The scanning is going well, but the scanner crashed whilst working on a large document. I had about 75 sheets to scan in the 350 page document before it stopped. Thankfully I was able to save the data that was already scanned in (about 275 sheets) and when I reboot the PC I will be able to scan the other 75 sheets and attach them to the end of the document.

I have never quite worked out why it crashes, but I have found that it normally takes over a thousand sheets to cause it to crash, so it sounds like some type of memory leak. A memory leak is when a program asks the operating system to use some memory to do something, and then returns most of it, but not all. And then requests some more memory, returning most of that lot. Often it will only be a few bytes that get forgotten about, but when an operation is performed a large number of times, they add up.

And then that does not leave enough memory for other programs which causes an issue for the stability of the operating system. Another way programs fail is if they ask for the memory up front from the operating system in one go, and then try to manage the memory themselves, and fail to return all the memory to the program itself. In which case the program might crash instead of the computer.

The final thing that might happen is if programs request a lot of small blocks of memory, and then return only some of them at any point, the memory will become fragmented just like a Hard Disk. The memory will look like swiss cheese. What will happen is that the operating system will try to allocate more memory out of the holes and will either fail or have to move all the holes together to get things to work.

95% of IT projects are not delivered on time

According to this Article linked to by SlashDot.Org, 95% of IT projects are not completed on time. Also, Microsoft has just released an SP1 update to Windows Server 2003.

My run was not exactly what I would call a success... I only managed about 2.5 KM averageing about 8.4 KM/H. This was not a what I would call a great success. These figures are deceptive though, as I was not going very fast for the last 700m or so. Basically I went too fast at the beginning, and that pooped me out. A hot shower and a sit down has made things better. It never ceases to amaze me about the healing properties of a hot shower or a hot bath.

Not sure if I will get to have a run tomorrow or over the weekend. I will see how things go. It depends on how I feel, what I am doing, what the weather is like, and if I have a chance to buy some new running shoes. I *REALLY* need a new pair. My feet are starting to get a bit sore from the distances that I am running.

I thought I would let you know how the scanning is going. The best way to do that is to show the current pile. It is not the best photo to explain the scanning, but there are probably 1500 pieces of paper there that have been scanned in. That is not a bad collection of paper that will be soon recycled, but there is still a lot more to go. Part of the problem is that the scanner only allows 30-50 sheets so it needs refilling constantly. The scanner can scan about 15 sheets a minute, double sided. It does 30 if it is single sided. The new version does 25 and 50 respectively. The old version of this one does 10 and 20 sheets. As you can see things change rapidly in the scanner business.

More news... On my grandmother. They are moving her stuff out of her self-care unit at the retirement village in 10 days time since there is no way she can go back there. When she leaves the hospital she will need to go into a high care area or nursing home which is not good at all. She definitely needs all the prayers that she can get.

Right now I need to go for a run. I will try to do 3 -> 3.5KM, and I do have the GPS... I found it. So I should have a nice map to show once I get back. I hope I can do the 3.5km. We will have to see how I go. I expect to be able to do it, but you can never tell. The temperature seems fine.

I just checked the site for LookOut which is a full text program for outlook and found a new version. I use it a lot... It searches all my emails in a few seconds for whatever keywords I type, as well as any documents that I want it to search too. The software is not only free, but Microsoft thought it was so good they bought the company.

My only problem is that I need to re-index all my email now since I upgraded to the latest version. Indexing is commonly 50 messages or documents a second so it works quickly to get up and running.

I just heard from my brother. My grandmother had a seizure on Monday and is not in a good way. This is not good - prayers would be appreciated.

Also, I have just spent two hours on the phone with a business meeting. I do have a headset phone, but the headset is broken. I really need to get that fixed ASAP. My arm is a bit numb actually, although the feeling is coming back...

A couple of years back I needed to attend a planning meeting in the USA. I could not attend in person so I did it as a teleconference. I think I ended up spending about six hours on the phone, and that time I most certainly did wear a headset. It would have been more time on the phone, but I went to sleep about 1AM for a few hours whilst the other people in the USA continued to work. That is the problem with the international time zones.

My 'C' programming is going well, although there are times that I am using the wrong functions. One of my 'C' languages uses slen to determine the length of a string, and another uses strlen. strlen is more common, but is implemented in a library, rather than in the core language so anyone can implement it how they like. They are normally consistant, but not enough as can be seen in this case?

The question as to why they didn't put the string functions in the core language. This is a language that was written in the 1970's on computers costing the equivalent of $100,000 or more. The response was that they wanted the langauge to be able to be used to control a toaster. Completely stupid at the time, but it is about close to the truth these days.

Firstly some very good news... I just got a fairly good order.. I guess I will be celebrating tonight... I am really happy about this order. It has been a long time coming, with a few hassles along the way.

More Rabbit Season

Since I am waiting for some glue to dry, and I also need a break from programming, I thought it would be cute to add a photo of what I am working on. This is the rabbit has some serial interfaces for some devices I will be attaching to it. Some of the hardware will be mine, and all the software will be mine, apart from a small amount that I have outsourced.

And the software I have written for the device is working right now, so I am really pleased. It took some time to work out the correct logic, but things are finally working.

TinyTrak Radio Trackers

I have needed to build up some radio based trackers. So here are some units on my workbench.

I found a cool tool yesterday thanks to the Circuit Cellar magazine. It is called PortMon and monitors the serial port without needing any wires. This is such a cool debugging tool, and has the potential to save me so many hours of heartache.

The only issue is that the software is no longer being developed. Still it is a good piece of software and it will cetainly be in my bag of tricks to be used in the future.

Rabbit Season

Right now it is Rabbit Season. I am working on an embedded controller from a company called Rabbit Semiconductor. It has been some time since I have worked on the rabbit, and it is slowly coming back to me. Some of the strange ways that things are done. My first serious Rabbit project was the Hollywood Scooter job.

The Rabbit is derived from a 30 year old processor, but they have added new features and this device is actually quite fast and powerful. It is certainly powerful enough for what I want to do with it. And if not, I upgrade to a faster one. This processor is only running at about 20 MHz, which is fast enough for most embedded applications. This saves battery power, and you dont need to worry about heat dissipation or fans either.

My poor Dell laptop refuses to talk to the device through the serial port - so I need to get a Rabbit 'Approved' serial converter to program the device. So right now I am programming it using another older laptop. But since I want to keep only one PC on my desktop I am using VNC to control the other PC about a meter and a half away.

Anyway I would write more but it is breakfast time, and I am hungry.

Music:

I found a gem - Eurogliders with "Cold Comfort". This could almost be a christmas song as it talks about Israel. I am more interested in it musically. Right now I have Billy Joel playing on Random Play.

Blogger Outage

Sorry about the lack of updates in the latter half of yesterday. Blogger.COM had an outage. What I did not know about, but do now is that there is a Web Page to tell the Status of Blogger.Com. Anyway it is fixed now.

This entry will contain a lot of small links. Normal blogging will continue today now.

Some Links

There is a story on the SMH about a 'silent' party where guests will be required to wear headphones after midnight if they want to stay at the party. They are looking at having about 3000 people there for the event. Interesting concept.

There is another story describing how a person was killed in an argument relating selling a virtual weapon inside a computer game.

And finally, there is a Report about hackers breaking into the PABX of a Canberra hospital making lots of free calls - commonly called Phone Phreaking.

Survey Call

A few weeks ago we posted a survey for comments on this Blog. Since the natue of a blog is that people do not always look at the history of what has been posted between visits I thought I would provide another link here to the Survey

K-Mart and Sears

Sears have merged with K-Mart in the USA according to a Story in the SMH. This is a totally different K-Mart than the company in Australia. As far as I can tell the name K-Mart is licensed from the US K-Mart. The reason for the merger in the USA is that K-Mart went bankrupt.

I alluded to an issue one of my clients was having yesterday where connections were stopping in their tracks. Well, we have a solution. It seems that the connections remain connected when they stop, but are just not sending any data. When the server program restarts things work as they should again, fixing any of the remote devices. Hmm. This is strange, but it fixes things. This is good.

When I want to have a break from things right now I am feeding my scanner with papers... Old documentation of all types. One day I will write an application to manage all this information, and offer it as a product. There must be other people out there with needs similar to me. It cannot be too hard to build a system to meet these needs, and also to work well.

Once any of the papers are scanned they are placed onto to optical media and then recycled. Depending on what is being scanned, they are shredded before being sent to recycling. I think I will do all the shredding on one go, and turn it into a shredding party :-) I have about 4-5 piles of papers to be scanned. I am just thankful that my scanner is really fast [That does not mean that I would not like faster one - there is a new model that is 40% faster than this one for the same price.]

Easter Eggs

I am almost finished all my easter eggs. Thankfully I got some but not too many. I had one friend of mine offering me easter eggs last christmas. They seemed appreciative that I didn't bring them any easter eggs this year!

I didn't get any work caught up on last night, so I will need to work extra hard today. Thankfully a teleconference scheduled for today is not on, so I might get a chance to get more work done. My to-do list is there and it does not look to horendous. I will see how it goes during the day. Invariably it will change as things go on.

Already there is one thing that I need to work on which I have not put onto the list yet.

Visual Basic.NET

I have been working with VB.NET for a couple of years now. I have a client who wants a program to work well on different screen resolutions. This is actually harder than it sounds since things do not rescale that simply. There is an article that does explain how this should be done.

Gershwin's Law

It Aint Necessarily so

Travel

There is a Story on the SMH about how a QANTAS flight from Japan to Melbourne was cancelled thanks to the flight crew getting into an argument.

Music:

Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly

My friends at InstantEffects.Com have sent me a copy of the latest version of their software, or at least the a license key to allow me to download their software and install it. Surprisingly my nVidea graphics card only just meets the minimum specs - or in their language 'partially meets the requirements'.

The video card I have is a nVidea GeForce Go5650 with 128 mBytes of Ram. Basically it was top of the line from a laptop when I got it. This card is a bit slow with the software, but it looks really cool.

Los Angeles

News.Com has an article describing what to do in LA. Not a bad little collection of a things to do in LA.

Problems with Blogger/PowWeb

I have been having a problem with Blogger.COM uploading to PowWeb. The issue has been that it cannot find Terra.Powweb.com. The solution has been to add the IP address of the server rather than the name of the server. This was documented in the forum in the customer support area of PowWeb.

This afternoon has been a series of phone calls. Just as one would finish another one would start. And this is not call waiting or anything like that... Each phone call came in on a different line just after the other one would finish. I found this all rather strange actually. It just turned out that all the calls were synchronised. I like it when things actually just like up perfectly.

I have been building some tracking units for one of my clients. I will add some photos later here on what I was building up. It took about 90 minutes to build about six units, making a nice tidy profit on those. Business is just a process of bringing in money constantly rather than hoping for big payouts occasionally.

I have not managed to get all the work done today that I hoped to get done. Maybe I will get some more work done tonight, and a lot more done tomorrow. I will let you all know how it goes...

Music:

Well, no music at the moment. There is a MASH Marathon on at the moment, so it is on in the background. Not that I am a great fan of MASH, but it is nice to have on in the background.

Sometimes my work leads in strange ways. I have just found an undocumented feature (BUG) in one of the mobile phone carrier's systems. It is a bug that affects about 0.0001% of users, but is causing me some problems. You see, to save money, I am telling some tracking units to stop transmitting overnight. BUT, and this is a big one, the tracking units are still connected. They are just not sending any data back.

This is causing the network to think that the unit is not connected, but at the same time think that it is still connected. This is the problem with wireless systems, working out who knows what when the communications are not reliable. Also the systems get very complex so things are not as easy as they would appear.

Obviously none of the cariers is going to let me look at the internals of their systems. Even if I did I could not see the source code, since they do not have it themselves. And if I did see it then I could not tell anyway since the code is so complex with to many variables.

Welcome to my world.

I am starting to recover from todays run, and thinking that it would be nice to go running again a bit later today. I am turning into a fitness nut :-) No way, only kidding. But I am feeling great, and a lot fitter...

Music:

I have just returned from a run - I did about 3.5KM in about 25 minutes. I am really impressed with myself, although I should say that have sweat pouring from me at the moment. I am drinking some mineral water right now to re-hydrate. I added a circuit of a cricket pitch to extend the distance. This added about an extra 500m to the course. This is my longest run in over 12 months. I was tempted to keep running a bit to reach 4km but I think that would have been overdoing it slightly.

After about 3km my feet were a bit sore - another indicator that I need to buy a pair of decent running shoes. Yet another indicator. On my next run I will take the GPS and do another map.

Overseas Orders

I order some items from overseas to resell to my clients. On item was shipped from the USA on Wednesday. It arrived today - tuesday. Not bad service from the US Postal Service and Australia Post. I am generally fairly impressed with both of them. Now I need to build up some of the tracking units for one of my clients.

Music:

I am listening to Harrigan Logan's SHINE. It is unobtainable here in Oz, but the sound is fantastic.

Now I am feeling a whole lot better after the run, and I am cooling down... Now I am off for a shower.

Personal Insight

Since this blog is my diary, I can write about whatever I like, with some limitations. But this is my place, and it is entirely a place for me. As you might have been able to work out, I love writing. I enjoy putting thoughts (and to a lesser extent feelings) down on paper, or at least into the computer. And if people enjoy reading the content here that is fantastic. If not, well, so be it.

Since my relationship broke down I have been using this blog as a way to organism some of my thoughts, and I think it has worked fairly well for me. It has allowed me to deal with what has been a stressful situation without loosing a sense of reality. Most of us have been in relationships which have broken down. From personal experience I can assure you that an engagement that breaks down is far worse than when it is just with a girlfriend (or boyfriend if the reader is a woman). Each of the emotions experienced with the breakup are amplified significantly. I would guess that they would be amplified once again in the case of a broken marriage.

Every day I feel better about life, and I look forward dating again as soon as the right person comes aroung. When will this happen? Who knows. But I am ready for whatever God brings my way.

Book Review

I had promised to write a book review for the book I got on Thursday. At just under two hundred pages I found the book easy to read. The language seemed simple and the chapters were rather short. The book was written such that I started reading the book at about 10:30 AM on a workday and had finished reading it at about 2:30PM the same day. I literally could not put the book down. It was that engrossing. And I have found some real insight in this book, But I am not going to review it. If you want to ask me about this book I would be happy to tell you about it. But I will not be writing about it

Scanner

I finally got my scanner back and I love having it back. The only problem is that it is not working too well with my old laptop. And if I use my newer laptop then I cannot get other work done. Well, that is just how things go in this game I guess. ARGH.

Music:

Madonna with 'Skin' on random play. I am listening to Matchbox 20 in my car. They have some great songs, and some OK songs. DJ Sammy with the classic Bryan Adams song 'Heaven' is on Random Play now. Then Bruce Springsteen with 'Born to Run' from his Live CD set.

 

These are some battery chargers from Bayswater Power Station. They could supply 500A continuous at 240V DC. And I worked on them live. Notice the paralelled 415V incoming power lines at the bottom of the first picture.

This was a smaller 110V and -24V battery from memory.

Right now I am rather tired, and I am writing this in bed before falling asleep. At this moment I am not really sure that I will get this entry even finished before falling asleep. It has now been about four hours since I stopped work on the plane and I can still smell the thing. This is after having a shower too...

Many people know that I give out the registration details for the UI-View software after the Author died last year. I just had an email request from a friend for a registration key - and decided that he did not need the registration code just quite yet. You see he got married yesterday. And is on his honeymoon. Thus, I have decided that he will not get the code until he comes back.

Digital Conference in the USA

Below is a photo of a conference I was at in Des Moines, Iowa last year. I gave three talks from memory at the event. If you can work out who I am, then good. But I promise I really do have more hair than that. It is interesting who is sitting around me. On my left is Bdale Garbee, who is in charge of Hewlett Packard's US$2 Billion LINUX business. Behind me is Phil Karn of Qualcomm who designed much of the CDMA digital phone system.

It has been a LONG day... I have helped Richard seal the fuel tanks and this has taken much of the day. The idea behind sealing the fuel tanks tanks is to grab this goop that is like a thick icing when mixed. And over times it gets harder, like a hard rubber.

The fuel tanks are about 1m wide and about 50cm deep and 30cm high, and have 5 ribs in them. Basically in previous months we put the entire tank together with the exception of a plate that is about 1m wide and 30cm wide. This is held on with about 2-300 rivets. And under this plate under each rivet is this black goop. It makes tons of mess... Richard and I went through over 100 disposable gloves today... and we actually ran out. Then we used acetone to clean everything off afterwards.

This is not the nicest job, but at least it is now finished. Richard could have got the fuel tanks built for him at US$1800 but this is a lot of pay for the amount of work needing to be done.

Right now I am zonked. The sealant is horrible, and gets everywhere. Time for a shower and a something to eat I think...

Music:

I woke up early this morning thanks to the end of daylight saving. After a while of not being able to get back to sleep I gave up and checked my email. Seeing nothing of note I then watched the end of The Mission. This was much more edifying. I found the story to be somewhat disgusting with how the people of south america were treated by the Spanish and the Portugese.

It really is a movie to watch - and I suspect in surround sound on a large screen would be spectacular. Even on a smaller laptop screen with two speaker sound it is amazing.

Promotion of Films

Strangely, I just saw an article on the SMH that describes how Jackie O from 2Day FM is the voice of one of the robots in the Animated movie Robots. Well, she is one of the voices but only here in Oz. The producers of the movie cast a celebrity in every country to help promote the film.

I am watching The Mission in a window whilst I write this. What is cool about WinDVD is that the software remembers where the movie was up to last time. This happens evem when you remove the DVD from the drive and put it back in later. I can never remember where I was up to so this is a great feature. You also dont need to see the copyright and menu messages again...

The more I see of the movie the more I love the cinematography of the movie. It is the cinematography that tells the story with the music, rather than the dialog. There is surprisingly little dialog in the movie. You could not quite get by without removing all the dialog but you could come close.

Jeremy Irons is fantastic in the movie. He plays a jesuit preist in the movie. And does a very good job at it. He seems so much younger in this movie than he does in any other movie. Robert De Niro is un-recognizable. As is Liam Neeson.


Music:

Right now I am at Richard's... I have spent the afternoon building, and I will be staying here tonight so I dont need to drive all the way home tonight and back tomorrow. So much simpler this way. Not that I live that far away, but it does save a lot of time. They needed to go out so I tried to watch a DVD. With some hassles I got the DVD player to work but without sound. So I am going to watch it on this laptop in a window whilst I do some otehr stuff

Tomorrow we plan to seal the two fuel tanks. This is likely to be a horrible task as it gets rather messy. Commonly when we do sealing we wear two pairs of disposable gloves as it keeps things cleaner that way. The sealant is commonly called 'goop' since that is the best way to describe it. Until it sets, then it is just sticky and horrible.

Still, tomorrow we will basically be finishing dealing with fuel tank sealant for the entire plane. This is a real milestone.

Three Wheeled Car

When driving over here today I saw a cute car just on the north side of the M4 on the Cumberland Highway in the far left lane. From the back it looked like a small vintage car - the type that used to be in race events. But the strange thing about this car was that although there was a motor at the front, with the normal two wheels, there was only a single wheel at the back. I found this rather strange. It was almost as if the people were driving an oversized side-car without the motorcycle.

The people in the car were wearing their old style caps and seemed to be enjoying driving the car at it's 60 km/h maximum speed.

HAPPY EASTER...

Unwired's Impact on my Business

It is interesting to look at the potential impact that Unwired has on my business. I am an engineering consultant, and much of my work involves getting information around. Or more correctly working out how to do that. This may sound easy, but implementing it is often hard given the limitations of each piece of technology.

From my point of view, Unwired is a technology that provides great benefits for my clients. Basically it is easy to use, and provides and Ethernet interface. Unfortunately it is only available in Sydney and maybe other capitals, but the abstraction of the communications infrastructure is useful. Basically I can attach whatever piece of equipment in that I like, and it will just work.

Charlotte's Web

There is a story on the SMH WWW Site saying how the movie of Charlotte's Web is being filmed in Victoria. I had not heard that this was being filmed. I will be interested to see the resultsm as I am slightly sceptical about putting this onto film.

GPS Tracking

There is an article in The Australian about how a truck was stolen in Sydney with $2m worth of computer games, and was recovered thanks to a GPS tracking system inside. I Whilst these were not my GPS trackers, this is the type of work I do. Not stealing the trucks, but tracking them.

Outsourcing Gone Mad

People these days are outsourcing everything. Many companies have outsourced the provision of IT servces, so if a computer fails on a desk you ring a helpdesk for a different company, and they send out one of their technicians to fix things. Well, according to The LA Times McDonalds is going this with Drive Through. They are getting a callcentre to take orders in some restraunts as a trial to see if it improves service. That is, the people in the store with drive through would not be the ones taking your order, but someone hundreds or thousands of Km away.

Music:

After taking junk to the tip this morning, the boot of my car needed a bit of a clean so I gave the whole car a vacuum... I can assure you it really needed it. I think it needs more but what it got certainly helped most of the way. And I spent some more time cleaning the Garage following that. More rubbish thrown out, and more to be thrown out. But I am fairly happy with the progress. I could throw a lot more stuff out quickly if I needed to, but since there is room there, and things are neat and tidy I dont really need to at this stage.

I spent some more time writing the book review this afternoon, but I am finding it hard. The book was a highly interesting read, but working out what to say about it is not easy. I found the book confronting to some extent, and I am not sure yet what I want to say when I review it. The only thing I am really sure of is that I actually do want to review it.

Los Angeles

The LA Times has a story on the correct name of Los Angeles. About the only thing that people can agree on is that Los Angeles is in the name. Some people contend that the correct name is El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles Sobre el Rio de Porciuncula meaning "the town of the Queen of Angels on the Porciuncula River". All other versions are variations on this. Los Angeles is just the short version of the name.

Building

Sunday afternoon and monday I get to work on the plane. This will be fun, and a great chance to relax and think about something different for a change. I doubt that I will get a chance to update the blog much during this time, but you never know. Just depends on what we are working on, and what else is going on.

I am not actually sure what we will be working on. I think the wings are almost finished so we might actually get to start on the fuselage of the plane. There is still at least 12-18 months work to get the plane flying... It will definitely not be flying this weekend :-)

Music and Movies:

Robbie Williams 'Better Man'. I have also started watching 'What Women Want' which is quite a fun movie. I started watching the making of 'Lantana' but I did not feel quite in the mood for that. One of these days (or years) I will watch it... One of these days.

I went for the run. I did about 3KM in about 20 minutes. Not sure exactly how long it took since I didn't take the GPS and I didn't time myself.

I borrowed the movie 'School of Rock' and this was a cool movie featuring 'Jack Black'. It is a movie I had wanted to see since probably the middle of last year, and I had never quite got around to seeing it. I came close a few times, but alas.

The music was cool, and the story was non-conventional. It was at times conventional, and at times hard to predict. They are the hallmarks of a good movie. I wouldn't call this a great movie, but it was a good comedy. I loved where Jack Black comes out wearing an 'Angus Young' style school uniform right at the end doing an ACDC song. How cool is that.

Lunch was a homemade pizza. Well, sort of. Normally I would have made the base myself but not this time. I just picked up some frozen ones since I wanted to see the movie.

My normal Pizza base is:- 2 cups Self Raising Flower; 200 ml warm milk with two very heaped tablespoons of margarine melted in it. Mix all the incredients into a dough, and roll into the shape of a Pizza base. Add toppings as required and cook in a 200 Degree C overn. Vary the amount of margarine depending on the style of base - the more margarine the flatter it is.

Music:

Just the School of Rock.... On DVD...

Cleanup

I have just taken a car load of junk to the tip. I had intended to take it to Glenfield but it was closed as today is a 'public holiday'. When I did research, it actually is. How strange. Anyway I took it to 'Jack's Gully' at Camden without any problem apart from the extra hour and a half it took me. Still, as you can see, at least I got rid of a whole lot of junk. Also, they have recycling there so I managed to recycle some cardboard instead of throwing it out.

And the price was only $9 which is not too bad. It would have been $7.50 at Glenfield, but still it could have been a lot more expensive. And given that I was throwing out things like bricks as well as old wood and other stuff this was not a bad price.

Although this next photo may not show it well, this is where I put about 6 loads of compost yesterday.

Right now though I have done enough work and I am going to go for a run... Wish me luck :-)

Last Night

It is now 11:30PM on Friday night and I cannot sleep for some reason so I thought I would start the next entry in this Blog... Earlier I made a fatal mistake... By earlier I mean dinner time. I decided to get some takeaway for tea, and decided to take my PDA for something to do whilst waiting. Playing solatare. This would have been fine, but I won the first game. And then didn't get any other games out. Even whilst watching the 90 minute show on the ABC whilst playing I didnt get any out. So much so I got a cramp in my left arm, and it is still hurting a bit...

After writing this I went back to bed and played Solitare until 12:30AM. That game is SO additctive. Time to remove it from the PDA.

An Alarm Clock

Some students at MIT have come up with an alarm clock that hides itself every night making it hard for you to find it to press the snooze button, ensuring that you actually get out of bed when the alarm goes off. Cute idea.

Music:

I have been listening to Mix 106.5 in the garage since the MP3 player will not reach out there

Wireless Router

My wireless router just dropped out. When I checked it, the power adapter had come out slightly. The router uses a power adapter with two round pins, and needs an adapter to fit into the power board. And it does not fit very well. Of course I do not have an adapter that will work to replace this one, although I will need to get one. What I find strange is that things fail when there is nothing nearby to to cause it to fail. Admittedly the powerboard is on it's side, and the power connection is quite tenuous on the adapter, but even so...

Sandra Bullock - The Net

Yesterday I mentioned the Sandra Bullock movie 'The Net'... And then what do I look at News.Com.Au but this article which tells how Sandra Bullock gets her Star on Hollywood Blvd.

Paypal Problems

I was just looking at Cryptome.Org and they noted that they had had their PayPal account suddenly blocked for a few days. Very strange. They suggested looking at PayPalWarning.com about the problems experienced by some users of PayPal. For those that do not know, PayPal is a micropayments service that allows secure purchases on The Internet. Or at least that is the idea. I have not had any problems myself with them, nor have I known anyone who has had problems.

Music

I am listening to my catalogue of Robbie Williams music on the Jukebox with some decent bookshelf speakers. MP3's even at 128k sound fantastic through decent (or even semi-decent) speakers.

OK... I have got the 'work area' of the garage fairly clean. There is more to do, but it is mostly there. A lot of stuff has been thrown out, and the floor and benches have been swept and vacuumed. Why vacuum? Well, it causes less dust to get into the air, and works fairly well. I have an old vacuum that I just use in the garage. When I was doing work at Royal North Shore Hospital building a TV studio I used the vacuum there and had to repair the main switch at one stage. Following the repair it is now working really well. You can see a photo of the cleaned workshop in the photo below.

Tomorrow I will take a few carloads of junk to the local tip. That should be fairly easy - most of it is in the trailer at the moment. So why take the car? Well, it is usually $7.50 for my car, and a minimum of $30 for a trailer at the tip. And the other problem is that I dont have a tow bar. This is something that I have been meaning to fix, but I still dont have one. I can fit a lot in my car when the back seats fold up.

I didn't end up going running today. Slack you say? Well, instead I moved about 6 large wheelbarrow loads of compost from the back yard to the front lawn and spread it out. I think that was more of a work out than a run. It certainly felt like it.

Building

It looks like I will be working on the plane on sunday and monday... It will be good to get more work done on it, as I have not touched the plane for probably a month or so... Both Richard and I have been really busy.

Phase 1 - The Garage Cleanup

Phase one of the cleanup is the garage cleanup. Right now I am cleaning up the area with all the powertools. I should say that I have not kept this area as clean as I should have. This is after some work has been done, and is slightly deceptive as to making it look cleaner than it is.

Now, this picture is of some rubbish and some stuff which is not rubbish which is clogging up the garage. It is off to the side of the photo above.

I have to meet up with a friend and his business partner right now for about an hour. When I get back I will update this page...

I have started watching THE NET with the director's and producer's commentry. The movie is now so dated. The movie was shot in 1993/4 so things are so different. There are so many strange things in the movie, like sending a Floppy Disk by Fedex with a program on it. These days people would usually just email something like that, or download it.

And certainly they would not normally use a floppy disk. A memory stick or a CD would be more common. I have a floppy drive for my laptop but I rarely use it. It is external, and I do not even normally have it plugged in. In the movie she also had a computer screen to act as a 'log fire', but the graphics were done by an artist. These days it would have been at least photo-realistic, if not actual video. All in all it is funny to look back at what was cutting edge technology at the time, which is certainly not so cutting edge now.

I have looked at a few minutes of 'The Mission' and I am really impressed by the cinematography. It is really impressive, and I can only imagine how dangerous some of the initial scenes were for the actors involved. I hope that stuntmen were used, because it certainly looked like Jeremy Irons was scaling a water soaked cliff without any protection.

12 Months

Yesterday was an anniversary for two events. Firstly it was 12 months since my mother finished Chemotherapy for Lymphoma in her bone, for which she is in remission having made a great recovery. Secondly it was 12 months since her mother died, following being in hospital with a broken hip. At that time Mum was not well enough to go to the funeral which was hard for her. The nursing home where she died has a memorial service for those who died coming up, so mum will be going to that

The long weekend is here and I have some things planned and I have some things that I may be doing. Apart from church, tomorrow I will be cleaning stuff out. I want to take stuff to the tip Saturday morning, so that means that I will get getting the stuff together tomorrow. Over the last few weeks I have also been putting stuff into the normal garbage. This even includes old rocks and house bricks, except I need to be careful so I dont make the bin too heavy.

In my view, if the bin is too heavy for me to lift off the ground, it is too heavy to be put out for collection. I don't know if the council places limits on the weight, but it is probably best not to make the bin too heavy even if they dont.

I should be helping Richard with the plane sometime this weekend. I am just not sure when that will be on.

Running

I didn't get a chance to go running today. Maybe tomorrow... Today I had to do some things when I wanted to actually go running, and by the time that was finished it was a bit late to go. C'est La Vie. Tomorrow I promise myself (and you dear readers) I will go running.

Music:

Elton John with Tiny Dancer on Random Play.

K-Mart was having a sale - so I picked up a coupld of DVD's. Firstly there is THE MISSION which won the Acadamy Award in 1985 for best cinematography, and then THE NET with Santra Bulloch.

THE MISSION is a movie that I have not seen for many years. The music is by the amazing Ennio Morricone and describes the story of a Jesuit mission in a jungle, and the story of what happens when Spain and Portugal sign a treaty which signs the death knell for the mission. It is truely an amazing picture from what I can remember of it.

THE NET is a more modern tale of identity theft. In this case the movie is not the greatest ever, but for under $9 it does fill a hole in my DVD collection. Also the Audio Commentry might me amusing.

Reverse GeoCoding

I have been playing with reverse geocoding this afternoon. Basically this is taking a position of a vehicle and working out what town, city, road etc is closest to the vehicle. It is an interesting exercise, and there are some cute things you can do with this information. A friend told me it was easy in a meeting, and then admitted that it was not quite as simple as it sounded. So there was my challenge - do this, and make it as fast as possible. I think I have done both fairly well.

I have made a few assumptions that would make Christopher Columbus unhappy and make me a member of the 'Flat Earth Society', but it seems to actually work fairly well. It may not work so well when you want to work out if a vehicle is closer to a town 1000 km to the NorthEast or one 1000km to the SouthWest, if the towns are somewhat closer the results are fairly accurate whilst being faast to calculate.

Music:

Red Hot Chilli Peppers with Californication. For some reason the RHCP's gave me the idea that they were really a heavy metal band from their name, until I started listening to their music. But they are quieter, and the words are easier to understand - usually a good thing with music. I think my favourite song of theirs is 'The Zephyr Song'.

My book has arrived from Angus and Robertson's finally. And it is not a good book to have, if you need to work. You see, I am finding it hard to put down. The chapters are short, and the book itself is only about 175 pages. I have a feeling I will have the book read within the next few days, and a review written here soon after. Well that is my hope.

Correction: It is now 1:15pm and I have just finished the book. It was that hard to put down. I am glad that I read the book - it was a good read. I am still not sure how I am going to write a review of it, but I would certainly recommend reading the book. I found it refreshing, if short. I think I need to spend some time thinking about the content before I write the review.

Coding

I have been doing some more coding. The problem with coding is when you want to use the same program to do about a million very similar tasks is that sometimes you forget about the insignificant variations that interact in strange ways. Sometimes it takes ages to find the interactions. In this case it has taken me a few days to work out, and it was only when the program seemed to crash that I realised that the software was not operating how it should have.

Running

I will be going running today. Sometime later today. Not sure how far I will get, but it should be at least the 2.5km for the short version of my long course. I will try to get the 3km version done but I am not sure how successful I will be at that.

Sometimes windows just goes strange... Mainly outlook... As if the computer has thought that I am pressing the alt key or something all the time. I try to type an upper case "I" and a menu comes up... pressing other keys does other things. It is really really strange. Changing to another application helps sometimes I think... No matter what it seems to dissapear after about a minute. Very strange. I am thinking it is something like 'Sticky Keys' in windows turning itself on... But I have no idea. I also occasionally have the voice functions in word trying to turn themselves on.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

The Obfuscated C contest has opened again. I have not looked at what you win if you win, but you can find more details on their Web Site. This is one contest for the really perverse code authors. I would have no hope of winning. My mind is not that demented. I have included a past entry below. If you can work out what it does by just looking at it, you are better than I am.

They even give out an award for the worst abuse of the rules. And they award prizes to entries that cause them to change the rules for future years.

#include /* O b f u s c a t e d */ int m ( int c ) { int x = 3 + ( c - 1 ) * 9 + ( c - 1 ) * 27 + ( c - 1 ) * ( ( 993 - '!' * c ) / 320 ) + ( c - '9' + '8' ) * c + ( c - 1 ) * 243 / 9; return c - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? x % x : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } int a , b , c , d , e , v, f ; int main /* n ( c ) { return c ++ - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? 0 : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } x ( ) { int a , b , c , d , e , v ; while ( ( v = putchar ( d ) ) != EOF ) { if ( ( a = m */ ( ) { while ( ( e = d = c = b = v = getchar ( ) ) - EOF ) { for ( ; d < 0 ; d ++ ) { f = f / getchar ( ) ; a <<= f ; ( v * v * v - v || e * e * e - e ) && ( e - 2 || ( d & f ) - 4 || ( a >> v != ( e - 1 ? f : 0 ) ) ) ; } if ( ( v % v + f * --f + v ) && ( v < f ? v / v - 992 * b : v * v ) && /* o ( c ) { return c - 32 ? c - 9 ? c - 10 ? 0 : 3 : 2 : 1 ; } y ( ) { int a , f , b , c , d , e , v ; while ( ( v = getchar ( ) ) != EOF ) { if ( ( a = m ( c ) ; */ ( a = m ( b + ++ f * 3888 ) ) && ( b = m ( getchar ( ) ) - f / 243 ) && ( c = m ( getchar ( ) ) + f ) && ( f == 1 ? 124 - ( ( c < 8 && ( ( c & b ) != e || ( c >> d ) != 3888 ) ) ) : 1 ) && ( d = m ( getchar ( ) + f ) ) && ( e = m ( getchar ( ) ) ) ) putchar ( f + a - 1 + ( b - 1 ) * ( ( 993 - '!' ) / ( '(' * 8 ) ) + ( c - f - '9' + '8' ) * 9 - 4 + ( d - 1 ) * 243 / 9 + f + 11 + ( e - 1 ) * 3888 / '0' - 7 ) ; } return ( f && getchar ( ) ) ; }

9:30 PM

This morning I was woken up by the wind and rain about 6AM so I am a bit tired right now. I really needed a bit more sleep, but alas, I didn't get any more. Nor did I get a chance for an afternoon nap at my desk. That is the advantage with working from home, you can do strange things like that. And whilst I dont where bunny rabbit slippers, I do have some lambskin ugh boots for when it gets colder.

7:30 AM

I got an email from a friend this morning letting me know that another friends company had released a new version of their Program. The company is InstantEffects and sells a PowerPoint Plugin which allows 3D presentations to be done easily. It really is an amazing product, and I just wish I was an investor in the company. You can download the trial version of the product for free, but you need to be warned... You need a decent video card to run the thing. It runs OK on my laptop, but not great. My laptop was the top of the line Dell 18 months back with a nVidea graphics chip and 128 mBytes memory and it still was a bit slow. The CEO, Don Brittain, has his own Blog too...

Mobile PC's

MobilePC Magazine has an Article on the history of notbook/portable computers, starting with the 1975 IBM 5100 Portable weighing 25Kg. Actually the article is missing photos of many of the important milestones along the way, including the Tandy Model 100 that was very very light, albeit not all that much use for much other than word processing. But it would run for hours on a set of AA batteries.

Music:

Natalie Merchant once more on Random Play, with San Andreas Fault.

I have just requested some bids to do the real work for one of the todays jobs, rather than doing it myself. I would expect that the cost of getting the work done will not be too expensive. I would guess that a decent programmer will be able to do the work I need in a few hours, or maybe a couple of days at the latest. Given that a highly skilled and payed programmer in Argentena costs US$6 per hour rather than the $100 per hour that I would need to charge, I am sure that I will come out ahead.

OK. Well, my time to myself is free, but you get the idea. And if it costs me most of the income from the project to outsource the project, then either I have underquoted or I should be doing the job myself in order to make money. This is normal business.

This is of course the advantage of working in an international networked economy. I can get people to do work for me all over the world, safely and securely. I have had a few cases where the work was not up to scratch but that really is the exception.

ISS Issues

There is a story on TechNewsWorld about an issue on the Interational Space Station where another of the Gyro's has failed. The cause seems to be a circuit breaker that has tripped that is outside the space station. Now, seems to me that it is a bit of a problem if a circuit breaker trips and you need to do a space walk to fix the problem. From memory this is similar to what happened in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" where HAL required that a component be fixed on the outside of the jupiter transport vehicle just before killing them.

Music:

Yanni with his 'Aria', also known as the 'British Airways' music from a few years back.

It is now 4:30PM and I have just got back from the meetings. I got back about five minutes ago, and I have just had lunch. I prefer to have lunch closer to midday if at all possible. Unless I choose not to have lunch. I will not say what I did have for lunch but it was not McDonalds. I have been off McDonalds Hamburgers for about 5 years. Almost exactly 5 years now.

Both meetings were fantastic. The first one was some programming work that the client wanted to get done. This should be fairly easy, and I will probably outsource some of it.

The second one was more interesting, not only because of the challenge but also the dollars were bigger. I demonstrated some things, firstly on the internet and then using my own software. This worked really well - the client had an Unwired unit in their conference room and I used this. It really was as simple as 1,2,3, although with DHCP it took slightly longer to get an IP address. But I was certainly online within about 20 seconds.

The speed seemed to be good, although it was hard to tell from the work I was doing with it. All in all I spent about 2 1/2 hours with the client, and I really enjoyed the time with the client. Coming up with solutions to their engineering and business problems. I have to go back just after easter to spend some more time with them, and now also write a quick spec for them. This is the sort of work that I really love - looking at a business and then seeing what technolog can solve their business issues. What I also loved was seeing how my own product can be improved to meet this clients specific needs.

Music:

Australia Crawl's "Hootchie Gucci Fiorucci Mumma". Bette Midler's "From a distance"

Insurance

I was speaking to a friend recently who was organizing an event. Get got a bill from an organization for over $3000 for public liability insurance for the bill - for a 45 minute event. So he did a bit of research, and found out that the person who sent him the bill did not own the asset that they wanted to charge insurance for. The owner of the asset was able to confirm that the event my friend was organizing was covered under their own policy. Hmm... I am just wondering if the organisation that sent the bill out receives a percentage of the bill...

Meetings...

I have a couple of meetings today... One at Guildford, and the other at Rosehill. The Rosehill one is a pain as it is a right hand turn across the main road. Thankfully the traffic is normally stopped at lights making it easier, but even so it is not one of my most favourite intersections. [Come to think of it, I hate right hand turns across traffic no matter where they are. Anywhere.]

The Rosehill meeting could turn out to be an important one... They want to do a lot of things, and I want to support them with this as much as I can. They were one of my first clients when I set up the business, and through a weeks consulting I was able to prove that they didn't really need to do what they were wanting to do at that time. But now things have changed, I hope.

Job Descriptions

Another cute article on the SMH www site talks about job description titles. Working for myself, I can call myself all sorts of things... "Chief Engineer", "CEO", "CIO", "Owner", "Consultant", "Principal Engineer", "Web Master" and "Office Manager". The list goes on. The article lists some of the strange job titles that are around. It also points out that many job titles would be illegal in many other countries, since we here in Oz do not restrict ourselves to requiring engineers to have teriary qualifications.

I am an "IT Professional"... How come? Well, I belonged to a union - "The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers". And they basically joined with the "IT Professionals Association". As part of the deal you could join the other organisation for zero cost. So I became a member of the ITPA, and got a certificate from them saying I was an IT Professional. Totally bogus, but at the time I needed it for work. Don't Ask :-)

I have a badge in my room... From MIT in Boston. It says...
"NOW I AM AN ENGINEER, WHEN DO I GET TO DRIVE A TRAIN"

This blog entry will probably be written in two parts... An evening part, and a morning part. It is now 11:10PM and I have recently got home from the meeting. I would guess the meeting took a good three hours, with some frank exchanges of views. In the end the course of action in the short term was obvious... There was only one choice of what needed to be chosen, and we are now looking at how to implement the decision. Unfortunately I cannot go into the reasons here right what this course of action is...

Right now I am fairly tired, and if I closed my eyes I think I would have the QWERTY's in the morning. For those who don't know, the QWERTY's is the condition that you get when you fall asleep with your face on a computer keyboard - the impression that the keyboard leaves on your face. This is a DILBERT thing.

I have mentioned the polygamist Dilbert cartoon before. The other classic has Dilbert going to an airline counter, finding that he has been 'bumped' and is not able to get a flight. On the next frame he is saying 'I paid for this flight. I demand service'. On the last frame he is taped to the wing of the plane using duct tape, and he says "You know, I am not convinced that there really is a thing called 'Duct Tape Class'". Sometimes you have to be careful what you demand.

Now Wednesday Morning 6:24AM

OK... I have had some sleep. And no QWERTY's for me - but there was a nice warm bed. Ayway when I woke up this morning the program I had been working on yesterday had crashed. And I pressed the wrong button so I have no idea why. ARGH. Maybe I should have woken up first.

Pixar

There is a cute Article on AintItCool.Com detailing a tour of PIXAR. The coolest is the cute little 'houses' that some of the animators work in. The have roofs and doors all inside a huge building. That is the way to make employees feel important.

There is also an article on the SMH WWW site about how the 'NSW Office of Industrial Relations' "Raided" one of the restraunts from the Channel 7 show "My Restraunt Rules" over how much workers are being paid. From the description I would not have called it a raid, but it does make an interesting story.

Looking on the SMH WWW site, they list the most popular stories for the SMH and THE AGE in Melbourne. The interesting thing is that the most popular story in The Age is one on the FireFix Web Browser. Rather computer savy in Melbourne? Well, no. SlashDot.Org linked to the story on their WWW site causing the increased traffic. That is why...

Music:

In the car I have the soundtrack from "Love Actually". I do so love that movie. The wedding is so cute... The whole movie is cool. Now LAND is on Random Play, featuring one of the members of Midnight Oil. Cool song. Great for this time of the morning. Now "Can't fight the moonlight" from the movie "Coyote Ugly" is on. This is a movie I didn't really have any desire to watch until I was 'forced' to watch it on a flight from Sydney to LA.

I have just turned the music off so I can work listening to the rain. I just love the sound. Now if I only had a good book (and no work) I would get into bed right now and start reading. Ah, well... I will just have to wait until tomorrow until my book arives FINALLY. If it is still raining that is.

My software seem be behaving itself. I am glad. Today I am thinking that I love software more than hardware. Other days when I get fed up with software, I love the hardware more.

I heard from a client today that I gave a proposal to. They loved the proposal but they need to interface with another part of their organisation, so they need to wait for them to set their requirements. What this will mean is that I suspect that another zero or two will be added to the cost of the project, and then it will be canned. Oh, well.

I needed to generate a random time delay on the program that I was working on earlier today. I could not find the RANDOM function in VB.NET to generate a Random Number. Turns out it is improved from VB. The syntax may be a bit strange, but oddly it does make sense.
getRandomNumber = New System.Random().Next(low, high)
Another article I found on DevX.Com described how to create a GUID - or Globally Unique ID - a number that is perfectly unique...
GetGUID = "{" System.Guid.NewGUID().ToString & "}"

Travel

I was thinking about the strangest place I have every been. One place came to my mind. Tropic. I can't remember if it is in Arizona or Utah or Nevada. It is in one of them, near all the Canyons. Anway Tropic is a small community, and I was there in a January, and I can tell you it was cold. I left a bottle of Coke in the car overnight, and it froze. Actually, most things froze. Concidering it was only three degrees that morning. Farenheight. Making it about -20 or so celcius.

I can recommend the general store/restraunt there for breakfast. I ordered a large stack of pancakes, needing all the energy I could get. Big mistake. I could only eat half of them, thanks to most of the pancakes being about an inch think, and huge. And the price was reasonable too.

At some stage I will drag out some of the photos from Tropic and add them here.

Music:

I have Dido's "Mary's in India" on the Random Play again. The song is so cool. Now Marina Vidal's "Body Rock".

When programming at every corner there seems to be another problem to solve. This can be a real pain at times. Well, most of the time. In VB, I just learned how to find a date, for instance 100 years back. It is the AddYears function. And to generate the date 100 years back, you type something like
dim OneHundredYearsBack as date = now.addyears (-100)

Now, using the -100 took my a bit by surprise. It is logical, but took me some time to find. Not hours, but probably a minute or two. This is about a minute or two more than it should have. Right now I am working on an algorithm for a communications infrastructure, and I am having some issues getting it running; not actually implementing anything, but with working what I need to implement.

Simplifying some of the logic I think I have got things working. The testing looks good. I will see after a few hours what the database is telling me. So far things are looking really good.

Radar

What is not looking good is the weather RADAR on the BOM Web Site. The weather looks horrible. But thankfully I do not need to be out in it driving or anything like that.

Running

I was planning to go running today, but it seems that it is raining outside. I will see how it goes in another hour or so. I expect that given the weather lately that things will improve. It is certainly not the 'wild storms' that are predicted in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Update at 4:00. The rain does not look like it is going to let up for some time. So I decided to get the treadmill out and spend some time on it. I could only do 7 1/2 minutes on it. The stresses on the body are different from running, with no visible goal apart from the clock, a harder run since it is slightly up hill with more friction, no wind in the face and none of the open air. When I stopped I certainly neeed to have a sit down - which is what I am doing right now, before a cool shower to clean up.

It would have been nice to run outside but I just don't feel like getting soaked today. After all it isn't 'Summer Rain'

Reading

I spoke to Angus and Robertson yesterday. They say that one of the books had arrived yesterday, and should have gone out yesterday or today. So with some luck it will be here tomorrow, and then I can review it. I expect the book to be an interesting read, but it could also be a hard one at times.

Programming

I am working on software for a radio based tracking system today. The software is running a bit behind. I was just testing the software, and it was not working. Then I looked at the code I was calling. I had not written it yet. OOps. Time to write that now. [Slight Delay]. Just waiting for the program I have written to start. Lets see if it works. YES. It works. [Of course it worked. What did you exepect :-) ]

The software is getting there - almost finished actually. Just a few more hours work. I hope to get it finished enough to send to the client today for testing. I think he will be happy with it. Well, that is my hope. Time will tell though.

My monthly FedEx shipment from Microsoft just came in. Not sure why they FedEx the discs in, but they sent 4 DVD's from singapore, which I will most likely not actually use. They are updates for older versions of the DVD's containing official microsoft software. I get them as part of a developers program where they send me the software so that I can encourage more people to use windows.

Ordering from the USA

I need to order an item from the USA for one of my clients. The cost of the unit is about US$180. But it seems that all the suppliers refuse to use anyone other than the normal expensive courier companies like DHL, FedEx and UPS. That means that it will cost US$100-$180 to ship the product over here. Adding customs clearance fees it becomes cheaper to but the unit locally at A$479 rather than A$230 + Postage. Of course I might be able to get a friend of mine to pick it up and ship it across but that becomes messy when the credit card does not line up at all with anything else.

On another work subject I have just outsourced some more work. Hopefully this work will be better than the last lot I outsourced. The price is good. It would take me a good 1/2 day to do the work I have just outsourced for US$40. The bid came in below this but I got the guy to increase it slightly. This is business, but I like to pay a reasonable fee for the work I get done.

Anto-Smog Devices

A friend of mine sent me a link to Engadget.Com where they have a story that reports that scientists are debunking a $299 disc that people put in their fuel tank to reduce their care engine emissions. The disc was supposed to emit "holographic frequencies into the gas tank and change the molecular structure of the fuel". Another interesting WWW site is BoingBoing.Net

They link to a project that turns an old rotary phone into a cellphone. Also a Wooden Laptop can be found here. Wow.

Music:

I mentioned 'Say Goodbye to it all' yesterday... It is now on Random play. I was wrong about what this song was about. The person singing is talking about how they were a refugee from presumably WWII. I though that the person was a soldier.

Music:

"Otto Titsling" by Bette Midler from the "Beaches" Soundtrack. How cool a song. I really want to see how it is used in the movie. Now Madonna is on with 'Easy Ride' which does not really sound like one of her classic songs. Now is Pink Floyd's 'Eclipse', another of those songs that don't really date. Then Melanie C's 'Never be the same again'. Now Missy Higgins... Her music is so beautiful. It took me a while to work out what her song 'Ten Days' was actually saying. You have to take careful not of the words. 'The Special Two' is also great.

Justice Kirby

The more I hear about Justice Kirby of the High Court the more I like him. Today there is a story in the SMH about how he is suggesting that the time and energy being put into counter-terrorism could be better spent elsewhere. Also on the legal side, there is an article on GrokLaw.Net about open source software allowing car computers to be accessed without very expensive software and hadrware

Programming

I outsourced some work but the guy doing the work dropped out. Fortunately I had not paid him yet, but it means that I need to do the work that I was getting him to do. And it is easier for me to do the work than explaining it to someone else who does not know the code at all. The work in particular is database programming. I have not done much of this for about twelve months, and I love other things more that that. Not that I don't enjoy it, but there are things that I would rather be doing.

Music:

There are times when my MP3 player is so completely wrong about the music it chooses. Like now, I have just put on 50 songs to be played at random, and 49 of them are not what I want to listen to right at this moment. This current playlisy is looking better... Out of the first five tracks I have found two that I want to listen to. Not great, but an improvement.

Elton John is playing right now, with 'Rocket Man'. Now 'Oxygene 8' by Jean-Michel Jarre. For those who do not know his music, he is an electronic musician. He is in the Guiness Book of Records for the biggest concert ever, or at least was. His music was using in the movie Galipoli. His father was Maurice Jarre, who wrote the score to Dr Zhivargo, and from memory got an Oscar for it.

I got into Jean-Michel Jarre back in High School when I needed to mix the music for a school fashion parade where they used Oxygene Part II for the section on 25th century wedding dresses. I have the video tape of that around here somewhere - although that was a year 11 task, and I was in year 10 at the time. When I did textiles in Year 11 (Long Story, ask me sometime), they changed the course since having a guy in the class making a wedding dress was sort of not politically correct.

Narnia

I wanted to start reading the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis last night, and found that I am missing two of the seven books in the series. The worst part is that I am missing book 1 which is the one I obviously wanted to start with. In eight years the series will be out of copyright since it will be 50 years since the author died so maybe I should just wait until then. Project Gutenberg has a few of his documents that are out of copyright, but not the Narnia Series.

The movie of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' was shot just around the corner from a friends house just outside Auckland

Church Meeting

I have a church meeting tomorrow night. Another meeting of the Finance group. The figures are not nice but I have some information to present which might provide interesting reading for those who are attending. The information is highly confidential so I cannot detail it here at the moment, but I believe that the members of the church will agree with my suggestions.

It is something I have been sitting on for over 12 months trying to decide what to do with it. Now I have a group who can look at it and decide what to do next. It might be an interesting meeting

Courier

The courier finally arived about 3:50pm. This meant I needed to go flat out for about an hour to reprogram the units and send them off. Not fun at all. But I got them out of here and to the Post Office in time. Just. With about 5 minutes to spare. That is what I call a close call.

Darryl's Toys

One of my clients wants me to write a document describing what he described as "Darryl's Toys". That is, all my software packages that they can sell and where they are up to in development. Stay tuned...

Work

My work in the city went well, but it took about an hour and a half longer than I had expected. This was not what I was hoping for - I expected to be out of there in an hour. It took 2.5 hours. Some of this was some additional work that I needed to do, and some was trying to get a bolt off that I had accidently glued on.

Right now I am waiting for two courier packages for some other units that need reprogramming. These need to be out of here today so I am itching for them to come in.

License

I must remember to renew my radio license. If I don't I can be slapped with a $50,000 fine and 10 years in Gaol. That is just for transmitting on the radio without a license, just once. This is under fereral jurisdiction meaning that I would be very unlikely to get caught even if I decided to transmit without a license.

Music:

Petshop Boys on at the moment. They have some cool music. I think 'Always on my mind' is their best. Their version is better than the Elvis version, at least in hy opinion. Well, Elvis was before my time so I may be slightly biased there. The filmclip was cool too, but I have not seen it for years.

This morning I have to go over to North Sydney again to do a quick reprogramming job. I should be in and out in an hour I hope. It will be a simple job. It is slightly tedious but thankfully there is not much to be done. I would guess I will be home before noon. We will see. In this world, at the moment, it seems that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

For instance I have two versions of my code - one is tailored for a specific client. Yesterday I needed to program some units, and I got them mixed up. No harm done, apart from needing an extra 15 minutes to fix things up. Cest La Vie.

My neck is still a bit sore, in need of a backrub I think, but it is getting better. I just need to make sure I do not hurt it any further, which I dont think I will.

GPS Tollways

There is an Article on the SMH Web Site detailing how the government is looking at using GPS to charge trucks tolls on the highway from Newcastle to Brisbane. Given the route being used this might actually work, since there are not many roads that follow right next to the route, which is one of the problems they are having in Germany. GPS can be inaccurate, and there are reports of trucks being charged tolls if they drive on a road next to an AutoBahn.

It will be interesting to see the proposed implementation of the system, as it is so open to being abused. The GPS receivers can be switched off, deactivated, not installed, you name it. It needs to be policed. Time will tell if it is.

DVD's

I watched some of the special features on the original 'The Italian Job' last night, and it was really interesting explaining some of the basis for the story, and talking to the people who made the movie. Over the next few days I will watch the movie - although I was disappointed to find that the movie was shot in Turin, and not Rome. I have not been to Turin, so the movie does not have quite the same buzz. I think buzz is the correct word to use there.

Phantom

I have finally finished the Phantom book by Susan Kay. What an interesting novel. Adds extra detail, and explains the characters so well. Each version of the story adds something different, and the versions do not always line up. It is in the overlaps that things get interesting.

In the movie, the Lake is important. Having never seen any of the other movies or read any of the books I had no idea why the lake was there. The book explains the context of why the lake is there. It would be interesting to know how much of the legend is true, and how many of the characters are based on real people.

Bayswater

A bit of history. This is Bayswater Power station in the Hunter Valley. For about nine months I was one one two electrical engineers in the electrical section of the station. If it looks large in a photo, it is even larger when you are walking in it, or under it. The main building is close to 700m from one end of the other. There are roads inside with street signs and speed limits, it is so big. There are also lots of pushbikes on the site too since it is so large.

Picture of the Day

This is a picture of the rainforest just west of the Gold Coast. I found it so relaxing there.

Music

Chris De Burgh came up on the Random Play. His music is great, and I am now playing his 'Best Of' album. I should say that 'The Lady In Red' is my favourite, closely followed by 'Say Goodbye to it all'.

The lyrics include "Took a boat over Lake Geneva; It was raining all night long; We were lucky and we saw no enemy; And came from Switzerland, poor refugees; Far from the guns of war;We said goodbye to it all;". They just explain the story so well - how the singer (at least in the song) was someone escaping occupied europe in World War II. It makes me want to jump on a plane tomorrow to visit Lake Geneva and also Normandy. One of these days...

I have wanted to visit Geneva since I before I was 10... They had an annual inventors convention there... And I really wanted to visit. I have no idea if the convention is even still on there, or if it is even worthwhile visiting.

Reading the Phantom book has reminded me of one of the things that I want to do one day. That is to write a book. More precisely an autobiography. I have various notes from highschool and early uni on with some stuff written. Given that my writing style and typing speed have improved significantly since then, I would probably want to re-write that stuff anyway.

Anyone who reads this Blog will realise how much I love writing. I truely wish my typeing was much faster. I am building my speed, and it is better than it was, but I have been working on typing since I was about 8 or so, so it would be expected that my typing would be improving.

I would love to be able to play the Piano or other keyboard but my skills to not lie in that area. It is more the applied arts rather than the performing arts. This photo is of one of the few pieses of artwork that I produced in school which looked nice. The picture is on it's side, but you would not know


Right now I have a pain in my neck. Literally. Not sure how I did it - it is not too bad unless I try to do something like place my chin on my chest, or turn my head the wrong way too far. I think it is only a pulled muscle. I could use a nice backrub though. It was not enough to stop me from cooking dinner though - a nice stirfry.

Picture

This picture is of my tracking software and a tracking unit I designed in use.

Movies

There are a whole lot of movies in my collection that I have yet to see. The current list includes 'Casablanca', 'Dishonorable Lady' with Heddy Lamar, 'What Women Want', 'Lantana', 'The Italian Job' as well as numerous years worth of Tropfest. 'The Italian Job II' is on it's way - one more thing to watch.

One DVD that I have seen is 'Tron'. The movie has dated terribly, and the plot could have been improved. But for the time it really was groundbreaking. My copy is autographed by a friend of mine - Bill Kovacs. [I found out a couple of months back that the friend from New Zealand whos farm I stayed on in December also worked on the movie. I will have to get him to sign it too]. Bill gained an acadamy award a few years back for his work with computer graphics. A photo of Bill appears below, taken in 2002 in Hollywood.

Election

According to the AEC WWW Site, right now about 38% if the vote has been counted. Labour has 55% right now, and the next closest is an independant with 8.5% of the vote. Since the liberal party did not stand, this is not surprising. OK. It is now a bit later and with about 76% counted, with results in from all the booths, the percentage for labour is the same.

Programming

Today I have been doing a small amount of programming. Mostly it has been testing some code, but there have needed to be some small changes made to allow some improved functionality. I guess that does not mean much but there are some commercial factors I would rather not mention in case a competitor finds this page and starts reading. From what I can work out, very few people actually visit this blog so I don't think I have too much to wory about, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

Last night I sent off some work to be outsourced. There are times that I would prefer to write a quick specification and get someone else to write the code under a fixed price quote than write it myself. This is either because I dont have the time or I would get a better job getting someone else to do the work. When I get someone else to do the work, the debugging is mostly done so that reduces my stress levels significantly. I save more money than it costs normally.

Easter

Apart from the normal easter church things, I am planning to do a big cleanup. I will be taking a few loads of junk to the local tip. This is a nice house, but it does let you accumulate rubbish. There is too much plain junk here. Stuff that I dont need that can be thrown out. Bricks, wood, steel, cardboard. The list just goes on. Chemicals, car batteries, paints. Some of this can be recycled, and other stuff just needs to be thrown out.

Depending on how energetic I feel I might even get rid of the compost heap and put the compost onto the grass on the front. The lawn is not too bad out there but it could do with some help in places.

EzyDVD

EzyDVD has a sale where you can buy selected DVD's for the bargain price of $45 for three. Individually they are $14.92 each, or $44.76 for three. Guess which I chose? I was buying a copy of The Italian Job II... I have the original, but I have not got around to watching it on DVD yet. One more thing when I have time. Someone to watch it with would be good too, but not essential.

Easter Show

I was looking forward to visiting the Easter Show this year. I have not been in many years, since I was about 8 or 9 I think. I don't want to go alone and I don't have anyone to go with. Maybe next year I will actually get to go to The Show. I really cannot remember much of it from when I was small. I can remember seeing the wood chopping and the fruit displays but that is about it.

Angus and Robertson

I am very unimpressed with Angus and Robertson Booksellers right now. I have been waiting for a couple of books for ages. I ordered the books on the 22nd February and I still have not got them. They have not been even shipped. I have just emailed them saying that I wanted to cancel one of the books since I could get it cheaper and faster from AMAZON.COM. This is not right, particularly when the book is only $35 + postage here in Oz. I am really looking forward to reading the book and I do not have it.

A, um, Hunger Strike in Italy

There is a story on News.Com about how Mussolini grand-daughter's is having a Italian hunger strike. She is having cappuccinos and water only to sustain her. Below is the balcony that her grandfather used to speak from just before and during WWII.

Ingleburn Festival

Ingleburn Festival

As mentioned before it is the Ingleburn Festival today. This is in addition to the byelection thanks to Mark Latham resigning. Peter Garett and Kim Beazley have been in the area in the last few days, although I have not seen either of them. Nor have I seen the actual candidate. Those who have seen him tend to ask who he is when seen beside the better known public figures.

The ALP were giving away free baloons at their stall. And the Greens were campaining at their stall against the local council wanting to allow up to 10 story high rise buildings in the area. The Police had a large presence, mostly in the form of the Police Band.

Music:

Come Undone by Robbie Williams. "...So Rock and roll, so corporate suit. So damn ugly, so damn cute... ". I picked up some CD's from the local 2nd hand store - "The Cranberries" with 'Everybody else is doing it so why can't we?' as well as the Soundtrack to 'Dying Young' featuring music performed by Kenny G. I will play them when I am finished moving the music to the jukebox. As normal with 2nd Hand CD's, the cases needed to be thrown out. But with new cases, the CD's look new.

Stressed

Last night I was a bit stressed. It is a whole gammut of things, some personal and some professional. Some of it is probably lack of sleep too.

I had a good talk to my father last night. My grandmother varies with the day. I finaly found out what she had the operation for. It was to remove some blood on the brain. And she seems to be variable with her cognitive abilities depending on the day. The operation aparently did go very well.

Blogger

What I have found is that Blogger is often quite slow. I know it has not updated the number of blog entries that I have in something like two or three weeks. It has always been a bit slow updating them, but this is far worse than anything I have seen before.

I suspect that as Blogging takes off their servers are finding it hard to keep up. That is what happens when you get exponential growth - which is what Bogging has been seeing. Many businesses see this growth pattern too. Dealing with it can be difficult.

CDMA

I tried accessing the Web from a CDMA 1x card today, and the results were less than impressive. In fact I found the results quite poor. Bringing up WWW pages was especially problematic, probably because of the number of connections that need to be made to show a page. I was expecting a lot better. In fairness to Telstra we were probably in a poor location but the system did not work well. I was really disapointed. I was expecting significantly more than what I got. I am guessing that the cell site we were connected to had high loading from other 1x customers leading to problems.

Music:

David Bowie - "Ziggy Stardust" on Random Play. Oxygene Part 10 by Jean-Michel Jarre.

Photo of the Day

This is a really cool photo... Taken during the olympics. I believe it was the closing ceremony. On the back of the dish is a video screen, and on the screen is a video image coming down from a helicopter of an aerial view of the stadium. This dish had a person to point it at the helicopter when the person moved.

I have had a long day today... Visiting a client in north sydney and then going onto Penrith Lakes to do some software updates. The North Sydney client was mostly successful, but I need to go back there monday to update the software on the units again since I introduced a minor software bug when I fixed some more major issues.

I will be happy when these units are working fully and I don't need to touch them ever again!

Penrith Lakes was interesting. Rather muddy too... I had to work on a CAT earthmoving 'scraper', reprogramming a unit installed in it. What made this more interesting was that I was attempting to keep my rather new Rivers shoes and Colerado pants clean from the mud. I did fairly well, but I could have done better. The pants are now in the wash soaking to get the mud off. In the last few months I have been wearing nicer clothes when I meet clients. I knew it would backfire.

This was right next to the Penrith Whitewater Stadium which my former employer built. By right next to, I mean it was about 20m away. It was that close. I had never actually seen it before, apart from photos and on TV...

I made a mistake getting to Penrith. I went via the airport whereas I should have taken the M2 and then the M4. This would have saved quite some time.

13 thinks that do not make sense

The New Scientist Web Site has an Article on 13 things in science that do not make sense. The things are quite technical - I certainly do not understand them all, or even most of them. I do understand what they are talking about though.

Music

I have been playing two of the Matchbox 20 CD's in my car. In my opinion, some of the songs are fantastic, and some are ordanary. Working out which is which depends on the day and the mood I think. Much of the music is classic. On random play I love how sometimes the music is so right... I am typing this page with some type of guitar playing with a piano. Sounds nice and relaxing. Just what I need.

Election Tomorrow....

There is an election tomorrow in Ingleburn. I was looking at the Sydney Morning Herald whilst having breakfast and found an Article with an attached picture. I have included the photo here. This is of my local church, and the church's Child Care Centre. It is being used for pre-poll voting for those who are unable to vote on the day.

7:30AM

I didn't sleep too well last night. Well, I woke up at about 5:30 and I could not get back to sleep. And I also woke up at 12:15 or so and could not get back to sleep either so I read more of the 'Phantom' book for a little while. I will grab a coffee soon I think.

I have just finished writing some code that has been on my to-do list for a few weeks. It does not work as well as I was intending, speed wise, but it does work and that is the main thing. With some back end work any speed issues will be easally resolved.

I watched more of the Phantom movie this morning. I love this movie - and I knew I would ever since I heard it was being released. I just wish that the movie had been more popular in the box office. It has similar production values to 'Moulin Rouge', without the modern music, and without most of the impossible camera moves.

Too much to do. Too little time to do it of course. Right now I have so many priority one things to do... At the moment I am on MSN working with an Italian client testing some software. Given the distance, and the language problem there are some issues getting things running. MSN is good, but it does have limits.

There is always the problem that bugs might be related to the style of date, time, decimal points, etc. In this case I think the problem is the date format. No. I was wrong. I just dont know the difference between a row and a column. I sent over a version of the software with a bug that I fixed earlier today.

My ADSL dropped out for a minute also thanks to this. MSN has a problem with my modem in that it does not like files being sent through MSN. I had upgraded the modem but there seems to be another problem. It is definitely the modem that is the problem.

Once I got it working the client was very impressed. I like it when things just work, even after what seems to be a lot of issues. I even had a problem with the proxy settings which I had added and promptly forgotten about. Given what today has been like... I am not surprised I forgot about it.

Friday morning I need to make a quick trip into north sydney to do some quick reprogramming of some units. And then back home to do more programming and testing. I already have two things that must be done at 9AM... I guess I will be using my cellphone to do those when I am on my way in.

Music:

Working for Myself

Depending on the way you look at it today has been great or horrible. I found a bug today in some code I supplied for a really major client. This is really really bad. The units failed after 12 minutes. Thankfully I have found the problem. And it also explains some other issues that this client has been having. In the process I think I might have saved this client. And I really hope I have saved this client. For their sake as well as mine.

I love some clients. I just had a client ring because I had not invoiced him yet. When I said that I had not yet reached the mutually negotiated billing amount he was gladly surprised. Right now I have to write a spec for him, and then send him the invoice. And I think I just got some MYOB consulting from him too. He wants to set up BPay and Credit Card By Phone, things that I have with my business.

What I have found is that my clients love having the ability to pay which ever way they like. Direct Deposit is good, but the audit trail is not as easy as with BPay and Credit Cards since they are harder to link with what is in the accounting system. I even have people from overseas ringing my 1300 billing number to pay bills. I love this. I send them the bill in $A and they just use a credit card. What could be easier.

It certainly is easier than getting a cheque from the USA cashed, and safer than having US$2,000 in your pocket leaving the USA when the client paid part of their bill in cash (Well, that only happened twice. )

More Emergency Work

I got an ASAP job to do... A rather horrible 'Drop Everything and do this job'. After working on this for about an hour or so I get a phone call saying, 'do you think you will have it all done by sunday afternoon?'. ARGH. Drop Everything means I want it done within the next hour or two, not the next few days.

One of my functions returns a value as being SYSTEM.VBNULL instead of an empty string. What I have to do is change my code from saying dr("PhoneNumber") to dr("PhoneNumber").ToString. Except that I mis-typed .text instead of .tostring in one case causing me some issues. Just found another bug. I have a table called 'HardwareAddres', but there is only one "s" at the end. OOps.

I now know that there is a bug in my code. I have just instructed a friends car to shut down remotely. And judging from the fact that I have not receieved an angry phone call I guess it did not work. Then again, it would have helped if I had actually told the unit in his car to do something, and if the unit in his car had been hooked up so that it would stop the car. But they are mere details. The software appears to work.

Running

I am planning on going running at about 4pm. Maybe I will be able to go the three KM. We will see about that. I will probably take the GPS again, or maybe the PDA with the bluetooth GPS. Cute toy, and it is work related too.

Given the number of rush jobs I am not convinced I will be able to have a run today... ARGH.

Vehicle Tracking

I just had a phone call from a friend of mine. He has vehicle tracking which I designed in his car. He was driving to Melbourne and needed help. So I brought up some software I had written to work with the tracker that I had designed and I was able to tell him where to drive.


The mapping software was written by someone else by the rest of the system was written by me. This is something that I love doing... The last time someone came to visit me they needed tracking... This particular friend of mine missed the turn off to Ingleburn, and ended up in Bowral. I know many people consider Ingleburn a long way away (and with the M7 I think it will only take about 20-25 minutes for me to visit my friend Richard in Castle Hill) but it is not THAT far away!!!

Phantom of the Opera

A friend of mine got me a pre-release copy of the DVD of the Phantom of the Opera CD. I have seen very little of it at the moment, but I am VERY impressed by it. I saw the movie at the end of december. At the movies was great, but a I missed a lot of the detail, partially because I had never seen the stage show, and partially I was so much further back watching it.

Hand in hand I am reading the Susan Kay book, and there are bits of that back story that are coming out in the staging of the moving. Stonework and the like. Minor things really.

Satellites

I have been doing more work today playing with satellites. Well, not playing. Working with this time. From an engineering perspective a satellite is just a radio with a solar powered battery a long way away. There are some issues building a satellite, but basically it is easy. The hardest part is getting a launch, and that is not too hard provided you don't mind paperwork. I have enough hardware here in the house to build a satellite. If I wanted it to last I would need to buy some more parts from Dick Smith. And if I actually wanted to get it launched I would need to pay a couple of thousand dollars getting a case made but that would not be too hard.

Getting the hardware through 'Shake and Bake' where they test the hardware before launch is the hardest part, but that just requires some re-engineering of some of the parts. I believe that PVC cables are not good in the vacuum of space because they give off vapours. And there are some other components that are not good to have up there either. Any dust or metal fragments can do real damage.

Doctorate

I mentioned that my mother was close to finishing her doctorate a few days back. What I forgot to mention was what she was doing it in. She is looking at the use of non-biblical parables in learning and literacy. It will not be too long before she finished. Then I will be the least qualified in the family. My brother has a matsters in pure maths. My father has a PhD. I only have a degree. Hmm.

Grandmother

I have just heard that my grandmother is doing well after the operation. She is bright and chirpy. Not sure if it has fixed the problem. We will see.

Music:

I just picked up a copy of Maroon 5's "Songs about Jane". I have not heard it yet, but I am about to move it to my Jukebox and then play it. The couple of songs I do know from it I love. The songs I know I know are "This Love" and "She will be loved"

Rain...

Rain and Bad Weather

I woke up in the middle of the night and had the pleasure of listening to the rain before I fell back asleep. The sound of rain is so soothing, and tends to put everything into perspective. It makes the problems of the world go away. One of my favourite CD's is Pink Floyd's 'Delecate Sound Of Thunder'. Well, this is the delicate sound of the rain.

I was in bed, under the blankets just listening before I fell back asleep. This is what I call relaxing. Madonna has her song 'Rain' on the subject. So does Belinda Carlisle with her song 'Summer Rain'. Also Harrigan Logan's version of 'Over the Rainbow'. And not forgetting the sorrowful "I think it's going to rain today" sung by Better Middler on the Beaches Soundtrack. Probably the most beautiful is Enya's other version of 'Storms in Africa', but not the version on the Watermark album. And there are so many other songs. Anyway, basically, rain is too beautiful to be experienced alone in my opinion. Right now though I guess I have to.

A friend of mine had to take a flight south from Sydney last night. Aparently the weather was pretty horrible... So much so that he saw that the flight attendant got a call on the intercom, sat down and tightened her belt. Then my friend tightened his belt, and just then got hit by really survere turbulance. He managed to hit his head on the baggage rack, probably 6" above his head normally. And his seat belt was really tight. That is what I call turbulance. Basically I am glad I was not on that plane.

GPRS vs. CDMA 1x vs. Unwired

Quick comparisson... Unwired seems to have the lowest latency, followed by CDMA and GPRS. CDMA has the best coverage, followed by GPRS and then Unwired a disimal last. Unwired is the only one that allows connections back to your computer, which is essential for some protocols and P2P programs. Unwired scales the worst of the three, requiring the most towers, followed by GPRS and then CDMA. Unwired transmits more energy than the other two followed by GPRS and CDMA. I beleve that CDMA would work best in a mobile environment followed by GPRS and then unwired definitely last.

Basically CDMA stacks up fairly well, apart from the issue of being behind a NAT gateway. Unwired probably would not be good as a mobile phone since it most likely transmits far more power than the other two. CDMA has the potential to lite on power usage since it uses 'closed loop power control' commonly requiring 10-100 times less transmitter power. I suspect that Unwired does not even bother about cell handovers. GPRS does hard cell handovers, whilst CDMA does 'soft' handovers all the time.

If none of this makes any sense to you, then I am not surprised. This is the sort of stuff I learned to do in my course at uni, analysing available evidence and working out what it means.

Non-Free Trade Agreement

AustralianIT from The Australian has a Story about how Sony is trying again to ban PS/2 mod chips. The argument last time was that the mod chips remove an artificial barrier allowing australians to buy games from the USA at cheaper prices. Strange that a free trade agreement is being used to reduce the amount of free trade.

Computer Problems

I just got home after a meeting with my courier client and then fixing some computer problems. I sure hope I have fixed the problem with the courier.

The computer problems with the other client were interesting... This is the same client who had a keyboard and mouse with connectors which a child had attacked with a pen. Hmm. I thought they would immediately need to be replaced, like happened about 2-3 weeks back. Well, using the back of the insert of a pen I was able to get the pins so that they fit into the socket on the back of the PC. I also noticed that the VGA socket on the motherboard was pushed in somewhat. They actually used a card for VGA, probably thanks to the damage, but the screen still was not all that clear.

When I started the PC, the address bar was not visible in IE. Oh, they have a spyware toolbar. Fine. Fix that problem. Then I try Outlook express. It would not work, and killed the connection when it finished. That turned out to be an option that said kill the connection when it was finished sending and receiving. Then they had secure send and receieve. However the ISP only allowed secure send. Fixed that problem.

The internet was VERY slow. Hmm. Do a netstat -n and see about 3-4 pages of outgoing connections. Port 445 from memory... Oh... Strange. Look for Norton Internet Security... Not installed. Put the disk in, and it asks for a serial number... The number is lost... ARGH. Had to leave him with that one.

GMail

If anyone wants an account on GMail, Google's free email service with 1GByte of quote, just send me an email.

A Sinking Feeling

The Daily Telegraph has a Story on the sinking of the Swedish super-ship Vasa in 1628. This monumental ship sank soon after it was launched thanks to it being significantly unstable. It is now on display in a museum in Sweeded. Wow. I want to see that.

Music:

Kelly Clarkson with 'The Trouble with Love' from Love Actually. I will have to buy a copy of the DVD one of these years. Then there is Icehouse with "Don't Believe Anymore". And now that I have got home, 'Borderline' by Madonna. One the way home I was listening to MixFM most of the time...

CamTrack

One of the products I am working on at the moment is a product called CamTrack. It is designed for the situation where you want to record on a video camera where the video was shot from. This sounds easy, but it is not as easy as it sounds. So I have come up with some hardware to store the GPS location on one of the audio tracks of the camera. Then it can be decoded with ease using my software, and even played with a video image and with a map showing where the image was shot from. I think this is a cool piece of software and hardware.

The details of CamTrak can be found on This Page.

OziExplorer	Video Image

Server Stuff

Whilst I was looking for the photo of CamTrak, I realised I had a problem with my WWW site. The Marketing site has been off the air for a while waiting for my brother to help me fix it. I should mention that this site is a bit old and needs updating. It probably has not been updated for about nine months, and not all the content is there yet either.

This requires updating about 500 individual pages. Fortunately I use a thing called the Web Meta Language so there is not as much work involves as you would think. I need to update a single file and then compile up all the pages. The average page has about 1000 page views so that is not bad...

With some other housekeeping stuff I have four copies of Telnet open to my server so I can see what is happening. Using telnet I can quickly swap between tasks without too much bother. Simpler than even using VNC or RemoteDesktop. There is probably an hours worth of computer time and network time to update and upload all these pages.

I just checked my Statistics. Despite it being slightly supersceded, my OziAPRS software is currently my most popular page. It is number four on the all time statistics of page view, but for the last little while it is number 1. This data is taken from adding up all the page counters and looking at that data.

My Home Page

What do I use as my home page at home? Well, that is simple. I use http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/index3.html containing most of the links I need from day to day. For some reason favourites dont seem to work with InternetExplorer how I use it so I tend to store links on that page or on the Blog. Or on a scrap of paper on the desk.

Music:

Maroon 5 - She will be Loved (Live). Foo Fighter's Walking After You. Madonna's Material Girl. Save my Life by Pink.

Meeting Today

I have a meeting today to drop off some equipment arround lunch time. Then I need to visit a client in the city to finish off some computer work. Both should be fairly quick, but we will see.

New Zealand

I was trying to explain to an Italian friend of mine all about the election and one person's desire to have a 'short but glorious war with New Zealand', and asked if I was kidding. I had to inform him I was not kidding. The candidate might have been but I was not.

I didn't get a chance to tell him about the Effie & Norman Gunstan song "I don't care who wins, provided Australia beats New Zealand". He wanted to know where all the 'Bad Blood' came from. I asked what bad blood.

Grandmother

No news from my father on my grandmother. I assume that means that things are going well.

Book - Phantom

I am now about a third of the way through the book. If this book is anything like the 'true' back story for the musical and film then it is no wonder he was a bit strange. The book is strange in that it is all written in the first person. Not many books are written this way.

Music:

Moby has a new album out. I will need to get it soon. Warren Zevon on Random Play. For those that don't know him, he sang the song 'Werewolf of London'.

Run

I went for the run. I only did the 2.5KM version, since that was enough for me today. The weather was a bit hottoer today than it has been so that really affects things. Also as I was about to leave a friend from a few houses up asked if I could come and help him install his Air Conditioner for 10 minutes. And I was waiting for a courier package so that is some time.

Basically the 2.5km run was enough for me today. I will probably rest tomorrow and see how I go doing the 3KM on thursday.

Lunch

What I forgot to mention earlier was my lunch. I had Thai food - Pad Khi Mau Gai (Or spicy noodles with chicken), and I love it. The people at my local Thai restraunt know me know, and are making it progressivly hotter for me for some reason. When I had the first bite today I must have needed about half a glass of water. I think I had two large tall glasses of water during the takeaway meal. It was really nice though.

The strange thing is that I have neber had this out at a restraunt - one of these days I will have to go to Gordon Thai and see how they go making it. From past experience I am sure they will do a good job.

DVD Burner

Whilst I am writing this I am also using my DVD burner to move some files off the Hard Disk. As mentioned before I have been having some issues for a few days with this. Today is my final test before I ring dell and tell them to fix this again. This is a new fault - I believe that the DVD has experienced an ELF - and Early Life Failure.

What that means is that devices are more likely to fail when they are new or old. They are less likely to fail in mid-life. And I would bet a lot of money on this unit having failed in service. I hate it when technology does not work.

The DVD recorder seems to be stuck on 1x burn too mostly. This is not good.

Personal Stuff

It looks like the earliest I will be working on the plane is easter monday. Richard and I have both been really busy, and I have been unable to get over there to help him work on it since the end of february.

Wireless Technology

A friend of mine sent me a document describing the differences between Unwired and GPRS as seen by one person. Their experience was that they both operated in a similar manner, offering similar costs, but that the round trip times (commonly called 'PING Times') were much slower with GPRS

But GPRS is a more scalable solution which is why the ping times are longer. There are ways to improve the performance of GPRS but they mostly require the carrier to set it up.

Unwired allows connections to contact the local PC from the Internet. Most GPRS providers do not have this option, placing a NAT gateway in between the unit and the internet.

How do I know all this? Well, telecommunications engineering was my major at University. And I have been dealing with these types of equipment for most of my adult life.


Music:

Running

I have a busy afternoon programming, but I plan to find time to do some running. I plan to run about 3km. I should bring the GPS so a screendump is not out of the question.

Right now I need to wait for a courier. I hope he arrives here soon... I really need the run.

Coding

Right now I am still working on moving the software from the VB6 to VB.Net. I hope to have this by start of business today, Italy time :-) I now have a basic version of the code running. At least it is playing back the files that I saved from the previous version. After I have a run I will have a look at getting the rest of the software running. This is a good start though.

Grandmother

I have not heard from my father about my grandmother. I hope she is OK.

Meeting at the Stamford Plaza Double Bad

I had a meeting in the Stamford Plaza in Double bay this morning. It is really nice, and if I ever need to stay in the city for any reason looks like a nice place to visit. Getting there was fairly straight forward, not too far away from the exit of the Eastern Distributor. Getting back was a bit harder, since there was a no right turn where I wanted to get onto a street to get back to the city. But I eventually found a route to South Dowling Street via Centenial Park.

Direct-X Programming Under VB.NET

I need to move a product to .Net quickly. When I upgraded my PC to XP ServicePack 2 I was no longer able to compile the old version of the software in VisualBasic 6. So now I have to do a quick conversion. I have most of the code done already, but not all of it. The part that was causing me problems was working out how to display live video under VB.NET.

Thankfully I found an Article On The Code Project that told me what to do. This article is actually complaining about some of the aspects of trying to play a video in some specialist ways but tells me what to do anyway. Strangely it seems the Microsoft calls the technology "DirectX DirectShow" but is accessed through Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback. This is slightly counter intuitive and does not fit the the naming of the rest of the DirectX function calls. [ARGH. I was just typing the word 'calls.' and four times I spelt it 'call.s'. Well, it is correct now]

Music:

Photo of the Day

OK. This photo is taken from the front seat of a car during the Sydney Olympics. Not a great photo. This photo was taken in Auburn. I was sitting in the front right hand seat. The driver was in the front left seat. The vehicle we were driving in was registered in Pennsylvania, USA, and was of course left hand drive.

One of my was driving another vehicle during the Olympics, also left hand drive. They didn't feel it was 'right' so they went to K-Mart and purhcased a steering wheel cover and taped it to the vehicle where the steering wheel would have been. This was fine until the passenger sitting in this seat got in trouble with the police. The car was pulled over and the policeman started complaining that the person in the right seat was driving using a mobile phone. He then realised that the steering wheel was only taped on, and that the real driver was on the other side of the car. He was rather embarrased.

More Programming

I was working on one job today. The client very specifically told me I needed to send two characters at the end of each line. VERY SPECIFICALLY. OK. For some reason that does not work well. What is going on here?

Well, it works when I type it by hand. Very strange, Hmm... Ignire the instructions. Just send the one character that would be sent if I had typed it by hand. Hey, that works. WOW. Time to amend the instructions.

I also have a problem with the GPS position... The position the device is sending is about 12,500km off, directly due west. It almost doesn't really matter if it is east or west... At this sort of distance the difference is minor. The point on the left side of the map should be in Sydney.

This problem is probably related to the GPS receiever that I use. I tend to use a Garmin GPS16, and this uses different numbers of decimal places than some other devices. This means that sometimes software gets slightly confused.

Meeting this morning

I have a meeting with a new client today at the Stamford at Double Bay. From what I have heard this is a nice place to stay. I will be interested in what my client has to say. I believe it is only about $450-$500 per night. I would guess I will be back from the meeting well before lunch.

Grandmother

Grandmother

I just heard from my father. My grandmother is still in hospital and is having a minor operation tomorrow to remove preasure on her brain. This really is a minor op, my grandmother had a few similar ones in her time. But that does not mean that there are not risks involved. So prayers and thoughts would be appreciated.

Software

Sometimes I love writing software. Sometimes I hate it. Sort of like running I guess. Like today I was talking to a client. The hardware was not behaving. Or so I thought. So we worked through it on a long distance call. Turned out my software was misbehaving. The hardware was basically working properly. Now I have to search through the software to find the problem.

I was speaking to my Official Microsoft Buddy today... I mentioned that there were times I wanted to pull my hair out trying to get things to work. He suggested emailing him before becoming that extreme.

I am now having a problem with some other tracking hardware. These units used to work properly, but now have a hardware fault after a software upgrade. Things are not supposed to happen that way. ARGH.

Music:

Carinval of Sorts - REM. The Coors - Dreams. Bette Midler with Superstar. An old one...

Picture - Olympics

Mobiles Overseas

You need to be careful when you use your mobile overseas. I did the research before I escaped for a few days in January. Whilst I was over there I made two mobile calls. The first was to my friend who once again missed me when I arrived at the airport. This 10 second call cost $1.88. Then I called my father in Australia for 13 seconds for $2.44. When he rang me back that night to my mobile, I paid $6.48 for a 24 minute call which was much better value. As was the 10 minute call the next day for $2.84.

The same bill has GPRS charges for one of my SIM cards. The cost for GPRS for the month was $0.155. That is right. They charged me 15 1/2 cents. For another SIM card they were more reasonable, charging me $1.37. The reason is that GPRS is charged on this plan at 0.5 cent increments. Plus GST of course. My telecommunications bills always make good reading before visiting the scanner and shreader.

GST

For another client I quoted $2,800 for a particular job. I have got the work, and they sent me a purchase order. All the line items are listed, without GST, with GST added for each item. This is fine, and all the numbers add up, except that my invoice for $2,800.00 is now $2,800.01. No matter what I do I can just see the paperwork involved with that once cent. I can only guess at the number of phone calls it is going to consume.

At Pacific Power we used to have internal billing, which really was funny money. It was just internal accounting. In my younger days I suggested that we replace the billing systems with monopoly money, and pay for things that way. After all it was expensive to run billing systems. With monopoly money you could have armed roberies, forgeries - the ideas are endless.

Anyway we had one client who had been billed $400 internally for some drawings for one of the power stations. There was no question it was work related. This client tried wanted to drive to the central coast and investigate this expense. It was going to cost the organization more than the bill to investigat. In the end she saw the sense in accepting the charge.

I was running the billing system for my branch in my spare time at work, and most months I was sending out over $100,000 in bills. It was always amusing seeing a $10,000 facility charge next to a $0.14 photocopy charge on the bill. Each month I would give my boss an overview on how his part of the oganisation was going, since many of the things that we were doing with technology were significantly reducing the bottom line improving the performance of the business. I did learn a lot about how businesses operate at Pacific Power

Music:

San Andreas Fault by Natalie Merchant. I love this song. All her stuff is cool, but this is great. Dido's Take My Hand on now.

Programming

I mentioned I was doing some work on the Rabbit Controller. The code is starting to be written, and I have about 300 lines of code done already. This will need to be debugged. There are probably another 600 lines of code to be written. And then it all needs to be tested and debugged. I joke that writing the code takes 90% of the time, and that debugging it takes the other 90% of the time. Lets hope not. The demo hardware is below. I will not get the real hardware for a few weeks, since it is only partially designed at the moment.

Reprogramming

I have mentioned a few times reprogramming embedded devices. Once more I am doing this task. It is a task I can almost do with my eyes closed. This is the LAST time I will do it on these units...

Picture of the Day

This is a photo of the Big Island of Hawaii during Ironman in 2002.

Intel Inside

Intel Inside

I love this photo. It was taken in the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. I just wish I could have purchased the shirt. It is so cool.

Doctor Smith

My name is Darryl Smith. My middle initial is R. So every now and then I get mail addressed to "DR SMITH". This is also my father's title, as he has a PhD, and has had one for about 15 years or so. I was speaking to my mother today. She is planning on handing in her thesis just after easter. She was trying to hand in before easter but will not make it. She is getting an EdD - a Doctor in Education.

Another Hollywood Photo

Coding

Right now I am waiting on some code to upload to a GPRS unit I designed. I can multitask so things are not too bad whilst it is uploading. But it does get a bit tedious when I need to do a lot of uploads when I am testing software updates.

I was getting an error message... I finally worked it out. For a particular use the C language uses "!=" and Basic uses "<>". I was trying to use the Basic one in C. It did not work all that well.

I dont know where I would be without PC Anywhere and RemoteDesktop. They are fantastic. I can look at machines anywhere in the world without leaving my desktop. So useful. A friend of mine has tried to convince me that you can do useful things from a PDA in this way. I dont think so. PDA screens are just too small. Then again I think an 800 x 600 screen is too small these days.

More Coding

I have also been playing with getting back into the Rabbit controller. This company was cunning. First they developed a CPU module that was cheap and so easy to use that an experimenter could buy them and play with them. Then they effectively gave the compiler away for free. These two combined made the device so much more attractive.

I used them in my hollywood junket, and also in the Goodwill Games project I described a few days back. Right now I am working on another project. Unfortunately I cannot go into the details here... But it is cool. The photo is of a set of scooters I built in Hollywood.

DVD Problem

There is a problem with the DVD writer. I am not sure if the problem is with writing or reading. But one is not working properly. When I record DVD's I do a verify, and the verify is failing. And so is the reading on the same PC. Time to try another DVD.

Two Months

It is now about two months since the end of my relationship, and a lot has happened. With the help of some close friends and a diary to write my thoughts and feelings in, I think I have come through this whole thing relatively unscathed. I have learned a lot about myself in this process. I feel a lot happier about myself and life now than I did even a couple of weeks ago. There have been some dark times, but I believe that the dawn has broken.

During this period I have been on an emotional roller coaster. There have been days when I have been mostly happy, and days when I have been mostly sad. I have been angry, scared, unsure, uncertain and anxious. I have been questioning my self-identity and my self worth. But there have been two overriding emotions. The first is one of loneliness following the breakup. The other has been the sense of loss for what could have been.

I have found the breakup, in many ways, to be an alienating experience. It has given me a new insight into what people undergoing a divorce must be going through. It is interesting to see where support comes from, as it is often from unexpected areas.

So, what is my next step? This is a good question, and one that cannot be easily answered. I have some good ideas, and I am starting to work through them. Part of this is doing a good spring clean on this house, throwing out stuff that I have accumulated over the years. I have gone through my cupboard, giving old clothes to charity. I have been fairly ruthless and I have more to throw out. The garage is getting the best clean it has had for a while. My office is improving to, although that mostly relies on retrieving my scanner from a friend.

I have been building up my fitness, jogging a few times a week where possible. I am up to running about three KM in about 20 minutes. Over the coming weeks I hope to build this up to over four KM in 30 minutes. I am not sure about going in the City to Surf this year, but you never know.

And on a personal side, I really think that when the right person comes along I will enter into another relationship. I did enjoy being the relationship. It was only the process of breaking up that was hard.

Calling Einstein

Calling Einstein

Dire Straits has a song called 'Calling Elvis'... But in New York, according to the BBC they are calling Einstein. A group in New York wanted to bring look alikes in for the 122nd anniversary of his birth. And have 100 einsteins there. Also to be in attendance would be two of his original colleagues, both in their 90's.

A Contraption

Although I have not managed to actually view the file, the description on their Sitelooks cool. Windows Media Player 10 has a problem playing it... If you go to DivX.Com you can download the codec required. The non-pro version is fine. Now I have seen the clip I can see it would have been better with improved lighting and better camerawork. I needed to use the DivX player to view it. Maybe if I restart the PC then I might be able to play it in Windows Media Player 10.

Cleaning my Wallet

I figure it is time to clean my wallet... Concidering I just found NZ$30 from New Zealand from January... I would guess it is way overdue...

Work

I got a lot of the work done that I needed to today. It does not need to be complete until Tuesday morning, but much of it needs to be tested. And I have mentioned my to-do list before. It is too long.

This afternoon a friend came over and took some bits and pieces that I offered him. I am getting rid of things that I don't want, don't need, or can't justify keeping slowly. Maybe I should just get a Skip in and that would force me to tidy stuff up fast. Then again I really dont have the time. I am sure that someone will suggest I stop writing this. Well, um, yes. But I use this as a break from work.

Dilbert... On Single People

I found the following Dilbert cartoon a while back... I loved it... And I just found it again... So, without violating too much of the copyright... Here it is.

Boss: My new policy is to discriminate against single people. It's totally legal!

Boss: Write your marital status on this list so I know who has no reason to go home at night.

Boss: Dang! What are the odds that you'd all be polygamists?

An Old Project

This was for the Goodwill Games back in 2001 in Brisbane. We wanted to remotely control the movement of a dish on top of one of the TV Towers in Brisbane. I designed and built the control box for the system. We wanted to be able to dial into the controller and point it at where on the ground the microwave signal was coming from.




Basically the concept was that I put a GSM modem inside the controller, and we could dial up to it at any time, and change where the dish was pointed. I can remember dialing into it from Sydney for a test.


Anyway I need to get going. I have to cook myself some dinner... and Monster Garage is on too.

I have completed some of todays work. I have just designed something. Right now I would prefer not to say what it is, but I will in a month or so. It should be revolutionary on the Australian market. It took a bit longer than I had intended but it went fairly well, all things concidered.

Heddy Lamar

For those that don't know, Heddy Lamar was a movie goddes from arround the time of World War II. I have a DVD of hers that I need to watch at some stage. It is called Dishonoured Lady. There is a professional reason that I want to see the movie.
You see, she was also an inventor.

She invented the radio system that is called Spread Spectrum, which is used in CDMA cellphones and WiFi wireless internet. We receieved an IEEE Medal for her work just before she died.

Music:

OK. I am NOT listening to it, but I found a tape of Burl Ives. My grandparents had this tape when I was young, and I really loved it. If you don't know of Burl Ives, I personally cannot suggest it right now. But it does bring back lots of good memories.

Photo

This photo is of a sculpture near Broken Hill

Working today :-(

Such a beautiful day and I am here at home stuck working. Life is certainly not fair at all. The worst thing is that I am having to remove much of the work from a few days back when I burnt my finger. That is so disconcerting.

Election

There is a photo of Kim Beazley in the SMH today on page 3 in a local cafe in Ingleburn. Unfortunately the Web version does not have the picture of them so you will need to look at page 3 of the SMH.

Italian Food

The SMH has an Article on what to eat in the different regions of Italy. I will have to send this link to my Italian friends.

Picture of the Day

I think this would make a cute windows desktop.

Music:

I just heard a great song on a Chill Out Album... Fuzzy by Grant Lee Buffalo.

Book

I am working my way through Susan Kay's book 'Phantom' giving a version of the story of The Phantom Of The Opera. It diverges from the 1943 movie by giving the phantom a Birth Defect rather than an acid burn as noted in the movie. At least for the first few chapters, the story is being told in the first person by the mother of the phantom.

Music:

Avril Lavigne with "How does it feel?". I love her version of Bob Dylan's Knockin' of Heaven's Door. Followed by Pink's Humble Neighbourhoods. And then Robbie William's Come Undone.

Elton John's Circle of Life. Wow... "There is more to be seen that can ever be seen; more to be done than can ever be done.". Nice counterpoint to Vanessa William's "Color of the Wind". I had to look what else she sang... This was from Pocohantas. She also sang "Save the best for last".

Photo of the Day

This is in the new annex to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC (September last year is when I took the photo). This part is right next to Dulles airport, just out of DC. It is the airport that was used in the movie "Die Hard II" with Bruce Willis.

A Photo from Parkes RadioTelescope

This is a photo from up the Dish at Parkes, looking up the road that was used in the film as the 'Original' road before they built the visitor's centre.

Skype

I just had a great chat on Skype with a friend of mine in New Zealand. He is the one who I have stayed with a couple of times. He and a friend (in the USA) of his were on and talking to me about my friend Richard's plane. I think I convinced them both to look at building an RV-7 each after looking at the RvProject.COM Web Site. More specifically they loved looking at all the videos that the author of the site had made. Really cool.

Music:

Joe Satriani - He was the musician who did the music on the RV Project WWW site. Oxygene Part 7 is playing now by Jean-Michel Jarre. I love his music, although it gets monotonous, repetitive and boring at times.

I am a bit concerned about the randomness of the MP3 player. I just had two tracks by Jean-Michel Jarre in a row. Whilst this is possible, I also got a couple of Robbie William's Tracks. OK. It was two, now three out of 50 tracks.

Photo of the day.

This is a photo from 2003 of the Wellington, NZ waterfront.

Busy Day

Today has been busy... I have had a lot worse, but it has been busy. Right now I am designing a major modification to a circuit and I am waiting on a FAX to come in so I can see some of the work that I have done on it in the past, and forgot to keep a copy of. Well, I would have but my good scanner is out on loan.

Tomorrow it looks like I will be working again. Richard was working on his plane today, and planning to do some work tomorrow. I needed to work today no matter what today so I didnt get to help build today... Nor this weekend.

Music:

Blue Man Group is playing at the moment. This is a group that is used in the Intel adverts on TV. I saw them at the 2001 Intel (internal) Sales and Marketing Conference when I was working on one of the presentations. These guys must be seen to be believed.

I mentioned before about INXS's Don't Change... Probably my favourite INXS song is Beautiful Girl. I really love the song. Mediate is good, but Beautiful Girl is great. I dont know why... I just love it. Maybe because of the clear piano playing at the front.

Grandmother

My grandmother is in St George hospital at the moment and has been in there for a few weeks. She has had some problems with fainting and the like, and has been getting worse. Not sure exactly what is wrong. The photo is of my uncle and my grandmother.

Starting a Startup

There is an interesting article on SlashDot on how to start up a Startup business.

Strangeness

Here is a link to a group that decided it would be cool to place a >Buttler in McDonalds as a prank. They also organized a demonstration called Writers against piracy which was protesting about libraries lending books

Liability

According to an article on the SMH the High Court have decided that Lawyers involved with court cases, at least in victoria, are protected from Liability. What is most interesting is that Kirby was once again against this decision. Also the article seems to be highly biased away from the legal profession. Whilst that may be justified to some extent, I do not really think it is quite as justified as the article is biased.

Music:

Bolero was playing on Random Play. Powerful music. Now it is INXS... Actually no. It is not INXS, but someone else. Grinspoon's cover of the INXS song "Don't Change". I think they do as good a job as INXS with the original.

Urgent Project

I have an urgent project that I am looking at. I am not sure if it needs to go ahead, but if it does I need to very quickly get it up and running. Hmm. Why is it that there are so many urgent jobs?

I am getting a friend to do some work. He asked when we needed something done. I told him I was not sure. I had to reply that it was needed sometime between a month ago and three months into the future.

Ingleburn

This is a photo of Ingleburn during last year's Ingleburn Festival. The weather was not great, but it was a nice day.

Another Nice Photo

The following photo is taken from the back verandah in early February 2003 during a flash storm. The creek there is normally probably 1/2 to 1m lower than the level of the water there.

Used CD's

Here is the big question. What do you do with a hundred used recordable CD's? Actually I just gave probably 40-50 CD's to a friend with some scanned material on it (of material out of copyright, or with the copyright holder's permission of course)

Election

I know I have mentioned our local by-election. Latham resigned, and Ingleburn is the centre of the electorate. It is so much a safe seat that the Liberal Party are not even contesting it.

But by some strange coincidence, Ingleburn is having their festival that day, so everyone will have an excuse to participate in the event. Should make an interesting story on TV. Celebrations and Street Parties for an election. I can see the headlines now... "Ingleburn Celebrates a labour win" regardless of if the people who are celebrating and there for the fireworks even voted.

Garage

The garage is tidier... Just before writing this entry I was sweeping the floor of the garage. I can see the floor which is fantastic. More rubbish to throw out, and more stuff to recycle. It certainly helps when friends take bits of rubbish away for me. It also lets me feel less guilty about throwing out stuff which may not have been cheap when it was purchased.

I have had a busy day today. Some software/hardware failures this morning, and then I have had a meeting with a sub-contractor who is doing some design work for me. Then following that, we went to Ingleburn shops for lunch. Right now my desk is getting covered with stuff to do, and realistically, I dont have a handle on all the work I need to do.

Right now I am sitting waiting for a piece of equipment to fail. Unfortunately it might not be today that it fails, so I just need to leave it running and wait for something to happen. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe saturday.

I have some work to follow up too. People send me leads and I need to follow them up for work. [Short interruption whilst I email one of those people]. I'm back. I thought I had the phone number of the person. No such luck. No such luck. Now time to do some more proposals and quotes. The joy of being a small business person.

Running

Sometime this afternoon I plan to go running again. I think I have recovered from tuesday, and the weather is good. I find running helps me thing. Unfortunately I cannot run for long enough to let me work through the things I need to work though. This might change as my fitness level improves. With my running I could certainly go a lot further if I slowed down. However, I really dont want to do that - I would rather go at a pace that suits me.

P.S. I have just got back from a 3km run in about 20 minutes. I am pooped. But refreshed. The run was worth it

Music

The Pretender's "I'll Stand By You". This is a song I have loved for ages. I love the words so much. Ever get the impression that I love the music I have. Well, I would not have bought it if I didn't like it.

Right now I am waiting for some data to come though, and I have to monitor it, and be able to drop what I am doing at that point. So I am writing here. Some hardware/software has stopped working. I am working through what is going on. I just wish it was working. More things for me to work on.

Walk of Fame for Games - The walk of Games

The Hollywood 'Walk of Fame' on Hollywood Blvd and Vine St is well know, even if it really is a bit over-rated. Accordig to a story on CNN SAN FRANCISCO is honoring those in the Computer Game industry with their own stars.

Music

Scooter doing 'The Logical Song' from Supertramp. An interesting version of the song. Normally I am not all that into techno, but there are times that it certainly sounds interestng. And now some more Robbie Williams. And now Fields of Gold from the Celtic Chillout Album. This is a remake of the clasic Sting/Police song.

Testing Software

One thing I hate about testing software is when it needs to interface to other systems, and the other systems fail. It is never quite sure which system is correct, is it the work that I am working on, or the other end not working. You are never quite sure.

When there is hardware involved things get more complex. And more infuriating. What is even worse is when there is little or no debugging information available for the other system.

Canberra

I just happened to be down in Canberra during their fires, and the following photo keeps standing out. It is just so powerful. This was from the War Memorial, and is of a friend of mine from the USA. John is also the president of TAPR, of which I am a board member. This was about 2pm on the saturday.

Joke

Sorry to any Blondes reading this...

This blonde really wanted to go ice fishing. She'd seen many books on the subject, and finally, after getting all the necessary tools together, she made for the nearest
frozen lake.

After positioning her comfy footstool, she made a circular cut in the ice.
Suddenly---from the sky---a voice boomed,
"THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

Startled, the blonde moved further down the ice, poured a thermos of cappuccino, and began to cut yet another hole. Again, from the heavens, the voice bellowed,
"THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

The blonde, quite worried, moved way down to the opposite end of the ice, set up her stool, and tries again to cut her hole. The voice came once more, even louder:
"THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

She stopped, looked skyward, and said,
"Is that you, Lord?"

The voice replied,
"NO, THIS IS THE RINK MANAGER!

Code

One of my friends has asked me to quote on some work for him converting and updating some software. The software is in VisualBasic and needs to be updated to the latest version. There were over 400 error messages when I started looking at it... Far too many for my liking. And apart from the normal errors, there were issues with how the previous author wrote his code. To say it needs major work is an understatement.

Work

Today is not the lowest stress day ever. I have been having some software and hardware issues with one of my major clients and this is not good. It is adding just another thing I need to work on. Everything was working, but has started failing in the field. I cannot work this out, and it is not how things should be.

The reason I have time to write here is whilst uploading code to the unit, and also because if I didnt have a break from the code then I would go nutty.

Music

More Neil Diamond. Nice and soothing. I need it right now. I *REALLY* need it.

Artworks

There is an Article talking about art on the silicon in silicon chips. It refers to the Silicon ZooWeb Site.

Network Problems

One of my clients is having some network probems. It is a really strange one... It is only when I tried a few strange things today that I found where the issue is. For redundancy we are using two different IP addresses on a system. If a connection to one fails we then use the other IP address. Now, testing using one wireless carier has no problem. When using another carier only one of the IP addresses work. This is very strange.

IMAX - Cyberworld 3D

Whilst listening to my music player, I heard a the opening bars from a piece of clasical music, and placed these bars immediately. They were used as the opening bars in the Imax movie Cyberworld 3D in the segment called 'Tonight's Performance'. It just so happens that I am one of the few people in the world to have that part of the movie on DVD, so I recognised it immediately.

That section was placed onto a demo real for REZN8 in Hollywood, and I was given a copy of the DVD when I did some consulting for them. I have since worked with the producer that produced that segment.

Music:

Jackson Browne's The Road. Not a bad sounding song. I love 'The Load Out/Stay' a lot more than this song thogh. 'The Load Out' is about packing up after a concert. Having worked on a few productions at school, I can relate to what he is singing about in that song.

Last year (and recently re-discovered) I found the song 'Light as the breeze' by Billy Joel. The lyrics are, um, interesting. The lyrics have to be carefully listened to in order to work out what he is talking about. The song is on the album 'Greatest Hits Vol III'.

I am listening to Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits. Until I listened to his Greatest Hits I really did not have much love of his music. Listening to it gave me a new appreciation of the music. So many clasic songs.

Books

Back on the 22nd of last month I mentioned that I had ordered a couple of books from Angus and Robertson. Well, today I got an email saying that one of these books had been backordered. Which is what I got told on the 22nd. So I rang them and they told me that the book was in transit from the USA. Pity. Otherwise I would have just paid Amazon.COM to get the book in. Why is it that so many books are unavailable in this country. The other book should be dispatched early next week.

I will publish a review here of both books when I finally receive them. Sometime in the next nine-twelve months I would guess, given this performance. I had hassles with my last order with them too. That book was recommended to me, and I certainly did not feel it was worth buying.

Sore Finger

My left index finger is slowly getting better after being burnt a few days back. I dont need to wear a bandaid any more, but it is still really red. And it is quite tender. Maybe I will learn not to burn my figers with a soldering iron in the future. We can only hope.

Visiting Moscow

There is an article on News.Com.AU about visiting the Kremlin. I think this would be an amazing place to visit, although like Rome I doubt that it would be what I expected. I love the quote from the article noting that Winston Churchill once described it as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".

More Rubbish

I have found more rubbish. I have found about backup 45 CD's that can be placed onto DVD. This will be fairly quick to do since they are already on my server. There is all sorts of stuff on these DVD's. Once I finished uni, I didn't throw out all my notes after a year or so like many people do. I kept them and then scanned them. So I now have all my notes from my earlier years at uni scanned in, and all the lecturers notes scanned in.

The reason I dont have my later notes scanned in is that I typed them as they were written. There were two of us with laptops in the class, and I got to the point where I could even keep up with a physics lecturer including typing all the equations. I took fairly good notes because of that. For Electrical Engineering, notes really isn't the correct work. Basically you tended to copy down every word that the lecturer wrote.

Now, all I need to do is work out what to do with the hundred or so recorded CD-Roms. And I now need to buy some more blank DVD's. I have run out of the stock that I have had for more than 12 months since the burner was last working.

Music

Paul Simon is on the other laptop at the moment on Random Play. Then Robbie William's Monsoon - cute song. As always the lyrics are great.

More Microsurgery

A Run

I have done another run this afternoon. It was basically the same as the one last week where i did about 2.45kM, although in this case I can assure you I was more exhausted at the end. I think I was running a bit fast at the beginning. It was my intent to do another 500m but I just did not feel up to it.

So, why have I started running. There are a few reasons for this.

• Stress Reduction. The last couple of months have been really stressful for me, and running helps reduce the stress level. Thankfully I am now a whole lot less stressed than I was a month and a half ago, and I am thankful for that. But running is good for stress levels.
  
• Get rid of agression. Not that I am agressive. I rarely even raise my voice even in the middle of an argument. Just that running is a great way to get any anger out of my system. It seems to work well.
  
• Get into shape. Not that I am out of condition. It is just that I want to get more in shape.
  
• Get Healthier. I have found that when I exercise I am healthier. During winter I do not seem to get as many colds or flu as often. This is definitely a good thing.

Often I use my GPS as a way to make the running fun. I do not running by a road or anything like that. I like being near nature, and turning the run into an adventure.

More Microsurgery

I am doing more microsurgery today. I am changing things around this time. I am cutting wires first and then soldering them on. This seems to make things go faster. Not sure if it actually helps. I would like to think that it does.

Thankfully I have not burnt any fingers today. This is a good thing. I don't like pain, and burning fingers is not nice. I did manage to drop a hot part onto my leg. This hurt a bit, but not too much since the part was smaller than a grain of rice.

Spam

One of my friends has sent through a plot showing his SPAM levels since August 2003. What he is seeing is that Spam has been decreasing since about November 2004. I think that my Spam level has been decreasing, but I really cannot tell since I use a few tricks to reduce spam before it gets to my PC.

Professional or Tradesman?

In the last few days there has been some debate as to if people should go to Uni or get a trade. I went to Uni, and did a degree in Electrical Engineering. And I loved it mostly. There were some courses that were not fun, but I got through them all. I should say that the 2nd half of the course was more fun than the first. I did need to actually do work at Uni too...

Anyway, when I was leaving Pacific Power the training budget was opened up. They allowed us to do any training courses within reason. Do I did a telecommunications cabling course. It was something I was interested in and it was practical. And it was fun. Then when I left Pacific Power they paid up to $5,000 for training. So I turned the cabling course into a Cerificate III in Telecommunications Cabling. That actually makes me a tradesman as well as a professional engineer.

Power Plays

There is an article in the SMH about how Delta Electricity is looking at spending about $2b expanding their Mt Piper Power Station near Lithgow. I think this is quite interesting since I used to work at Wallerawang Power Station just near Mt Piper, and I used to support the people who were actually building the power stations. I also worked at Mt Piper's sister station in the Hunter Valley.

The problem that Delta Electricity has, apart from having little money in the bank, is that they lack the significant engineering resources to build the station. In the past the Power Plant Engineering part of Pacific Power would have done the work. But that was then and this is now, and Pacific Power has been shut down.

Music:

CD-ROM and DVD

It is great having my DVD and CD-ROM working again. I missed having access to it. It was a real pain not having it work. If I was going away and wanted to watch DVD's as well as have my main computer with email I needed to take two laptops. That got hard to do. Now I will only need to take the one laptop. My back will thank me.

DVD Players in Cars

India

One of my friends has just asked me if I want to go to India for a few days to do some work for him. Basically I will just need to visit the airport. OK, I may need to leave the airport only if I need to visit a hotel. But apart from that I don't need to leave the airport.

It would be a long way to go for a days work. But it would be fun. And it would be paying work. It should also be Business Class so things would be a bit nicer. With computer power these days it would also allow some decent programming time on the plane.

DVD Players in Cars

There was an article in Monday's paper about how DVD players are now popular in cars. It was on the front page of the SMH. The article was slightly incorrect in what it suggested the legal situation was with DVD players in cars. They noted that it was illegal to have a DVD player that was likely to cause distraction to the driver of the car or to the driver of any other car.

Unless things have changed in the last 6 months, the situation is that it is illegal to have a "TV or Video Display Terminal visible by the driver of the vehicle; or the driver of any other vehicle". This is the situation in NSW. The reason I know this is that I was researching GPS units in cars. It just depends in that case on the definition of a Video Display Terminal. However for DVD players in cars the situation is quite plain.

Then again you could also argue that a police radio has a video display unit and is therefore illegal to use whilst the vehicle is in motion.

Running

Later today I will go for another run. I will see how far I can go. I am hoping to make it to about 3KM, but I think it is more likely to to 2.5km. It really will depend on the temperature. I know that my fitness level is dramatically improving.

Music:

I now have a shoebox of casettes to throw out. And I have another 10 or so casettes to transfer to digital. I need to ask my father about digitizing the casette tapes of my father interviewing my great-grandfather. This I think would be interesting to listen to - I know the tapes exist but I have never heard them.

I found an old song I loved - Stay by Shakesphere's Sister. I haven't heard the song for ages. Cold Case last night played Duran Duran's Ordanary World. I love this song. Probably the best CD is Greatest which has this and so many other clasic songs. Strangely, Sanity.Com has the DVD for cheaper than the Audio CD.

Computer History - Build an Apple 1

One of my interests is the history of computing. The stories behind the technology. How the internet came into being. That sort of thing. I was reading SlashDot this morning and found a link to a Web Site offering a replica of the Apple I for sale. Rather tempting apart from the back that I have so much more junk here already. If it looked more exactly like an Apple 1 then I might pick one up as an antique artifact...

Music:

Mostly 80's stuff in the backgroud... Some of the 80's stuff is so dated. Some is just so timeless. Just with any musical era I guess. Because I am recording at the moment I am not playing any CD's or MP3's. I do have a normal radio, but the ones I have are elsewhere in the house.

I was cleaning up my desk today and I found some airline vouchers from September which did not get Frequent Flyer points on them. I should contact Qantas and see if they will still redeem them. I think it is only one Alitalia let that is missing, and a BA trans-atlantic which gets 25% normal points, and maybe an American Airlines trip in the USA. All in all not many points. Actually the status credits are more valuable, but I will still not get enough to get to the next level of frequent flyer by June when my year drops out.

Dell

My Dell DVD writer is so much nicer than before. They upgraded it to an 8x recorder when they replaced it. I guess this is cheaper than keeping older inventry. The recorder also does double sided discs which is cute... If only I had some.

CD's are bad. DVD's are good

Now that I have the DVD burner working, I now have the job of moving old CD's to DVD's. Right now I have probably 70 CD's to convert to DVD's. They are all on a stack - and they will be copied and disposed off. Not that I ever need to access this information - some of it is just library material... But just in case. I would rather store 10 DVD's containing 47 GBytes than 70 CD's. It is just so much easier to search for stuff on DVD's. When something bigger comes out I will be even happier.

Soon I will need to move VHS tapes to DVD too. I just dont have the hardware for that at the moment. One of these days I will set that up. I have been meaning to buy a video camera for a few years too... Maybe I will get both at the same time.

Right now I am burning DVD number five. Leaving a stack of 46 CD's to be copied to DVD. If this sounds a bit strange, remember that I work for myself, and these are my professional library. And the way to manage information is to store it in a way that is easy on the person trying to use it. At some stage I will implement a decent document management system and import all this data into it.

Blogging

CNN has an interesting Article on Blogging.

A PABX for your home

There is a Site talking about a home PABX using Asterisk.

A short trip...

I have just got back from a quick trip into the city; well, actually North Sydney, but I had to go in through the city. Such a beautiful day. I did manage to get lost, taking the wrong exit going over there getting off the Gore Hill Freeway. I managed to get from just near Royal North Shore Hospital to my clients offices without using a street directory. I was impressed. It helps that they are near the Channel 9 tower so all I needed to do was look up and I could see where I had to go, basically.

On my way home, I was going to visit a another client of mine but he was not available for me to finish his job. I believe that the issue he is having is that he is unable to plug in his new keyboard or mouse. The old keyboard and mouse was killed by his toddler and a pen.

Dell

When I was on my way home, Dell rang about coming to repair my laptop. I was stuck in the M5 East tunnel at the time. By the time I got from there to Ingleburn, grabbed some lunch and checked if there were any emails that I needed to deal with the technician had arrived.

He didn't even bother about powering down the laptop. He just shut down the DVD drive, put the new one in and tested it. And it worked. Whilst I am typing this Blog, I am recording a DVD of some WAV files. It is good to have a working DVD recorder again. It has been far too long.

When burning CD's and DVD's I have found that things work better if you kill Outlook before starting. You may not need to do this on a desktop, but on a laptop it does help.

Music

MIX 106.5 actually in the car for something different. Back when they were 2UW, I had a friend working there so I got a tour of the studio - a rather cool engineering thing to do. The office was rather bizzare - It was a split level spiral. Rather a strange place to visit - architecturally that is.

Music

Don McLain's American Pie came on random play. Time for something more upbeat. So I now have the Madona version playing. Much nicer. And much shorter.

So many times with Random Play I just hit NEXT since I am not in the mood to listen to a particular track. Sometimes I am prepared to just listen to what comes on Random Play. Other times I just press next track after track. Just depends on how distracted I become I guess with real work.

Tax Time

I knew Tax Time was too easy. I have a few documents that my accountant wants to see that I need to find. ARGH. I have found some of them. Others are harder to find.

Wireless Mesh Routing

There has been some talk for a little while on mesh networks. In fact this has been an interest of mine since my University days. More importantly I have written some interesting papers and articles on the subject too, and they have been well received. One even elicited a job offer in San Jose.

Anyway there is an article on LinuxDevices about a company commercializing some of the mesh technologies. Or at least what they call mesh technologies. What this company has done is built a repeater to minimise interference so that you can extend your wireless network without worying about network cabling, whilst maximizing bandwidth.

Programming Issue

I found the programming issue I was having. All I needed to do was to use .ShowDialog instead of .Show on a form. This may mean very little to most but it means something to me, and I am sure that everyone else can ignore this comment.

There is also an interesting FAQ on www.syncfusion.com

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Music

The latest bit of music on the player is Elton John's 'Tiny Dancer'. I didnt have much time for this until the movie 'Almost Famous'. This song seemed almost to be the theme from this movie. It may well have been the theme for all I know. Interesting movie.

Another interesting song, the one that caused me to actually look at Tiny Dancer was the Elton John song 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road'.

TV: CSI is on tonight, and so is Law and Order, and NCIS... No sleep tonight :-)

Work

I hate having to work so much. I would love to be out enjoying my weekend, going to the movies, watching some videos and the like. But not this weekend unfortunately. Tomorrow some time I need to race into North Sydney to drop some tracking units off to a client. All of the units have been modified over the weekend. I also have Dell coming to (hopefully) fix the DVD burner on this laptop. Right now I have about 80 GBytes to put onto DVD.

I am having a problem with VB.NET with this thing called WindowFormsParkingWindow. When I bring up a dialog window where I have created the dialog, the dialog seems to have died. When I close it I get an error message about WindowsFormsParkingWindow. What I dont like is that code almost identical to this works without problem. I have now worked out that there is some interaction between interactive and non-interactive execution.

Vaccine

There was just an article on the SMH www site noting that scientists in W.A. are working on a vaccine for Dust Mites.

Tax Time

Work

I needed to reprogram a small embedded programmer. For some reason my computer was not detecting the device. Check in Device Manager. It is missing... Hmm... Look at the back of the PC. OOps. It is not plugged in. Originally I just put the processor in to turn another device on and off. Not it does a lot more thanks to some software and hardware mods.

At the time of the original design, I thought about using a whole series of normal electrical parts since I thought that using a microprocessor was overkill. But now I know that it was exactly the right thing to do. It has made things so much better for me.

I am doing some work with a software product from a multi-national company. Every now and then when I do the wrong thing it crashes. I can reliably make it crash. I have actually been very disappointed with this supplier on the software side. I expected better. Particularly concidering how big this company is...

Tax Time

Time to do my tax, or more correctly to get everything together for my accountant to do. This should be fairly easy. I know where everything is, I hope!

Update: Yes, it was fairly painless. It took about 10 minutes to get everything together for my personal stuff. Business stuff took an extra 2 minutes, mostly emailing the accountant. Now, lets see how I go.

Music

Random Play - The Eurythmics 'Angel'. Such a sad song. Then Enrique turned up on Random play. Much happier music, mostly. So right now I have the album 'Escape' playing. So many cool songs.

Calendar Question for the Day

If you could relive one day in your life, which day would it be?

No rest for me today

Today I have so many things to do. First there is lunch. The meeting today went well, and I got home from it about 15 minutes ago. So first off, lunch; Then I need to do some software modifications for our tracking unit. I will not go into the details here, but the modifications are important, and will mean that I can eat this week.

Then I need to write some code for one client in W.A. which is running late as I have mentioned before. And then I have to write a report for the client I met on friday. Strangely I was speaking to a friend from church and he had heard of the project that the client wants me to work on.

Pacific Power

I spent more years working for Paicific Power than I would like to admit. They paid for me to go to uni, and mostly provided useful work for me. Sadly, they did not always value their people, and never gave me a pay rise that they were not required to.

Anyway working for them, I occasionally needed to take a trip to one of the sites. Commonly this was a day trip to one of the Power Stations within the state, and it would be a drive to get there. I did get one trip interstate. It was to a Power Station we were building in Queensland, in a place just this side of Nanango. That is about 20 minutes this side of Kingaroy. If you have heard of Nanango, Wow. It is small. The local pizza place closes at 8:30 pm, and the town is small.

I had to go up there to install a new server. Actually server is not the right word. It was more of a PC that we were using as a server, to save time accessing drawings up in the middle of nowhere. This was a project on a shoestring. The PC was shipped as checked luggage using my extra baggage allowance with Qantas Club so I did not need to pay excess luggage. It did horrible things to the computer network every night too, when I used 100% of the bandwidth for about seven hours. Later this improved to only 4 hours when they improved the link.

Anyway the photo below is of the partially complete power station that we were building. When I get my scanner back from Richard I will put some of my photos from the hunter valley on line.

Missing cases...

Here I am sitting at home on a saturday afternoon (almost evening) with no intentions on going out. This really is a sorry state of afairs. What is worse is that I am working. And I have been working (or thinking about working) most of the day. There really is something wrong with the world - or at least with my world. And I have basically got no emails. Not even SPAM. I really do need to rectify this. All emails would be gratefully accepted.

Before sitting down to write this, I was just finishing up the returns of the courier job that I have been talking about for some time. Right now I am about to re-assemble the units, and wouldn't you know it. I cannot find one of the cases. The worst part of it is that I am not sure that this extra case actually exists. I do not know.

Guess what. Just found it. the box was under my laptop case. I am glad that I have found it. I hate it when that happens. At least this proves that I am not going insane. Not today anyway.

Music

I don't really feel like random play, and nor do I feel like choosing anything either. Red Hot Chilli Pepers turned up on random play so I found 'The Zephyr Song' and I am playing that now. Who knows when that finishes. With the amount of music I have there is so much to choose from. If any readers want to have a look at the music collection you will need to ask for a login, and then visit here.

I have just found some music I want to listen to - Robbie Williams. He has some great music I have found. Following that, maybe The Pretenders. We will see.

Music:

I am not sure how many people know this but I love the music of Bette Midler. Right now I have "My one true friend" from the album "Bathhouse Betty" playing. This song is so poiniant. Once again, the lyrics are so powerful.

Movies

There are a couple of movies that I have been meaning to see... They are Beaches and Casablanca. I have a copy of Casablanca but I dont want to see it alone. And I dont have a copy of Beaches, and I have not seen it for years.

The Big Cleanup

I have a service call in on my Laptop. Dell should be here monday to fix my DVD burner so that I can put a whole lot of stuff onto optical media. I have something like 10 GBytes of WAV files to put onto DVD. And I have probably another 10 GBytes to generate so I can get rid of the magnetic media.

I found a stack of 30 CD's of doccumentation. They are being copied onto my windows box as we speak to that I can move them to DVD. Then I have probably another 50 CD's of stuff that I also want to get rid of. Old backups and the like. The problem is that DVD's are too small :-) Well, not really. But there are a lot of cases where an extra GByte on a DVD would be really useful.

Church Reports

I have done the church annual report apart from the chore fo actually getting it printed. I will do that tomorrow before church. The copier is fast so that should be no problem. I hope there are no problems with the minutes of the last meeting. I just looked quickly at them. The meeting before it was agreed to call a 'FINANCE' meeting. However, as I typed this I must have got the spelling incorrect and it became a 'Fiance meeting', meaning that only our family ministry worker was elligable to attend. OOps.

A Conference, and more

Today

Today I have to write some software for a client in WA. This has been dragging on, and I don't like that. Other things in my life have been distracting me in the last few months, but I need to get this done. So my aim is to get this at least partially finished today. There is some good money in the project so that should help.

I also have to program and test some other tracking units that I have recently modified.

Conference

At some stage I need to think about writing a paper for a coference. The conference is in the USA from 23-25 September, 2005 on Digital Communications, and wireless technologies. Rather an interesting small conference. I have published about five papers for this conference in the past, dating back to 1997.

This time it will be held in Embassy Suites Hotel - Orange County Airport North in
Santa Ana, California. For those that do not know where that is, it is right near John Wayne Airport, and only a few miles from DisneyLand. Unfortunately, Qantas does not seem to fly from Sydney to Santa Ana direct, and the conference organizers are working out how to get people from LAX. If all else fails, I will take the LA train system, followed by the Amtrak.

Last year I had there talks to give. We will have to see what happens this year. This time I certainly do not want to need to work on the plane writing my presentations. That only works so well thanks to the reduced space in the table in front, the need for sleep and the cramped conditions.

Music:

Another nice piece of music is the Evanescence song, "Hello". This is a rather stiring song. I actually find it very hard to understand the lyrics for this song without actually checking them in print, apart from the occasional line. And it was an occasional line that got me to check what the lyrics said.

PC's...

Microsurgery - a burnt finger - again

Different finger this time. It was on my left index finger, on the outside close to the hand. Right now the burn is weeping a bit - but I am sure it will quickly heal. It was not a bad burn. I was performing microsurgery on some GPS trackers. The trackers needed some more wires added inside to reset them if they failed. I didn't think I needed this circuit when I designed the units. I needed to add three more wires to an IC that is 1cm x 0.5cm. This is really fine work and I hate it. Still, it must be done.

PC's...

I really need to re-install all the software on this PC. There is SO much junk on it, and I need to clean things up. Part of the problem is that the last time I did a re-install it took about three days. Right now those are three days that I cannot afford.

At some stage soon I need to get a new HDD for the other PC. When I do that I might put the HDD from this PC in that PC, and then put the new one in this PC. Then I can move the software across as needed. And do it without too much effort.

I totally understand why companies use things such as Terminal Server and the like to reduce the time it takes to install software. It must cost businesses a heap of money. I even have a server here running a terminal server. This is great if I need to do something on my network when I am away from home. I can log into this machine over the internet and then do whatever I need to, as if I was at home. Like set up my home server to act as a private outgoing SMTP server so I dont need to worry about re-cofiguring email everywhere I go.

Music:

I just heard Dido's "Mary's in India", and I must say I love the lyrics. Dido has a great voice, and with these lyrics, the song is wonderful. I think my favourite song of hers is "This land is mine". This is a real love song. It builds up medieval imagery in my mind at least, paralelling the middle ages with falling in love. Have a listen and tell me what you think.

Todays Meeting

This mornings meeting was certainly interesting. I cannot speak about much of it as the conversations are commercial in confidence. But basically the project that the client wants me involved with would be 'cool'. This is the sort of project I like. The organisation I want to see sounds interesting too.

They have a nice location, on one of the wharves at Pyrmont. Beautiful location, apart from the fact that the car park is on the wharf too. You need to park your car so that all you can see in front of you is water. Sure, they have some bits of concrete to stop you driving off the edge, but I certainly would not trust that one bit. Very strange.

I did manage to leave my wallet in my car with the back window open when I parked it. Dont ask me why. I dont know. Concidering the carpark is secure with surveilance I did not worry about going back to grab it. It was certainly there when I went back.

I love Ingleburn

Driving into the city today I remembered how much I love living in Ingleburn. There are few places in Sydney that I would choose to live. Ingleburn is one of those places. I love it so much, with the wide open spaces, as well as suburbia. Having said that I don't think I will spend my life here... We will see what the future brings anyway.

I love being able to go to the post office and the people there do not even bother to ask for ID any more. They know me and I know them. When I post an article over seas I fill in the "For Australia Post Use Only" section for them to save them time.

That said, there are so many parts of Sydney which are so nice. The picture below is from the North Head Quarantine Station back in 2001 or 2002 at a Pacific Power event when I was working for them. This was about 7am. There are so many parts of sydney like this.

Save Toby (Or Darryl)

The expense of Engineering

Engineering aint always cheap. So far today I have destroyed over $100 in equipment thanks to having installed a resistor on the circuit board. This part costs about $11 for a roll of 5000. Purchased in the sort of quantity that any large equipment manufacturer would buy them and I am sure that the parts in question would probably be approaching 10 for a cent. So the mere presence of a part costing under a cent has cost me over $100.

Hmm. Something is wrong with this world I suspect if that is the case. ARGH.

Anyway I have just heard that my 10AM meeting is still on so I need to get going... ARGH. I wrote the parts below before this bit obviously.

Save Darryl

There is a Web Site called SaveToby.Com in which people are encouraged to donate money to save Toby the Rabbit from, um, meeting an, um, (un)savory end. The Web Site sounds like a joke in terms of accepting donations, apart from the merchandise. And although you can buy the merchandise, it really is a joke too.

A friend of mine threatened to start up his own version, of the form SaveMyPet.Com to which I replied that I was also thinking of starting one... DontSaveMyPet.Com. This would allow a bidding war, and increase the income available from the site. Quite Logical I think. To which he wants to register another new domain, DontSaveDarryl.Com. If such a domain ever exists, I would encourage you not to donate to it. Please. I Guess SaveDarryl.Com will be linked to this WWW site real soon now.

You *WILL* be required to donate to the SaveDarryl.Com site when it becomes live. It will be in the updated terms and conditions for accessing this web site.

Cute Photo

Here is another cute photo from my collection. It is from a Hollywood Parking log back in 2000. I seem to recognise the man with the shadow, but I can't remember the company name. Maybe a reader will be able to help me.

More Olympics Stuff

Follwoing the Sydney Olympics, all SOBO (Sydney Olympic Broadcasting Organisation) Staff were awarded a Silver commemerative medalion. I am not sure what it is actually made of, but it weighs a but. I would hope that it is nickel or something like that, similar to coins, but you never know. I do know that it looks sort of cute, and came with a personalized certificate.

There are times when I seem to get pulled in all directions for all sorts of reasons, and I dont really have control, nor do I have the time to devote to the activities that really need the time. I have too much on my plate, and because I have a small busines I find it hard to knock back work. How can I?

What I do a lot of the time is think about engineering problems, and possible solutions. Some people call this day dreaming. I call it work. For instance when I was driving home from lunch today I was designing a circuit in my head. This circuit had other requirements on it, and needed to be designed using existing parts if possible. And I basically came up with the design in my head, without pen or paper. I can assure you that I normally do write things down when I am designing. It was just that driving on the Hume Highway using a notepad was probably not a good idea.

Tomorrow I am supposed to have a meeting somewhere in the city at 10:00. The client has not got back to me confirming it, so I guess I may not be going in. I will see how it goes. If I do go in I have some other work to do in the city, just behind the George St Cinemas - I need to fix a computer where a toddler attacked the plugs for the computer with some type of pen, killing half the pins.

Tomorrow, if I can get some software working, I will probably need to do some micro-surgery. One of these days I will buy a flat panel screen and a small video camera for when I have to do this type of work. Until then I just need to rely on my eyes. I think I have posted a photo of one of the IC's that is on my circuit board. Well, tomorrow I might need to modify the board, adding wires to the IC.

Oh, someone asked what engineers actually do. When I was at Uni, one of the assignments in one subject was to design a microporocessor. Some of the easy stuff was already done for you, but you needed to design it, and then simulate it to make sure it worked. This is work that 20-30 years before would have earned a Nobel prize, and it then becomes an assignment at University. Things change.

Anyway I need to get to sleep. I am tired, and there is a bed with my name on it. Good Night to all, and to all a good night. Sweet Dreams...

Technical Issues

I have been fighting some technical issues for the last few days. A chance comment at lunch has probably shown me what is causing the issues. Solving them is a bit harder, but I have a handle on that now too. It is amazing how some coincidences allow the correct solution to come out.. Quickly.

Michael Jackson Trial

I have been reading the US based Legal WWW site for the IT industry called Groklaw.net for well over 12 months. It is alwats interesting, but at the moment seems to be concentrated on the SCO Vs. IBM court case. Anyway, one of the contributors to the site was a potential juror on the Michael Jackson court case. The potential juror has posted his comments here now that he has been dropped as a potential juror.

Another Run

I just completed another jog. This time I did about 2.45 KM in just over 16 minutes. This means I was averaging about 9 km/h. This is not a bad time for my fitness level. It is surprisingly humid outside, although there is distant thunder. As if by cue, just as I was typing the previous sentence there was a clap of thunder rolling in the distance. Right now I dont care. I need to get a drink and then have a shower to cool down. The purple in the photo is from today. The green is from yesterday. If I combine both I should be able to do at least 3km on the course. These plots are straight from the GPS, imported into OziExplorer.

A Day Out

I have just got out from a lunch with a friend at North Ryde. As always it was interesting. What was just as interesting was visiting the Macquarie Centre Shopping Centre. I was early for lunch so popped in to look around.

Dymocks had a pot luck stall outside Big-W... Some interesting books there. I picked up one quite cheap. I also saw a shop called "Net.Girl". Hmm. I had a look at the clothes through the window and I could not see anything with the clothes that would cause them to name the ship "Net.Girl". Maybe a reader can tell me why. I must say that I did no go into the show to look around, so I may have missed something there.

I also find that Macquarie Centre is unique in that the best way to see it is to go to the roof, and work your way down with gravity, as the entire design is based on a spiral. Very interesting

Lunch

I am going to North Ryde today for lunch. I am meeting one of my good friends for lunch... I have not actually seen him since, um, november I think. We have spoken since then of course, but mostly emailed. Whenever I get packages from him they always contain a little mars bar or something like that. It will be a good chance for us to catch up. It has been too long.

Unfortunately my father will be at work at the time, otherwise I would have dropped in on him at the same time. My father lives just up the street from where I am meeting my friend, and I have not actually seen my father since christmas day, although I have spoken to him on the phone a number of times since. I probably spent about an hour on the phone with him when I was in New Zealand at the end of January, since he was in Thailand the week before hand with his wife.

Music:

One of the options on the MP3 Jukebox is for it to favour un-played music when it does the random selections. This allows me to get some different music than if I choose to listen to an album or artist. In a few weeks when I have listened to it all I am hoping it will favour the tracks that I have not heard much of.

So right now I am listening to Neil Diamond with his song 'America'. I love a whole lot of his music. Bob Dylan has also appeared on Random Play recently. Then I find other strange music - such as Pieces of You by Jewel which has lyrics like "She's an ugly girl... Does she make you want to kill her... does make you want to kick in her face... Do you hate her because she is pieces of you?". If this was some heavy metal band I could understand, but this is Jewel we are talking about. Not what I was expecting.

And then there is the even stranger 'Tunak Tunka Tun Dj Akaash Remix' from the Hemishpheres Album that was released during the Sydney olympics. This sounds like DJ Sammy doing Turkish techno. If you think it is a strange description, you should hear it on CD.

Then there is the 46 minute CD1 from the Original cast recording of Phantom of the Opera which also got random played in the same collection. The reason it is 46 minutes is that for some reason when the CD was mastered, they did not break the album into tracks. Given the cost of mastering a CD at the time I am not surprised, but that does not make it right.

Some More Photos

I found this cute photo I took of a car back in 2003 in a museum. It is a Kingswood, and I thought it looked cute. I can't quite remember which museum it was - I have an idea, but I will not say in case I am wrong. If you cannot work it out, this is a Holden Kingswood.

Now, sometimes getting WiFi access in a hotel can be hard. The first photo is connecting to a city wide Wireless network which I paid about $20 for 200 mBytes for from memory. But from my hotel I could not get very good access, so I added a large antenna to my laptop card, and attached it to the window with some electrical tape.

Ironically, in that case I was in town to give three talks at a national convention, and one talk at a local club. Two of these talks were on WiFi, including WiFi antennas, and experimenting with them.

The 2nd photo is from a Hollywood hotel room, connecting to someones home WiFi network to use their internet access for free. This was fantastic since I was paying US$0.30/minute for internet access on dialup thanks to high dialup charges.

Even more exhausted...

I just did a count of the SIM cards on my desk. There are 14. Wellm there are 14 activated SIM cards out in the open. There are another six in a box on the floor, and one in my phone. And another two phones without SIM cards on my desk. Can you spell GSM :-)

In many ways I love GSM. With CDMA phones, being based on the AMPS system, you have to ring a carier if you want to change phones. And your phone number is locked to the phone too, and you must enter this manually into the phone (although some phones these days can be auto-configured). With GSM, everything is stored in a database back at the server. The SIM card just contains a serial number and an encryption key so that it is hard for people to listen in on your call over the air. Not impossible, but hard.

Testing equipment is easier with GSM since you just swap a SIM card. When the SIM card is set up correctly...

With all this on my desk, I think I need a holiday...

Run Away... And Mobile Data...

I have just been for a run. It is a bit warm and humid outside after a morning thunderstorm. The sky is now mostly blue, probably in the high 20's. I went a bit further today - going exactly 2.0 Km in 14min 04sec. This means I averaged about 8.5 km/h. That is not bad.

My fitness level certainly is improving. I should be up to a 3Km run within a week or two I would say. I will see how I go tomorrow - I will try for at least 2.5Km, and I will see about going 3Km. It just depends.

Mobile Data

My prediction for this year is that Mobile Data will take off. Basically internet anywhere. I intend to get a GPRS sim card from Vodafone soon, for their unlimited mobile broadband offer. GPRS has some latency, but apart from that the results are quite amazing.

It would be good to be able to sit in an airport lounge and not have to rely on WiFi or dialup. WiFi in airports tends to get expensive and dialup is slow and tedious. Anyway I will subscribe to the vodafone plan soon..

No Run yesterday....

No run yesterday. By the time I got home from an afternoon taking my business partner from the airport to Penrith, then to a friends business and back to the airport, I was exhausted.

12 Apostles Helicopter Rides

When he was up here yesterday, Jack once again asked when I was going to go to visit the 12 Apostles. He also owns a helicopter tour company called 12 Apostle Helicopters offering tours of the area. From what I have seen, the tour would be spectacular. I really want to get down there at some stage. I was hoping to get down there in mid-february, but I didn't get a chance.

Maybe I will get down there soon. We will see.

BTW, this is a photo of me in one of Jack's helicopters. It is from my phone camera so the quality is poor. But this is the closest I have been to actually riding in a helicopter.

Another Photo

When I was thinking about the helicopter ride I remembered I had a nice photo of Chicargo from the Air at night. I took about 5 different photos, and this is the only one that turned out. I was amazed that any of them did actually. The big black area is Lake Michigan.

Old Tapes - Fashion Parades

Younger people reading this blog may not remember cassette tapes. They were used to copy albums before recordable CD's. In fact my first CD writer cost me $1400 and blanks were about $14 each. And yes, I did have a business need for it. And it made it's money back.

Anyway I have audio tapes here dating back to school days. And where appropriate I have been digitizing these, so that they can be placed on DVD or CD. Right now I have done probably a bit under 10 hours of digitizing. Much of this stuff is archival. Like the backup recording of a time capsule that was placed at my highschool for the bicentenial (with some other stuff, one item of which is a practical joke).

Anyway I have found the audio tapes I made for the school fashion parades. These were not your normal fashion parades. You needed to actually be in clothes you made in class, and also you needed to do it choreagraphed to music. And yes, I was in the parade... With a couple of suites I made, one for my Year 10 formal, and one based on the 1920's, and some other clothes. Whilst I have some of this on video, I was amazed to find the audio tapes I put together for the show.

I really am surprised the teachers got away with some of it. It was great fun. When I was in year 10 I almost got to run the show... I designed the tickets, typed up the list of students who would not be in class, set up lighting, set up music, performed, stage managed, everything. It was great fun...

One day I will have to move the raw video to DVD too...

More Telstra SIM problems, And Missed Work

Some times I get really annoyed with Telstra. I have been working on GPRS tracking for a while. We got some SIM cards activated with GPRS recently. They were put onto a GPRS plan. And we were told that they were set up for GPRS.

And it did not work. And we got this checked. And it was correctly set up we were told. My business partner brought up the unit today for me to look at. And I looked. and what I was finding was that it was not connecting to the network. This was not good.

So we checked up again with Telstra. Not connected to GPRS. They lied to us. The account was listed as having GPRS but it was not set up. I am really unimpressed about this. It caused me so many problems it is not funny. And so much stress. Stress that I did not need.

We got the GPRS activated and things started working. I was impressed. This is how it should be. Not happy telstra. This was the last thing I needed over the last few days I can assure you.

Missed Work

I missed out on some work for thursday. I am answering my friends phones for him for his business the 2nd half of this week. Otherwise I was going to be going to the Gold Coast for the day... To do some 'work' for him up there. I think I would have arranged to have some time of on my own and come back a few days later... Pity.

Telstra Sim Fun

I have found that Telstra is not really set up to activate SIM cards over the phone, when you already have the SIM. They start wondering how you got the SIM, and why. They find it even more strange when you have the 'CODE' of the plan that you want to go onto.

I needed to activate a SIM on a $10/month plan, and I spent about 15 minutes on hold after speaking to the first person. This is understandable. Why would anyone have a pile of 20 SIM cards in their house?

I originally tried to activate the service through Telstra CountryWide by email. This would have been fine if I had a business phone account I wanted to add the SIM to. But since I am adding it to a residential account then things are different.

Of course they cannot give me the PIN number right this minute. ARGH. I have to ring back for that

Unexpected Trip to the Airport

I need to make an unexpected trip to the airport today. My business partner has a meeting in Penrith, and and decided to fly up instead of drive... So instead of driving himself from Albury, he is flying in. So I need to pick him up, take him to the meeting and then take him back to the airport. Joy :-)

I guess I will not get a chance to write much here today. For some reason I dont really like sending long SMS messages to here from my mobile although it can be done. Actually I can post here anywhere I can send an email.

Oscars

I admit it... I only saw a little of the delayed replay of the oscars. Basically from 10:30PM. There were frankly better things on TV than watching awards shows talking about movied I had not even heard of.

The Oscar for best song for a motion picture was interesting. Firstly, the song was won by a spanish song, or at least a song with a spanish version. Secondly, there was a nomination for "Learn to be lonely" from Phantom of the Opera. Nice as this song is, I am glad it did not win. It has charm, but does not have even the power of "Music of the Night" or most of the other songs in the movie. Then again, it was the only one especially written for the movie, so they were slightly restricted in what they could do I suspect.

I suspect that the song was sung during the closing credits of the movie. It sounds like that is where it would have been used. It has been just over a couple of months since I saw the movie, and the movie was fairly long.

The Obituary Roll in the Oscars was interesting, seeing which important showbiz people died during the week. Jerry Orbach from Law and Order. Marlon Brando too. Jerry Goldsmith, who composed music for so many SciFi movies. And Ronald Reagan.

Telstra Bill

I got a monthly Telstra bill yesterday. It was far more sedate, at only 18 pages. The value of the bill was significantly reduced too.