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paul.j.fenwick

Welcome to my home on the internet! Everything here is free under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license unless marked otherwise.

This site contains various pieces of writing across my various interests, and spanning several years. You can fork this site on github if you wish.

Dance Games

Dance Games
Managed to find an on-line retailer with clues and a copy of the required game. Hurrah.

Accountancy
We seem to be missing a statement from the bank. Either we received it and it's been mis-filed, it was never sent in the first place, or it was lost/stolen in transit. Given that Jacinta and myself keep separate copies of this particular bank's statements, it looks like it's lost. That worries me, but given that I've seen our post arrive in the entirely wrong suburb before, or us receive mail for occupants in a different house in a different street, it's not entirely surprising.

It is, however, incredibly bothersome. I can't reconcile that account until the missing statement arrives.

Employees
Lizy has started working with Perl Training Australia. So far she's shown herself to be extremely organised, skilled, and is showing plenty of initiative. The only problem is that I only have her on a part-time basis.

Tax
Yup, I need to complete my tax. Even with highly detailed financial records it's still a complete bore.

Wedding
Is happening very soon now. Organisation is huge. I'm surprised the wedding industry does't put together package deals. Buy a reception for 100 people, honeymoon to one of these destinations, photos, flowers, wedding location, cars, invitations, celebrant, gift registry, dresses and suits, and a pair of fashionable wedding rings for only $xx,xxx. Finance to approved customers, early-bird discounts available, conditions apply.

I guess everyone wants their wedding to be unique and special, or maybe I'm just missing something.

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Appreciation from clients

Appreciation from clients
I had the entire support team from one of my clients spend considerable time telling me how much they appreciated my work, and how it would save them incredible amounts of pain and end-user headaches. I was honoured, and quite speechless.

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.

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Search Engines

Search Engines
Google seems to have missed indexing the Dungeon Cart Jingle. However, I know that if I make mention of it in my diary, then it will dutifully do so.

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. :)

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NetSaint/Nagios

NetSaint/Nagios
Nagios is great. Always good to call a client to let them know something's wrong, before they call you.

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!

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