Losing Weight
After being weighed every time I donate blood, and noticing the steady upward trend on my weight every time I visit, as well as my pants being a little bit tight, I've decided to reverse the trend. This isn't a matter of great importance, I'm right in the middle of the healthy weight range, instead it's a way of providing support to Jacinta (who's also losing weight), and saving myself from having to endure the dullness of purchasing new clothes.

A couple of weeks ago I was 71.5kg, now I'm 70.0kg. My goal is to end up back at around 65kg, as that was my weight a couple of years ago, as well as still being comfortably within the healthy weight range. Five less kilos also makes bicycling (particularly hill-climbing), and rock-climbing easier.

Dead Machines
Looks like the machine with the dead power-supply ended up damaging its mobo as well. While the machine is running again, it's very unstable, often rebooting with no good reason whatsoever. Looks like I'll need to be getting some more hardware. AFAIK Ian has sold off all his old PCs, so I may have to use another source.

Apricots
Had a large branch drop off our apricot tree the other day. This is the second time in three years. I suspect we'll have to prune the tree rather than have it lose large bits every time it produces a bumper crop.

Work
Yes, working on a Sunday. I don't want to think about work, but I am. Very much looking forward to the break I'm getting in a few months time.

Dead machines
Two dead machines in two days. The first killed by a bad PCI card, the second killed by its power supply dying a horrible death.

We're not particularly concerned about either. Sure, they need to be resurrected, but either were critical, and any important data they had was on the main fileserver.

New laptop is fun.

Laptops and cruft
Got a new laptop. It's very nice. Big screen, high resolution, fast CPU, wireless networking. All those good things.

Installing Linux on it is a pain. I expected it would be, and so far things have gone just about as well as expected, which is very slowly and painfully.

In the process of setting things up, I got out my old WL200 wireless network card, since I actually have a motivation to use it now. Unfortunately, it was one of the pieces of hardware that the floods a few weeks back managed to affect. I thought it was okay, but apparently not. It's taken out a desktop machine. Either a dead powersupply, or dead motherboard. Hopefully a dead powersupply.

I'm not eager to try the card in another machine now. I'm a bad sad that it's dead, since it's possible to convert the card into an access point, and it's got good support under linux. And it cost quite a bit of money. Drat.

I can see at least one other network in my area, apparently if I walk down the street I can see Ian's as well.

I may well end up buying an 802.11 to ethernet access-point/bridge. Probably less stuffing around. Even so, the WL200 would have gone into our loungeroom PC. Hardware sucks, and it sucks more when it dies and takes things with it.

Holidays
Goodness, it's awful coming back to work from holidays. Work is good -- after all, I set my own conditions and hours -- but having free time is _so_ nice.

What I really want to do right now is hack code because I want to hack code, not because it's required for some project I'm working on. That would be lovely.

I should stop trying to work on this client contract. But being distracted is so much better than reading legalese.