IMPORTANT: The following journal is intended for the use and viewing of approved persons only and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this work is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word ‘absquatulation’ has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the creation of this journal and a minimum of Microsoft software was used. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards.
Year View| Summary| Highlights| April 2008 (Month View)
Dec ‘07 | Jan ‘08 | Feb ‘08 | Mar ‘08 | Apr ‘08 May ‘08 | Jun ‘08 | Jul ‘08 | Aug ‘08 |
01.04.2008 – Tuesday 1 April – Car Accidents & High Speed Internet Nails
- 9am
- • On my way to an interview with a recruiter, I was involved in an accident. Coming around a corner in a 70 km/h zone, I found a stopped rubbish collection truck. It was directly in the centre of the right-hand lane in a two lane, one way road. It wasn’t off the side of the road. The rubbish truck man was standing behind it loading a bin into the truck. I managed to stop before killing the rubbish truck man. The car behind me didn’t manage to stop before running into me. The front of their car was forced into their radiator, their bonnet bent up a good foot or so. Mine has some scratches and a little cracking on the plastic bumper on the back. I’m now a great fan of large, heavy, well-built cars.
- 1pm
- • Stella and I bussed into the city and watched a few hundred people freeze in place at Queen Street Mall. It was interesting. I then had lunch at Govinda’s.
- Evening
- • I drove to Maz’s, where we managed to get a gigabit network connection through concrete, brick, glass and aluminium, using only a 3 inch nail.
- Night
- • Stayed up programming something in C# to measure internet download usage.
02.04.2008 – Wednesday 2 April – Blading
- • I dropped past Maz’s to discuss some .net problems I was having. Bronwen came around, and we went rollerblading.
03.04.2008 – Thursday 3 April – Shopping
- • Went to Maz’s. Went to Indooroopilly. Gave the economy a small amount of money.
04.04.2008 – Friday 4 April – Nacho Heroes
- Afternoon
- • Train into city with Stella, meet Maz, buy pop rock candy, and then back home. Drive to Indooroopilly to get nacho ingredients with Grace, and then back home.
- Night
- • Eat Grace’s nachos. Watch an episode of Heroes. Grace goes to study. Maz and Stella get drunk. Drive to KFC at Kangaroo Point for dinner for Maz. Maz and Stella play games in the park. Drive Maz home. Find out there were $309 return flights to Kuala Lumpur, but that they had to be booked by tomorrow. Regret not knowing this sooner. Go to bed.
05.04.2008 – Saturday 5 April – Rocket Scientists
- Morning
- • Lazy sleep-in.
- Evening
- • Bronwen came over.
- Night
- • Had a nice dinner with Bronwen, her parents, and her brother and his fiancé.
- Later Night
- • Went to a combination birthday, housewarming, and house expulsion party—for the same person and the same house. He’s moved in and been immediately evicted, on his birthday. It was probably also the largest single collection of rocket scientists (or hypersonic engineers, technically) outside the US, which made for an interesting party—though there was also the dance teacher.
06.04.2008 – Sunday 6 April – Fire, Curry & Ugly Green People
- Morning
- • I slept in.
- Afternoon
- • Watched “Shrek 2” with Bronwen, then had a late lunch at Indooroopilly with Stella and Maz.
- Afternoon
- • Watched “Shrek 2” with Bronwen, then had a late lunch at Indooroopilly with Stella and Maz.
- Night
- • Had curry from Halim’s with Stella, before driving to Maz’s. It’s very cold.
- 4am
- • Fire alarm went off, for no apparent reason. I do not like it.
07.04.2008 – Monday 7 April – Broken Bolts
- Afternoon
- • Woken by Stella, who was fifteen minutes late for a presentation at uni. Rushed her to uni. Parked at South Bank and walked to Govinda’s for lunch.
- Night
- • Drove to Kangaroo Point with Maz and Stella to go rollerblading, but a bolt holding one of Maz’s wheels sheared off. Instead we walked across the Goodwill bridge, through QUT and the botanical gardens, and back past McDonald’s and Hungry Jack’s, through South Bank, to the car, then back to Maz’s.
- 3:30am
- • It’s got late. I’ve been up re-jigging my résumé—changing it from a performance to a functional résumé, at least in theory. In reality, I got sick of that and have been writing up the rest of my Tasmanian trip, and sorting out some of my music, filling out some missing Massive Attack and Pendulum songs—incomplete albums are a horrific imperfection to a perfectionist such as myself. Using “an” before an hard aitch is also an horrific mastication of the Queen’s good English.
- 5:30am
- • Bed. Now. I have just discovered that the real estate lady is coming today, not tomorrow.
08.04.2008 – Tuesday 8 April – Bad Traffic
- 9am
- • I sort of wake up when my alarm goes, so I can be sort of awake, should the real estate lady come.
- Later
- • The real estate lady came, saw, and left.
- Later
- • The real estate lady came, saw, and left.
- Afternoon
- • I drove out to Wooloowin and bought two foam mattresses for $15 each, so that Stella can hide her guests away in her room. Traffic is insane for some reason—not any busier than normal, just chaotic driving. I saw a motorbike rider most probably killed by two cars, a stopped bus, several smashed cars blocking traffic, was forced to drive on the wrong side of the road to avoid the remains of cars, and waited in traffic for ages while police guided people through lights closed due to accidents, to mention a few. And this was before it started raining.
- Night
- • Bronwen came over and we went and got pizza and watched a few episodes of Heroes with Grace. I drove Bronwen home and then drove up to Maz’s, where I waited until Stella finished work. The driver chaos continued on the way home, where a car sped and somehow managed to slide itself in at a strange angle between me and a maxi-cab in the next lane before stopping. Neither the taxi nor I were touched by the errant maniac in his car, but it certainly got the ole heart racing.
- Midnight
- • Off to bed, so I can get up at a reasonable hour for a change and get some things done.
09.04.2008 – Wednesday 9 April – Heroes
- Midday
- • I got up late again. Caught a bus into the city with Stella, though she got out at South Bank to go to uni. I dropped Maz’s broken rollerblades at Rebel Sport, who are sending them away under warranty—not an ideal solution as I don’t know how long that’ll take, but there didn’t seem to be much choice.
- Afternoon
- • Added a few things to the fullboar site.
- Evening
- • Caught a bus into the city, met up with Stella on her way home from uni, went grocery shopping. It is, once again, quite cold.
- Night
- • Watched the remaining couple of episodes of the first series of Heroes with Grace. I had planned to go to bed around 10, but it’s now midnight, so off to bed I am.
10.04.2008 – Thursday 10 April – Firefly
- Morning
- • I actually managed to get to bed not too late last night, and managed to get up before midday today.
- Midday
- • I rushed off to uni to print things at POD. It rained a little.
- 2pm
- • After rushing back from printing at uni, I rushed down to the Computer Associates building, checked the second level for people waiting for me, found that Hanson, the only people on that level, weren’t waiting for me, and arrived at Candle on the ground floor ten minutes late—unsure if I was supposed to be there or not. Turned out I was, and I had a chat to Kevin, who discussed the Queensland Health role with me.
- Afternoon
- • Watched several episodes of Firefly with Grace, who was home from uni early.
- Afternoon
- • Watched several episodes of Firefly with Grace, who was home from uni early.
- Night
- • Drove to Hawken Village with Maz, Grace and Stella, where I bought a mixed veggie rice thing, of which I ate half before finding it contained chicken. I was given a second serve that didn’t contain chicken, so ended up eating quite a bit.
Spent some time developing my responses to the Queensland Health position.
11.04.2008 – Friday 11 April – Slowly More Ridiculous
- Morning
- • I woke up. No, seriously. I then ate a breakfast of “Crunchy Grain”, the cheap Nutri-Grain lookalikes that are unfortunately nowhere near being taste-a-likes.
- Evening
- • Drove to Indooroopilly with Maz for a late lunch. Met Kieran at the train station on his way home from work and spent the evening at his place.
- Night
- • Went to Maccas with Grace and Stella so Grace could buy dinner, and then stayed up until 3 AM getting slowly more ridiculous.
12.04.2008 – Saturday 12 April – Computer Building
- Morning
- • Picked up Bronwen from her parent’s place and drove to Maz’s. Ordered parts for her new computer with Maz and Kieran. Drove to Umart to pick up the parts, then to Kieran’s for a monitor and lunch at Indooroopilly.
- Afternoon
- • Put Bronwen’s computer together at Maz’s with Maz, Kieran and Bronwen. It had lots of problems, was very unstable, and randomly rebooted. Formatted my computer and put Vista on it.
- Evening
- • Messed around setting up my computer again, and figuring out that it’s most probably faulty RAM causing Bronwen’s problems.
- Night
- • Had dinner at Kieran’s. Went back to Maz’s. Stayed late.
13.04.2008 – Sunday 13 April – The Black Balloon
- Morning
- • Quite sleepy from getting to bed late last night. Didn’t do much. Relaxed.
- Evening
- • Drove to Paddington Woolworths with Grace and bought items for sale therein. Then caught a bus to the city, and watched “The Black Balloon” at the Regent with Grace and Stella. As predicted, it was depressing and not very good.
- Night
- • Drove Stella to uni so she could print things due tomorrow.
14.04.2008 – Monday 14 April – TV Tuners are Bad
- Morning
- • Took Bronwen’s faulty RAM back to Umart. Fortunately it failed memtest there so I got store credit. Unfortunately they didn’t sign the store credit. When I went to the Umart shop to buy new RAM for Bronwen and a SATA DVD drive for me, I had to get the manager to sign my credit note, and take the 3% credit surcharge off it.
- Evening
- • Drove to Woolworths at Indooroopilly with Maz and Stella to do shopping. Drove out to Bronwen’s to drop her RAM off. Drove back to Maz’s. Chatted for a while.
- Night
- • Up all night messing around with the media centre. Gave up installing Vista again, could not get TV tuner to work. Ghosted the previous install back. The media receiver service fails to start, complaining about being unable to find a file. I have no idea why. Anyway, after hours and hours of pointless effort, it’s back to how it was before I started.
15.04.2008 – Tuesday 15 April – Faulty New Computers
- Afternoon
- • Stella’s friends, Sam and Emma, arrived. I picked up Maz, and his new computer parts, from Umart, and spent the rest of the afternoon watching him fight with hardware that didn’t fit. The heat-pipe cooled RAM didn’t fit in the RAM slots... not sure how they managed that one. The graphics card didn’t fit in a large-sized case, and the power supply was longer than normal and only just fit with difficulty.
- Night
- • Picked up pizza and got Bronwen from South Bank, and went back to Maz’s. He is having problems with his computer freezing up. Drove Bronwen home after.
16.04.2008 – Wednesday 16 April – Curried Relaxation
- Afternoon
- • Applied for a few jobs.
- Night
- • Picked up Kieran and drove to Maz’s. His computer appears to have a faulty motherboard. Had curry from Halim’s with Stella, Emma and Sam, then drove them up Mount Coot-Tha, before driving back to Maz’s, and eventually driving Kieran home. Stayed up for a while talking to Grace, and later Stella and her friends, before going to bed.
17.04.2008 – Thursday 17 April – Rebellious Rollerblades
- Morning
- • Woken by someone from Telstra in Perth phoning—“your number is not with Telstra, but is obviously working so I guess it’s an Optus number?” Responding that it was an IP-based phone had him hang up almost immediately. I then went to Umart’s service centre with Maz, to drop off his presumed-faulty motherboard.
- Afternoon
- • Maz and I messed around building up a computer, and generally lazing about. I dropped Stella, Emma and Sam at Indooroopilly and picked them up again a couple of hours later. I dropped past Hungry Jack’s for lunch.
- Evening
- • Grace, Maz and I went to Rebel Sport, where I bought Grace some rollerblades as a late birthday present, and picked up Maz’s warranty returned blades.
- Night
- • Maz and I watched some Stargate at his place, and finished building up a computer.
18.04.2008 – Friday 18 April – Korma
- Day
- • Updated my resume, and sent it off to a couple of recruiters who had requested an updated copy. Drove Stella to uni. It rained.
- Afternoon
- • Picked up Maz’s motherboard from Umart, then picked up Maz, and drove to Maz’s place. It seems his computer is working now, though no idea why.
- Night
- • Drove out to Bronwen’s. Helped her set up her media centre/server/computer/thing, but couldn’t due to lack of monitor and antenna cable. Drove back here, made korma.
19.04.2008 – Saturday 19 April - …and so on
- Morning
- • Dropped Maz’s computer at the Umart Service Centre, for checking.
- Afternoon
- • Went to Indooroopilly with Maz and Bronwen.
- Evening
- • Dropped Bronwen home to her place, and fought her new computer, having all sorts of silly problems. It can’t connect wirelessly as the signal has to pass directly through the centre of the computer long-ways, so she’ll need to get an external antenna for that. It wouldn’t POST to the TV until it had its special funny-plug to S-Video adaptor installed, and then it wouldn’t detect a secondary VGA monitor without a reboot, then it had redraw problems in a virtual machine viewed via a TV, and... so on.
20.04.2008 – Sunday 20 April – Bad Hard Disk
- Morning
- • I woke late, fought some SAS software, made a virtual machine image, burnt it to a DVD, and rushed down to Bronwen’s to give it to her.
- Afternoon
- • I drove to Indooroopilly with Maz and Stella, did some grocery shopping there, and had Subway for lunch. I also dropped past Officeworks, where I found and bought an 80 GB “Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini” for $50, which had been returned as “unsuitable”.
- Evening
- • Fought Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Knoppix, in a dual attempt to Ghost my machine and format as FAT32 a new Maxtor One Touch hard drive I bought, which I think may be faulty. Eventually managed to get Ghost working by disabling AHCI SATA mode in the BIOS. With that enabled, nothing will boot from a CD other than Vista, it appears. I didn’t, however, manage to format the new hard drive. Crazy things happened—it managed to BSOD my computer, showed up as several thousand gigabytes, no gigabytes, didn’t show up at all, froze Explorer, froze the disk management stuff, and most things in between.
21.04.2008 – Monday 21 April – HTC Hermes
- Morning
- • Telstra is shutting the CDMA network in 7 days, meaning I’ll have to change to another network, and another phone. So, I bought a new phone (HTC Hermes, or TyTN) on Ebay--$258. I’ll try the whole geek thing, chatting on messenger and sending email from unlikely locations.
- Day
- • Picked up Shan and Kylie from Kangaroo Point and drove them to Mount Coot-Tha, then back to my place for a chat. Caught a bus back into the city, had some food,
- Night
- • Drove to Chez Tessa for dinner with Grace and Stella, picking Maz up on the way back, and going rollerblading.
- Late Night
- • I added comments to my Hard Answers site.
22.04.2008 – Tuesday 22 April – James Bond
- Afternoon
- • I bought a power supply for Maz and a webcam for Stella, from Umart.
- Night
- • I dropped Stella at work, and continued on to Maz’s, chatting to him for a while before driving out to Bronwen’s and bringing her back here. I then pondered for a while, before ordering pizza, getting ten James Bond DVD’s out (including the same one with a different cover twice—clever move that), going and getting Maz, driving Bronwen back to her place, rollerblading, driving Maz home, installing Visual Studio 2008, and drinking an iced coffee.
- 6:02am
- • I may have accidentally stayed up watching James Bond, “Live and Let Die”. I regret it now.
- Comment by io – Saturday 13 December 2008, 4:10 AM
- lol oops!
23.04.2008 – Wednesday 23 April – Pancakes & New Phones
- Midday
- • A man came and removed the smoke detector from the kitchen and replaced the one in the hallway with it. Hopefully it won’t go off in the middle of the night now.
- Early Afternoon
- • Stella woke me up to give me my new phone, which arrived in the post today.
- Afternoon
- • Maz and I picked up Maz’s computer from Umart, went to Officeworks to return my hard drive, and spent the evening installing a new firmware and software onto my phone.
- Midnight
- • Grace, Stella, Raymond and I went to pancakes for dinner.
24.04.2008 – Thursday 24 April – Bronwen
- Morning
- • Drove down and picked up Bronwen, bringing her back here via Maz’s phones he bought on eBay.
25.04.2008 – Friday 25 April – ANZAC Day
- Morning
- • Woke up just before eleven o’clock, too late to go in and watch the parade. Not very patriotic of me.
- Night
- • Watched TocH thing at midnight.
- Comment by io – Saturday 13 December 2008, 4:12 AM
- You've got the "Morning" and "Night" swapped! TocH was before parade, and also before dawn service!!
26.04.2008 – Saturday 26 April – Driving
- Morning
- • Bought an LCD monitor from Umart for Bronwen.
- Afternoon
- • Drove to Bronwen’s and picked up my monitor, then back to my place.
- Night
- • Drove out to Bronwen’s, and then back here. Spent some time up at Kieran’s. Re-imaged my phone again. Hopefully it stays working nicely this time.
27.04.2008 – Sunday 27 April – Tashan
- Afternoon
- • Picked up Maz and Kieran, and drove to the Sunday Computer Markets with Bronwen, then back to Indooroopilly for lunch, then on to Kieran’s.
- Night
- • Caught a bus into the city and watched a Bollywood film, “Tashan”, with Bronwen at the Regent. It was unfortunately not very good—the plot was too implausibly predictable.
28.04.2008 – Monday 28 April – Rollerblading
- Morning
- • Walked to the city with Bronwen.
- Evening
- • Went rollerblading with Maz and Grace, the same path as the other day—across the Goodwill Bridge and back across Victoria Bridge.
- Night
- • Got Thai from the Ville with Grace and Stella.
29.04.2008 – Tuesday 29 April – Casino Royale
- Morning
- • Drove up to Bronwen’s parent’s place. Chatted to Bronwen.
- Day
- • Did day sort of things. Chopped up a cheap IKEA picture frame to make it smaller.
- Night
- • Dropped past Maz’s, bought pizza with Grace, picked Bronwen up from Kangaroo Point, bought her pizza, watched “Casino Royale”, drove Bronwen home, and fuelled up. I’ve driven 445 kilometres in the past week.
30.04.2008 – Wednesday 30 April – Geeking
- • Stayed up all night implementing AJAX-y photo things for my journal.
Dec ‘07 | Jan ‘08 | Feb ‘08 | Mar ‘08 | Apr ‘08 May ‘08 | Jun ‘08 | Jul ‘08 | Aug ‘08 |