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.)

New toys!

I just picked up a new towbar kit (towbar, ball and wiring harness) plus a set of roof racks. Ended up buying 'Genuine Toyota' parts because they were cheaper than anything else I could easily find anyway. Who would have thought? Still have to work out how to install them though. The towbar looks easy enough and the wiring kit may have a few tricks in it but there aren't exactly instructions with these things, so it could go either way.

Stay tuned for more exciting car news.

*NEWSFLASH*
Looks like the wiring kit includes some instructions although I'm not convinced yet they are good ones. Once I have pulled my car slightly to pieces I will know. When my car was stolen, it had my (cheap and nasty) toolkit in it, so I'll have to get a replacement. Which means.... MORE TOYS! Yay!

Yet another panorama

Quick(ish) and dirty attempt this time. Just wanted to put it together to see what happens. It's at Gunlom again, but looking up to the lookout where the other Gunlom panorama was taken. I might need to compile the software myself to get the current version and start messing with different projections. I'm using cylindrical at the moment but I want to see how it goes with Mercator, which means either waiting for a binary to turn up or compiling my own. Could try rectilinear but that would probably distort the image too much.

Hooray! Finally got a Flickr account!

I have many photos of the Darwin trip now on Flickr. Of course they are backwards because I am uploading them forwards. I'll fix it when I can be bothered. Maybe. I still have more to put up there I think.

Edit: Hoorah! 61 photos uploaded!

Blogthings

Alright... I should stop procrastinating. But until I do.....

You Are Heineken

You appreciate a good beer, but you're not a snob about it. You like your beer mild and easy to drink, so you can concentrate on being drunk. Overall, you're a friendly drunk who's likely to buy a whole round for your friends... many times. Sometimes you can be a bit boring when you drink. You may be prone to go on about topics no one cares about.

What's Your Beer Personality?

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

Who's Your Inner European?

Your Quirk Factor: 65%

You're so quirky, it's hard for you to tell the difference between quirky and normal. No doubt about it, there's little about you that's "normal" or "average."

How Quirky Are You?

Your Personality Profile

You are funky, outdoorsy, and down to earth. While you may not be a total hippie... You're definitely one of the most free spirited people around. You are very impulsive - every day is a new adventure. However, you do put some thought behind all your actions. Still, you do tend to shock and offend people from time to time!

The World's Shortest Personality Test

More pictures!

Well it was a rather fun weekend, and I took some photos on Saturday which I think are worth sharing. Firstly, these little guys (there were actually 2 of them) landed on the balcony across from me, then flew to my balcony and did not seem even remotely scared. So I wandered off and got my camera, came back and they still hadn't moved. This shot is a little more action than I thought it would be, and looks like birds have taken to skipping. Which is fair enough. If you've been flying for so long, why not?


This next little piccy is from my brother's place up in the mountains. The smurfs have moved in and are taking over his front yard.



I think this mushroom is a Amanita muscaria or 'Fly Agaric' although apparently getting a definite ID on a mushroom is very difficult.

Fog is soooo sexy!

It was so awesome to see Sydney blanketed in fog this morning. I didn't realise how much of Sydney was fogged in. If I did, I would have brought my camera on my journey to work and taken photos of some of the sandstone buildings emerging from the fog. Oh well. I did take a couple of shots of the lack of view from my balcony which I'll pop up real soon now (tm).


The sun can *almost* get through!

One more time for the dummies

Okay... I had to try it again. This time for sure. Wanted to get the contrast right and it looks like it helped. I changed the contrast anchor to be the 1st frame (instead of the 3rd) and left the position anchor as the 3rd frame. Am I OCD? Maybe. Just wanted to get it to look as good as it can. This is also here partly so I remember what I did and can get it right much easier next time I try panoramas.

Gunlom Revisitied

Alas, I can't actually go back there right at this minute, but at least I can still keep tinkering with the photos. Still using Hugin, but using the PTStitcher engine rather than nona and enblend. This allows for colour and brightness correction, and has a different way of blending the borders. I also leaned how to add extra contol points to control horizontal and vertical features, which has left me with a much better horizon. At least I'd like to think so. There are 2 ways to make these things better. One is to use a tripod and the other is to learn how to use the camera better to lock down all the brightness/exposure settings. Even if I only locked the camera settings, it would already have made it much better.


Edit: While I'm on a roll, here's the Nourlangie Rock and Arnhem land photo redone similarly.