Finance::Quote
Had a good night of hacking, and fixed a number of items I had outstanding on my list of jobs.

One thing that had me stumped for a while was with the Yahoo::Europe module. Xose had provided me with a working set of code which rolls all the hard parts of Yahoo lookups into a common base, and even squeezes out a bunch of complexity to boot. However, the code Xose provided me with, and the code that Yahoo::Europe used, didn't make use of all the data available from Yahoo. I was pretty certain there wasn't much difference between the European Yahoo stock scripts and those from Yahoo USA, so I figured that it should be easy to have them both fetch the same data.

Unfortunately, while the idea was simple in theory, it proved to be a bit more of a challenge in practice. The data I got back on the European stocks had field mismatches and data corruption. Very odd, especially considering I was getting the same information fine through the webpage.

I eventually found the problem. F::Q was fetching the information from Yahoo's French site, and the French apparently use commas rather than periods as their decimal point. This is fine, except when exporting decimal information into a comma-delimited file. Fetching the information from Yahoo UK fixed the problem immediately.

Diplomacy
The third game has started, and I've been watching some of the politics going on as the impartial arbitrator. I'm having a ball watching how everyone's trying to make things work for them.

The game I'm playing in has just got very interesting. Junwei got stabbed by Phil, so the next year or so should be very interesting. I have to admit, Phil has guts. He wasn't happy just to stab the largest power in the game, he also sent out an attack force against the second largest power as well. It will be interesting to see how this all turns out.

Grinding
Ben showed me a short video of skateboarders who didn't quite make their tricks. I think councils who don't want skaters hanging around would do well to take a look at this video. Rather than putting up signs saying "No skating, fine $200", they could instead put up signs saying "Grinding a bar and failing could permanently separate you from your reproductive organs." Any desire I had to do skateboarding tricks completely drained away from me after watching Ben's short vid.

Quote of the Day
Humpy (to Scott): Well, you tell me. You're the one who's going to be writing the crappy code.

Food
One cannot live off wedding cake alone. I tried that today, and it didn't make me feel any better.

Banks
Looks like the banks approve me in principal, but want the paperwork and the actual house before signing on the line. This is pretty much what I expect, and that the banks tell me that I'm "very comfortably within my limits" is reassuring.

The Real Estate agents still need to send me a complete Section 32, the one they gave me was missing the rates notices. Interesting that the notice of rates also usually contains a valuation by the council. I wonder if they're trying to hide something?

Health
Woke up on Saturday with a bit of a sniffly nose. Ignored it for the day. Woke up on Sunday with a more sniffly nose. I figured I wouldn't let a sniffly nose tell me what to do, so I cycled 25-30km and then hauled myself up some walls. Interestingly enough this got rid of the sniffles for a while. Woke up this morning and the sniffly nose was back, and it's currently being kept at bay with a mixture of codeine and other chemicals, which have also dropped my sensory perception significantly.

Houses and stuff
Things seem to be going okay. I'm awaiting a few phone-calls from the banks to say that they like me enough, and then I'll be making an offer on the property. I'm feeling a lot better about the whole thing now. Even if we don't buy the house I feel a lot better off for the experience, knowing how everything works.

I'm sorry to hear that ajv is having problems getting a home-loan. If it's any help, the banks seemed to be much happier when I mentioned that I was poached by my current employer.

Rockclimbing
Jacinta managed to climb the "training wall", which is the first of the big walls out at Nunawading. This is excellent, and I'm very proud of Jacinta's efforts. She was rewarded with a free mexican meal.

Fish
Dan Golembo was telling me about fish in Russia that are harvested for "black caviar". Apparently one of these fish can contain as much as 100kg of caviar -- which makes it one HUGE fish. Unfortunately it seems that the fish are being hunted to the brink of extinction, as the black caviar is such a sought-after commodity, and their natural habitat is becoming polluted.

Remind me not to wrestle any Russian fish in the future.

Work
Yesterday, Sharon "left", which is executive talk for being made redundant. Nothing was announced, and I thought the only reason Sharon wasn't around was because she's in the middle of her exam period right now. What makes things worse is that nothing was said in the staff meeting today, it was only afterwards via e-mail that this was announced.

This is a very bad sign, and goes completely against our "Company Values", which I feel some executives desperately need to read. It may well have been that Sharon wished to move on anyway, but the way it was handled with the rest of the company was awful. A few months ago there would have been cakes, drinks, proper announcements that someone was leaving, speeches and thank-yous, and generally a chance for everyone to wish them the best for the future. I hope this isn't the start of other employees "disappearing" with maybe a short note on the news list to testify their passing.

Finance::Quote
We finally have our new webpage thanks to Ben. It looks really pretty, although I've just discovered that it's unreadable unless you have stylesheets turned on. The good news is that it looks fine in lynx.

Unfortunately, the page has very little in the way of content, although this is not Ben's fault. The original design forwarded to me by Ben had lots more content, and although it was true, it wasn't quite as appropriate.

Still haven't had a chance to hack at code yet. Been too busy with house matters.

GnuCash
Showed Sofie GnuCash today, in exchange for a promised massage for Jacinta and myself on the weekend. Sofie claims that she can probably skip most of her accounting homework simply by typing it into GnuCash, and has asked me to install it on her machine.

Banks
All the banks seem to be happy to lend me much more money than I want. This is probably a good thing.