House
We made an offer on the house, and someone else made an offer for the full asking price, so they got it. I'm not too upset, as there are plenty of other nicer houses out there, and in a few months time I'll be in a much better position to buy. What I find interesting is that both Ian and Sofie, and Benni and Tara are looking at buying houses now. It's almost looking like a Monopoly game.

Banks
One of the banks who I was talking about home-loans with wants to give me a complimentary credit card with an outrageously large credit limit. I'll be handing it back to them.

Diplomacy
Junwei is winning, and after this game I am going to have to take lessons from him about how he does this. Italy (Phil) is eating out of Junwei's hand, and is probably going to spur Junwei on to victory. I think we're going to have a hard time convincing Phil that possibly losing is better than helping Junwei and definitely losing. Unfortunately being the second largest power, everything thinks I'm trying to nobble Junwei so that I can win. The truth is I want to nobble Junwei so that I don't lose. I'm much rather force Junwei to draw than have him win the game. I'm researching stalemate lines to see what I can do.

Work
Negotiating with Dan to try and get a nine day fortnight. Believe it or not, I actually want more of a life. There's been a lot of proceedural stuff flying around recently, and not all of it is stable yet. It should be good once it is, because as bug-boy I want quality more than most.

A legacy version of one of our products is now finally finished, the customers using it having upgraded to the latest and greatest. This makes me very happy.

Finance::Quote
Spent some time at CERES (a beautiful environmental park) and hacked together a lot more of the documentation. The project is almost ready for release, but I need to find some spare time where ADOM doesn't tempt me too much so I can finish it. I should also get in contact with Jon again about The Perl Journal article.

Ian
Ian has his new car, and he's so proud. I want him to act as taxi-boy this weekend for rockclimbing.

Rockclimbing
Finally climbed Cretin, and (after Ian and Ben's most helpful advice) discovered that it was much easier than expected.

Hacky-sack
We have a lot of skill in Schoolsnet now. I'm very proud of everyone. To quote Natedawg, "We have the reflexes of a momma!"

House
Made an offer on the house today, and there seems to be a very good possibility that we'll be accepted as well. We should know in the next couple of days what's happening. If everything goes well we'll be moving in about three months time.

Permaculture
The local trainstation had a big impressive permaculture poster up which appears to have been sponsored by the train company. Surprisingly enough it wasn't just "trains are good" propaganda, but made mention of low-impact housing, backyard food systems, and (surprisingly enough) Critical Mass.. It's good to see things like this going up around the city -- sometimes it seems that any poster advocating sustainability lives inside a University campus, or leads a very brief existence before it's plastered over with concert posters.

Work
Friday drinks are finally becoming a little more organised and are running more smoothly. There was a small problem where we miscalculated the horde of brew we were purchasing, and a couple of the pizzas we ordered didn't come through. Depsite this everything seems to have gone well, and we have what I hope to be a sustainable system in place.

I'm expecting to see a few sparks on Monday regarding some mis-communication problems, and I think that we really need a good priority system implemented for tasks, as not everyone sees eye-to-eye about which tasks are the most important.

Finance::Quote
It works. It's beautiful. It's extensible. It should be released. However, I haven't finished the API documentation. I should also check with Jon about when I'm supposed to have my article for TPJ written -- there's nothing like writing an article to speed up the next release of a project.

Melbourne Geeks
Rita, who used to work for Schoolsnet, is now working for Allison, who I was trying to poach to Schoolsnet when Rita first joined. Allison also did software engineering/computer science with Jacinta (who used to work at Schoolsnet) and Elise (who now has my old job at ITS). Sometimes I get a feeling that I'm only one link away from every other geek in Melbourne.

Hacky Injury
An important lesson for all those people planning to play hackey-sack in an office environment. If you're playing without shoes, and the hackey comes down just on the corner of a table, pull your kick. Table-corners hurt a lot when you kick them with the upper bits of your feet.

Rockclimbing
Had a great time rockclimbing. Kathryn came with us this week, and showed an excellent amount of skill for a first-time climber. I climbed the black that I'd been working on for a couple of weeks, and decided that it's either been made a lot easier, or I've become a much better climber. At the end of the day we had races up the red climb on the training wall, and I lost. I blame it on my colour-blindness, having to always look twice before going for a hold.

Houses
After visiting the real-estate agent we decided to put our offer in on Saturday when we'd be eligible for the $7000 government bonus for first home-buyers.

Finance::Quote
Awright! Finance::Quote now does automatic currency conversion, and makes it dead-simple to use:

use Finance::Quote;
my $quoter = Finance::Quote->new;
$quoter->set_currency("AUD");
my %info = $quoter->fetch("nasdaq","LNUX");

%info will now contain information about VA Linux Systems, except all information will be in Australian dollars, rather than the US dollars which Yahoo supplies it in. This makes me very happy indeed, and means that it's now very very very easy to write stock tickers and the like which show information in your local currency.

Work
We have very sweet people at work, especially Tim from the Support team. Tim hasn't thrown any bugs my way in weeks, for which I'm very grateful.

Finance::Quote
Finance::Quote is in the top 100 active projects on SourceForge this week. That makes me feel good inside.

Banks and houses
Another day, another home loan approval. This is good. I'll be making a formal written offer for the house tomorrow, and will be trying to drive a hard bargin.