Heading to Brisbane for the weekend for my brother's birthday which will be fun :)

Tristan dropped around just before I left to bring me two very nice surprises. The first was a case of Red Eye Platinum as a thankyou present - phwoar! But the best was yet to come: he then told me the wonderful news that another baby is on the way! Congrats you two, you're awesome parents and I couldn't be happier for you. I hope everything goes smoothly for you and Melinda and I'm sure Tyler will be glad to have a little brother or sister :)

In work-related news, another site project was signed off on today. I've also temporarily migrated this site to iiNet until I get the time to redesign it.



I'm now connected to iiNet after the ADSL churn went smoothly today (ahead of time). Being able to download at 150+ KB/s is great!

My "sister" was in the bay yesterday and dropped by for a gossip - you love it. She's so retro - too cool for skool.

That reminds me... I went to see Pryde a couple of weeks ago, which was unusual. This time last year I wouldn't have expected I'd be in a position to be visiting dead friends at a cemetery. I mean, that's something your parents do, not something you do, right? It's one of those defining moments when you realise that this kind of thing can only become more frequent as you age. In a way, it's depressing, but on the upside, he has a really nice burial site; a garden under a large tree where the sun sets casting long shadows through gold light - in fact, all of the other souls would be envious (I was envious, and I'm not even dead!). I wish that he'd talked more about his problems before acting on them in such a permanent way, and that those he did talk to hadn't been so caught up in their own superficiality to do nothing. Now I'm sounding bitter...

The weather has been slightly cooler today. My UPS has been working overtime with a recent spate of electrical storms causing spikes and blackouts. Last night the power was off to the entire Wide Bay for over an hour because the main so-many-thousand-kilowatt transmission line was struck by lightning and damaged.

The major project was signed off on, which is almost unbelievable - it's only taken a year to get to this point. It looks like I may already have another site lined up once it's finished: a custom kitesurfing board manufacturer and designer.

After too many late nights, it's time to rest those neurons and synapses. G'night.

It's been hot.

Another item sold on eBay though the buyer is being difficult. I'm selling off a few old CDs and DVDs that I know I'll never watch again, along with miscellaneous pinball parts.

By Saturday I should be on a 1500 kbit/s internet connection, three times faster than my current connection, as I churn to iiNet from Netspace. Hopefully the process will go smoothly (unlike trying to fax the authorisation form to them, where the form provided a different fax number to the one in the e-mail, both of which were different to the one they told me over the phone). But, all that was corrected and the churn application is now in the hands of Telstra... (uhoh)

This will mean that my webspace with Netspace will disappear and I'll have to transfer the bulk of this site to somewhere else. I'll probably redesign parts of it at the same time and move it to my main server, with just the large image files on the iiNet webspace. That is... if I get time.

Things have been busy, as they always are, and there's a lot of code to finish. The large website project that's being in the planning stage for the last year is about to begin. I've nicked it "La Gare Montparnasse - 1895", because that's how it's going to end up if I don't keep the client under control.

A little over a week since the last update and a busy one it's been. Thursday saw a lot of driving and an hour-long presentation that I'm still feeling mentally drained from. Nearly all of Monday through Wednesday was spent preparing for it, so hopefully it'll pay off. Unfortunately it's meant that I'm now behind in other work that has to be finished, so while this weekend would have been spent in Brisbane it'll now be spent here, coding away.

I decided this afternoon, after finishing more coding and feeling trance-like due to little sleep and excessive analytical thinking throughout the week, it was time to have a break and re-energise. I headed to Virtuosity and played about 20 games of The Twilight Zone pinball machine (scoring a lot of replays) before a main mode switch in the game failed and made it impossible to progress to different features (d'oh). The game is caked in dirt, so it's a challenge to play at the best of times. Still, it was fun, and most importantly, relaxing.

The rain is gone, the weather is hot again and the air con still isn't installed... *melts*

The oscilloscope I mentioned last time has a dead CRT, so it might be expensive to have it fixed (still waiting on a pricing estimate for that).

One last thing, the food at the Java Sea Noodle Bar and Café is awesome! I had tom yum style hokkien noodle soup there tonight and although I couldn't identify most of the ingredients (most of irregular floating shapes appeared to be decendants of some kind of fungi) it tasted fantastic! I wish I'd know about it months ago... sif Subway!

Now... sleep.

To my surprise and delight, the item I listed on eBay sold after just two days! Now that I think about it, it was a bargain at that price.

More rain and the weather is slowly settling from wild storms to consistent drizzle and light showers. The high temperatures have subsided temporarily, so I'm enjoying it! The rain has caused a few instances of minor flooding but nothing too serious here.

My ring arrived yesterday and I love it. I ordered it from NZ at the end of last year; it's a 21st birthday present to myself (I had to order in advance because of the lead time). I've always loved titanium rings; I became aware of them about two years after I first started using the net by just stumbling onto a website from an AltaVista search (at that time the world's best search engine). I was immediately fascinated. I love the utilitarian yet stylish essence of titanium. Amazingly light, extremely strong, warm to wear and subtle tone.

I'm still improving things slowly on the pinball machine when I get a little spare time. There's more activity in that log than there is in here, so head over there for some more reading material (which won't be interesting to those uninspired by electronics and mechanics). Hopefully the replacement transformer will arrive soon and then a full clean out will be done. Reproduction cabinet decals are about to be made by Phoenix Arcade, which will provide the ultimate finishing touch. I went on a little pinball hunt on the weekend and found that there's a place just down the road from here that has an Addams Family machine - an excellent game and a lot of fun! The replay award is currently at around 40 million, so that makes for a lot of free credits for me :D

The Bristow Laser Systems website was completed this week and next week I'll probably be heading out of town for a meeting to do with the next major project after the one I'm currently working on. There's a big line up of work and the deadlines are pretty scary, but nothing's undoable.

Someone was throwing away an oscilloscope recently and I ended up with it. It doesn't appear to work, or maybe I just set the triggering incorrectly, so I've taken it into a local electronics repair shop to see what they can make of it. It's possible that there is a simple component failure that will be cheap and easy to fix. It's also possible that the CRT is dead and it would be cheaper to buy a new oscilloscope than replace the tube, but since I have no practical repair knowledge of oscilloscopes the investment of $30 for someone to check it out seemed reasonable. I hope it's something simple because it would be nice to have an oscilloscope and a bonus if there's only a ~$100 outlay to make that a reality.

Time for an early night.