Quade's World

This is getting predictable.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:34:46 GMT

Well. What to update this week?

Family news. I am a first-time uncle as of Friday last week. azhure and I paid a visit to her brother and his family at hospital. Of course we copped a few "this will be you in a few weeks" comments, but that was to be expected (and tolerated). ;). My new niece is very cute btw!

Let's see. I picked up a Bluray copy of Transformers 2 last week and managed to watch it on the weekend. This is now officially the loudest disk I own.....my new(ish) subwoofer really had its work cut out for it! In fact my newly pastered ceiling had its bloody work cut out for it from the vibration!!

I couldn't resist this weekend's Steam special. Bioware's "Mass Effect" game for $10, bargain! It's one I have put off buying for years because I couldn't really face the time investment of another RPG, and for all of its wonderfulness, I know the game had its flaws. Anyway, $10 is pretty much an automatic purchase these days, so I did! :).

I'm still hankering to buy myself a new SSD harddisk for my PC. The problem is, that I want one that is bigger than 200Gb. Problem being that for a decent one, that means a thousand dollar outlay. I just can't bring myself to justify that much money on what is admittedly a HUGE performance boost, but is really something I don't NEED. A THOUSAND! Grrr. The other thing with that is that I would like to upgrade to Windows 7 when I switch, and I want Windows 7 sooner rather than later, so I am torn over this bloody thing. I could go for a smaller SSD, but I just know I will run out of room too quickly, and the last thing I want to do is split my apps onto a spinning platter (that should be for bulk data only). I think I'll sit on it a while longer and see what happens to prices (stop going up!!!).

Ok, getting to the topic and excuse for my posts is this week's weight update. No surprises here again, 1.1kg farted into the atmosphere in total last week (azhure would have you believe that this is where it has all been going).

The graph is boring but looks like this!!

Holding steady

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:22:34 GMT

What can I say today? Not a hellava lot really. Week three of the job is starting off smoothly with no particular dramas yet. We are still going to be busy for the next month, so we will see what happens after that. Lots of talk about BHP and Rio Tino join ventures and how it will affect our project in the future, but we can only continue on as planned until we find out otherwise.

I had a mildly productive weekend with a shop on Saturday and a nice free lunch on Sunday.

On Saturday I managed to
Fix the retic with a new main solenoid (stripped the thread on the old one in previous repair attempts)
Bought all of the Startrek Next Generation movies on Bluray
Bought a used copy of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for the PS3 (in preparation for importing the sequel).
Inadvertently found two copies of Neverwinter Nights 2 for $4 each (couldn't resist).
Bought a shiny new laptop for azhure . Even if it was a Mac (patooey!)

And I think we ended up watching a boatload of downloaded and recorded material from the week.

Oh, good news on the PS3 front......the long awaited PlayTV addon is officially out on November 26. This was after being promised for the Olympics last year mind you!! I am very glad to have gone for the PS3....the extra stuff that Sony keep releasing for it make it a pretty kickarsed little box. (I especially like the idea of streaming TV over the network to my PSP).

And finally, the week's weigh-in. I was once again a bit nervous of this one since my weekend was not as well behaved as I would have liked. However, I think my good behaviour and the sheer amount of times I visited the small room during the week (due to increased water intake) compensated for that. I have managed an even 1kg this week, which couldn't be any more average :).

Nother week, nother kilo

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:49:05 GMT

A good weekend has been had! After a loooong week at work, it was very welcome to get a bit of time off, even if that meant attending a very long anti-natal class. I didn't mind it per-se...it was just a long time to be sitting down and listening to people talk.

Come to think of it, last week was a tad weird. The work days felt short, but the work week felt like it took forever! Maybe the universe popped in a lot of really short days last week rather than 7 long ones?

Saturday night was the week's saving event with Squasher's 40th birthday shindig at the Sail and Anchor pub. It was a perfect night to be out on the balcony catching up with old friends and watching Fremantle hum from above :).

I was a bit worried about this morning's weigh in. I had deliberately saved calories for the weekend so I could have a reasonable amount of beer. I had an extra large dinner on Sunday too since I was feeling exhausted and realised I was probably just running out of food in my system ;).

Anyway, I shouldn't have been worried, as it was a bonus 1.1kg week this week. Makes up for last week's 0.9, so I am bang on 1kg/week target again!

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:47:54 GMT

First day of the new job!!

What can I say at the moment really? It's not like I did any actual work at all. I got myself settled in and all of the inductions out of the way, and then a good chunk of the afternoon was spent in a meeting.

I just love the fact that it is in town and so bloody convenient to public transport. 25 minutes door to door during peak hour. How can you go wrong? I need to get my smartrider all sorted out though......why does the dept of transport make it such a pain in the arse to get one of these things??

Let's see. I suppose I should talk about my LAST day of work at Serck too.

Sucked!

Felt very sad and emotional all day, but held it together till the end of the day. Kept the goodbye speech short. I felt much loved and appreciated though, which is always nice to hear. It was also a good sign that the GM decided that we'd all just take off the last hour of the day to celebrate too.

Saturday was spent fixing retic (which promptly broke again), and taps, and spot of shopping! Shopping involving a nice PC upgrade. I am now quad core enabled!! Not that I game a heap these days, but buggerit, I had a bigarsed long service payout and I wanted a present!

Sunday I managed to dodge azhure 's baby shower (for the most part), and went out to buy beer, engine oil and help dad fix a fence....I felt like I had to assert my manliness or something. The evening was spent celebrating the new job at Little Creatures :).

Finally, this morning's weigh in..... somewhat spoilt by last night's LC splurge, but still a good result! 0.9kg is beginning to look like a habit!

Shh, quiet. He posted!

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:39:47 GMT

I have been a quiet little lurker for a long time here, but I have some news to share so I shall!

For those who do not read azhure 's LJ, I am soon to be a father! This is old news to most, but I am sure someone out there hadn't heard yet. Little bugger is due on my birthday, so there goes any hope of me getting any attention from now on! ;) Well I am still having Crayfish dammit! This is clearly the biggest news and news that I am not quite absorbing myself I suspect. It will all get very real soon tho :). I just spent the day constructing the cot and other furniture, and taking delivery of prams and car seats.

Actually, on the weekend I finally got round to cleaning out the "junk room" which is now the nursery with some much needed badgering and assistance from Steph. This room has been full of junk since we moved in 2 and a half years ago, thinking "I will get round to organising that"...hmmf. Ended up turfing a lot of old computer gear and rubbish that I was too sentimental to get rid of during the two house moves since I left home. Part of that was my old Uni notes. Wow...there were some old memories there.

Second piece of news is that I have resigned from my job of 12 years to face the big wide world as a contracting Engineer. Pay is good, market is still unstable, but I am keen to give it a go! This week marks my final week with Serck, and it is going to be interesting! I have a lot to get done before Friday! Good news is that I will be working with old friends in the City which will be a real change of scenery for me. Also I will be working in quite a different capacity in the new job in a completely different aspect of process control than I am used to.

And lastly for now I am back on my weightloss regime again! I am once again posting progress so you bugger can keep me honest. I started up in secret so I could see if I could do it for starters. It has now been a few weeks and I have been averaging a smidge better than 1kg/week which is fine by me. The difference this time is that I am not on the Jenny Craig food. I am simply limiting my Calorie intake to 1200-1500 per day. My weight gain reason is simple, I love to eat a lot! By simply cutting down and sticking to reasonably healthy fare I hope to get down to 80kg by the end of January 2010...let's see.

I will once again post the chart for progress.

Well that was some big news all chucked in at once. I will try to keep things posted as they develop from here! :)

Congrats!!!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:06:49 GMT

Sending out a huge well done to the US of A for making the right decision today!

On behalf of the rest of the world, I thank you :)

I will send a fruit basket!

Olympics for REAL men!

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:23:13 GMT

A rare post for me, but I had to share given the current Olympic climate.

http://www.realmansolympics.com/

This is pure gold! (pun only partially intended) The Olympic medal tally, but weighted for each event's manliness!
Unfortunately Australia just doesn't rate due to our swimmer's fruity costumes ;).

One cool thing is that you can put in your own weights for events, so you can make your own medal tally based on your own arbitrary criteria!

I just watched the ABC global warming doco...

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:45:36 GMT

And I only have one thing to say, and that is...

Who let the eugenics nutters into the audience??

I mean really.....Did they just manage to accidently find them all in the audience? Were they just the only ones wanting to ask questions? Did they sneak in en-masse?

If nothing else the audience "question time" made for some laughs tonight!!

This was too good not to post!

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:09:37 GMT

Your stats are:
STR:16
INT:15
WIS:13
DEX:13
CON:13
CHR:15

The real life AD&D Stats Generator.

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 14:52:17 GMT

Well, that is Linux updated to a new core for another year.
I am fairly impressed with how smoothly these updates to Fedora go. This is the second time I have simply dumped the DVD into the PC and said update, and so far, both have been pretty successful.
Try doing that to Windows and see how many problems you get!!
For the record, this update was from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6. I am getting into the habit of updating every 2 cores when the previous version looses its update support.
The only problems I had were several unresolved dependencies...usually the result of an obsolete utility package that could just be removed entirely, and a few services that weren't quite fully installed.
All hardware, drivers and settings seemed to be retained. Even the problematic Java stuff seems pretty solid.

Only one problem now is that the auto updater seems to have changed its behaviour (doesn't download updates nightly like before), and none of the documentation I can find has listed this change. BAH!

This prompted another spate of software updates on my own PC....things that I usually don't check as a week by week thing....firmwares, UPS, hardware monitoring.

Also been playing Lego Starwars 1. The sequel is by FAR the better game......the original has several sectoins where you can trap yourself, or the AI will screw something up. Also the vehicle sections are abominable. The general design and quality of puzzles is also lacking.

Ooo it's official

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 08:55:04 GMT

Theyre making the next Indiana Jones movie!!

Ok, I'm impressed

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 12:19:20 GMT

Yep, I should have looked at the google homepages first before asking questions ;).

Thanks to those who suggested I check it out. My god these clever little boffins are good aren't they? The shit that google manage to put together in web pages is amazing.

I guess that's is what comes from a development environment where the geeks are allowed to bend their wills to whatever the hell they feel like. Getting payed to PLAY is the way to get results in technology I think. Hell, I think I get more work done when I am "unmanaged" at work myself. I am lucky that my boss is pretty hands off most of the time.

What is your homepage?

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 09:20:32 GMT

After a long hiatis I post once again.

I have been on holiday over the Agnostica/New Years break, and aside form a couple of nasty (read 10) callouts in the last 2 days, it has been spent watching telly and playing Lego Starwars 2 on the laptop.

I have somewhat questionably decided to swap ISP's over this period too, which has led to about a weeks worth of downtime. Luckily, being on call has allowed me to leech off the work's wireless connection in the meantime, so I haven't been completely offline (I would have enabled dial up but I forgot that my NEW shiny linux motherboard only had a single serial port which was being used by the UPS...doh).

Anyway....I am not on IINet's shiny ADSL2'ness and have a question.

What do you use as your homepage?

I have traditionally used my ISP's homepage/member page as my home, but after moving from Westnet's great members page to IINet's somewhat bland home page, I am looking to break tradition.
I am tempted to simply point my browser to Google and be done with it....fast, small, and useful.
But I want options.....I like opening the browser to see a local TV guide, news headlines, and weather info.

Yes, I could just keep using Westnet's members page, I hear you saying, but that feels a bit...wrong, I dunno. Times are a changin and I feel like a change too :).

I downloaded a free VOIP client to test out the VOIP I am paying for, for no good reason, and that seems to work nicely. I am still trying to figure a use for it mind you, as I don't know anyone internationally, or interstate for that matter. I am also resisting the urge to spend over $300 on a wireless VOIP phone that would save me approximately fuckall on calls since I generally don't make any.....but damn.....an IP enabled 802.11 phone....that is just cool.

Actually it is phone envy all round after having a gander at hbb's shiny newness. I think I might give up on my slim hope that Nokia will decide to release an 850MHz HSDPA version of their N95 marvel, and go for the IMate-Jasjam. Being Windows Mobile, it will have more or less the same software support as the Symbian platform I am familiar with, and all I really miss out on is the GPS and media features, which, well, are there for flash and not going to be big features for me after all.

New Years will be a quiet one this year...between on-call and lack of inclination, a night in will be relaxing before heading back to work :). Weather permitting, I will have an excuse to get the telescope out :)