The Week of Woe
Last week was one of those weeks that started off well, and then rapidly slid downhill. It went a little like this:

Australian Copyright Infringements
If you're reading this from Australia, then you better make sure that you don't use your VCR to tape shows from television. Most people don't realise that doing so is illegal in Australia.

In other news, I've managed to use my Palm Pilot to transfer music from my computer to my/Ian's mobile phone, and I have far too big a backlog of work and invoices to catch up upon.

Rain
None. Nil. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Victoria is in heavy drought right now. Water restrictions are in place, and there's no indication they'll stop anytime soon. We have a 1000 litre rainwater tank for gardening and livestock, so keeping our trees alive doesn't place any additional burdens on our resevoirs. Unfortunately, the tank is becoming rather empty, and the days are very hot and dry. I'm really hoping we get some rain soon, but the BOM doesn't thik that's likely in the next week.

Cereal Toys
Once upon a time, when you opened your box of corn flakes, you might get a little plastic truck or aircraft. Yesterday I got a Age of Empires complete game on CD in the cereal box. There was a huge shelf of them. Looks like the cereal manufacturer thinks they can sell more boxes if they put games in them, and the whole box and game intro pushes hard about how good the game expansion is, and why you should buy it.

Mind you, I'll admit the game's been more fun than a plastic truck.

Toys
Lots of toys arrived today. I now have much more desk space, and a huge bed with a 15 year warranty.

Phone
My old phone had an unfortunate accident and its antenna snapped off. It doesn't work very well without its antenna, so I'm looking for a new phone. Usually, when I'm in need of new hardware, I turn to Ian's House of Secondhand Electronics. Ian is almost always up-to-date with the latest gadgets, and hence often has older technology that he's no longer using. Since Ian had recently showed me his new super-phone, I figured there'd be a good chance he had another, unused phone lying around somewhere. Sure enough, he did.

My old phone has the size and functionality approaching that of a small housebrick. It can store numbers on the SIM card, dial them, turn itself off without no good reason, and snap its antenna off should you sit upon it. I was hoping for a new phone that had about the same set of features or better, so Ian's "old" phone was a bit of a surprise.

The phone has a Java Virtual Machine, mp3 player, WAP, an assortment of games, voice dialing, dictaphone, infra-red port, and a variety of other things that I'm sure are completely unnecessary on a mobile phone. It uses multi-media memory cards (MMCs), exactly the same things that my Palm uses. In fact, it talks to the Palm rather well. I've almost reached the stage where I can get my Palm to dial out through the phone, and establish an ssh connection with a remote machine.

I've only found two problems with the phone. It doesn't appreciate my Palm trying to send its entire vcard database at once (it only accepts the first entry), and one of the most useful buttons is broken. The broken button can be ignored 90% of the time, and is a complete and utter pain in the rear for the remaining 10%. On the other hand, Ian is selling the phone at a very reasonable price, so I'll have to see what I think over the coming week.

Work
I so want to be back on holidays.

Frontier: First Enounters
Wow, it really does work under Linux. In fact, it works really really well under Linux. I'm very impressed.

Chickens
One of our chickens is still broken. For reasons unknown, she's laying eggs with very thin shells. This is very bad, since they break in the nest and foul it. This messes up the other eggs, bedding materials, and any chickens that are inclined to go broody. The chooks have plenty of grit and calcium sources available.

Unfortunately, I have no idea which chicken is having difficulties. Separating a few of the hens around laying time should reveal the culprit.

Holidays
I had a delightful break over the last couple of weeks. Shame it didn't last as long as I would have liked. However, major highlights include:

• Spending a few days up on future-parent-in-laws farm at Clunes.
• Playing lots of board-games with friends (something I rarely have time to do).
• Role-playing with friends (something I haven't had time to do for a long time).
• Purchase of a new bed-frame and pocket-spring, queen-sized mattress.
• Order of some rather kickass 16ms refresh 17" LCD monitors.
• A friend's wedding.
• Not taking support calls.

Games - Transport Tycoon Deluxe
I've always been a big fan of the game Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD), which is an excellent and engrossing game. For many years, there's been talk of many things that it would be "nice to have" in the game (bugfixes and features), and some lamenting that it's no longer actively maintained.

Well, imagine my surprise and great joy when I discovered The Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch. Bugfixes, new features, new vehicles, improved signals, helicopters that don't obsolete, Win2K/XP compatability -- a whole bunch of things that the TTD community was talking about a few years ago. All this written in assembler, under an open source license, and without the original TTD source code. From my extensive testing, it's also very stable. Wow!

Games - Frontier: Elite II

On the topic of games that Chris Sawyer (creator of TTD) has had a hand in, both Frontier: Elite II, and Frontier: First Encounters have been released as shareware by the copyright holders. There's also talk of providing access to the source code so that the games can continue to be extended and updated.

But, it gets even better. Normally, Frontier: First Encounters completely refuses to run under anything other than "DOS Mode". However, there now also exists a Windows Port (JJFFE) of the game, courtesy of John Jordan. There's even instructions on getting the game running under Linux!