Hardware
Sucks. My faithful home workstation, ai-chan (a mighty P133) is showing clear signs that the hard-drive does not have much life left in it. It made quite loud and alarming whirr, clunk, pling, bzzzzt, clunk, zap, bzzt, bzzzt, clunk, whirr sounds, which in my book translate to "Backup immediately, I'm going to blow smoke." An immediate backup is what I'm intending on doing. I can't say that I'm at all interested in buying new computer hardware, but having my hard-drive die is not going to be fun. Stupid junk. I hate hardware.

New hard-drive probably means a long and boring time waiting for Debian to re-install. Sucks hugely.

Gwen
Gwen is leaving us this weekend, back to Ballarat for a week or two and then off to her new life in Perth. I wish her all the best, but it means she's taking her machine that I use for playing X-COM. I've backed up the required files to my dying hard-drive, lucky me.

Houses
Found a house a few days ago with a nice yard, reasonable price, close to Ian and a tram. Looks like it might have a heritage listing, though. From my experience of renting my current heritage-listed property, I know that the telcos won't touch the damn thing. Going to have to chase things up with the council.

General
I want a huge weekend. I've spent way too much time at work, or looking at houses, or otherwise doings non-relaxing things. This weekend doesn't look as if it will help much either -- I'll be spending time buying new hard-drives, visiting my family, and (trying!) to release Finance::Quote 1.02. Sure, none of them are bad, but they're not quality relaxation. Real quality relaxation requires three days.

Houses
Went looking at lots of houses over the weekend. None of them particularly took my fancy. Visited my parents, and discovered that housing prices in their area have been going up quite significantly in the last few years. They're very happy, as their house is worth quite a bit now. Even the pub in the formally dodgy suburb of Spotswood is getting in on the act. A few years ago it used to have "Strippers and Topless barmaids." Now the sign proudly reads, "Exotic Dancers and Foxy Bar-Ladies. (Entertainment may of be a sexually explicit nature which may cause offense to some people)". Very upmarket indeed.

Looked at a house in Coburg that had a great location. Perfect cycling distance from the city and close to good things like Ian, Sofie, Ben and Tara. Sure, the house had oh-so-trendy brick-cladding and vinyl-woodgrain coverings for that true 50's and 60's feel, but it wasn't in such bad nick. My main concern is that it's slightly higher than my usual price bracket, and that the yard (whilst large) is smaller than I would like.

Going to try and look at comparison houses tonight to get a feel for what else is in the area and if we want to proceed further with this current prospect. I'm going to feel much much better when all this house-buying business is over.

Sunshine Movie Theatres
Went to the movies with Dan and saw X-men. Had to go out to Sunshine to find a cinema that had it showing. Good movie provided that you suspend disbelief about anything you know regarding genetics and mutations.

The thing that impressed me most were the toilets in the Sunshine movie theatre. Very shiny and well-cared for, the facilties were large enough that not only could they fit an entire football team, they had enough space to play a game of football if needed!

Finance::Quote
A bit of hacking the last few days, mostly some well-needed tweaks. Volkers and Keith have recently written new modules to do lookups at Deutsche Bank and UK funds, and these should make it into the next release. I'm very pleased.

The ASX seem to be doing some weird things with their website. I thought maybe they were intentionally objecting to robot-type things, so I checked their robots.txt file. Nope, nothing parsable there, just a really misleading error message. (Sorry guys, "Not Found" and "High load, try again later" have different meanings in most people's books.)

The Perl Journal
My draft almost has all the sections filled in, and the example program is finished and working well. Hope to have something reasonable to submit this weekend or early next week. Still needs polish, of course.

Work
Friday already? The week seems to have started just the other day.

Dan and Tiff seem to be sick. :( I hope they're feeling better soon.

Games
X-COM III is great. Loving it still.

House
Been drooling over some of the land available in Earth Garden magazine. 49 acres in the middle of Queensland for less than $AU 10K.... Mmmm, very tempting. May have to use a couple of tin-cans on a string for a network connection, though. Satellite downlink is also an idea.

Advogato
Good to see that Gossamer has started a diary. Hi Bek! Long time no see.

Work
My opinion of Dan has increased muchly. He's helped me keep my sanity during a time when I would otherwise be losing chunks of it. I'm very glad he's around.

Finance::Quote
ASX have indeed rejiggered their website, some things for better and some for worse. Writing a patch that should fix things and also provide a good speed boost.

TPJ
Jon seems quite happy with my draft, and has given me a green-light to go ahead with a second article. I'm most pleased.

In true perl hacker's fashion, my journal article is also its own formatting program. Running perl over it turns it into editor-in-chief friendly format, whereas leaving it as-is turns it into author-preferred format. :)

Advogato
Alan Cox on a chip? Alumni of some weird organisation? Are we being hijacked here?