiting for Debian to re-install. Sucks hugely.

Gwen
Gwen is leaving us this weekend, back to Ballarat for a week or two and then off to her new life in Perth. I wish her all the best, but it means she's taking her machine that I use for playing X-COM. I've backed up the required files to my dying hard-drive, lucky me.

Houses
Found a house a few days ago with a nice yard, reasonable price, close to Ian and a tram. Looks like it might have a heritage listing, though. From my experience of renting my current heritage-listed property, I know that the telcos won't touch the damn thing. Going to have to chase things up with the council.

General
I want a huge weekend. I've spent way too much time at work, or looking at houses, or otherwise doings non-relaxing things. This weekend doesn't look as if it will help much either -- I'll be spending time buying new hard-drives, visiting my family, and (trying!) to release Finance::Quote 1.02. Sure, none of them are bad, but they're not quality relaxation. Real quality relaxation requires three days.

Houses
Went looking at lots of houses over the weekend. None of them particularly took my fancy. Visited my parents, and discovered that housing prices in their area have been going up quite significantly in the last few years. They're very happy, as their house is worth quite a bit now. Even the pub in the formally dodgy suburb of Spotswood is getting in on the act. A few years ago it used to have "Strippers and Topless barmaids." Now the sign proudly reads, "Exotic Dancers and Foxy Bar-Ladies. (Entertainment may of be a sexually explicit nature which may cause offense to some people)". Very upmarket indeed.

Looked at a house in Coburg that had a great location. Perfect cycling distance from the city and close to good things like Ian, Sofie, Ben and Tara. Sure, the house had oh-so-trendy brick-cladding and vinyl-woodgrain coverings for that true 50's and 60's feel, but it wasn't in such bad nick. My main concern is that it's slightly higher than my usual price bracket, and that the yard (whilst large) is smaller than I would like.

Going to try and look at comparison houses tonight to get a feel for what else is in the area and if we want to proceed further with this current prospect. I'm going to feel much much better when all this house-buying business is over.

Sunshine Movie Theatres
Went to the movies with Dan and saw X-men. Had to go out to Sunshine to find a cinema that had it showing. Good movie provided that you suspend disbelief about anything you know regarding genetics and mutations.

The thing that impressed me most were the toilets in the Sunshine movie theatre. Very shiny and well-cared for, the facilties were large enough that not only could they fit an entire football team, they had enough space to play a game of football if needed!