Chooks
RIP Boor'yall. She dropped off the perch (quite literally) Saturday morning.

Karaoke
Once again I'm amazed by some of the things that exist in the world. On Friday myself and some friends were looking for a Karaoke bar in order to do a bit of singing. We found one promising looking place and entered. The group had a couple of Japanese exchange students in it, so we wanted to find a bar that had a good multilingual selection. This place looked like it should.

Upon entering, I was very politely informed that this is the sort of bar which has "ladies to sit with you, and since you have your own ladies, there wouldn't be much point...", and "yes, it is a karaoke bar, but more of a gentleman's club karaoke bar".

We didn't stay, but we did spend a fair bit of time disbelieving the bar and wondering if it really was true.

Toy
My palm m505 arrived the other day. It's been very handy in planning and prioritizing. It's also shown me that I'm much much more busy than I thought I was previously.

Quote of the day

Excessive gambling may cause financial problems for some people.

--- Crown Casino, Melbourne

Wireless keyboard/mouse
New wireless keyboard and mouse (made by A4 tech) arrived today, and they work beautifully. I can type from another room and all works fine. Considering the purchae of another set for the second machine, since they're just so darn handy and nice to use.

Apparently each keyboard and mouse has its own serial ID, which the receiver can remember (and hence excluse all others). In theory this lets you run lots of wireless keyboards/mice side-by-side, and while syncing your keyboard to your receiver is an easy button-press, I can't quite figure out how the mouse is done without software. Even so, the units have two channels they can operate on, so a second keyboard/mouse combo should not be a huge problem.

Mackay
Spent some time in sunny Queensland (Mackay area). Took me a day to get used to the heat and humidity, but very much enjoyed myself after that. Went ocean rafting, which was a lot of fun, but I pretty much had to be dragged out of the water at snorkling time. Coral reefs are really pretty, and all the stories you've heard about swimming with schools of fish are true.

Also found the most perfect property imaginable up there. Hundreds of fruit trees, green pastures, house in perfect ocndition, permanent creek, and an amazing swimming hole. Reasonably priced, too. Trouble is, we're not really looking at moving yet, and in order to purchase and move we'd need to do a lot of employment, financial, and social juggling. I also doubt I can get a high-speed, low-latency Internet connection in the middle of nowhere. :)

Work
Lots of work to do. Never rains it pours sort of thing. That's good, because it looks like I've got a secure line of jobs lined up for the next 3-4 months. No starving here.

Investment
Having looked at the farm in Mackay sparked a big session of financial planning. Found some great investment properties in Mackay (excellent rental returns), but Mackay's property prices aren't exactly moving, and the average price of units fell a little over the last year. Mackay's a small place, so any statistics on prices there should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Looking at properties closer to Melbourne, somewhat because it's easier to get to (living in Melbourne at all), and somewhat because of the high population and property value growth.

UPS
After a bit of fiddling, the UPS finally works the way it should. Trial-and-error revealed what the functions were for the various pins on the cable provided with the unit, and genpower did the rest. Teddybear (our server) will now happily shut itself down on power failure and switch itself (and the switch and the ADSL modem) off. When power is restored, everything comes back nicely. No fscks involved.

Anyone who purchases an UpSonic Power Guardian should know that the attached cable can be treated as an "apc1-nt" by genpower. No doubt the Linux software that comes with the unit also works.

Olympics
Okay, I've had a few drinks, and I'm watching the winter olympics closing ceremony. Having an oh-so-funky loungeroom PC means that I can share my thoughts with the rest of the world.

Dinosaurs
Giant plastic skeletons (with no lip sync) and KISS immediately afterwards... Please, gimme a break. Some original comedy for the dinosaurs would have been good.

I'll pay KISS. We resurrected some really ancient artists for our closing ceremony in Sydney.

Earth, Wind and Fire?
By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!

I'd never heard of these guys before. I assume they're a late 80's group, since their music sounded the same as everything else from that era.

Pyrotecnics attached to skates
Okay, *that* was cool, and definitely illegal in Australia.

Harry Conneck Jr
Most people n Melbourne associate him with a train company now. Most people who use the trains don't even remember who he is.

Tap-dancing
Had to have microphones in the shoes. Get Smart, eat your heart out.

Pretend rap?
There's some group playing now who look like rappers who want to be jazz players, and are failing with both. One of those all-male groups. I think that expecting the olypmics to play good coding music is too much to ask for. (Yes, I code to Run-DMC, so shoot me.)

More dinosaurs
Lame lame lame! We had giant clotheslines. Much more original. :)

Cleaning the ice
Sounds like a captain planet song to me. Jacinta likes it. Her musical tastes are still stuck in the 80s. I don't know who this Wayne dude is, but he seems to be okay at skating. Of course, being the winter olympics, you'd expect a few decent skaters to be around.

Interlude - Gold for Australia
We won two gold medals at the winter olympics, the first two gold medals ever for Australia in the winter olympics. Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!

Temptation Island
Australian Temptation Island is starting as of next week. Personally I don't give a hoot about the show, but it's traditionally been followed by Buffy, to whom I give many hoots. Buffy rocks.

More Olympics
Steve Bradbury is carrying the Australian flag. Everyone know Steve, he won the speed-skating. He's had an awfully good sense of humour about it all. Did I mention that Australia won two gold medals?

Flags
Winches? Winches? Back in my day you had to pull the rope and tie it off at the end. Operating the winch looks like harder work anyway.

Dinosaurs
Shame shame shame.

Lighting
I'm impressed with the ability to light up the whole stadium with such clarity. There must be some very good projection units there.

Dinosaurs
When I die, I'm doing the organ donation thing, *and/or* the medical students in Sydney slicing me up for their undergraduate degrees. I don't have a problem with that. However, I want it recorded that I *do* object to being re-animated for an olympic event.

Security
I think this has been the first olympics ever where both the armed forces and the residing security have been thanked for their efforts.

G'night
It's certainly time I should get some sleep. G'night all. Make sure that you use your powers for good and not evil.

Cube
The new machine has been dubbed cube, due to its shape, although it's more shoebox than cube proportioned. Sound under Windows was a right pain to get working, and involved an upgrade from Win98SE to Win2K in order to get a peep out of the darn thing. Sound under Linux worked a treat, first time. Those people who are curious, it's an FV24 VIA motherboard with on-board sound.

The machine is currently sitting in the lounge-room, and has a TV connection, but no connection to the sound system yet. Considering the purchase of a Creative Extigy and a bunch of high quality surround speakers, but I'm sure that would be excessive at this stage.

Again, many many thanks to Ian for providing his wealth of knowledge regarding hardware and drivers.