Done and dusted but not steam cleaned.

Handed in the keys today! Momentous moment! And thanks to the wonder of direct deposit, you can now get your bond back sooner :-)

No longer in my prime!

That's it. I'm no longer in my Mersenne prime. Unless somehow I manage to make it to 127, I won't be seeing another one of those again. To misquote Nixon, "I am not a nerd!"

Enough silliness for one day. I also didn't want to post this on my exact birthday because hey.... that's too much information! Don't want the entire world knowing my exact date of birth.

New toys are fun!

Well.. they will be when I get time to use them. Still unpacking and putting things in useful places, but at least I got to buy new toys.

Last weekend I bought a bunch of tools (drills, bits, socket set) and some stuff in particular for the fitting the towbar to my car project. I bought the required 30mm diameter hole cutter, which of course turns out to be a specialist tool requiring a drill which can cope. So yes.. this will cost more than having it fitted but at least I have toys I will own forever! I also may need (although not sure how compulsory it is) a torque wrench. Not cheap but could be fun anyway. Jury is out on that one.

And in other shiny tool news, a new version of Hugin is out! Yay! So I may play with panoramas again (when I have the time). It does a whole swag of new projections, and improves the built-in stitching tool. It also apparently multi-threads, which would be great if I had more than one processing core. Oh well.

It's all over bar the carpet cleaning

Well... that's it. Goodbye old flat! Last night was spent doing a final clean-up. Was a good ol' flat. Did its job well. Boy did I keep a lot of junk in there. Some of it is now binned or recycled. Still have heaps to get rid of. Just need to decide what!

A big thankyou to DestructoMeg for helping me with this less than delightful task.

Yeah the carpet is still a bit dodgy and there are coloured stains on the walls which will never be removed (honestly... the place needed painting when I moved in). I am fairly sure that the place is cleaner than when I moved in to it. Maybe I'll get the REagent to organise the carpet cleaning for me. They like taking money out of your bond anyway, right?

That was tooooooo easy

Recently I subscribed to TPG's offering of ADSL2+. The rates seemed okay, so I went ahead with it. They kept updating me of progress via emails, and yesterday morning I picked up my Zyxel modem. Apparently I now have VoIP if I want it, but the main bit is that it's a funky modem with 802.11g wireless, 4 ethernet ports, and heaps of security features. You can also configure it via telnet session.

The funny thing was that after I finally got my computer to boot again (there was an incident involving the smell of burning circuit board), I plugged the modem in, and straight away I could browse the world. How cool is that? It was all pre-loaded and set up for me. Either that or something really weird is happening. So now I've changed the admin password like a good security person, and I need to work out how to set up the wireless network. Particularly for linux (in Redhat flavour).

Picking at the carcass

This morning I drove to Smithfield to the auction house were my ex-car is currently housed. Was an interesting experience (well, getting there was fun too...) and it was an odd deeling to see the car in more detail. The thieves had popped open the bottom of the steering column and the key mechanism was entirely exposed. Apparently, according to the auction house, NRMA had not sent the keys through. I was a bit suspicious of the "popping it in the internal mail bag and hoping for the best" approach they had. Not that it really mattered, given the state of the ignition.

So what was left in the car? Almost everything. A few things missing included umbrella, brand new sunshade, cheap-arsed toolkit and matching cheap-arsed air compressor. What was there was my chuck in the car wool blankets, and... my inherited from Aveline large aluminium ex-army frying pan. Woohoo!

I got one too!

Well if ForBattle! can have one, so can I!

adopt your own virtual pet!

I met Peter Garrett! Woohoo!

Last night I was at an event organised by work, called "Meet the CEO". It's a loungechair Parkinson-like interview of random CEOs, covering life experiences and done with a good sense of humour as well. Being an employee of the faculty, I was allowed in to the VIP area. Met a lot of people... many who did not want to meet me (not exactly surprising... I have little to offer them). The only person on the distinguished guest list whom I really wanted to meet didn't show, so I ended up walking up to other random strangers and saying hello. Then it turned out that Peter Garrett was there. I may well have been mid conversation with other people whom I just met but quite frankly... I wasn't going to miss the opportunity. So I wandered up to him and had a chat. He was mild mannered and put a lot of thought in to things he said. Spoke about all sorts of stuff for about 5-10 minutes. After the main event (the 1 hour interview with the CEO of Westpac, Dr. David Morgan), the Honorable Mr Garrett had to walk past me and said "See you later, mate!". He called me mate! That's almost a first name basis!

Well it certainly made my day.

Quick random poll...

If you were a female, on your own, and you saw me lurking in the shadows, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying a bundle of stuff under my arm, would you be really really REALLY scared?

Yes there is a story to this. Was picking up stuff from Megs place last night and had a few things to pop in the back of the car. Well, the car from the people in the other part of the house had pulled up. Since they had to walk around the back of my car, which is where I had to go to put the things in, I decided to wait for them first. This may have been interpreted as lurking. I had left the door in the fence open since my hands were full on the way out. This turned out to be important for the sole occupant of the car. I didn't realise quite what was going on until she (I hadn't even noticed gender) dashed out of the car, powered through the door, firmly closing it without losing speed, and scrambling in through her front door. My first thought was "How rude. Didn't even say hello." This was soon enough replaced with "Ooops. I'm being scary again aren't I?"

That answers THAT question....

A funny thing happened to me while moving house. Some mighty, mighty friends (Ob, Dr_Nik, Dr_Scruff, Topsy, Mouse and of course Megz) were helping me move house when I get a phone call from Maroubra police. "We've located your car" they say. Wow. I thought it was gone forever. Of course it's not my car now, it belongs to NRMA. I did go check it out. Some stuff is still in there but I don't have a key to do anything about that. Funny thing is that it's only about 2 blocks from my flat. Wonder how many times it's been broken in to. The locks looked badly popped. The lovely detective described the car as "Better do something about it. It won't stay there too long. It has a screwdriver hanging out of the ignition." It had been all nicely dusted for prints, with a calling card on the seat from the detectives.

Phoned NRMA... took forever to the helpful phone operator what was going on. Kept needing to check and recheck things. I was doing them a favour by explaining where the car is, since it's theirs now, but they kept insisting that they were assisting me. I guess I still own the contents, which I'll have to figure out how to get now. They gave the worst instructions to the tow truck guy picking up the vehicle. He thought is was a smash, not a stolen-recovery, and didn't even know the colour of the car. He contacted me on my mobile to get real directions, and was nice enough to thank me after he found it. Actually.... he was ecstatic about it. Probably because it was Sunday night and he wanted to go home.

Old meets new

While up in Brisbane I took this photo. I quite like the contrast of age, style and charater.

Send them to the Hague. Now.

Honestly... how is this not a crime against humanity? (Not the lack of focus... the colours.)