Work
Dan has returned, and with a beard no less. As expected, Dan is showing himself to be a pretty busy guy, and had requested that we speak to him about nothing but code for today. Tomorrow I get to tell Dan about all the fun things that have been going on while he was away.

I did a bit of a Dan last Friday, it seems. When purchasing things for myself, I almost religiously get receipts. When purchasing $100 worth of pizza on behalf of the company, I forget to get a receipt. This is going to make getting the money back a little interesting. Mind you, I do have a bunch of witnesses who can personally verify that I came back with a large tower of pizza which they then proceeded to consume, so I'm sure I can work something out.

The Building Committee also elected to have the meeting room near the dev/systems/support area called the "Daniel Ingvarson Memorial Lost Article Room" (DIMLAR), in memory of all the keys/watches/credit cards/wallets/stuff that Dan has lost in his travels.

Bad debts
Ghassan Matar, of Hexapods, seems to have completely dissapeared, along with the money that he owes me. Luckily I made him pay for a large sum of the money up front, so I'm not much out of pocket, and most of the work I did was on Finance::Quote and which I would have done sooner or later anyway.

House-hunting
I have to admit, I really like the house that we've been looking at. Jacinta checked with the council, and yes we can run chickens there. I've been talking to various banks and other financial institutions about getting a home loan. This is all very exciting, and very scary. I'm also now quite aware how much money I have, how much I'm spending, and how much I'm saving. Overall that stuff is looking pretty healthy, although stamp duty and the legal costs of transferring a house can be quite high.

Diplomacy
Getting very interesting. Junwei and I are very good friends, which is why I've been kicking his butt out of neighbouring provences. Phil and I are also good friends, which is why he tried to invade me last turn. I'm also good friends with England, so good friends that he's letting my troops stay in his capital city. Everyone's my friend.

Finance::Quote
Been doing absolutely nothing recently, which sucks. Been spending all my time looking at houses, looking at home loans, cooking dinner, and defending France from the Italian hordes.

Chickens
Chickens are way cool. If we move to Preston, I can keep six of them, but I'll probably start with five. I've decided to call them Ben, Tara, Ian, Sofie, and Daniel.

Smoking and thanks
I'd like to thank fozbaca for his tips and how things look from the smoker's side of things. Unfortunately Kathryn tells me that she's given up on giving up, which is a shame -- a week and a half with no cigarettes is a very good start.

If Kathryn does decide to start again, I can feel safe in the knowledge that I won't put any deadlines in front of her. Kathryn's job, as a member of the Support team, is to put work in front of me. (I've been doing a good job of dodging it, though.)

Finance::Quote
Linas has greatly increased the traffic on the mailing list with some great ideas about historical quotes and non-http quotes. I've got lots of good things to be thinking about now. Linas even wants to do the web-page. I'm a happy boy.

Work
The company sponsored pizza, the employees purchased a huge amount of drinks, and a good time was had by all. I even played a little Counter-Strike, but quickly stopped because Windows is just so damn annoying. That and Natedawg is too good and keeps whipping my butt.

Monday is a public holiday (yay!), and Tuesday Dan is due back.

Diplomacy
My goodness, due to popular demand we're going to start a third play-by-e-mail Diplomacy game here at work. It's amazing how much people are getting into it. Sometimes I think Ben speaks the truth when he says that I've destroyed productivity with my silly strategy games.

Good luck
I wish dmerrill all the best in giving up smoking. Hang in there.

House-hunting
Like aaronl, I also went looking at houses today. Unlike aaronl, I was looking at small 2 bedroom places, rather than ones with 16 fireplaces and a T1.

I didn't expect to be looking at houses at this time of year, but this one in particular happened to catch my eye. It's in Preston (not too far from the city), has lots of land, and is quite affordable. The only problem is that the house itself is quite small. It should be fine for Jacinta and myself to live there, but if Gwen were to move in as well it would be rather cramped.

I'm going to arrange for a second inspection and if we still like it we'll throw them an offer and see what they say. I would very dearly like to own my own house, and this place certainly has enough space for livestock and vegetables to keep me happy for a while.

Melbourne geeks -- two degrees of separation
It seems that every geek I meet in Melbourne is related to every other geek by at most one other person. Katherine had her birthday party last night, and I met a girl there named Nicole. She ended up knowing me from when I worked at the University of Melbourne, and I ended up knowing her partner from when I was a student.

Smoking
I have an interesting dilemma at work. Our new support person, Kathryn, is an unsuccessful ex-smoker. She gave up for a while, but she's now buying and smoking cigarettes again. Since she wants to give up, I'd like to help Kathryn beat her habit. Unfortunately, it's hard to argue with complete and utter unthinking physical addiction, and nicotine addiction is about as strong as it gets.

I've never smoked, I've never had the desire, and I don't intend to start. I have had a family member die a painful and protracted death from a smoking related illness, and I don't think that experience is something I will ever forget. I can't think of very many worse ways to die.

I'm not an anti-smoking zealot, but if someone wants to give up, then I'm seriously very happy to help them. My dilemma is that I don't know how. I've tried taking Kathryn's cigarettes, but she just buys more. I've even offered to trade her cigarettes for lollies and sugary things (Kathryn has a sweet-tooth). Alas, no luck so far.

Bughunting
Sam managed to find the REAL bug-of-doom that I had spent so long looking for. It ended up that our daemon had opened a couple of unix-domain sockets before forking, and the children inherited and used the open file descriptors. Due to the nature of the code this was okay during quiet periods, but caused huge problems during load. Sam was presented with the Bugfinder's Beer and everyone is happy. Good work Sam!

Diplomacy
Very interesting turn. It seemed that everyone lied to everyone, and a very messy turn was had by all. What fun! I'm looking forward to see how it all turns out.

Finance::Quote
I'm very thankful to Jacinta for her work. She's spent a lot of time cleaning up code, making sure things are consistant, and reviewing my hacker's guide and other documentation.

I'm playing with Debianising Finance::Quote, although it will probably be a while before I get the proper hang of it. I've got some examples to work by, so I'm using them.

Cartooning
I'm once again walking the fine line and have restarted my cartoons.