kjp
It would have been good to have had dad around over the past while:
* watch The Hollowmen (a great ABC political satire show)
* talk about work stuff
* orienteering (only my fourth or fifth time this year, I think) - a bit steep in parts at Bardon.
* Wednesday night dinner with B, C, D & M (P was out of town).
That's life I suppose.
We saw The Dark Knight (Batman movie) last night. It was a pretty good film, on the long side, but not a problem. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I don't watch any television, but I'm probably a bit more sensitive to the violence in it than others. Dunno.
A few interesting articles:
Should we Get Rid of Juries? - playing sudoku in court.
Searching for God in the Brain.
No Country for Young Men - China's gender imbalance.
The other day (or week?) I realised that my blog has been stuffed, for a while, I assume. In particular all category and date archive pages, along with the generation of each individual entry page were not working correctly. The fact that these pages are dynamically generated has something to do with the problem: the pages are fine (now), being generated as static html pages. Not the ideal solution, but it works.
So it seems that I have a few issues of late. Pretty much: family, work, and the flat.
The family problem isn't really my problem (although I don't fully get everything that's going on), although indirectly it is my problem: family is family. I suppose a key is to always work at things that are important, be understanding, etc. etc. "Communication is key" someone pretty tops once said. It's interesting how there's millions of people in the world that completely disagree with each other on fundamental things (eg: religion), but still can get along fine, and love each other, etc.
Work's been stressful for a while. Not really surprising of late. Thinking about the 'soft skills' course (personality profiles) at the end of last year: under stress, people like me don't say no; or say nothing. Fantastic (yes, sarcasm). Very very bad (not sarcastic). Stressful, with bonus nights of not being able to sleep.
Apparently my flatmate smokes. After replying to my ("must be non-smoker") advert as a non-smoker, found out after they'd moved in that they smoked in the past - giving up about a week or fortnight before they moved in. A stressful day today: and they're out on the balcony a bit. Hmmmmm. Not sure what I should do. Nothing yet, I think: see if they proactively come to me to explain... In a few days talk to them (I'm away from the flat from tomorrow morning to Sun midday). I've got an "out" in the living arrangement contract. They're not on the lease until after 2 months after they move in, and I'm happy that they go on the lease...
I was in Sydney last weekend (plus a few days either side), to see my nieces I and L, and the rest of the family. Overall it was pretty good trip: spent a fair amount of time hanging out at the park overlooking South Cronulla beach. Was good. There's some comments on the bulk of the trip (excluding the last hour or so of the trip) - maybe written up later; some other comments on the last hour or so of the trip - probably not written up later, and the flight back to Brisbane:
I got dropped of Sydney airport - terminal 2, and proceeded to walk through the carpark to terminal 3 (or maybe it was the other way around, I can't remember)... I hadn't bothered to print off the booking sheet - just the flight info in my phone calendar. Anyhow, after getting through checkin and to my gate, my 3.30pm departure flight was now due to leave at 3.40pm. OK, that's fine. After a while that changed to 4pm. We boarded a bit before 4, when the doors were shut, they told us that we couldn't leave until clearance had been given (or something)... a ~45 minute wait. Brilliant.
It's a bit average when the time your flight is delayed by is pretty much the flying time... (each being 1 1/2 hours).
A few days back I finished reading The New Rome - The fall of an empire and the fate of America - a book by Cullen Murphy. It was pretty interesting: worth a read: about the similarities between ancient Rome and modern day America. Learnt a few things about both of those two societies, will probably read more on ancient Rome. Worth a read.
A few weeks back I installed a wireless adsl modem/router/firewall. Netgear DG834G. It was a bit of a pain to get going for a few reasons:
* I had previously gone through and turned off unused services, apparently I needed some!
* I thought I got an IP dynamically assigned, apparently not!
* Multiplexing method is LLC, not VC based. The router's autodetect seemed to get this wrong.
Initially, the autodetect didn't work after quite a few attempts. A reset on the back button was required so that instead of starting up with an autodetect, it went straight to the menu, which allowed me to set some things up so that the autodetect would work.
It's all good though now.