David's leaving
One of my very good friends is joining the Army, and is likely to be posted to some far-away place by the end of this week. He'll be sorely missed, although we all hope that he'll be able to make it back for the wedding, as he has a spot on the bridal party to fill.

Cheesy Dance games and mats
We're now the proud owners of two cheap playstation dance mats. They're just like regular controllers, only rolled out into large plastic sheets you can dance around on, and with all the controls in different locations. Getting the mats was easy, they'll available everywhere, although prices seem to range from AUD $30 to AUD $300, depending upon quality and construction.

We thought it would be easy to pick up a cheesy game like Dance Stage Konamix, which is designed to work really well with the mats. In fact, it's proving to be an extremely difficult task. The only place I can find that seems to have it has a broken registration process, broken ordering form, broken e-mail, and no contact details. Despite that, the site appears to be regularly updated and maintained. I figure that nobody's been able to actually contact them to tell them what's broken.

We ended up playing Gran Turismo and Pocket Fighter on the mats, both of which were interesting experiences. We also played a little Bust'a'groove, which is definitely not designed to be played on a mat. Hopefully we'll have the appropriate game(s) by the end of this week, before David dissapears.

It's amazing the poetical works one can come up with when faced with the proposition of ensuring that a very large set of validation rules are working correctly.

I can't wait until Lizy starts next week, then I can assign her the task of checking validation rules. :)

X-COM
Running under wine, completely stable. I have hit one, maybe two hisenbugs, but they appear to be related to the actual program itself rather than the emulation. Absolutely fantastic.

ToEE
Google has finished indexing the public mirror of the ToEE wiki. What's scary is that people are visiting based upon Google searches. The wiki comes up second on a google search for Grugg, something which has David most pleased. I'm not sure why people are searching for "Grugg".

Wedding
You want me to pay how much for flowers? My goodness, I was told that weddings are expensive, but I really had no idea they would be this expensive. The reception costing a bit I can handle, they're supposed to. The photos also costing a bit, fine. Priest, church, reception, photos. That's all that's needed, isn't it?

Noooooo... There's dresses, and make-up, and suit-hire, and bouquets for all the brides-maids, and a bigger boquet for the bride, and flowery button-hole things for the men, and a cke, and jewelry, and decorations, and rings, and hire-cars, and invitations, and special paper for the invitations, and an increasingly large list of incidentals that I had simply not comprehended before. Five digits (AUD) worth of wedding expenses easily, before you get to the honeymoon. Crickey!

I'm looking forward to the honeymoon. Tropical waters, SCUBA gear, boat. No mobile reception. No ssh via palm-pilot to the infra-red port on the mobile back to my server so I can tunnel out to fix a client's mail problem because they can't deal with word-wrap in filenames. It's going to be wonderful.

Talking of honeymoons, I'm going to have to organise agreements with my (hopefully) fill-in SysAdmins, Ian and Josh.

Staff
When the going gets tough, the tough hire new staff and outsource. Our new software engineer starts next week, and I have an associate of mine working on some data munging and matching work before he's heading off to a new Career in Canada? Skud did exactly the same thing a couple of years back.

Spring
At last!

Business
Is good, and busy, as always. After much negotiation I've managed to bring another software engineer on-board to help out with our workload. I'm very excited about this, even though the business will only have her on a part-time basis. I've also found a few suitable people who I can outsource to, so I'm hoping that things will quieten down as the wedding approaches, even though Perl Training Australia's throughput is increasing.

Training
In negotiation with some other organisations to provide extensive training over the coming financial year and beyond. Very exciting stuff.

Trees
A wattle tree in the front yard fell over. Just walked out to get the mail, and there it was, lying on its side. It missed the house, missed the vege-patch, and missed the fence. Very considerate of it. Now we just have to remove it and tidy it up.