First, I should start with the past few days, since my updates have been sparse.

Of initial interest is my post from the 19th. I should remind people reading this site who haven't spoken to me on a regular basis over the past 2 years that the subject matter often doesn't relate to what they think it does (i.e. them). There's been several occasions where people have thought that something I've said related to them or someone they know, when really it related to someone or something different, more often than not, someone they've never met and don't know. People move on, build existing friendships, meet new people, drift apart... progress.

I assure all who I haven't spoken to in over a year and who have thought that something I've said related to them, that I am not, despite all evidence to the contrary, a mind-reader!

For all I know, you could have moved to Uruguay and be secretly trying to reinstate a guerrilla movement.

The moral of this story: don't jump to conclusions!

Meanwhile, the daily interests of life go on. My brother is up from Brisbane on holidays and we now have the keys and official ownership of our new unit (which we'll be moving into this Friday/Saturday/Sunday). I also have some other things to do in Brisbane, so it'll be a busy weekend. After that, we'll be back here, though.

Yesterday afternoon was spent shifting topsoil and spreading it over the back and front lawns (a term which I use loosely with regards to their current state). Last night storm clouds rolled in and helped to water it, with lightning licking the horizon until around 2:30 AM.

After a brief sleep I woke up into today and we all unwrapped our presents hurriedly and left for my 'Place of Birth' where we met up with relatives for our usual Christmas get-together. Splash and Toddles came around too, which is now a tradition :) It's always good to catch up, even if it's just for a few minutes.

After some more food and general chatting, silly behaviour and the usual mix of photos and announcements (some big news always seems to be released) we turned around and came home, with another storm following us up the coast. Unfortunately we haven't had much rain here, just a bit earlier on and a lot more lightning. We also had dinner at my brother and sister-in-law's place and shared some more presents and well wishes there. A great day, in all :)

Now, off to bed I go, hoping for more rain and lightning. Falling asleep to the sound of rain and distant thunder would be nice :) Night!

With a huge update coming soon...!

Surprisingly, I received an apology regarding the copyright breach and an assurance that the offending material would be removed no later than the 22nd. We'll see what happens.

On a totally different note, I think a few of my friends have become aware that they've been used by certain individuals. As a result they can move forward in their lives, which is a great thing.

As an aside, it's intriguing to watch from an outside vantage point to see how people manipulate others close to them. Usually the tactic I've witnessed involves making a person feel sorry for them so they'll do something for them that they normally wouldn't do (or changing their opinion on doing that thing, i.e. making it seem acceptable when they would normally think it unacceptable). It's disturbing just how easily people can get their way using this tactic.

The people that do this are emotional manipulators.

On a lighter note, my new credit card arrived today (how vain does that sound?) which means I can rid myself of my old bank card that was difficult to use. The lengths we go to for simple shopping ;)

Anyway... to bed! *exits*

I've just stumbled across another website that has stolen some of my graphics, changed the colours, and used it on their website as though they had made it, thinking no one would ever notice.

It's not really that I'm annoyed by them stealing it - I'm annoyed that they stole it and then tried to hide that fact by changing a colour in the design (and in fact, making it look worse in the process).

I know all of my designs like the back of my hand, whether they be complex 3D designs or simple 2D background images, so when I saw the pattern I knew immediately it was mine. I did a Photoshop difference of my original and theirs, and sure enough it was a pixel for pixel match (something that can't be explained by coincidence, considering the method I used to originally create the design).

*adds them to the Shame File and writes their phone number down for tomorrow*

My tests with the eye specialist went pretty well. First there were a few normal focus and vision tests, then they numbed by eyeballs and did a glaucoma test, which made me feel rather sick. Basically what they do is use a chemical that numbs the front of your eye, then they get this device that looks similar to an 'inflated pen' and proceed to push it against the front of your open eye to measure the internal pressure. It's not really a very nice thing to see or feel. It's made worse by not having any sense of them pressing against your eye, other than feeling the pressure on the back of your eyeball as they push against the front...

Then they performed the procedure I talked about the other day: chemically dilating the pupils. Now, my pupils are quite large under normal circumstances (and so I usually find any bright light quite glary - it also means I have good night-vision), but after 15 or so minutes of putting in the drops (no trouble as my eyes were already numb from the glaucoma tests), everything became super-bright and blurry, as it also reduces the ability of your eyes to focus. Once they were fully dilated they checked out my retina and the problem I'd originally gone to see them about. The verdict was that it was nothing evil (except being a little annoying) and that there's nothing they can do... it's just, in his words, "unusual". It's caused by fine tendrils in the gel (vitreous humor), similar to "floaters" but in a different shape and attached in such a way that they're always there. At least now I know that they won't cause any harm.

My dilated pupils lasted for a good portion of the day and looked very strange in the mirror. My pupils were so dilated that only a small fringe of my iris was visible, so my eyes looked as though they had no irises at all.

The irony I found was while signing the invoice and payment slip for the tests and consultation: I couldn't even see what I was signing, or my signature. For all I know they've run off with the entire contents of my bank account, heh.

After my eyes were back to normal, we saw Die Another Day, the new James Bond movie. It was a lot of fun and a good flick; much better than the last two.

As 6 AM is not my normal wake-up time, I'm starting to feel sleepy... so I'm going to turn this thing off and get into bed. Night :)

The final preparations for the tidal flow traffic system, the last stage of the Coronation Drive redevelopment that has been undertaken over the last five years, are being made tonight. Now that the system has been tested, they have to complete all of the line marking for the additional tidal lane.

The idea of the system is to change the direction of the centre tidal lane(s) depending on the time of day and the traffic demand for travel in a particular direction. For example, in the morning the majority of traffic will be towards the city and in the afternoon the majority will be in the opposite direction, thus the name "tidal flow". Logistically the system is very complex to implement, but it's designed to be simple for drivers to understand. I'm sure that won't stop there being some accidents, however.

I faxed away another quotation this afternoon. I have a feeling the client is expecting something less expensive but there is more work involved than there appears to be. I'll be wrapping up the SCEC website shortly, as soon as the translations come back from SBS Language Services (it's taking longer because everyone is busy this time of year). I've been told there will be another contract for a companion site to the SCEC site I've been building; I have a good chance of being the successful applicant because of my previous experience and knowledge of the requirements of the site.

In my spare time in recent weeks I've been working on a side-project that I plan on launching either at the end of this month, or early next year.

Some people may have noticed that I've redesigned the intro page to The Zone. It uses some newer features of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to position the background image and text. It's also quite cross-browser compatible, with the exception of much older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 (which I've officially cast into the waste-land of the net, as it doesn't remotely support even CSS 1.0's specifications). I plan on designing some more introduction screens for The Zone that will cycle, just to give you something interesting to look at when you visit my little digital outpost.

We've just arrived in Brisbane, so I'm going to put my wireless card in and record the latest networks to compare with previous trips.

You see The Ring.

Well, I saw it tonight... it's one of the scariest movies I've seen in quite some time! I'm very impressed! For those that don't mind scary movies that make you jump out of your skin every few minutes, I'd recommend checking out The Ring as soon as possible in a cinema. It also has some great CG and cinematography.

There's also that annoying little group of people when you see a movie, that just will not shut up. Usually they'll giggle themselves stupid throughout the entire movie and devoid it of any atmosphere. The Ring was no different... at least for the first 3 minutes. Then there was a 'jump out of your skin' bit that scared them into submission. They remained pretty quiet for the rest of the film.

Tomorrow night I'll be in Brisbane again, for an appointment early Friday morning. I'm going to see an eye specialist to have a few things checked out - nothing major (I hope). I'll probably be left with chemically induced blurry vision for the rest of the day if they decide they need to dilate my eyes completely, though. We'll probably stay until Saturday and then head back.

At last, some heavy rain. Throughout the afternoon it swept up the coast and blew into here after dark had set in. It lasted for a few hours and brought with it thunder and not-too-close lightning. The sky resembled a tired fluorescent light tube for a long time after the rain had stopped.

The air is cool now, the kind of atmosphere that's perfect for falling asleep in.

The rain has helped other parts of the country by slowing bush fires, while marginally bringing back life to the cracked soil of the farm lands that surround this area. Further inland though, the dams still look more like small impact craters.

Maybe the predictions will be wrong; this summer may be a wet one if a hurricane makes its way over the coastline.

As it turns out, the day wasn't as hot as I'd expected and I didn't have to do as much furniture moving as I'd expected.

I woke up and a lot of the work around our unit had been done already (because they decided there were some items they needed and they happened to correspond with items we no longer wanted). Then, over at their unit, nearly everything was already packed up as they'd been working while I was… well, asleep. How handy! To top things off, Splash helped me avoid any more work by providing a means for escaping from the unit and going wireless network hunting!

Although there were lots of networks a lot of them were encrypted or had terrible signal strength. The original idea was to test out the free wireless net access that's being provided in Queen Street Mall, but for some reason it didn't want to assign an IP. I think I must have had something configured wrongly because the signal, although marginal, was allowing us to connect to the access point, but it just wasn't doing anything else. I'll need to read up on the exact settings and work out what was going wrong… it should be pretty easy. Next time, we'll be building a hand-held cantenna to pin-point access points >:)

We saw my uncle today in hospital and he's doing a lot better now. The operation went well, even though things weren't looking very good for a while there. He had a blood and cholesterol test only a week ago, where everything was A-OK. It demonstrates that a bunch of tests like that don't always show the whole picture. After some quick thinking by medical staff they had a radioactive-dye test going and it revealed that his heart was operating at only 3% of its normal capacity. At that point they said there was no time to waste and nothing more to talk about. Literally within minutes he was on the operating table and being 'cracked open' by the same surgeon that performed a heart transplant years ago for my other uncle. Thanks to that doctor and the other medical staff, he gets a second chance at life...

My Wacom tablet arrived today and I'm very happy with it. I'm down in Brisbane right now, without net access - I feel so cut off from the rest of the world ;)

It's cooled down slightly tonight but tomorrow promises to be a scorcher, especially since we'll be moving large, heavy, oddly-shaped objects all day. I think furniture designers purposely make their items difficult to move, so that once people buy them and put them in their homes, they're discouraged from ever moving them again. In this way, the designer's item lives on forever, much like refrigerators and televisions that are usually generations out of style by the time they stop working.

I'm being forced to go to bed early tonight, which will no doubt have an effect on my body clock similar to that of a car hitting a lamppost at high speed. I'll leave you to decide if the car or the lamppost represents my body clock.

P.S. I like online Monopoly.

My uncle is doing OK. The surgery ended up being a quadruple bypass... not much fun :/

Netspace have changed their ADSL plans and have yet again increased the amount they're giving to the users while not increasing the price. Now there's 4.5 GB on peak and 7 GB off peak (11.5 GB instead of 10 GB). There's also the option of having datashaping after you hit the caps, so that instead of paying per MB, you can use as much as you like but with reduced speeds.

I've completed and sent the Expressions of Interest request to TPA. *fingers crossed*

There was a long power outage this morning that killed my uptime (darn) and required a restart of every computer in the house and the office. The server at the office and my computer automatically shut themselves down after sitting on UPS for ages. Damn Ergon!

It's really hot right now, so I hope we get some more rain as soon as possible.

I've ordered a Wacom Intuos2 graphics tablet for use with Photoshop, which will be excellent. Having the additional control will make a big difference to my work flow.

Did I mention it was hot?

I stayed up all night working on some ideas and also an Expressions of Interest request for the Townsville Port. It'd be a fun job to get because it involves some tricky cross-platform database access (using MS SQL Server from a Cobalt Qube 3 running Sun Linux).

This morning's weather was eerie; the breaking light of day revealed a half-light of rolling grey clouds and unusually gusty winds.

I just found out that my uncle had a heart attack last night and is undergoing bypass surgery at the moment. Luckily the outlook is positive at this point, so hopefully there won't be any complications...



Today felt a little unproductive. After a few additions and changes were requested for a website, I ran into some issues with the Scripting.Dictionary object. It just didn't want to behave, so I had to use arrays instead (though this paragraph won't mean much to those that don't code).

A few more payments came in though, so the day wasn't a total loss. The audit also went smoothly.

This weekend I may be in Brisbane again, depending on my motivation levels and which locale is forecast as being cooler ;) If I go down I might have the chance to catch up with friends this time. There will be some moving to do though, with my cousin and her fiancé moving from their old unit.

It's surprising how quickly the weather can change. The past week has been warm, but not really hot... until yesterday. Now it really feels like summer.

There have been some storms on the horizon and a little rain, but not enough to improve the colour of the landscape. There's more rain forecast for today and tomorrow so maybe that will change.

Capitalise();

"won't you tell me something true"