Health
Woke up on Saturday with a bit of a sniffly nose. Ignored it for the day. Woke up on Sunday with a more sniffly nose. I figured I wouldn't let a sniffly nose tell me what to do, so I cycled 25-30km and then hauled myself up some walls. Interestingly enough this got rid of the sniffles for a while. Woke up this morning and the sniffly nose was back, and it's currently being kept at bay with a mixture of codeine and other chemicals, which have also dropped my sensory perception significantly.

Houses and stuff
Things seem to be going okay. I'm awaiting a few phone-calls from the banks to say that they like me enough, and then I'll be making an offer on the property. I'm feeling a lot better about the whole thing now. Even if we don't buy the house I feel a lot better off for the experience, knowing how everything works.

I'm sorry to hear that ajv is having problems getting a home-loan. If it's any help, the banks seemed to be much happier when I mentioned that I was poached by my current employer.

Rockclimbing
Jacinta managed to climb the "training wall", which is the first of the big walls out at Nunawading. This is excellent, and I'm very proud of Jacinta's efforts. She was rewarded with a free mexican meal.

Fish
Dan Golembo was telling me about fish in Russia that are harvested for "black caviar". Apparently one of these fish can contain as much as 100kg of caviar -- which makes it one HUGE fish. Unfortunately it seems that the fish are being hunted to the brink of extinction, as the black caviar is such a sought-after commodity, and their natural habitat is becoming polluted.

Remind me not to wrestle any Russian fish in the future.

Work
Yesterday, Sharon "left", which is executive talk for being made redundant. Nothing was announced, and I thought the only reason Sharon wasn't around was because she's in the middle of her exam period right now. What makes things worse is that nothing was said in the staff meeting today, it was only afterwards via e-mail that this was announced.

This is a very bad sign, and goes completely against our "Company Values", which I feel some executives desperately need to read. It may well have been that Sharon wished to move on anyway, but the way it was handled with the rest of the company was awful. A few months ago there would have been cakes, drinks, proper announcements that someone was leaving, speeches and thank-yous, and generally a chance for everyone to wish them the best for the future. I hope this isn't the start of other employees "disappearing" with maybe a short note on the news list to testify their passing.

Finance::Quote
We finally have our new webpage thanks to Ben. It looks really pretty, although I've just discovered that it's unreadable unless you have stylesheets turned on. The good news is that it looks fine in lynx.

Unfortunately, the page has very little in the way of content, although this is not Ben's fault. The original design forwarded to me by Ben had lots more content, and although it was true, it wasn't quite as appropriate.

Still haven't had a chance to hack at code yet. Been too busy with house matters.

GnuCash
Showed Sofie GnuCash today, in exchange for a promised massage for Jacinta and myself on the weekend. Sofie claims that she can probably skip most of her accounting homework simply by typing it into GnuCash, and has asked me to install it on her machine.

Banks
All the banks seem to be happy to lend me much more money than I want. This is probably a good thing.

Work
Dan has returned, and with a beard no less. As expected, Dan is showing himself to be a pretty busy guy, and had requested that we speak to him about nothing but code for today. Tomorrow I get to tell Dan about all the fun things that have been going on while he was away.

I did a bit of a Dan last Friday, it seems. When purchasing things for myself, I almost religiously get receipts. When purchasing $100 worth of pizza on behalf of the company, I forget to get a receipt. This is going to make getting the money back a little interesting. Mind you, I do have a bunch of witnesses who can personally verify that I came back with a large tower of pizza which they then proceeded to consume, so I'm sure I can work something out.

The Building Committee also elected to have the meeting room near the dev/systems/support area called the "Daniel Ingvarson Memorial Lost Article Room" (DIMLAR), in memory of all the keys/watches/credit cards/wallets/stuff that Dan has lost in his travels.

Bad debts
Ghassan Matar, of Hexapods, seems to have completely dissapeared, along with the money that he owes me. Luckily I made him pay for a large sum of the money up front, so I'm not much out of pocket, and most of the work I did was on Finance::Quote and which I would have done sooner or later anyway.

House-hunting
I have to admit, I really like the house that we've been looking at. Jacinta checked with the council, and yes we can run chickens there. I've been talking to various banks and other financial institutions about getting a home loan. This is all very exciting, and very scary. I'm also now quite aware how much money I have, how much I'm spending, and how much I'm saving. Overall that stuff is looking pretty healthy, although stamp duty and the legal costs of transferring a house can be quite high.

Diplomacy
Getting very interesting. Junwei and I are very good friends, which is why I've been kicking his butt out of neighbouring provences. Phil and I are also good friends, which is why he tried to invade me last turn. I'm also good friends with England, so good friends that he's letting my troops stay in his capital city. Everyone's my friend.

Finance::Quote
Been doing absolutely nothing recently, which sucks. Been spending all my time looking at houses, looking at home loans, cooking dinner, and defending France from the Italian hordes.

Chickens
Chickens are way cool. If we move to Preston, I can keep six of them, but I'll probably start with five. I've decided to call them Ben, Tara, Ian, Sofie, and Daniel.

Smoking and thanks
I'd like to thank fozbaca for his tips and how things look from the smoker's side of things. Unfortunately Kathryn tells me that she's given up on giving up, which is a shame -- a week and a half with no cigarettes is a very good start.

If Kathryn does decide to start again, I can feel safe in the knowledge that I won't put any deadlines in front of her. Kathryn's job, as a member of the Support team, is to put work in front of me. (I've been doing a good job of dodging it, though.)

Finance::Quote
Linas has greatly increased the traffic on the mailing list with some great ideas about historical quotes and non-http quotes. I've got lots of good things to be thinking about now. Linas even wants to do the web-page. I'm a happy boy.

Work
The company sponsored pizza, the employees purchased a huge amount of drinks, and a good time was had by all. I even played a little Counter-Strike, but quickly stopped because Windows is just so damn annoying. That and Natedawg is too good and keeps whipping my butt.

Monday is a public holiday (yay!), and Tuesday Dan is due back.

Diplomacy
My goodness, due to popular demand we're going to start a third play-by-e-mail Diplomacy game here at work. It's amazing how much people are getting into it. Sometimes I think Ben speaks the truth when he says that I've destroyed productivity with my silly strategy games.

Good luck
I wish dmerrill all the best in giving up smoking. Hang in there.

House-hunting
Like aaronl, I also went looking at houses today. Unlike aaronl, I was looking at small 2 bedroom places, rather than ones with 16 fireplaces and a T1.

I didn't expect to be looking at houses at this time of year, but this one in particular happened to catch my eye. It's in Preston (not too far from the city), has lots of land, and is quite affordable. The only problem is that the house itself is quite small. It should be fine for Jacinta and myself to live there, but if Gwen were to move in as well it would be rather cramped.

I'm going to arrange for a second inspection and if we still like it we'll throw them an offer and see what they say. I would very dearly like to own my own house, and this place certainly has enough space for livestock and vegetables to keep me happy for a while.

Melbourne geeks -- two degrees of separation
It seems that every geek I meet in Melbourne is related to every other geek by at most one other person. Katherine had her birthday party last night, and I met a girl there named Nicole. She ended up knowing me from when I worked at the University of Melbourne, and I ended up knowing her partner from when I was a student.