According to News.Com.AU, QANTAS is being taken to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission over their decision to use the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for crew. They claim that downtown LA is not safe. What startled me was the number of rooms they have booked there on average - 250. That is a lot. But when you work out that there are maybe 10 qantas flights a day through LA the numbers certainly add up. So would the nightly cost even at bulk rates.

News.COM.AU is also reporting that Split Enz is getting back together for a tour. Their last tour as a group was called 'Enz with a Bang!'. Cute name.

I was speaking to the wife of a friend earlier this evening, whilst she sent her husband off to do some jobs. She was commiserating about eBay... She has bought and sold a lot on eBay, and has had no problems until her latest sale. She sold an item at auction, and it sold but the person did not pay. So she re-listed it, and once again the person has not paid. Twice in a row for the same item is a real pain. But it is one of the risks with a site like eBay.

For a computing story, News.COM has a short history of Hard Disks. The part I love is when in 1982 the weigh per GByte of storage went down from 121 KG/GByte to 42 KG/GByte.

Right now I feel like a back massage... For some reason my upper back is slightly sore... I guess I have been sitting down too much today. I think I need a new work chair too... The one I have is getting a bit old - and it is not as comfortable as it used to be. I might whip down to Office Works tomorrow at some stage.

Tomorrow morning I have a chuch meeting - basically to introduce the new treasurer to the church accounts. Not that I know much about them, but I have some idea. The previous treasurer documented so much, and we need to hand all that over to the new treasurer. Not sure how long that meeting will take. I am hoping that it will be quick, but you never can tell. [On the subject of treasurer stuff, I was speaking to a business partner in Trakworks, and he was telling me that his first job was working in a bank, and he started there the same week as decimal currency was introduced. He assures me it was an interesting week to start work].

I have been having a few issues with doing some programming in VB.NET... Not in my TeamTrack application, but in another program I am working on. The issue is that I am trying to add strings to a collection, and it is not working. VB.NET is telling me that the variable is not yet initialized, but I cannot work out what is going on. Whenever I look it is set... When I get a solution I will write it up here.

I think today has been fairly successful. I have managed to get most of the things done that I wanted to get done. Sure, I would have liked to do a bit more driving to test trackers, but apart from that things went fairly well... And not too many interruptions from people either. A good day I think.

I think I have just made a great mistake. I picked myself up a copy of a DVD of Jean Michele Jarre with one of his concerts in Moscow. Jarre is a long time composer of electronic music, and one of my ambitions is to go to one of his concerts. The concerts are realy amazing, with over a million people commonly attending his outdoor events. If you think of someone taking the New Years Eve fireworks with their synchronised music, put them onto most of the buildings in down town sydney, project images onto all the buildings too, and have this all done live for two hours... Well, that would be close to what he is like.

He is in the Guiness Book Of Records for the biggest concert ever at about 1.8 Million people (estimated) for the 150th anniversary of Houston.

Anyway, the DVD is a distraction to me at the moment - mostly from writing here, but also doing other stuff. Thankfully the work day is mostly done so it is not too much of a distraction from anything but it could be worse. Half the reviews rave how good the DVD is, and the other half make all sorts of complaints about the DVD. I think I am on the side that raves how good it is...

When I first bought this laptop I found a piece of 1" high aluminium extrusion and used this with a piece of neoprene to raise up the rear of the laptop so that it would be better for typing ergonomically. With rearrangements of my desk this fell by the wayside. I have now dusted it off, and I am trying again to use it. Generally it is actually an improvement I think, but we will just need to wait until I have been using it a few days to see if things are actually better.

From my point of view there are two problems with eBay. Firstly is that there are too many cool things to buy on eBay, which is part of the charm. The other thing is that sometimes you are not getting to the right people - and the tools for letting people know they might be interested in something obscure are not all that good. Taking a break from other work I found a few tracking units I used in Hawaii for Ironman back in 2002. These are slightly superscened, and I have no use for so many, and want to sell them off. But realistically they would not sell well on eBay. So I need to sell them through other means.

Having said that some things sell that I do not expect to sell. The price of the Calligraphy set I am selling is now over $30. I think I only spent $25 on it a few years back so I am going to make a profit. But I think this is more the exception rather than the rule.

I have released the new version of TeamTrack with most of the DLL's now included in the main software again, but as classes. It seems to be running really well. It seems to actually have improved the performance of the software too which is good. I will see how it goes under load.

Internet Explorer 7 still has some issues... If you (accidently) close the Internet Explorer window, all your tabs close. And to make this worse, there is no facility to save the state of the standard tabs. Firefox does have the ability to save the tabs which is a fantastic feature, meaning that I can open my normal windows automatically if I like. Well, I could if I used Firefox.

Earlier I took the mailing tube to the post office... They were rather surprised at the length, but they were fine about it when I told them it was just under the maximum length - they did however have some issues actually balencing the tube on the scales for weighing it. It cost a bit more to send than i expected but it was still under 1c per KM that it needed to travel. Actually, it was under 0.5c, which probably says more about the sheer size of Australia than anything else.

The programming and testing I have been doing today has gone really well. The testing has all worked, and the programming has been easier than I anticipated. Not that I am complaining - not in the least.

Oh, and I saw a link to This product which is a USB memory stick with a secure copy of MSN Messenger on it with a secure diary. And they are charging a premium for this. Not a bad idea... Basically it is a portable digital diary that can plug into any PC... Sweet.

I am just waiting for some reports to finish running so that I can do some more programming... I could just disable the daily emailed reports, or have the reports run on another machine, but I have not got that far yet. Actually, I think I have. The reporting engine has only changed in minor ways in the last few weeks - so I guess it is time to have it running on my server sitting there churning out reports as needed. I really do need to get the WebServices written allowing people to submit reports - but that will come soon.

Something which I already knew wass that the M7 traffic is lower than when it opened. The road averages about 80,000 journeys a day, compared to about 140,000 when it was toll free. Not that I care. I pay the toll without too many issues... It saves me so much time and it is far more relaxing than driving in the traffic.

I saw an interesting project... An accelerometer using bluetooth. An accelerometer measures how fast objects speed up and slow down. It is something that people are always asking me to add to my GPS tracker, and which I will get to adding one of these days. Until then this is a cute project.

One of my clients is moving back into his house today... I did the communications wiring in it after it was damaged by fire. I am not expecting to hear from him today, but you never can tell... I am guessing there is a 5% chance that I will need to make a short trip over there today. Hope not... I have other things to be doing today - like some more modifications to my TeamTrack software. But what will come will come.

I have a couple of eBay auctions finishing today. One of the items is up to about $50, and the other does not yet have any bids. That second item has a few people watching it, although I am not sure how serious they are. This is development hardware I purchased for a project, and I have some excess hardware. If it does sell I might get rid of a second unit - but I need to wait until the first unit sells. I did have one query asking if the device came with the developers kit so obviously he had done his research...

Finally, the SMH is reporting on the top 20 DVD's of 2005. Not a bad list although I have only seen about half the movies. I certainly do not have all the DVD's although some are on my list... StarWars III is right up there... And I have not even seen the movie. So many movies. So little time...

Just after the last entry the PC got worse... Internet Explorer crashed as well as Outlook. Once these applications die you know that the computer needs to be restarted - it is just better that way. I did a small amount of research and I have found that Upgradable.Com.Au is probably the cheapest for upgrades at $259. The interesting thing is that I can upgrade one chip at a time, so I can buy a 1 GByte chip giving 1.5 GBytes.

I just saw a report on news.com.au about a Defense College building in Canberra partially collapsing without serious injury. This is important since the son of one of my clients started down there on the weekend.

Right now I have some code to document... We are having some issues and believe it is the with another supplier of software... And I need to tell this supplier how our software is working so that we can debug the issue.

Occasionally windows fails in some strange and unusual ways. For instance, at the moment I have the compiler for the CPU on the tracker open. Of course this program has its own icon. However at the moment the windows taskbar right now has the WORD icon associated with the program. Basically I think the PC needs more ram. It has 1 GByte but I do not think that is enough. I will have to look at the manual and see if I can upgrade the memory. I just checked and found that I can install two 1 GByte modules in this computer, so I can actually have up to 2 GByte. eBay has them for about $200, which I am not sure is a good deal. I have no idea at all. So that would be $400 or so to upgrade the PC. I will look around and see what is available.

I checked the local pawn store for an XBox. They had one for only $200. Yeah, sure. I might make an offer for the machine, but I suspect I will be looking elsewhere. I have seen a cool mod chip available here. Easy to install too.

There was a comment in a newspaper that stock market prices are most commonly starting with the number 1. There is logic to this since the prices are commonly percentage increases or decreases, meaning it is faster for numbers to move from starting with 2 or 3 etc than one. A doubling of 1 moves makes it 2. But a doubling of 8 makes a lot more than 9. A graphical description of this is available here.

One of my clients has been suggesting tons of new features for my TeamTrack software - and has even gone as far to purchase a copy of Crystal Reports so he can edit his own reports - and he is totally loving it. Anyway he found an issue with my reporting functions - since my software was saying that Normanhurst to Newcastle was only 120KM where it should have been about 150KM. I found the bug... It was reporting the distance as the crow flies, and not how you drive it. Quick hack and I got the distance correct. Sometimes. There was a minor error sometimes. If the program thought that one of the positions was 0,0 it would add about 15,000 km to the distance. OOps. It was a simple fix to correct that error.

I have also fixed up the size of the install program. It used to be 11 MBytes, and every time there was a new version of the program people will downloaded the large file. Most of this was libraries that was needed by the program. I have now split things with a second install program that installs 8.5 MBytes of library files. And they only need to do this once. WHat an improvement!

With Valentines Day coming up, the NY Daily News is reporting that a popular burger joint in New York is offering Valentines Day meals. You need to recognise that this is a store similar to McDonalds. So for Valentines Day, those who pre-book get met at the door by a waiter in a suit, and shown to a candle lit table with tablecloth and all the trimmings. It is aimed at those people who had their first date at the place, or went their after their prom etc. Nice idea.

I am actually getting things done today... Emails answered and software written.

I just had my first phone call of the day... 12:30PM... That is what I call a quiet day. Not that I am complaining - it is good to have quieter days occasionally. It actually allows me to get some work done!

A friend of mine has sent me a link to a report by Google that looks at what tags and other paramaters are used in web pages. In the past, most people have analysed maybe a few thousand pages. In this case Google analysed over a billion web pages. This is not a bad effort on their behalf. To be viewed properly you need a web browser with SVG support...

I think I have just created two of the worlds most bizzare mailing tubes. I am not sure that Australia post is going to like them, but they do comply with requirements. I am selling some antennas on eBay, and they just fit in with the maximum 1.05m length of a parcel. The only thing is that Australia Post DO NOT sell mailing tubes this long. So I needed to buy two and put them together and then tape them up. This required some 'engineering'. One of the eBay auctions is awaiting payment, and the other is still going. And then I have another two of these antennas available.



I am being sneaky here... I am waiting until one is sold before selling the next one in order to get the best price. I suspect that this is really common on eBay.

The test of my software when I was out looked good. It needs more testing, but at the moment things are looking good. All the trackers seem to be reporting correctly... I have a few more tests to do, and some longer journeys, but I think that will need to wait for a day or two.

One of the unintended consequences of tidying my desk is that I now have a couple of speakers evenly on both sides of my laptop so I am now getting the full stereo effect in music. It really is surprising how much better music sounds in stereo - although wearing headphones is even better.

I have been working on a bug with some software for a while... It is with date parsing. The system can send me data in two different formats. And VB.NET has an issue... I am importing data and it thinks it is in the local timezone, but the data is in UTC, or universal time. This is creating a few hassles for me. The problem is that I have solved this before and I cannot remember how I did it. I do know it was a pain to solve.

After some playing I found the following line...
TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.GetUtcOffset(Now).TotalMinutes
What this does on the .Net world is returns the number of seconds between UTC time and local time. So if I import data with the wrong timezone I can offset things. So simple... Provided I can work out if to add or subtract from the time...

P.S. Edit 30 minutes later... An issue/Bug..

Firstly I had an issue with the following line
time = Date.ParseExact(mArray(Fields.Time), "dd/MM/yyyy H:mm:ss tt", Nothing)
The tt understands AM or PM. Unfortunately it then ignores AM or PM. Probably something to do with the H in the hour field. But the following code fixed things...
If InStr(mArray(Fields.Time), "PM") > 0 Then
time = time.AddHours(12)
End If

Why isnt programming easy? ARGH!

I have to love some of my clients... One of them was telling me how to use my software in a more productive manner last night, and asked if he wanted to send me the instructions WITH SCREEN SHOTS! Like, WOW. And he did a good job. Now I just need to pull that into the manual. This type of thing makes my job so much easier. I wish more clients would do this for me... Then I would not need to work :-)

The Week Magazine has an article describing the schools of thought on the time front between the Atomic Time and Astronomic Time. Basically in Astronomic Time the time should be tied to the rotation of earth, since earth speeds and slows. This article is a consise description about the advantages and disadvantages of both schemes.

The Globe And Mail has a story of the RIM versus NTP court case over patents. RIM sell the Blackberry mobile device and have been sued for patent infringement. This has turned into a billion dollar problem for RIM who believe that there are no patents for the technology they are using. The story is a rather interesting read.

Back to work for me I guess... Lots of emails to send, and other work to do... The To DO list is certainly getting a strong workout.

I did not quite get as much work done today as I had hoped. There are always distractions. But things did not go too badly. I just need to hope testing goes well tomorrow when I do some field trials. I am having to delay delivery of some hardware which is a pain, but since I am adding some new features my client really is not all that concerned. I get more time, and he gets more features.

I have been watching the pre-release of some episodes of 'Commander in Chief', and I must say that I like what I have seen immensely. This is The West Wing, but with more emphasis on The President rather than the staff; and is also looking at the changes that happen to The President's family as a result of moving into the White House.

Personally I find the concept intrigueing. The idea of a female president, and the issues that this creates for the whole concept - how they have to have a First Gentleman rather than the First Lady, and all that that brings with it. I will certainly be watching this show when it appears on TV this coming month... Much recommended. Anyway I am getting tired... I probably should not have stayed up watching the extra episode...

I hust just completed an Online Form with westnet to increase my monthly download limit. With the type of work I have been doing recently I need the extra bandwidth - and I realised it was probably going to be cheaper this way since I decide to accept charges for excess usage rather than having the internet connection slowed down. And still, even with a slightly increased monthly premium, it is cheaper than my old ISP and I get significantly more traffic.

One of the things I have been selling on eBay is some Orbcomm satellite antennas that are just over 1m long. I used them for a consulting project that went nowhere, and now I just have some of them lying there. So they are being sold off on eBay, at somewhat of a loss. Still, they are better being written off bringing in some money, and I really do not need antennas imported from Italy if I need to do a similar project. What I forgot to work out was Australia Posts requirements for sending these. they will not send items more than 105cm long - and in their packets they are 120cm. So they will not be shipped with their original containers... But in a couple of mailing tubes joined together to exactly the right length. And with some luck I will actually meet the postage I stated in the eBay advert.

I have been working on some code on trackers today. Adding a couple of new features, such as sending a position report as soon as someone goes over a certain speed, and averaging the speed over five seconds. But to test all this I needed to get a GPS lock. Normally I put a GPS antenna out the window, and generally have a few outside for this purpose. I plugged one in, and it would not work even after 30 minutes. Mysterfied I traced the cable. I had not plugged in the GPS antenna at all... Just a piece of wire that went nowhere. OOps. Plugging in a real antenna fixed things...

I think I have fixed another bug. Tracking units were mysteriously also sometimes not downloading their entire history for some time if they had been out of range. I have traced this down to a function that pings the server and makes sure it is still connected. Other layers are supposed to pick up if the link is down but they dont always work. So I had this other code which pinged the server. And what was happening was that if another message got sent to the server before the ping reply then the unit would see a problem and soon disconnect and reconnect starting again. Simple fix, but it took a while to diagnose.

It is surprisingly warm outside... I needed to do some work at the church manse where our new minister had moved in, and needed to climb under the house to patch in some cables. After getting past all the cobwebs (YUK) I was able to quickly get all the phone sockets in the house correctly connected up and the diversion on the church line cancelled. I will need to go back there in the next week to install an ADSL modem and central splitter when they get ADSL on. Definitely time for a shower.

My sales on eBay are going well. I am getting rid of things, and they are actually getting bids which is more surprising. I keep circling the house asking myself if I really need something. And sometimes the answer is NO! Like why do I need a calligraphy set? My writing is not that good. I have no idea why I bought it - maybe as a christmas present or something a few years back. Anyway I am getting rid of it...

It is now time for lunch and then working through some emails and on some trackers...

Unfortunately I have a whole lot of work to do today. Yesterday was mildly successful, essentially getting a consulting job out the door. All that needs to happen is that I need to send the hardware to my client and then my invoice off. And I have a whole lot more to get out the door today with some luck, with invoice, depending on how things go.

The SMH is reporting that Parking Prices at Sydney Airport are amongst the most expensive in the world. They also have a story on how there is a roller coaster very slowly being built at Katoomba... TG Daily have also worked out that plugging USB devices into an Intel Duo laptop will significantly worsen the battery life.

The Applied Materials Web site has a video on how Flat Panels are made. A very interesting video.

The X-Box 360 was due to be released in Australia on 3/March. Unfortunately, Microsoft have just announced that the launch will be delayed until March 23 due to lack of stock. This will also mean that the number of cheap X-Boxes will not be on eBay for a little while yet...

I have mentioned SuitSat before in these pages before... It is a satellite built into an old russian space suit from the International Space Station, and was designed by a friend of mine, Steve Bible, N7HPR. Steve and I serve on the board of TAPR together. I got news today that SuitSat is to be launched on 3/February/2006. The batteries are probably only going to last about four days though, and it is likely to re-enter the atmosphere in about six weeks.

The satellite will be transmitting a beacon every minute - and it should be able to be decoded on a relatively inexpensive radio... I will see if I can manage to contact it...

This afternoon I have been working on a real cool consulting project... Something that pulls together skills in everything from wireless design to textile science. Unfortunately I am unable to post any photos at the moment of the hardware, but I hope to be able to do that soon. Right now I am taking a break from that project whilst some glue dries. Then I need to do some more wiring and test the device. This project has taken a bit longer than anticipated, but that really is not a concern since I quoted in US Dollars and therefore there is no GST.

And I had budgeted in some allowance for the issues I had anyway. With some luck I will get to build another five of these devices shortly, which will provide some more consulting income. And they have provided a 50% deposit. It really is a cool project.

Still I have more work to do that I intended to get done today. I need to get a quote done for the Defense Department amongst others. Given what I have heard about in the past with pricing I am reasonably confident that I will be able to win that particular job.

I have also been doing some programming on my trackers adding a couple of new features, as well as working on a minor bug. I have a few trackers to get out the door this week too, so I will need to get some more nail polish to hold in the screws. I have been told that pink would be the best colour to use this time... I am partial to the dark cherry myself, but I am happy to listen to other people's opinions. :-)

Anyway I had better get some more of the work done if I am to get to bed before midnight...

So let me see... Some running around this morning. The post office was fun this morning... I needed to post off four parcels and pick up one... Three of the parcels were eBay items and one was normal things that I sell. The people at the post office now not only know me by name, but also know the PO Box number off by heart... And would you believe they even let me fill in the 'Office Use Only' part of the customs declaration. I am not sure if you can get accounts at the Post Office, but if this continues I will need to get one I think.

Following that I went to get some other things for some projects - dropping in THE WAREHOUSE on the way. I have been looking for some more furniture for my office, and picked up a couple of 'stackable cubes with shelves for $17 each. Now I have seen them I can see myself getting at least another couple. This however has lead to a rearrangement of my desk. At one stage I had my iPod playing but had no idea where it was on my desk. It was there somewhere. I found it, and now have it in its place. But the rest of the desk is in chaos, but getting cleaner. Also, getting a couple of six way powerboards helped too...

When I was out I heard a Natalie Merchant song that I first discovered probably a week or so back. The song is 'Beloved Wife', and I am guessing it was not written by her. Anyway I guess you would call it a lament... It is telling of a man who has lost his wife of 50 years, wondering how he will cope; but also telling of the love they shared. I purchased this CD in the USA in 2004, and I have been slowly discovering it ever since.

you were the love
for certain of my life
for 50 years simply my beloved wife
with another love I'll never lye again
it's you I can't deny
it's you I can't defy
a depth so deep
into my grief
without my beloved soul
I renounce my life
as my right
now alone without my beloved wife
my beloved wife

It is amazing how some sleep just makes you feel so much better. I was really exhausted last night when I got home, and I really should have just fallen into bed and turned off the light... Instead the laptop got powered up and I found a friend wanted to talk about some bad news he had got. I could hardly say I was too tired, so I kept talking for a while...

Yesterday the plane got most of the top skin on at the rear finally. This is a job that we had all been dreading - there were images of me needing to crawl to the end of the fuselage tunnel holding a lump of metal inches above my head whilst the rivet on the other side was hit with a rivet hammer in a most sadistic manner. Thankfully we found another way. We turned the plane 75% of the way upside down, and I kneeled down and got my body into the back of the fuselage, with some foam between me and any of the plane providing some support.

This was MUCH eaiser to manage... MUCH! There were only a few times where I was thinking that I could do serious damage to myself if I dropped the bucking bar onto myself. The plane would have been protected by the foam... It was my head that was my main concern. I am told I looked rather awkward... I am not surprised... I felt it. I will try to get a copy of the photo to post here...

At times I had my head on the side of the fuselage which really amplified the noise... I am sure that the whole thing was acting as a huge speaker cone. Actually at one stage a truck drove by outside and the whole shell vibrated... I heard (or felt it) inside the fuse, but richard did not seem to hear it on the outside...

Today I have a few slightly sore muscles, but apart from that, I am happy that the job is basically done.

Finally home... And frankly I am slightly exhausted. Well, more than slightly. I am very exhausted. I have spent a long two days working on the plane, and I am now frankly happy to be in my own bed. I want to update this... I guess I will have to wait until I have had some sleep.

Tomorrow I need to spend some time and money at the post office sending off eBay stuff mostly.... Getting rid of junk that I have that other people want.

I am torn between getting an X-Box and getting something else to view files over the net. I like the idea of the X-Box, but there is one feature that it does not have. It does not have a video in feature. There are many PVR's or Personal Video Recorders available which can record and play back TV shows from a HDD, but they have one flaw. Most of them are locked to a HDD, and they do not have Ethernet. Then the other units that do have record, playback and Ethernet are not available here in Oz. All in all it is a real pain. Indications are I think that I need to wait at the moment.

The SMH has a photo of the box that was found by the russians belonging to the british. This box was used to hide secret documents as the UK spied on Russia. Interesting read.

I was doing some programming this morning in VB.NET, and needed to use the random number generator. This was fine, except for one point. I was testing my code, and it would never complete. The code needed to have a number returned, for instance, between 1 and 100. These were labeled by Microsoft as the Maximum and Minimum numbers. However, this would return numbers between 1 and 99, and my code would not work. Hmm. What is going on. It seems that the random number generator generates a number 'LESS THAN THE MAXIMUM'. In the case of an integer that is the number one less. ARGH. Why? How many other people have fallen into that trap? How many other times have I fallen into that trap and now known?

I ended up not going for a run... I worked out it was probably not a great idea if I wanted to actually get real work done today on the plane - in essence I was concerned that the running would tire me out - and I think that was a valid concern. So no great run today. Maybe tomorrow...

Last night I was watching 'Top Gear' from the BBC, and they were wanting to get people to vote on the best 'driving song' ever. That night they were featuring Bat Out Of Hell, performed by Meat Loaf. I quickly found the lyrics with google, and was amazed at how long they were. I was also amazed at how strange the lyrics look when written on paper. Not that you can understand them when being sung, but they look even worse on paper. Just my opinion. Not a bad song though.

When I started up my PC today, I had an outlook alert come up, advising me of an event. What is important about that? Well I set it about two years ago, and I have rebuilt the HDD on this PC since then, and outlook still remembers it. So, what would I schedule two years ago? Well, there is an internet domain about to expire and I was interested in registering it myself. Simple as that.

The SMH is reporting that Air Canada is about to introduce flights between Sydney and LA. This is likely to upset Singapore Airlines since they have been arguing that they should be allowed to operate on that route to provide competition and additional services. The report states that this will happen from 'next year' although I suspect they might mean this year.

I am considering going for a run this morning... I have not been all week, and the weather does not seem too bad... If I get motivated I might actually do three or four KM. We will see how it goes.

I have come to the conclusion that anything can be obtained on eBay. For instance I am a board member of TAPR, which is a wireless R&D organisation based in the USA. Anyway TAPR is now about 25 years old. One of the projects they released about 20 years back is being sold on eBay with a current bid of US$2. I am not sure if this will go up very much - I suspect that it will stay about that price. The person who is the top bidder is one of the other board members, and I think he has only bid so that he can have a complete collection of TAPR products. In this day and age there is no reason for a radio interface for a 20 year old computer.

Low End Mac has a story on the history of Pixar. I have a friend in the USA how was deeply involved in the very early days with working on some of the hardware used by the company. I did not know about much of the history of the organisation despite closely following the company over the years. Also, The Register is reporting that they have found a Flying Car in Western Australia. Well, that is what it looks like. It is probably a sunshade actually... But it is impossible to prove.

I mentioned earlier that I had concerns about a winner of an auction on eBay. Well, I finally heard from the winner, and he had an excuse - and I was pretty dumb for not working it out. Turns out he was in Victoria fighting fires, so it is understandable he was not able to contact me. But now I have been paid so I am happy. I will probably put the proceeds for this to buy an XBox for viewing digitized video files.

I have just been to Parramatta to see the Australia Day fireworks there. This was really good - I got to be really close to the actual fireworks and there was not much of a delay between the explosion of the fireworks and the sound reaching me. I was amazed at the echos - they were really distinct - and it would be interesting to do an acoustic model of the area based on the echo.

Tomorrow we are hoping to get the top skin on the plane. I think there is a good chance of this. But you never can tell. I may actually need to do work too, but I can generally put most of that off until a bit later...

The XBox has now been modded. This was actually fairly simple, with a board needed to be added to the unit. This contained some significant technology on it. I was amazed at how easy the mod was to add... I am a reasonable surface mount solderer, but I am sure that people who have never soldered surface mount before would not have too many issues installing the chip. The thing that came with this mod chip was a PCB that did most of the wiring on the underside of the board without needing actual wires. A quick solder link between the side of the wire board and the XBox PCB was all that was needed. I the chip worked first go. I would like to think that it was my soldering that made it work, but I am not convinced... I think it was just a good product.

Booting a CD-ROM with Linux produced some challenges... The CD-ROM would not boot, so we found a link to a site that included details on how to improve the reliability of the internal DVD drive, and we followed these instructions... And only then did we realise that the CD-ROM and the HDD were both set as a slave when we put them back into the machine due to other tinkering. Once corrected, the CD-ROM booted without problems. We cannot say if our mod helped, but regardless, CD-Roms now do work in the device. All in all some cool hacking!

Happy Australia Day!

News.COM.AU have released a list of fair dinkum holiday destinations here in Oz. Looking through the list there are some amazing places to visit. I really will have to check some of them out... It would be good to climb Mt Kosciuszko, or at least see it... Definitely a summer time activity for that one I suspect... I just need to find the time.

The Sydney Morning Herald have announced their Australia Day Dishonours List for 2006. The list is a hilarious list of who in Australia should be publically ridiculed for things that they have done. INXS was nominated for a Canadian Lead Singer. Rebecca Hewitt was nominated for diservices to poetry for her wedding. And Naomi Watts for saying she is more Brittish than Austalian. A good read.

Anyway I had better get going... The plan for this weekend is to have the top of the fuselage riveted on. This might be a tad ambitions, but we will see how that goes. Something to aim for at least.

Tomorrow apart from working on the plane I have another task to work on... I have to do an XBoxEctomy... I think that is what we are doing. We need to replace the HDD and then add a mod chip to the device. I have never opened up an XBox before so it will be interesting to see the internals. And since all the parts are surface mount I will be needing to use all my surface mount tools to do the work.

Make Magazine has a link to a site that contains instructions on how to convert chocolate into cafinated chocolate. The only way to improve things would be to somehow combine cocoa cola to this... Surely Cafinated Chocolate must be at least one of the five major food groups... And it is probably more than one :-) [One of these days I will actuallt get around to writing down the 10 or so five major food groups.]

The Register is reporting tha Pixar has been sold to Disney for about US$7b. That is a LOT of money. I was quite shocked at how much it was worth. After all, it is a newer annimation studio... And I thought it was one of the smaller ones too...

I managed to get the password to the Advanced Telematics Options menu of the Benefon phone. When I was told about this password, I was also informed that I am not 'permitted to develop a commercial application without a developers license'. Legally and morally this is wrong. The developers license is worth about A$60,000. Since I have developed the software without the need for such a license I cannot see the need to spend so much money. After all I have not used any confidential information to develop the software, and I am not using any tools they have provided.

Now the software is written I just need to put some screenshots on my WWW site... The final piece of marketing. Oh, and if you search in Google for "site:AU benefon", my site is number one. A great place to be!

The more I look at it, the more I love the little ZipIt Instant Messaging appliance. I know a few people who are going to kill for it. In fact, I suspect that if I show it to them I will not get it back, at least without the claw marks on the screen as I suspect I will have to pry it from their hands. The one real issue I have is the keyboard. A few times I have mis-typed things... There does not seem to be the ability to go back characters except with the backspace key deleting the text as you go. Still, it is a product I call insanely great. I really do just love the size!

I have found some hack sites here, here and here. Great descriptions I know... But these sites contain lots of useful information on the device.

The thing I love about driving on the M7 is that it is relatively serene and quiet. The road seems to generate little road noise. I just put the music on, and drive... you do need to be careful though not to speed.

More importantly, my ZIPIT arrived from the states a few minutes ago. This thing is so cute. Imagine a laptop a Teddy Bear would use... That is what I have here... You can see their site here, but they will not sell to the USA. I dont know why. The device runs linux too... I am going to install SSH on it... It really is a nice toy somewhere between a mobile phone and a PDA or laptop.

I am still working out how to drive this thing... I think it has an MP3 player built in too... It certainly has a WiFi card inside. What I did need to do was enter the MAC address into my DHCP server to get it working... And then it just worked. Enter my MSN details (darryl@radio-active.net.au) and things just worked. What more can I say!

1PM and not only am I home, but I have essentially finished the job I was working on as well as had lunch. There are a few things that still need to be done, but they are fairly minor things. And the client needs to get ADSL set up on his line so that I can configure the modem for him. Oh, and the electrician needs to install a power outlet next to the patch panel. The client really loves the simplicity of the panel. I just need to write up the manual for him. So that will be a quick job this afternoon. Well, I hope it is a quick job. Should be. I need to get that into the mail to him so that he has something when he moves in on tuesday.

I am disappointed with one of the buyers on eBay for one of my auctions... This person won the auction a couple of days ago and I am yet to hear from them. I am slightly disappointed obviously. At least I still have the goods :-)

A paper in New Zealand is reporting how David Lange left a number of papers to the country when he died. Now the boxes are opened they contain all sorts of interesting details on how New Zealand has been spying on other countries. And since the ex-Prime Minister is dead there is little that can be done against him, even if the NZ Archives had not given permission for their release.

I am one of those people who tends to wake up at the same time each day regardless of anything else... This is not bad if you forget to set your alarm (yeah, and when is the last time I actually needed to do that?), but can be a pain if you get to bed really late... I think today I will be having to bring on the Cocoa Cola, maybe in the extreme. I have some work to do today at Pymble (again) but there is not much there. I will have to go back in a week or so to finish getting everything set up and finished, but that will be a fairly short visit. Thankfully I have another client on the way who I might be able to visit too.

The UK Phone regulator is investigating phone roaming charges in europe. They are basically annoyed at the huge price differences and are looking at what can be done to improve the situation. I am glad that I am not out of the country all that often - roaming charges would get really expensive.

Finally, the MPAA (motion picture association of america) are the great campaigners against movie piracy. However according to an article, they have been caught illegally copying a DCD. The quote I love is "We made a copy of Kirby's movie because it had implications for our employees" basically saying that it was OK since there was a reason for the copying. This is just as justifiable as saying 'I made a copy of it since it was not in the store yet and I wanted to watch it'...

I am just waiting for a computer to reboot... No, not here. At a clients place. We are having issues with getting some reports to run correctly. It is not the reporting system problem, it is an issue with massaging the data before it gets to the reporting engine. The thing is that it seems to work correctly on my PC, but not on my clients PC. And I was hoping that a reboot would fix the issue. It does not seem to be fixed by sending a new DLL. Nor a new copy of the EXE.

And I have just solved it... The computer was working out if an object was within a certain distance of a point... and the user had made the distance rather small... Too small to account for all the errors, and the fact that normally he would need to park his vehicle 50m from a client site. So nothing was showing up in reports. When I increased the size by 10 times the reports started looking good. I was wondering why things were not working.. I thought I was going crazy. At least this is not a sign for that.

Just before I finally got the code working I finished off the PCB for the client and emailed it across. I do not expect to hear overnight - it will not be looked at until tomorrow... Still, he wanted this ASAP, so he gets it ASAP :-)

One strange thing with the Benefon phone - I have not managed to work out how to change the time. Right now the time is set on 1-August 2005 I believe. As far as I can tell there is no where you can change the date and timer. You can change the format of the details, but not the actual date and time. It is supposed to update these from GPS I think, but for some reason it does not seem to be doing that. Maybe I have not been using it correctly, and have not been using it outside enough, but I would have expected it to synchronise when I got GPS lock initially - since I am assuming that is where time comes from... Or time on this unit comes from as a reference at least.

It looks like there is another hour or so of work on the PCB that I have been working on. New requirements are appearing as we work on the project. More major changes, moving things around. This is like some perverted chess game, working out what the best way to lay out the board. There are tools for auto-routing, but I have not managed to work out how to use them. I plan to on my next PCB. It gets ridiculous when there are so many mods being made...

Anyway right now I had better get some food... Salmon salad I think... If I dont grab food I think I am going to fade...

Must be soon time for dinner... I went out for lunch at a place at seafood restraunt at Pymble, and I really have not been all that hungry; Until now that is. A client rang me to get some more mods done on a circuit board, and he had to escape when his wife let him know that dinner was ready, and asked if I had eaten dinner yet. Well, um, no. Being rather cheeky, I then told him 'Can you send me some over...', and was politely advised that it was 'experimental' and it may not be so wise. On the same token though it was a Neil Perry recipie (the QANTAS Chef) and was not made by Qantas Catering (I did ask) so I placed my order... I somehow do not like my chances of a home delivery.

Just to prove that it really is a small world, one of the people at the meeting today is a mechanical engineering genius. He builds mounting hardware for eftpos systems, and retail point of sale systems and the like. We got talking and THE PLANE came up - it turns out that he is a plane lover. So I mentioned the type of plane we were building, not expecting him to know anything about it. His reply was more along the lines of 'Nice Plane', and the stranger 'I did start building an RV8, but then decided the RV10, (the four seat version) was what I wanted to do so I have decided to delay things whilst I get my license'. Interesting... And he showed me prototype mounting hardware for a small LCD screen... Ahh, Alclad. From an RV8... Oh... Recycling. The other strange thing...

Turns out I have driven past his house too many times to count - He also lives in Castle Hill... Might be an idea to wait for him to build his RV10 before commiting to building one of them... Interesting meeting... Very small world!

No names to protect the guilty... I contacted a company wanting to get an access code to a piece of equipment. They do not charge for access to this part of the firmware. In fact this menu is supposed to be available for users. So I contact the local support organisation for the equipment. Their response was not 'No Problem', or even 'No Hope', it was 'That piece of equipment is more than two years old... We suggest you upgrade it, and we have attached a pricelist'. The price list DID NOT contain a list of the price for upgrade, and they have not yet provided the code I need. We will see what happens tomorrow - I suspect that they are going to stall.

I hate going places for meetings in many ways... It just seems to take so much out of the day. Being somewhere, getting there and back, lunch, and all the other messing around just seems to take time out of the day. So in the end it just seems like nothing has got done. I know this is not true, but that is just how it seems. Actually it is true to some extent.

I got a charger cable today from the UK for my Benefon phone. I only ordered this last week, and once again I was expecting it to take much much longer to get this cable. It was a car charger, which I do not really need at the moment since the phone came with a 240V charger. But I did not know that when I bought it, and the cable was cheap. Actually the cable with postage from the UK was cheaper than just postage from Brisbane. You can find some bargains on the net. Then again A friend of mine bought 2000 AA batteries on eBay, and they all leaked when they got placed into equipment - that became rather expensive!

I have been receiving an eMail list for a while on Computer Aided Drafting issues. This goes back to my Pacific Power days. There was a great quote there today under the heading of 'Spin Doctor of the Moment'. Jonathan Knowles, former Adobe employee now heading up DWF at Autodesk commented that "...I wouldn't fly in an airplane that was designed from a PDF."

Thankfully the RV7 that I am helping Richard build is not built using PDF's... Well, mostly not. Some of the manuals are scanned to PDF, but they are fairly safe. I hope... Maybe we should audit things later this week :-)

Laptops are not the biggest ever area to be concentrated on by people modifying hardware. Actually, there are not many mods available at all. Even less to reduce the performance of the hardware. Nordic Hardware have released instructions on how to underpower CPU's in laptops to improve battery life. Sounds like a cool concept! But I will NOT be trying it on my poor laptop! No Way!

I have managed to get my Benefon phone working - the problem turned out to be the battery - I bypassed an IC Switch inside the battery and put it on charge for a few minutes and things started working. The battery is now up to 20% charged - correction... 23% charged. As yet I have not tested the GPS functionality, so that will be my next step. I also have not managed to change the settings for where position SMS messages get sent since Benefon seem to like to stop people 'playing' and lock users out of this setting. So I have emailed them to get the phone unlocked.

Once that is done I can start having some real fun. It appears that the protocol is slightly different from what I thought... Then again it may be the SMS library. Just checking that. No. SMS Library looks good, so it looks like the protocol documentation is not totally accurate. Simple fix.

On the subject of the SMS control software from the PC, this is now working much much better... If I send an SMS I now only receive one SMS in return. This is fantastic - and how the software should have been behaving to start with.

The SMH is reporting that there have been some complaints that watermarks added to TV channels are causing burn-on on Plasma TV's, and that owners are being warned to be careful of their contrast and brightness settings. This has always been a problem with computer monitors - you can see this on the screens on any railway platform...

They also have an article Suggesting that higher airfares are on the way

Earlier I commented on traffic with the M7 and M2 combination. Traffic was a bit heavy from Brooks road on the F5 to the M7 turnoff, and then was basically at the speed limit up until the start of the M2... Then things slowed down. I was frankly surprised at how quickly the traffic slowed... Much from the Northern Road entrance to the M2 slowing things down. But I was impressed. Coming home I did the reverse trip, and found it even faster. I was having to actively manage the speed I was driving at. The M7 should have a 110KM speed limit, but unfortunately it does not.

The Benefon phone is not working. ARGH. I have worked out that the battery pack is dead. It is not the batteries that has died, but the charging circuit included in the battery. If I put the multimeter on the battery terminals I do not get any voltage at all. There seems to be a device in the battery that has failed. I have ordered a new battery from Brisbane, but I will not get it before Wednesday at the earliest. Slightly disappointing, but understandable. The battery probably failed after the phone was last used. But this has not soured my throughs of eBay. These things happen.

Oh, and I was asked today if I was interested in a couple of overseas trips in the next few months. Sounds interesting... I am waiting to get some more details, but I guess I should be dusting my passport off soon....

My Benefon phone arrived today on eBay. It appears that the battery on it is not charging for some reason. I hope I can get it running without too many issues. The phone is not bad... About the size of a Nokia 5110 but with a GPS antenna... Cool.

I dont think I have mentioned this before... Some people go a tiny bit too far when it comes to fish. This site shows someone who built a 200,000 liter fish tank in his house... That is the equivalent of a few normal house swimming pools. Cool project.


The Wikipedia Foundation have released a competition for the best photos... The results are here.

I loved one of the runner ups... It is available here.

Home at last... I can tell you it has been hot outside. I was drinking LOTS of liquid this afternoon - I just kept filling a used 600 ml coke container with water and pretty soon it would be empty. The main problem was lack of airflow rather than great heat. I ended up doing six hours cabling today... Terminating Cat5 and TV sockets, testing them and making sure they all worked. Half the hassle was finding them.

At one stage I was searching for a cable - and checked east of the 12 or so locations in the house it could have terminated in. No... Didnt work. Try on one of the other wires. No. Try again, just in case I am too dumb to get it right. No luck. Think for a moment... Where could it be... How about behind the door in the same room as the other end of the cable... That is it... Found it! Probably 10-15 minutes wasted by me being dumb.

Still, this was not as dumb as the sign I saw today... It said 'Rego Cheacks'.

Good thing I remembered that this job was on today. I had a phone call from the client when I was almost to his house - it would have been slightly embarrasing if I had not remembered I had the job on today. An associate who was doing another part of the job had totally forgotten until I rang him. Thankfully his job is smaller and he does not need to be here until wednesday. So far I have installed almost all the outlets in the house, and I just need to install the patch panel next. This might be a bit of a pain but I dont think it will be too bad. I will be mostly finished in two or three hours I would guess

It is a bit warm outside... I can assure you all of that. Being in a house without electricity seems to make things hotter. Do does having to have long pants on for safety. Stupidly I grabbed a hot pie for lunch. Not the wisest move, but still, it was food, and it was nearby. I also dropped in at a friends business at lunch time to pick up a few things... And he asked what I was doing for lunch tomorrow. He has organised a meeting and really really wants me there... Guess I am being taken out to lunch tomorrow!

Sometimes I am a bit of an idiot... No! You do not need to agree with me. I was planning to be doing some work last week to finish of a job. Soon after that time was arranged we decided that it would not be last wednesday, but the 23rd. And of course I wrote it down as Wednesday 23rd January. And the 23rd is today. So I am supposed to be working on installing cabling today at Pymble. Thankfully I have not much else on, and it was flexable as to which day I was doing it. But even so I think I should put some time in today over there. Besides, I need to grab some other parts nearby too for a couple of other projects.

I will try the M7/M2 combination I think... See how that is in peak periods. How bad can it be :-) Ok, this is Sydney. But then again, this is not somewhere like Rome which has the worst traffic jams I have ever ever seen. But I am told that much of europe is like this...

Sundays paper had a short story about the mentor that Simone Warne went to as a way to help her through her split with Shane. Rather an insightful article, and personalizes Simone really well...

Intel have been playing with the Itanium processor. I mean messing with the internals, like removing the 32 bit hardware compatibility moving to software emulation. CNet discovered this and got a strange letter from Intel according to The Register. The letter comes from Will Swope who I met back in 2001 at an Intel Sales and Marketing Conference where I was doing some consulting work. Will is one of these people who is really really smart, and knows it, and has the social skills to make fun of it. Smart Character...

The SMH is reporting today that the baggage system at Sydney Airport is still really bad. It seems that performance peaked at the Sydney Olympics, and things have been bad ever since. At the moment they are undergoing a $100m upgrade to ensure that 100% of international bags are x-rayed, and this is making things worse. On January 1 where the temperatures were really hot the baggage system actually failed causing almost all flights to be delayed.

When I was a baby I used to love watching the fish in a fish tank, so I am told. I have no memory of this for some reason! None at all. I still find watching fish generally soothing and peaceful. There is one thing for sure... I would never actually build a fishtank like this. Actually I do not know anyone who would. This tank is about 200,000 liters. That is a lot of water by anyones standards.

And for the person who has built everything comes instructions on how to build a HDTV video projector. Really cool.

I have come up with some rules for eBay.

1. Do not bid on any items until the end. The exception here is when you want the item to appear on the list of bids rather than the watch list.
2. Do not sell more than one item at once unless you want the price to drop. If you run it as a dutch auction you are less likely to have people bid against each other. Sometimes even delay between items so people think you do not have any more left.
3. Use the 10 day option if you have something that you think might not sell well. You want to maximise exposure.
4. Just because a seach for something does not bring up any results does not mean that it will not sell on eBay. And if it does not sell this week it does not mean that it will not sell next week.
5. Having said that, there are some items that will not sell on eBay.

I have just finished watching the first series of MythBusters - and it has been fantastic. It is not surprising that this has been a hit series. If any readers have not seen this show then I would suggest examining this show. Even watersking behind a row boat...

Whilst watching it I have also been tidying my desk a tiny bit - getting recepits and putting them in the right folders and thrown out paper that is not needed. More is needed... As always... Having seen that I am about to fall asleep... I dont normally need an afternoon sleep... But I guess I need one today.

Just checking on some eBay auctions of mine. It is good to see a bit of bidding action... And some 'watching' activity from others. What I am becoming increasingly aware of that there is little use in bidding early on in the process. You should wait until the last minute if you want the best price. This is not the best if you are selling of course.

During the last week I purchased a VoIP phone from eBay. The phone works well even if I needed to do some searching on the internet to find a copy of the manual. And even then the manual was not particularly useful. But the phone is quite good, and it has good quality audio, as well as an extensive address book. A but of GSM interference does get into it but that is not a major problem really. The display on the phone has characters about 1cm high so they are actually legible across the desk. It also displays the date and time having synchronised to a time server which in itself is a cool feature. Yesterday though the LOGIN green LED was flashing all the time. From what I can work out the VoIP provider was uncontactable so the light came on to warn me. Cool.

The headline from a News.Com.Au says it all... 'Slippery when wet for Bon Jovi Jet' which tells the story about how a 707 owned by the group Bon Jovi skidded off the runway in Canada in a heavy rainfall.

I just saw a small presentation on the Net by Applied materials which creates the equipment used by most microchip manufacturer. I learned a few details which I had no idea about in this presentation - and I had done some of the things mentioned in Uni. Quite enlightening. Not for everyone though...

Cool new product - although probably not really useful in Sydney at this time of year - is the Slanket. This is a blanket with sleeves. With this blanket you can sit in bed, on a lounge or in a chair and read or use a video game of something like that without getting cold arms. Given the weather in Sydney at the moment I dont think it will be needed for some time. Cute design though.

PVR's or Personal Video Recorders are becoming popular in many parts of the world. They really have not made inroads into the Australian market for some reason. PVR's record your TV programs to a HDD automatically - rather a cool feature. The problem with almost all these units is that they will only record a single TV channel. So SnapStream have developed their own box that does 11 channels at once. This is probably a bit of overkill in the extreme... But is slightly cool.

Just heard... The Tropical Cyclone off the Western Australian coast has been named after me... Yes. Me. It is Tropical Cyclone Daryl. I just wish they had got the spelling of my name correct!

I was watching a new episode of 'My Family' on the ABC, and I was having a great time watching it. This episode had the two main characters house-sitting in a new 'designer' apartment with no door-handles, voice activated lights and security systems. They ended up actually trashing the place... I am not sure I would have reacted any differently if I was in such a place... They even had an old fashioned chase in the foyer shaped like a rabbit warren.

In the SMH today is an article in the 'PS - Private Sydney' section of the paper about newsreaders. There is a quote at the end of the article that I loved... 'Others don't have it so good. Making economy class look more like first class was Nine's Sharyn Ghidella, who regularly has to suffer the staring hordes in the budget end of Qantas flights, even though she is the airline's official in-flight newsreader.'. I just find it slightly strange that the newsreader would need to see herself on the screen in the economy section...

The SMH also had an article about the proble that has just been launched for Pluto. It turns out that NASA added a small extra payload to the probe - they added some ashes from the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. The widow of the discoverer was there for the launch too. Finally, Alitalia was forced to cancel 130 flights today and warned of delays on other international and internal services as cabin crew and pilots continued industrial action. While a strike that disrupted flights on Thursday and yesterday was suspended until Monday, some staff still stayed away from work, while unions were holding mass meetings. This has been going on for some time, and relates to a desire to rationalize the Alitalia business...

Lawns mown. They took a bit over an hour, but should have taken less time. The starter cord broke once again. Thankfully this time I did not need to look for cord to replace it with unlike last time. This time I just needed to replace it and install it. This was easier said than done since the cord was actually slightly big, but it worked. Well, eventually. The first time I tried it the cord would not retract. So off it came again, but thankfully I did not need to re-thread the cord. Also, despite the appearance to the contrary, the ground was not all that damp. Things are fairly dry out there actually, particularly on the top.

I got the user interface implemented for the Benefon tracking system. You can now right click on some vehicles and say that you want to start tracking. It will ask you how many seconds between SMS position reports, and how many minutes you want it to be tracking, and it will send SMS messages to each of the phones. I have not yet implemented the 'cancel tracking' button... It will be the next one. In some ways I do not want to implement this feature since it would be a way for the system to stop the system working.

After doing the lawns I had a call asking about the firmware inside the Oz-Flarm... There were some reports of an issue, and I just needed to check that out... No issues found thankfully...

The patch panel for the installation job this week has been built, and painted. At least the undercoat has been painted. I also managed to throw some junk out - I found a few tins of paint that were empty or had dried out. I really should go through all the tins to see what to throw out. Still, that is for later. The panel is about 40x50cm, and has holes for the outlets and cables to come through. When I get to the clients house all I need to do is feed through the cables and screw this to the wall. That is far far easier than trying to do the work inside the cupboard where the cables are terminated. Later I will grab some photos and post them - once the paint is dry that is.

Having got into the cleaning mood with paint tins I also managed to put together a bag of old clothes for recycling. How many old T-Shirts and jeans do I really need? They are just taking up space in the wardrobe and in my drawers. I still want to get rid of more but what i have done is a good start.

I have been watching some of MythBusters, and I really love this show. Some of the science is a bit shall we say, um, simplified. For the sake of TV they do not make the text as extensive as they could have. One of the things was dropping a dummy from 50m high from a crane. They were testing if having a tool belt under the person would have helped when they hit the water. They used a sledgehammer which is probably a tiny bit light. What was cool was a wooden cannon that they built. The wood needed steel bands around the outside, and they showed how these were forged - with the hot steel rivets being hit - really hit this time.

Right now I have some lawns to mow...

Long time readers know about the saga of what my first live dog is going to be called - not that I am saying I want one, but if I ever did it MUST be called BYTE. I think that is such a great name for a dog... Byte. I can see problems during training but it would be so cute.

So I looked at some interest at this page which described a project making a RoboSapien Robot Dog follow a lego robot in a bizzare form of catch. Cool project but I really cannot totally see the point. Byte would be a REAL dog, not some robot. Sure it would be nice to be able to program the dog not to chew the furniture, but that is half the fun with dogs.

The electrical wholesaler was a tiny bit more expensive than I had thought, but the client will be paying. Still, it would have been nice to get the price reduced slightly from what I ended up paying. Not much I can do about it though since it was all needed. I need to soon take some of the parts and get them made up into a panel I can install, along with a tiny bit of design work that I need to do too. Probably a good thing I am not working on the plane today then...

I have also been working on the SMS interface to my TeamTrack software. Right now the software will send out a POLL for a set of vehicles and display the positions when it is returned. The next features are to send a command to start tracking the phones every x seconds, and a cancel feature for when tracking is no longer needed. These features should be fairly quick to implement. Some models of the phones do not have the auto-track feature in-built so I need to implement that myself - it will probably just send an SMS out as a periodic event in order to fake the tracking feature - sort of an automatic POLL.

And if I get real energetic I need to mow the lawns. Yesterday evening when I was running I was pretty sure I could see the grass growing in parts. The lawns here are the same. If I wait a few days things will be really really horrible when I then go to mow. So I guess that is one more job. Good exercise though. [And a post script on the exercise, I managed not put on any weight over christmas and new-year. Not a bad achievement. ]

Shopping Time... I have a job early this week at Pymble, and I need supplies. So one of my jobs for this morning is to pick up the parts from the local electrical wholesaler. Should be an entertaining experience. Or should I say a costly one! Thankfully the client is paying...

This afternoon I was working with the SMS based tracking into my TeamTrack software. I did actually get it working this afternoon despite some issues, such as not actually having the SMS phone yet - and also with an SMS control that still has some bugs. SInce I did not have the phone I was sending the position reports from a PC based application from my PC... Just faking the position reports. I actually just sent SMS reports from the phone to it's own phone number - loopback mode.

This actually worked well, apart from a few timeouts in the drivers for the SMS. I ended up getting multiple SMS's sent, and even more received. This I believe is due to bugs in the serial port driver which should be able to be fixed without too many issues. I would send one position report, three would get sent over the air, and five or six copies would be received. Within a few days this will be working correctly I would guess. Tomorrow I will probably be doing some debugging of the SMS driver as well as doing some user interface options for when I actually get the phone.

Right now I am having some time off... Watching a Katie Holmes movie called 'Teaching Mrs Tingle'. Looks like an interesting movies - but It really does seem to pale into insignificance compared to '10 things I gate about you'. I will see how much of the movie I will see... I am starting to get tired.

The weather is beautiful outside - it really is. There is not a cloud in the sky and the sun is slowly setting - and there is a slight wind. And things are fairly quiet. It is the time of day that I like - and I guess the type of day I love too. I would really love to be sitting on a beach somewhere rather than at this PC inside. Still, even inside here it is nice.

So why was I outside admiring the beauty of nature? Well, that is easy. I went for another run. I think I ran about 4.3KM or so. It took me a bit over 30 minutes so I am guessing at the distance. I managed to do another loop of the oval, and take a slightly longer path from the oval home too. I will have to start running more in the evenings since it is so peaceful out there - and is a good oportunity to wind down after a hard days work.

Todays meeting was interesting - it will be interesting to see if it takes of. If it does then things will be amazing... You can never tell. I am seriously thinking who I can bring in to work on some of the projects I am being thrown at the moment... So much work, and so little of me. I could try and clone myself, but I dont know that the world really needs another me!

When I was out today before I put the iPod on I had the radio on - and there was a hauntingly beautiful song on. It was 'Beautiful Life' which in the past had been performed by the 'Ace of Bass'. It is only now that I have been able to seach iTunes that I have found that this is being performed by Tina Cousins. She has two versions on her latest album - I did find the 'Ballad' version the nicest of the two.

It was really hard on the freeway not to just close my eyes and listen to the music. The piano was so clear, and the vocals were amazing. The lyrics are available here. Like many songs, the lyrics are so powerful. I can see why someone like Tina Cousins chose to record this song :-
I just wanna be here beside you
And stay until the break of dawn
Take a walk in the park when you feel down
There’s so many things there
That’s gonna lift you up
See the nature in bloom a laughing child
Such a dream, oooh
It’s a beautiful life, oooh...

I can see how it can happen, but I do not totally believe it. A mueseum in spain has lost a 38 ton sculpture. It is not as bad as it sounds. The sculpture was in storage, and when a new director came in and ordered an inventory it was discovered that the storage company had gone bankrupt six years before. Oops.

The issue of Pherotones has become a hot potato with the Wikipedia entry facing deletion. IdeaGrove and Adrants have entries on the issue suggesting that McKinney is doing everyone a dis-service with this campaign. They point out that a company has made a grand mistake when people stop calling their campaigns marketing and start calling it lying.

According to Billboard, Kelly Clarkson has refused permission for any of her songs to be used in the next series of 'American Idol'. It was the 2002 series of that show which gave her a break into the music industry. It must be hard for someone like Clarkson when placed in that situation since she needs to break away from the show if she wants to be succesful in her own right. In a few years I am sure she will allow her songs to be used, but not right at the moment.

Also on the Music front, Universal Music have announced that they are digitizing a back catalog of 100,000 songs that are not on CD such as Marc Almond, Creme, Nana Mouskouri, Brigitte Bardot, Chris de Burgh, Big Country and Marianne Faithfull. Whilst I may not actually buy copies of any of these, Universal is doing a good job ensuring that people who might have access. The first 3000 songs will be available in February.

Morning meeting today with a new client. Should be a fairly quick meeting, but you never can tell. Sometimes the meetings that you expect to take five minuts take hours. And the reverse is true sometimes too! Then I need to do some serial port snooping working on this SMS project. With some luck my new cellphone will be here today. I am not hopeful but you never know. Then I will have cellphone tracking just like the movies.

Yesterday I had a phone call from a potential client. I have calls all the time about people wanting to track elderly relatives, but this was a new one. They wanted to track a six year old with some developmental problems since he loves to escape from the house at night and go missing. I really did not have much to offer except to suggest that the client contact some nursing home suppliers and see what they had. It must be hard for the parents.

Anyway I had better get going, I have some planning to do for this meeting...

Slight problem with the SMS control. Only minor one. The code to send SMS messages is working, but for some reason it is being a tiny bit too aggressive with the formatting requirements of responses. As an example, I sent four SMS messages to myself. This was fine. Except for the fact that I actually received about 73 SMS replies. Thankfully they are only a cent eact.

I could not work out if this was a receive issue or a transmit issue. So I sent an SMS to my cellphone. And rather than getting a single message I got seven. Count them. Seven. So it is a problem with transmit. The SMS control is not working correctly detecting a successful send and is therefore sending the same message a number of times. Not too bad at once cent per message (apart from any speed issues) but terrible when it costs 25 cents or more.

This should be simple to work out. Tomorrow I wil do some debugging - putting the serial snifffer online and seeing what the modem is doing. Then I need to write a spec to put a number of these modems on the same computer.

I have traced the problem with the SMS control. It has to do with the PIN NUMBER function of the SonyEricsson modems. The cards do not have a PIN number requested. And I should have worked this out a lot faster. When no PIN is needed, the phone will tell you that you need to enter a PUK2 code when you ask if a PIN is needed. This is strange behavior, but when you realise this things work better. Since I need a few other things changed I have just let the programmer know so that he can change the code on his end.

Once this has been changed things will be working a whole lot better. Better debugging capabilities are needed in the server control too. That is a minor thing to improve really. And it will not need much effort.

Oh. Yesterday I asked for a price for a developers kit for some software. They said 29.000 euro for the license, and then 3.000 Euro each year. Fine. 29 Euro was not too bad. Then I found today it was 29,000 euro. That is not acceptable. So I spoke to the Australian customer service person today and was told that I could get much support if needed subject to some limitations. So thanks to google and customer support I have just saved 29,000 Euro. Well, not really. I would NEVER have paid that much, but you know what I mean.

Why so much? I do not know. Probably to restrict access to the information. And stop people like me developing applications that are significantly cheaper than their own solutions...

ARGH. Some issues with the SMS control. I am not sure what is wrong, but the software cannot seem to work out what the SMS Message Control Centre number is. This is strange. It used to work, but is not working now that I have changed to Telstra SIM cards, even when I am using an Optus SIM. Hmm... What is happening?

My VoIP phone arrived a bit earlier. It is actually a nice phone - seems like good audio quality, and only took about 25 minutes to configure. A manual would have helped, but I am not sure how much. The pain of it all is though that I found out that my VoIP provider will only allow one user logged in at once. I guess that means that I need to finally get the VoIP PABX up and running - I will probably do that under Windows but we will see...

I also posted off a parcel to the UK for an eBay purchase. Australia Post somehow decided that a GPS in a small postpack could be classed as a large letter and therefore cost only $1.80 rather than $9.80. The woman at the post office was insistent that it was the correct price - who am I to argue. Sounds really cheap to me - and I normally cannot sell similarly priced articles within Australia for that price. Then again normally my parcels are a bit larger.

I grabbed a couple of prepaid SIM cards at the post office too. $25 including $25 in call credits. That is enough for me to make something like 5000 SMS calls over the next six months I hope that is enough for testing my software. I do need to wait for my new phone to turn up now too... I could have got another two Nokia phones for an extra $50 but frankly I did not see the need. I have enough of them, and it would really be a waste. Hmm. Now all I need to do is get the SIM's activated... How painful can that be... Oh, it is Telstra. Expect the worst!

Home after a couple of meetings. Not sure what I can say about them, but here goes. The first meeting went well... I found a parking spot at the Redfern Shopping Centre. It is amazing how these little shopping centres are still all around the place, and still have free parking. Not even a gate to enforce two hours free. Anyway that got me to within a hundred meters of the cafe I was meeting the client.

I am not sure that I would go to the cafe again. I found the seats to be too hard. They were a matrix of wood and nothing. Not comfortable at all. Actually I would say quite uncomfortable. I guess the meeting went for about 90 minutes, pitching a few ideas and just discussing the entire TV industry at the same time. Turns out that the person I was meeting with knew people in common with me. Not sure what will happen now with this, but we will see. If nothing else it is another contact within the industry.

The second meeting was to look at the circuit board I have been working on for what seems like ages. A few more modifications were needed, and I spent probably a couple of hours working on this. Hmm. Lots of work. Still it will end up taking less time working on this board than making one unit up by hand without the board.

Finally the IP phone I purchased on eBay arrived today after a week... .I am just about to test it... Wish me luck!

I need to pick up a couple of pre-paid SIM CARDS with Telstra today. They offer 1c per SMS between prepaid users, and this will be good to load test the SMS software as well as to test the SMS based tracking phone when it arrives in a few days. I am not sure how reliable the 1c SMS will be, but I cannot complain for the price. Dick Smith also have one that comes with a phone for only $20 more so that might be cool too. Then again I have more phones here already than I know what to do with. Australia has more SIM cards than people. I am one of the reasons for that.

I have done some digging into Pherotones. It seems that the company has its domain registered in North Carolina. I am guessing here but it is my guess that this site is being operated by McKinney Silver for a number of reasons. According to their registration information, they are also registered in North Corolina. But that is is not proof... Not by a long shot. Through some digging I have believe that McKinney Silver have classified this microsite as an interactive client, with job number 7216. I have emailed McKinney Silver to confirm this. Basically this sounds like a grass roots gurilla advertising campaign to me.

Time to get going... Reality TV, here I come!

This morning I have a meeting with a company doing a Reality TV show. Before being scared with the prospect of me appearing on 'Big Brother' or 'Survivor', or even worse, 'Australian Idol', do not be alarmed. I have not been asked to appear on the show. I have in fact been asked to talk to the shows producers as a technical consultant. Not sure of many details at the moment, but I am sure I will find them out in due course. So it *is* safe to watch your TV. At least as safe as it was yesterday at least.

It may not be safe to use your cellphone though, according to O'ReillyNet. They have provided a link to Pherotones which are ring tones which are supposed to make you totally and utterly irresistable to members of the opposite sex. Before putting your hard earned cash on the table ordering the complete collection I should tell you this. I have searched and searched and I cannot find how to purchase these ringtones. There are some demos, but you cannot buy them.

My guess is that this is a spoof... Concidering that I have not found any reference to the 'Auditory Institute' where this was developed except for the site itself, and Iran where the 'Auditory Institute' deals with auditing accounts. Hmm. Now the only question is WHY....

Finally, here is a link to a site in the Netherlands which contains a student's sculpture project in wood. It is hand carved and deserves a look!

The MythBusters show is really cool. Discovery have now released some videos that did not quite make it into the shows - dues to potential liability with the actions shown. Some things are apparently too dangerous or irresponsible to show, and they were afraid of being black-banned from networks I would guess.

News.Com.AU is reporting that the victorian police have ordered that photographers not take photographs of certain pieces of infrastructure. 'POLICE directives about what could and could not be photographed were an abuse of power and should be ignored' the article noted. This was following a report in a Melbourne newspaper today which said a member of the Geelong Camera Club received a visit from police after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery.

I did a 3-4Km run a bit earlier. Same distance as my last time, although I think that I did it slightly faster. I cannot be sure. I really need to drag out my GPS and start taking it with me again. Until then I just have to guess. True to form, and in line with my guess I got a phone call about five minutes after starting - which promptly got put onto hands free and I kept running for the next five minutes or so that the phone call took. I survived that fairly well.

The second half of the run had very light misty rain falling at times. Once again my glasses saved my eyes from getting much water into them. Still, I can understand why people wear headbands. I have also done 20 situps. I can feel my tummy muscles getting stronger - but it does take time. And requires me to keep at the exercise.

I have started on the SMS tracker... It is fairly easy to do when I look at the details. In the next few days I will be getting a Benefon phone I purchased on eBay which will allow me to get it up and running. Cute fone - has a GPS built in allowing me to be tracked at any time... Hello Big Brother.

ZD Net has a story titled The Essence of a Geek.

The cable for the SMS application worked well. Actually, so did the application, but I am getting ahead of myself here. I got much of the programming outsourced. Frankly I could have done the work without issue, but right now I really do not have the time. Step one was to get the modem working with my PC. I have a heap of SonyEricsson modems removed from old tracking units. They are missing the RF modules, but they are fairly cheap. Power cables for these units are a pain since they use RJ12 like telephones. Then the serial cable needed to be made up too - not too hard; I used a VGA cable for one end and put a DB9 socket on the other.

This would have worked first go except for two things. Actually three things. Firstly, I forgot to plug the power into the modem. Then I forgot to plug the serial cable into the PC. And lastly the GSM module in the phone was faulty. Replacing it was easy, and it now all works. Or the hardware works.

I tried the software out, and it worked first go. Reads out the serial number of the SIM, Signal Level, model of the modem amongst other things. What I really like is the test application that comes with the work I got done. To send a text message all you need to do is
If wrSMS.Open Then
wrSMS.Add("0412929634", "This is a test of SMS Sending")
wrSMS.Close()
End If

Receiving is almost as simple...
If rdSMS.Open Then
TB.Lines() = rdSMS.Retrieve
rdSMS.Close()
End If



Now all I need to do is write the tracking application to go with this.

One quote written, one phone call receieved putting me onto a short list for a Request for Quotes. And about to make up a serial cable. Not a bad effort for a morning I would guess. And it is only just 9AM. What I really need to do now is get the modem running so that I can actually get some more testing done. If it does not work my quote might be useless even if they choose me. When I started making up the cable I got out the documentation for the modem. I found all the information I needed - in two different documents. Unfortunately they did not line up. I am sure that the 2nd document is wrong since it describes a cable I do not have. We will see soon though.

I will probably go for a short run soon too. I know - it does take some time out of my work day, but provided I take my phone with me then I really am not too badly off. It takes dedication to keep running whilst talking on the cellphone on hands free speaker phone - something that I have done in the past. You have to be really careful of your breathing though if you do that - if not you are likely to faint. So kids, do not try this at home. Certainly not whilst trying to cross the street dodging traffic :-)

I am getting some real interest from a couple of my eBay auctions. One for a PAGER RECEIVER and another for some SOLAR CELLS. Both are leftover from an old consulting project and have just been collecting dust. It must have taken me 15 minutes to find the software for the RECEIVER - it was on an old backup and took some time to find it. Actually I found it and did not realise I had found it for another five minutes. Mostly you only need the software to configure the unit, rather than for operational use. This is good since the software runs under DOS!

A friend of mine just MSN'ed me from New Zealand. He is having some issues with his satellite dish - or more correctly the satellite finder for it. This is a device that you put on the lead and will help you actually get a picture. Amazing little device costing under $100 and reduces the pain significantly of aligning a dish. Well, it would if it worked. I have given him some ideas of what to try, and told him that if he cannot get it working I will just have to come over and try it myself!

Overnight I got some software to test... The SMS code I have been waiting for. By the end of the week I should have an SMS based cellphone tracking system up and running if all goes well. Todays job, apart from dealing with other issues, will be to test the SMS functionality - which will involve grabbing a GSM modem out of stock and making up a few cables for it. I do not expect any issues since it has been tested by the programmer - but I like to make sure that I can get things to work too... and then see what changes I need. I have a few in mind already.

Once again the to-do list is expanding. I do get things off it, but rather slowly it seems. Before bed tonight I intend to get a proposal to a client down south of the border. The problem I am having now is that I need to provide a coherent list of the options to the client so that they can choose which way they go. And do this whilst I do not have an existing product. And do this whilst getting to bed at a reasonable time. The good thing about an expanding to-do list is that I am having to open MYOB several times a day to do invoices. This is fantastic. It means that there is enough money coming in - I dont think I have not created an invoice any working day this year which is fantastic.

I made Honey Soy stirfry for dinner. Turned out to be really nice with some penne pasta. It tasted really nice although I think that the penne needed a bit more cooking - it was slightly under done; a few more minutes in the rice cooker would have improved it a bit.

More work... Bids to prepare... Software to write. Hardware to build. I think this year is going to be amazing. I think I finally have a buyer for my SMS based tracking solution. 90% of the software is already designed and running - I just need to bolt it together and write the proposal for the client. Some of the architecture will need to wait unfortunately until I get some documentation back from a programmer I have doing some work for me. I have an idea of how much I want to charge this client - I just need to work on the breakdown for them. But I think it will be a VERY good year...

More exercise, but given the weather it is inside - in the form of sit-ups. I managed to get 30 done, although I suspect that was about five too many.

Earlier when I was out two songs performed by 'The Pretenders' were played on my iPod on random play. They were I'll stand by you and Hymn to Her. I just love these songs - I guess they are love songs, but not quite the normal 'everything is perfect type' but more of the 'I am here for you' type meaning that these ones actually say something. If you click on the lyrics above and read them you will see what I mean. How powerful! What else could you say about lyrics like :-
When you're standing at the crossroads,
don't know which path to choose,
Let me come along, cause even if your wrong
I'll stand by you, I'll stand by you,
won't let nobody hurt you,
I'll stand by you.
Take me into your darkest hour,
and I'll never desert you.
What more could be said about the song?

For some reason I went looking for the lyrics of Cats in the Cradle performed by Ugly Kid Joe amongst others aparently although iTunes only has the original version. Looking at the lyrics I cannot really work out how it could possibly get sung - there seems to be no rhyme to it, but since the song does get sung there must be. I had never actually listened to the lyrics before, and it is a bit of a sad song - telling of a fathers promise to his son to spend time with him 'soon', and never getting around to it.

Sydney Morning Herald today has a story about how THE TIMES in the UK has had a rule changed in the passport office in the UK requiring that babies have a neutral expression in passport photos. In three months of last year 15,000 passports for children in the UK were rejected on the basis of the photos. One was rejected because the 'baby was too shiny' and another was rejected one 'whoes teeth too big'.

Worth 1000 has a competition for the best 'Out of place' photos. I love this one, obviously of mars with Uluru, or Ayers Rock from the centre of Australia.

Music:

Fuzzy performed by Grant Lee Buffalo from 'All That Chill - Disc 3'

Quick trip into Eastgardens for a courier run. I had to drop a PCB into a client. It is really really a pain having to do a job like that but he really needs it, so I guess it has to be done.

A friend forwarded me a few photos from a Lego Church. It looks so much like the Crystal Cathedral in the USA it is not funny... Doing some searching I found that this is the Abston Church... Abston is a made up place - named after ABS which is the type of plastic Lego is made from...



I just got an email from my ISP. Telstra is going to turn my ADSL off for 45 minutes at 2AM on thursday morning for an upgrade. It is to upgrade an NKY5 whatever that is. I think it has something to do with an authentication server but I am not sure. They assume that the people who need to know have some idea what it means, and explaining it to everyone else would be a waste of time since realistically there is no need for customers to know why.

Argh... I missed out on the D-Link network video device on eBay. The price went over what I was prepared to pay. Same for a couple of X-Boxes that I bid on too. Such is life - I guess I was not prepared to pay for the going price of the objects. I will keep an eye out for some bargains. The strange thing is that even faulty X-Boxes are rather expensive. I do not know why...

A few days back I was commenting on glasses, and uses. What I forgot to mention was one pain that comes with glasses. It was raining and humid outside, so I had the air conditioning on in my car. What I found was that as soon as I opened the door on my car my glasses fogged up. This was not what I wanted to happen obviously, but cleaning the glasses quickly fixed things, and the glasses did not fog up once more.

Finally, The Register has a story about how the victorian police want to get Segways. The problem is that the Segway is actually banned in Victoria. Oops.

The Worth1000 Web Site is often worth a visit. This time it is more so, as they have a competition 'Glorifying the most perfect food'. If you have not worked it out, that is chocholate. I think my favourite image is the 'Fudged Up Froggy' right up the top - which is not quite a chocholate fish, but close enough. Actually reminds me of the Harry Potter chocholate frogs that come with the wizard cards. Also looking decidedly delicious are the 'Chocomatos' slightly further down. Despite looking cute, the bear just above 'Chocomatos' just looks slightly wrong.

I wish I was a good enough artist to be able to produce graphics like that. I really do. Unfortunately I cannot draw... I am sure that I would fail colouring in at Kindergarten if I went back. Actually, I was playing with a friends pre-schooler a few days back, and he looked at my hand which had some red texta on it and asked what I had done. Lying I told him that I had been colouring in and was not very good at it - really I had been using it to mark where some wood was to be cut, and was not very good at it.

I really did not get much crossed of my to-do list. I did work on a few things, but not much was complete. I did get a tracking system basically complete, sans the doccumentation. And I did also do some consulting on an aviation project, but I have yet to work out if there will be an income stream from that one...

I have found the bug. It will be fairly easy to fix probably, but not by me. Frankly I do not have the esperience/expertise to fix this one - at least not properly. The piece of code is fairly time sensative, and I need to be ultra-careful when I fix things to make sure that it is being fixed in a way that will not cause performance issues. Which means thinking about the problem. It will probaly be a simple one to get change though, but some navel-gazing is required first.

Apart from that I am trying to get a tracking system out the door. I am just testing hardware and software at the moment... And I have to put together a systems manual and CD-ROM for the client. Always nice to make a good impression, particularly when they want to become a reseller. I just wish I could justify going north with the equipment to help 'test' the system, along with the beaches!

Something else I am doing is testing some tracking units... Five of them all in the same car. It is interesting them as they move. Some of them change locations at different times, meaning that the system thinks that part of the car is in one suburb, and the other half thinks that it is somewhere else. Depending on randomness of the GPS, the position reporting varies too... Some of the units might report every 30 seconds and other every 60 seconds if the speed is near a threshold, or the vehicle is changing speed. I cannot wait to plot the snail trail later today either!

I am slowly getting things done today - no phone calls, and not many email messages so I am actually getting a chance to do some real work. Whatever real work is BTW - and if anyone can work it out I would be interested in knowing. For instance I had a client email me yesterday showing me the reports he had designed for use in my software. They were really good - and really functional. He wanted to turn the reports into job sheets, and did a good job at it I must say. As a small business owner he was working on a weekend, and then I spent some time replying to him last night at home.

I have just found a strange thing happening with my server software, so I guess I know what I will be doing when I finish this entry...

The magazine Popular Mechanics has an article on the 15 tech concepts that will be important during the next 12 months. I am not sure I agree with them all, but I will keep an eye out on them now. The Etzy.COM site has plush tetris blocks for sale for toddlers. They are supposed to teach spacial concepts... That is working out what goes together, and that blocks cannot go through each other. Important concepts really.

Finally, An MIT Startup has released a tool for telling if web sites are good or bad. They register with a special email address and see if they get spam on that address... And they have a plugin for browsers that warns you what is going on...

I think I needed more sleep last night. There are a few give aways. Firstly I have needed to retype every third word of the last sentence. I do not think 'slaeep last nighet' is the correct spelling. This is on top of the fact that I actually do feel quite tired.

Part of the reason for this is that last night I got my first taste of the X-Box. The first thing I noticed when we turned it on was the user interface - the menu system that came up when you turned on the device without a DVD in it. It looked so familiar - it was designed by REZN8 which is a former client of mine - and the look and feel just reminded me of their graphics work. Screamed out as coming from their designers and animators.

We also hired a game to play on the device - after all it is no use having such a game machine there if you are not going to actually play at least one game. Well, we hired a car racing game, and I should say that I did not drive it well at all. Even after some practice I was hitting the walls more often than not. I just found the controller so hard to get used to. The controller is really well designed, but it is just that I am used to using my hands and feet to drive. It really was hillarious watching me trying to get a car around the course...

Breathe In. Slowly Exhale. Make an 'Ahhh' sound as I ask myself what I am doing updating my Blog now when I could just as easilly do so in the morning where I am not about to fall asleep in bed with my laptop on my lap, light on, and glasses on. Well, I wanted to write things down whilst they were fresh in my mind - and put them down on paper before I forgot things. Well, things have been forgotten, and my mind is not fresh, but you get the idea I am sure.

Visiting the computer market at North Rocks was an interesting affair. I only found one store there, and thankfully they had an ADSL router that will be needed by a client of mine. The ethernet hub will have to wait or will be purchased at a local computer store. It was strange not having many stores there, and I thought that I had missed the start date of the market for this year. Then I started back and found that Muirfield High School is the new location of the market. I did not go in there but it looked as if there were a lot of stores there selling their wares. It seemed everyone knew the market had moved except me.

Then we did some work on the plane. First trick was to make up a small bracket and mount it on the plane. I lost count of the number of brackets we made - was it three or four? Anyway it just did not sit properly. Then we worked out how it might work, and looked at the diagram. Both of us had been mis-reading it for more than an hour. Worse, I could not see how it could be any plainer what should appear on the diagram.

Then we worked on some roll bar stiffeners. These are pieces of metal that need to be bent to lie flat on a spiral. Sound hard. It is. The first one probably took well over an hour. The 2nd one took more like 10 minutes. Funny how that happens. I often think that if there are left and right parts we should get two of the left, and throw the first away once we have learned how to build it. Anyway, I think that was all the building we got done today... I am starting to droop, and need some sleep.

I have just won the auction for a ZIPIT wireless terminal. It will end up being about $100 which is a good price for a WiFi Instant Messaging terminal. It can also have an SSH program installed so I can connect to my server at home and use the LYNX text based web browser. Sure, graphics would be nice, but that adds power consumption and cost. This is a small device that can be used almost anywhere. I will see how it goes when I get it anyway.

Seems like I have some more work to do. I have a potential new client asking about a program called AFTrack that plugs into your Nokia 3650/6600/6630 phone and sends GPS data from a bluetooth GPS back to a server. I have not yet written the server, but it is not too hard to do, and I guess it will be added to my to-do list. The data can be sent via GPRS or SMS. The GPRS code should not be too hard as I have implemented something really similar in the past. SMS should be fairly easy too. I just need to work out how to add this - as a stand alone program, or as part of the client software.

Wikipedia has a list of most of the iPod hacks. Not a bad list... A good starting point if nothing else.

Time for breakfast I think... I also need to find some bits and pieces in the garage today for building... I was given a shopping list, and now just need to find it all :-)

I like driving... It forces me to think, just like running, although I can drive for longer than I can run. I have been known to drive for five or six hours continuosly with only a small break, whereas I can only run for close to an hour. But driving allows me to think about projects. There is one where the client wants a solution within a months or so, and I need to write up a proposal ASAP for this client. I have asked a friend for a quote for part of this job, and thought on the way home how to extend this a bit - making the entire solution more flexable at a minor increase in cost. I think the client will go for it... He will love it I am sure.

This sort of thinking is something that I really do not get done when I am not driving since I just do not sit down and think. When I used to work in the city I used to get a chance to spend a lot of time just thinking on the way to and from work on the train - and it is one of the reasons why I like running too. I certainly do not always think about work when driving, but regardless of what I am thinking about it is almost certainly worthwhile.

I will get more of a chance to think tomorrow when I go over to North Rocks Computer Market. I need some parts for one of my clients, and I will save some money by picking things up there. So it will be a quick trip to North ROcks a bit before noon tomorrow.

Finally, I have been meaning to post a link to this for the last couple of days. According to News.Com.Au, a swedish Uni has finally developed a female crash test dummy since women have a higher risk of whiplash than men.

One of my friends has just got himself an XBox, and needs to have it modded to load some new software on it. Thanks for microsoft, any code to be installed on the machine must be signed for it to run. Since code you add yourself is not signed, the XBox needs to have some modifications to run this code. The courts have agreed with the ACCC that mod chips are not in themselves illegal since they have substantial non-infringing uses. So you can buy a mod-chip from here.

Earlier I had the TV on, and there just happened to be a show on about US history, and they mentioned the 'Buffalo Soldiers'. I had no idea what they were, but did know the name. Turned out that they were a group of black soldiers over 100 years back fighting the indians. I had heard about them from the Bob Marley song.

News.Com.AU has a story about a helicopter rescue in Antarctica. The mission was needed because the plane the helicopter was meeting had faulty landing gear that needed to be fixed.

I am now home after a long day building. We did not get the things done that I thought we were going to get done, but got some other things done instead. The first thing that I worked on was a wooden frame to sit on the bottom of the aircraft at the back so that some sucker (probably me) will be able to get into the back and lie down to assist in riveting. The board reminds me of a back board used when doing first air.

Following that we then started match drilling the top skin of the rear. This actually took the rest of the day surprisingly. There is an amazing amount of work required get the two sheets lined up. Tomrrow afternoon the job will be to remove the skins and deburr them and also dimple them before riveting. I do not think we will get any riveting done tomorrow, but I am guessing that we will be doing everything but...

So basically just another day working on the plane :-)

Much of today will be working on the plane. I suspect that I will spend a whole lot of time inside the tail riveting up the top of the tail skin. Given the access in that part it will be a yucky job but it has to be done. And I am sure there are worse jobs. Actually, it will not be that bad... And I am guessing that we will be spending more time putting control rods in too...

The ACM Queue there is an interview with one of the engineers looking after the Hotmail Web Site. There is an interesting quote - "...New hires tend to want to do complex things, but we know complex things break in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy to put back together after they break.". I love that quote...

There is an allegation on the GRC Web Site that the recent WMF exploit was actually a back door intentionally built into windows for purposes unknown. By analysing how it operated the author of the page suggests that the fault was built in by microsoft, for internal purposes, or by some other organisation.

There is an article in news.Com.AU about how LCD and plasma TV prices are set to drop by 50% in the next 12 months thanks to increased production, and more players entering the market; combined with increased consumer demand.

On the back of Billy Joel releasing a classical album, Roger Waters has released an >opera called Ça Ira. Roger Waters is one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, a band whos music I love. Also created for performances of the opera are amazing images of Mark Holthusen. Technically this is not an opera since the words are in English. The opera is based on the history of the French Revolution.

One more bug in TeamTrack. I tried changing when the last report was run, and realised that it was not changing at all. Then I looked at the function call, and realised that this paramater was not even one of the ones listed being sent to the function call. I guess I did this since I had a seperate function to update the last run date, and did not want to accidently update this value. Adding a call to the function that does updates the last run fixed that problem.

Then I had a brainwave. I guess that one of my users would love an emailed copy of the report sent to him each day. Hmm... Lets try adding a semicolon between the email addresses and see if it works. Nah. I have to split the email address by hand. No problem since it is an easy job in VB.NET.
Dim ea() As String = EmailAddress.Split(";")
For Each eaa As String In ea
sm.To.Add(New Mail.MailBox(eaa, eaa))
Next
rather than
sm.To.Add(New Mail.MailBox(EmailAddress, EmailAddress))
Now I just need to wait about five minutes for the report to run. [Every five minutes the client software checks to see if it needs to run a report, and then runs it if needed. It has just run, and has been sent to both the email addresses. This is PERFECT!]

I really do need to start documenting the software. I suppose I could just point people at the Blog and say 'The instructions are in there' but that really is not a helpful reply. Maybe I could just pay someone to document everything. Might be easier that way. I love to build more than document. Documenting things is OK, but building is fun. [Yeah, I know, I am a true engineer... And I am not sure if that is a compliment or an insult :-)]

I may have been wrong with my prediction of the next iPod product. I had forgotten about the possibility of the iPod Mobile Phone. This is realistically not an area that Apple have got into in the past all that much. Their previous Motorola ROKR phone was a disaster with only 100 songs beingl able to be uploaded to it. But now, Australian IT is reporting that Apple have applied for a number of trademarks in the USA. They include phrases such as 'Mobile Me' covering areas including computing devices, mobiles and more.

According to The Register, Apple may be sacrificing battery life for speed with their new MacBook intel based laptops. The G4 based iBook has a battery life for the 15" version quoted at 5.5 hours. There is no such claim made by apple on the MacBook. My guess is that it would be about half this.

I do not knwo what has happened today, by my phones have been fairly quiet. Maybe people have been reading my blog and taking this as an indication not to call. I do not know. Regardless, things have been relatively quiet. I did get a SKYPE from Taipai, but that was all.

This week it seems that I am becoming a regular at the Post Office. You would not believe how many post office recepits were in my wallet. I have been going there about twice a day - when people need things tomorrow if possible, or if I want to get them out tomorrow just from a marketing exercise. It gives people a good feeling when they order something on a tuesday afternoon, and it arrives on a thursday morning, or even better a wednesday morning. That is one of the ways to get repeat business. Another of these ways is to meet your customers needs.

I have one user of my software who works for a government agency. They have issues downloading my software updates from the net, and need to use a computer in another part of their organisation to get the software. And the way that things are set up is that they have been storing 2 mBytes onto CD-ROM and then throwing the CD-ROM away. They thought about using a USB memorystick, but they could not get their IT department to supply one. They could get a new PC but not a memory stick. So today I purchased a 128 MByte stick from GoLo for $20 and sent it to them as a present. When they get back from leave they will be so happy - I have solved one of their problems for them. Give people what they want and they will keep coming back to you.

I was working on my TeamTrack software to add a 'Delete Scheduled Report Function'. Well, the first thing was that my database library was missing a minor feature - the 'Delete Report by ReportID' function. The function technically was there, it is just that it displayed a message box that said 'To Be Implemented'. Five minutes of programming fixed that one. Then I had to test it. I removed the report I wanted to delete, leaving another two there, but I wanted to do more testing. So I had to add some reports. And the software kept crashing. Very strange. It was saying a string was too big for the database field. Editing the database did not help either. This should not be happening.

Then I started looking at the code. The routine for adding the record to the database was being run lots of times rather than just once. I could not work out what was happening, particularly since the function did not seem to be called more than once, and the code was not inside a loop. After a lot of stuffing round I found I had copied some text to below the call to the Add Report function. And this code had a GOTO statment which caused the program to always re-execute the Add report by accident. Removing that piece of code made things work.

One side effect of this is that I added the reports saying that they had last been run in 1899 by accident. Well, I purposly set that date, but I had code that then said if the year is 1899 then assume that the report was last run today. And I forgot about that code, and thought that having 1899 was correct. Which could mean that the software would send through close to 40,000 reports listing the daily use of the vehicles. Needless to say that this bug has been fixed.

I am now runing out of features to be added. There are some new report formats to be added but that is not by job - I have a client who is happy to design reports and for me to include them into my software. What more could I ask? It is fantasic when that happens - I can work on the back end systems, and someone else can work on designing the reports how they need them. Since i do not actually use the reports myself for anything it is hard for me to know what to put into them.

I have just got back from a short run - maybe 3.5KM or so in just under an hour. I did manage to build distance slightly which was good - I did once around an oval 2/3rds of the way into the run. It was slightly humid outside, but that was offset to some extent by spitting rain.

During the run I came to two different conclusions. Firstly is that glasses do actually have a use. They can stop rain getting into your eyes. A couple of times droplets managed to get into my eyes, and I do not entirely like that sensation. It is like having eyedrops. I would prefer not to have glasses if that was the only side-effect, but not having that happen is a good side-effect.

The other conclusion I came to was that Apple's next iPod is going to be the 'iPod Nano Sports' or the 'iPod Video Sports'. Not sure which one it will be, or it might be both. But let me explain. Whilst running today there was a bit of rain out there - very fine, but there was rain. And I had a rather expensive iPod potentially about to get soaked. This got me to thinking - Why is there no water resistant iPod from apple. Surely it cannot be that hard if you sacrifice the size slightly for a plastic case. I am sure that people would pay a premium for this.

It cannot be too hard to build this either. The only hard parts are the docking connector, and the headphone socket. But I am sure that the apple engineers have ways around that - even if it is a flexable rubber plug that goes into the connector when it is not in use. Or they could go for a new connector just for this product with its own dock.

The Register has a list of the Top 10 Gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Personally, I found the gadgets listed to be rather boring. The most interesting was one that senses when you are exercising if you are watching TV, and turns the volume down if you stop. And even it was not all that great. My brother told me about a device that uses a gyro and a GPS receiever to help you locate stars and planets in the night sky. You can enter a planet (mars) and this device will help you find it.

They are also reporting that companies in the UK have been able claim back VAT on purchases even when the company that they have purchased from has illegally not paid VAT to the tax man but have claimed that they have. In the UK some companies have been bankrupted when their suppliers did not pay VAT, and they were effectively required to pay it twice. This is what I call rude. The European Court of Justice ruled that it was unaccpetable to force the buyers to be liable for VAT when there was no way that they could determine if the VAT had been paid already. I assume that the situation in Australia is that provided that a Tax Invoice has been provided then the buyer is protected.

I have been awake for about an hour, and I just could not get back to sleep for some reason. Not sure why. It is nice and quiet outside at this hour, but it is not good being up at this time when you need the sleep. Perhaps after checking mail and the like I will go back to bed and get some more sleep. I will see how it goes.

My father gets back from Indonesia this weekend at some stage. I am not sure exactly when he is coming back - I spoke to him a couple of days back when he rang to get some advice on GPS for work. I guess he will be happy to be home - it must be getting close to three weeks that he has been away - he left boxing day to go over there for a small project.

One of my friends noted that I had put a GPS receiver up for sale on eBay. He promptly sent me a message suggesting I add a photo to the item which is probably a very good idea. I had now added a photo, and a galary photo. I doubt that there will be many people bidding on this option but you never know. I actually had a person ring up yesterday wanting a GPS module, but unfortunately he needed a 5V one, not 3.3V. Else I would have had a definite bidder... And if this one sells on eBay I have a heap more to sell...

Time to get back to bed followed by a run I think...

So much for getting any programming done this evening. I started looking at it, and then the British SitCom of 'My Family' started. This would have been fine except the show sent me to sleep. I just could not keep my eyes open. One moment I was watching the show, and the next moment I was watching the closing credits. I had seen this episode before so it was not a total loss, but it did mean no programming got done. I guess the software will get done tomorrow.

And I think that this means that I really should get an early night. At the moment I am watching another episode of Junkyard Wars, but as soon ass that is finished I think I will get some shut-eye... This episode of Junkyard Wars is an edition for 200 years of trains, and so they have to build train engines to be raced against each other whilst pulling 30 tons of carriage.

Tomorrow should be reasonably quiet. Not much planned apart from some report writing and programming. Oh, and I need to get some more hardware out the door. If I start at 7AM I should be able to finish everything by about 11PM. About three weeks into the future. I was hoping to be able to spend a few days in Auckland during the next month or two, and given how busy things are getting that looks like a pipe dream. Then again I might just need to create the time.

I am going to attempt to get some software done this evening - I have some software that deals with the serial port - and I want to add the functionality so that it deals with a TCP Telnet connection. It should not take more than an hour or two... And I can do it whilst watching TV. I hope to do the testing monday if all goes well. Unfortunately testing is a pain since I do not have the hardware here to test things.

And if the weather is not oo bad tomorrow morning I think I will go for another run. 3km should be simple I would guess... I am looking forward to getting more running done.

More work... I have a meeting with a TV production company next week to discuss a project. Too many more phone calls like that one and I might have to look at getting an office job so that I can get a rest. Nah... I like working for myself too much. Despite a few issues I do really love it. After all, in how many jobs can you decide that you are tired and then have an afternoon nap? Unfortunately, often that afternoon nap will be interrupted with an eMail or a phone call. [Since emails are generally quiet, this is not really an issue. It is the phone calls that are anoying when they come in.]

Around lunch time I was out getting lunch, and noticed a helicopter racing south... Thanks for the SMH, I know what this low flying chopper was up to. It was on the way to pick up a person who had broken his leg in two places. In what is sure to create news stories internationally he broke his leg whilst kicking a spider. The Huntsman is listed by the Australian Museum as being a relatively harmless species FYI. The SMH reports that the spider was killed.

I got an email from my brother thanking me for the help installing his lights on Tuesday. The cool bit was disposing of the old light fittings. I will let you read his words... 'I put the old light fittings out for the council clean-up. One of the pendants went in under 15 minutes, the other has its covers taken within an hour and the covers for the old oysters were gone by the next morning along with the light globes...'. I guess council cleanups are the new way to recycle stuff.

Last night I watched a Junkyard Wars episode on Discovery. It was really cool - three part 800 mile race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas via various junk yards. There were three tasks to complete - one involved boating across the colorardo river. Another was across sand dunes, and the last was a rally course. Entertaining TV.

Of work continues like it has for the last few days I think I will need to start employing someone to assist me. Things are becoming that busy here. Not that I am complaining - I am always after more work - but I might need to think about bringing in someone to help me on projects.

As a way to indicate that the world is in fact changing, Nikon UK have released a statment that all but stops production of 35mm and larger film cameras and enlargers in favour of digital systems. I am surprised that this is happening so soon as I thought that extra high resolution users would still be using film for the next few years.

I just got off the phone with a potential new client in the pacific. They are at the moment doing a scoping exercise whilst working out priorities for this year. Rather than doing the eMail tag thing I just gave a VoIP phone call across there. I was impressed with how well it worked generally - it connected faster than using Telstra. There was the occasional dropout and also it did hang up once, but it was good. The potential client also let me know that he would arrange a site visit if he could, but I do not think that I will be able to justify it on this job. Things may change of course, but that is the impression.

Telstra decided to send me a bill today for one of my services. It is not on my single bill since the billing systems are not yet properly integrated between the service types - anyway this bill I know cost more to process than it did for the amount in question. It is a bill for one cent. They do say "PAYMENT IS NOT REQUIRED UNTIL NEXT BILL". It would be tempting to pay it anyway... I am sure I can find a 1c piece somewhere, and they are still legal tender.

Earlier I was looking for some suppliers of 'Data Radios' for a project. I came across an article titled 'GPS Water Vapor Estimation Using Interpolated Surface
Meteorological Data from Australian Automatic Weather Stations' which sounds really really boring. The translation is 'Determing Humdity through GPS satellites', and is something I have thought about doing every now and then. Apart from the time aspect, one of the reasons I have not done it is that it requires having a good view of the sky from the GPS antenna, something which the trees here stop. I can assure my readers that this was not an article I went looking for. Even I am not that much of a geek...

I have some more tracking units to go out later today. The pieces cam in earlier today, and they will go out later today, now that I have programmed them up and tested them - and of course invoiced the client for them too. The client will end up getting them next week, even with Express Post. Country Australia has this problem constantly. Next Day Delivery? Ha.

I did a few minutes in the garage earlier cleaning up and found some surplus but almost new GPS modules... I have been meaning to get rid of them somehow - so I decided to try eBay. I do not expect this auction to set the world on fire, but it would be good to get rid of some. They are actually a good GPS module, but only useful for people wanting to experiment or to build a product to put these into. I will see how it goes.

My to-do list is getting more sensible. Items are slowly coming off it, although the smaller items are tending to get replaced by bigger single line entries. For instance 'Send Email to Craig' has been replaced with something like 'Develop new earth shattering product'. Maybe not quite that extreme, but that is what it feels like. I should start estimating the time requirements for entries, and see what that tells me.

The Popgadget site is reporting that Levi's are releasing a pair of iPod Jeans. The pants contain a side pocket with an iPod dock, and one of the pockets contains the remote control for the iPod. It will be interesting to see what the laundry instructions are like, and how many iPods get put in the wash. Actually, I wonder how many iPods get washed right now.

This is a classic microsoft stuff up... According to a report published in The Register, Microsoft MapPoint has decided that the Holiday Inn Eastleigh is located in the middle of the English Channel, just south of the Channel Tunnel. This must be an amazing piece of engineering, although I am slightly confused at how to drive there.

So what is on my agenda for today? More programming, and some more research. My TeamTrack software is working well, and I am just waiting for comments back from the users about the new features. [There is one feature that I do need to add to the software - right now 3 minutes after it runs it starts running any reports that that have been scheduled since it last run. But there is no way in the software to delete a report. OOps.] I have to write some quotes too... And a friend of mine is coming back today to do some more work in the garage on one of his projects so today might be a bit busy...

I have just won a bid on eBay for an Ethernet VoIP phone. The device ended up costing about $75 which is a very good price really. I cannot wait to get it and plug it in. At the moment I have an ethernet to phone interface plugged into an old phone. This new device will have caller ID, a phone book and things like that. More information will be provided when I get it in a few days.

Macworld has been on today in San Franscisco. Apple have just released their new intel based wares. They have released a new intel based Laptop and iMac. Cool. They have also released an FM radio and remote for the iPod video and nano. Nice.

PlayAgainGames has a entire list of variations for rules for Monopoly. This includes things such as having two sets of tokens which move, doubling property purchase prices or allowing you to build on properties without owning all the properties in the group. It might be interesting to play with some of these rules. Time to get the Monopoly set out again!

Also, InventGeek has a project that turns a Oral B toothbrush into a lockpick. Cute idea.

One of my clients has been suggesting features constantly for my TeamTrack Software. He is the one who really pushed for the reporting engine for the software, and told me that he would start selling it when I had a reporting engine that worked. That was a good enough reason for me to significantly improve the reporting backed to the software. One of the things that the software does is report on when a vehicle starts and stops.

This functionality is obtained from tracking units in the vehicles, and interogating the database and analysing the data returned. The normal sorts of things such as how far the journey was, and how long it took were obvious ones to add. What I had never thought of was adding a paramater for the amount of time the vehicle was stopped just before the start of this journey. When you think about this it is really useful, but it did take me a while to cotton onto this. I am sure that I could have used crystal reports to work this out, but I decided it would be easier on users who were editing reports by simply doing the calculation myself and adding it to the dataset sent to the reporting engine. I guess it took about 30 minutes to add this feature, and it looks to be working well.

The other feature I added was to be able to use OziExplorer Waypoints in reports. OziExplorer manages waypoints in a text file with an optional range that they are useful for. I have added the ability to automatically use these text files too. Rather cool even if I say so myself...

There is an old Monty Python skit, well before my time, about the University of Wooloomooloo in Sydney and their Phillosophy department. Their new member of staff is asked to change his name since it caused too much confusion to the faculty. You see he was not called 'Bruce', but something like 'Michael'. It was felt that by having a person not called 'Bruce' then the people would not know what was being talked about.

Well, I have had a couple of people over with the same name, and I should say it was rather confusing. I would one a question by name, and both would be wondering who I was asking. It got even worse when I was talking about another person who shared their name. I actually thought about using surnames but I did not think that it was slightly rude... I used to work with a couple called Peter and Lisa - and I can only guess how they coped with this type of thing [Actually I was once doing some site work with Lisa, and we had just used our ID's to remove a significant amount of computer equipment from the site to be brought back to Sydney. After we were given our ID's back after having them checked Lisa realised she had her husband's ID, and no-one noticed. Oops.]

One of the peopel who came visiting was a friend I had not seen for about four years... It was great to catch up. What with work and the like we had not had a chance to meet up. We had a great time catching up... Time to get some more programming done...

There is an old Monty Python skit, well before my time, about the University of Wooloomooloo in Sydney and their Phillosophy department. Their new member of staff is asked to change his name since it caused too much confusion to the faculty. You see he was not called 'Bruce', but something like 'Michael'. It was felt that by having a person not called 'Bruce' then the people would not know what was being talked about.

Well, I have had a couple of people over with the same name, and I should say it was rather confusing. I would one a question by name, and both would be wondering who I was asking. It got even worse when I was talking about another person who shared their name. I actually thought about using surnames but I did not think that it was slightly rude... I used to work with a couple called Peter and Lisa - and I can only guess how they coped with this type of thing [Actually I was once doing some site work with Lisa, and we had just used our ID's to remove a significant amount of computer equipment from the site to be brought back to Sydney. After we were given our ID's back after having them checked Lisa realised she had her husband's ID, and no-one noticed. Oops.]

One of the peopel who came visiting was a friend I had not seen for about four years... It was great to catch up. What with work and the like we had not had a chance to meet up. We had a great time catching up... Time to get some more programming done...

I had a phone call a little while ago asking if he could come over and use my workshop to work on a case for one of his clients. No problem, except that I just needed to spend 20 minutes cleaning up the workshop so it was in a fit condition to be used. I expect him to be here at any time. So if this entry is rather short, well, that might be the reason why. [Correction... My friend is running a bit late... So I have time to go to the Post Office once more...]

The Queensland government is reporting that they are looking at shutting down a an SMS service showing the location of police traps. The service on Queensland's Gold Coast has about 300 'spies' on the lookout for speed traps, breath testing vans and police patrols. The operators are arguing that by informing the public about the location of the police they are therefore actually encouraging people not to commit an offense.

And the Paul Saffo web site is reporting how he is using GPS to track movements in his house form the San Andreas Fault. He was lent a surveying GPS to do the initial survey, and intends to re-survey things periodically in order to see how fast his house is moving.

Things are gradually getting off my to-do list. Some things were not expected to be off today are now off it. And other things have been added. On tuesday of last week I got an order for some IC's. So I placed an order with my supplier in the USA. The parts were postmarked January 3 from Las Vegas, and I got them this morning. I was expecting them to be here next week at the earliest. They are of the type that just need to be placed into a new postpack and sent on. Perfect.

One of the things on the list was to pay some bills. This was fine until I got to the cashback for the M4/5. They wanted a phone number in it for contact. I started with 0 2 9 6 1 8 6 4, and then ran out of spaces. Ahh, Even though only 2/2rds of NSW is in the 02 area code they assumed that everyone was and therefore decided not to ask for the area code. Great. That one will be sent to COMP.RISKS... One more thing for my list.

One other thing... I have found a couple of bugs with the software that comes with the Vodafone 3G card. Firstly is that if you have Internet Explorer running when you put the device in, the software will hang until IE is shut down. The other bug is that all images are 'compressed' regardless of the settings in the software. This is mildly annoying if you are wanting to use the web. This is fatal if you are trying to use GoogleEarth! Vodafone are sending me a CD with the new version of the software on it. Thanks, Vodafone.

Another order is half way out the door. By half way out the door I mean that there I have just built a couple of trackers for this job. I still need to wire some GPS cables, a radio interface, and some other stuff. But I am powering through it. Unfortunately I now need to place an order for some parts. Still, they should be here before close of business today. Whenever I work on building up these radio based trackers I always promise myself to investigate getting them made surface mount. That would make things so much faster when assembling. I will see if I can devote some time to looking at the costings of this. I have a good company that I use located just off Sunnyholt Road at Kings Park I think - I will talk to them.

I also got an email inviting me to talk at an event at Wyong Racecourse on February 19th. I am not sure how many people will come to my talk, but there are usually about 3000 people there for the event. I will be talking on Google Earth and giving a demo over GPRS. Last year I can remember finishing of my presentation at a friends place in the middle of a blackout on my laptop with my hail damaged car outside... I really should have put a bit more time into my presentation... I don't think it was my best ever presentation.

Anyway, time to order some parts and then visit the postoffice....

One order is has just been completed, and will be sent this morning. And I have a another couple of orders in production. I am just taking a break from work right now - I find that varying my work between spending time on the PC, and doing things that are more practical makes me more productive.

My mother heard back from the supervisors on her doctorate. Right now it is still in the administrative process following the thesis being submitted to the examiners. It is unsure how long this will last, but it would be my guess is that she will get her doctorate at the end of this year some time. But right now that is just a personal opinion - and universities are not usually known for their speed.

Apple has released some iPod statistics. They shipped 14 million iPods last quarter, and have shipped a total of 42 million of them ever. Whatever way you look at this, it is a HUGE number of devices, as well as a huge marketing coup. After all, the iPod is synonimous with the MP3 music, and realistically, given the world population, 42 million is not all that many. Not when you concider there are over a billion cellphones out there. And Apple has the naming rights to the industry which must be really cool.

I had better get some more work done. I need to unpack my car from yesterday when I did some work at my brothers... I was too exhausted to do it yesterday - so I need to do that job now. Then back to the soldering.

Despite being a good puzzle, I have never even tried Sudoku. It really does not interest me much. Whilst reading The Register today, I saw an advert for a Sodoku T-Shirt. But what makes this one interesting is that the numbers go more than from 0-9, it goes from 0-9 and A-F. Also rather than a 3x3 matrix of 10x10 squares, it contains a 4x4 matrix of 16x16 squared.

The Seattle PI paper is reporting that many of Sprint and Nextel cellphones and long distance in the USA have been unable to use their service after a fibre optic cable was cut near Phoenix, Arizona. I can see more of this type of thing happening as time goes by. Before the 2002 Ironman Championships in Hawaii, the islands cellphone network was killed for an afternoon as someone drove into a telegraph pole and also took out a fibre optic cable.

Finally, for the baby who has everything comes DIY geek babywear.

I have a lot of work to do today. Apart from working on my brothers place I did not actually get much done yesterday... Well, not productive work anyway. If the phone does not ring too much I might actually have some success in getting through some work.

I worry about some friends sometimes. This friend sent me a link to a site, and asked me 'do you think they are legit?', mentioning that they had VisualBasic 6 for US$50, and VisualStudio for US$129. They are saying that they are able to do this since they do not provide the CD's or manuals. Definitely pirated software...

C-Net News is reporting that UK House Of Commons MP's are demanding WiFi access. For security purposes the IT department have been resisting attempts to implement WiFi. So MP's are visiting a cafe nearby to get internet access if they do not want to go as far as their office. C-Net also reports that Steve Jobs has released some comments on the next iPod. "I have some pretty good sources inside Apple, and here's what I'm hearing," Jobs said. "The next iPod will be huge...an 8-pounder with a 10-inch screen."

I think it must be almost time for lunch... I finished off at my brothers place about an hour ago, and right now I am looking forward to a cool shower and some food. I was offered lunch there but I needed to race back here to visit the post office - I hoped to have a parcel waiting for me there, and I needed to send one off. Unfortunately the parcel was not there and was actually delivered to home, but I was not home so it will be at the post office later today. ARGH! One more trip out.

At my brothers place I ended up installing about eleven different light fittings. This ended up taking about five hours, or about 30 minutes per fitting. I was surprised - it did not seem like that long. Then again each fitting needed to be modified with different wire entry holes, and different mounting holes. All this adds up. I had awful trouble installing the ensuite's light - the toggle just would not go in. Must have taken about 10-15 minutes just to get it in. And then the walk-through wardrobe had similar problems getting a screw into an existingt hole.

And like many units, my brother does not have air conditioning meaning that there is little flow of air near the ceiling where I was doing the work. Still, this job is done right now. My next job is to decide which is more important - a shower or some food... Hmm...

I went for a run this morning - I probably did about 3km once more... I can assure you that it looked a lot cooler outside than it actually was. Correction - it really was not that warm, it was just a bit humid. I guess I went out probably 30 minutes too late, as it had just started to warm up after the rain. Out of the sun, and in the slight breeze it actually was kind of nice outside. I actually decided to sprint the last third of a KM or so. It felt good, but also felt good to stop I can assure you. Doing exercise is a great way to start the day.

Right now I am at my brothers place installing new light fittings. He has just gone down to the local hardware store to pick up some more junction connectors since we had run out. We have managed to get about four of the light fittings installed - and it is taking about 15 minutes each. The problem is that they have used the fittings as joiners for wires, and unfortunately the new fittings will not work that way. Which means adding joiners, and extending the wires. This becomes a real pain.

Also all the remaining light fittings also need more holes drilled in them - the ones we have been using have needed a hole drilled for the power cable - but the remaining ones also need a hole for the mounting holes. Yuk. Anyway I am getting through them slowly.

I finished downloading from the Web Site overnight - grabbing the entire content. I really did not expect to download as much as I did. When I woke up this morning I had downloaded something like 700 MBytes. I was expecting to get probably something like 50 MBytes. Thankfully I have a very good quota with Westnet, and even with all the other downloads I will make this month I doubt that I will go over my allocation.

I have been a users of Linux for more time than I would like to admit to. I think I have been using Linux since before day 1, since I was part of the Minix community when Linus was hacking Linux originally. I have been using windows about as long as that too... Which is why an article on Mad Penguin is so hilarious. Most people write articles on Linux for windows users. This one is on Windows for Linux users. Not all the events described happened at the same time, nor to the same computer, but they all happened...

The Register is reporting Something new under the sun, specifically in the way of a Lancaster plane for WWII flying over the UK in a Google Earth photo. I was expecting the plane to be much smaller given the height. After all, a 747 looks small when seen from the ground. And you can see a lot of area when looking at the ground from one. But logically, there is no reason for the plane to appear anything but the right side (or close to it) when photographed from the air.

There are times when I need to download a complete WWW site... There are a number of reasons for this - normally it is the easiest way to download all the information from a site without needing to worry about navigating by pages. Case in point... I am downloading from a company right now. I found a large amount of documents and it was just easier to download the whole site. And that way if the company at some stage decides that the information is no longer relevant then I have a copy locally of everything I need.

The program that I use is called 'Teleport Pro', and is fairly stable. They do not tend to release many updates for it since it is exactly what it needs to do. I have introduced other people to this same software, and they continue to use it... Therefore it must be good. One of the things that I love about it is that I can months or years later go back and download all the updates and it will just download the updates. Perfect.

Tonight whilst doing some work I was watching 'Go Big' on Foxtel. This is an Australian comedy from 2004 staring 'Justine Clarke' and 'Alex Dimitriades'. Justine shot to prominance in my mind at least by playing the lead in 'The Surgeon'. I found the movie really funny... Sort of a split between Bridget Jones and maybe Crackerjack. Cool movie... I could definitely seen it again...

Tomorrow I have to help my brother installing a whole lot of lights. Should be a fun distraction - not that I have the time, but I need to do it. My mother also has an important meeting... With her doctoral supervisors, probably to hear back from the people who examined her thesis. There will probably be some changes that need to be made, but that is normal with a doctorate.

I can only guess what happened... This morning when driving over to Brookvale I saw a car on the right hand shoulder. This is unusual, and dangerous. But the best bit was that the car was sitting on top of a mattress. I cannot for the life of me work out how that would have happened.

When I was in the USA I picked up a couple of Disney picture frames for a friends two kids. Since then I had not had a chance to actually drop them in... Whenever we have caught up it has been more by accident than good planning... Since i knew I was dropping past his office today I decided to actually drop the picture frames in. It turned out that he had picture frames for family photos... but nothing for the kids themselves. So he was stoked to get the frames. They are so cute... They have a button which lights up little stars around the edge...

Three years ago a friend of mine took me for a flight over sydney in a light plane, in part for thanks for helping him with some wiring in his house. The plane was hired like planes normally are. Today I found out that the plane is actually owned by a client of mine - I had no idea that he even owned the plane, yet alone owned that plane. It really is a small world. I knew the plane callsign sounded familiar, but I could just not place it. The only reason I remembered the three letters of the callsign is that ISM actually stands for something in my work world. [It stands for Industrial, Scientific and Medical BTW]

In Alaska a new Pizza delivery company has started. They promise (within their delivery area) to deliver Pizza's for free, although they do not promise to deliver it hot. The cool thing is that they delivery by air. They have actually set up the pizza oven at the local airport. Business has been pretty brisk aparently.

Right now I had better get onto my To-Do list... So many things to do, so little time.

One more job is off the to-do list, and more are on it. This is how things go of course. But it does mean that I at least have a lot of work to do. And I am learning things too - well between phone calls that is. One thing I forgot earlier - I had a phone call whilst I was in the parking lot with the PC's in the boot I had phone call from a client/friend. This was mildly inconvenient since the bluetooth handsfree had picked it up - meaning I needed to get into the body of the car to answer my phone.

Anyway this client was telling me that we wanted some work done in the next few days if possible since he was doing a couple of hours in Taipai for a site inspection on Wednesday. All I can think is that this is a HUGE distance to travel for such a short period of time. Still, if the client is prepared to pay for it... To me the entire concept is surreal.

Kottke.org has a list of 50 things to do with your iPod. Some of the things are particularly useless, and some are so obvious (like, who would have thought of using the iPod in your car?), but there are some I would never have thought of. Things like using it for displaying recipies, or attaching it as part of a RAID array in a server.

I have just got home and I now have more work than I can poke a stick at. I now need to see how I can offload some of it to other people whilst still making a profit. The meeting this morning was good. It 'should' be an easy project, but my guess is that there will be some complications. There always are it seems. This will be a good project - I am just not sure of the NDA issues at the moment, so I cannot say much more than that. Once more I need to do documentation to produce a proposal for the client - and they are interested in some type of profit share too.

The second meeting today was basically done from the boot of my car - with two laptops sitting there working away with the 240V inverter and also a wireless connection. I do love having the wireless connection - actually on this job I could not have done it any other way thanks to the architecture of the system. It was interesting seeing people from the company I was doing the work for come back from lunch. They would stop by asking questions... And generally interrupting. Thankfully I had someone there running interference.

And since I have got home I have needed to spend most of the time on the phone. Working out a server that was not working, then some administration stuff, and working out what phones are needed for the church manse, and working out how to do that. And unfortunately much of this is not chargable. Anyway I have some work to do before the post office closes... More soon.

Optical Mice are an interesting beast. They have a small CCD video camera in them, and take many photos of the mousing surface, and do correlation analysis between shots to determine how the mouse has moved. The correlation function determines the most likely movement of the mouse - with some limit below which it assumes that the mouse has moved to somewhere with totally different image elements. Surprisingly the CCD sensor is usually only about 18x18 pixels. Given that video cameras are about 720 x 480 pixels, 18x18 is fairly course. Then again, of that is all that is needed why over engineer the device.

A student in The Netherlands has decided that this might be an interesting device to look at. He determined that he could read the image sensor using the serial port and take a lot of photos joining them together. Right now the mouse requires a hardware mod, and it appears that this means that the mouse is no longer workng. It remains to be seen if the USB mice can have new firmware uploaded to take photos whilst the mouse moves. Just think about things, how many times have documents been placed under a mouse. Imagine if a piece of spyware could scan the paper and send it to a non-trusted person over the net.

I have an interesting meeting this morning - an initial meeting for a new project. I might have to outsource part of this one, but it is still a fun one. It is over at Warringah Mall which is a pain to get to. Still, work is work.

Under the DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME category on MythBusters... They were testing if CD's would break in high speed drives. So they connected a CD to an angle grinder... Basically it destroyed itself... What do you expect? CD's are not designed for that... And neither are angle grinders I think.

I watched Mr Headmistress this evening... There was little else on either cable or free to air, and that looked the best. Not sure why I started to watch it, but I think it was the fact that it looked like the best thing on TV, and I could always go back to watching a recording of MythBusters. Frankly though the comedy was surprisingly good... Somewhere above the normal men wearing womens clothing type movies, more along the lines of St Trinians meets something... Not sure what though.

I sent the PCB to the client, and he looked at a copy of the work I had done, and picked up an error. So one more quick mod... In the morning I will send it off for construction.

Coding is done... and it works. I was surprised a bit how easy it was. More testing is needed but it looks great. I have to prepare a better test plan for it followed by upgrading it to my server. Sounds like a job for tomorrow.

The most popular book of 2005 has been released. Surprisingly (not) it is Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. According to this story, the book sold about 4 million copies on day one, and about 7 million in total during the year. That is a lot of words, and a lot of money. Particularly when you multiply that with all the countries around the world.

The >SMH is reporting that the young actress Sophie Heathcote died a few days ago in the USA. The 33-year-old, who starred in Grass Roots, Water Rats and A Country Practice, died suddenly from an aneurism at her Connecticut home on Thursday. Her husband prepared to return to Australia with her body and their two young children. This is a loss for the Australian entertainment industry.

I have put a bid on eBay for a ZipIt device. I tried to buy it through amazon.com, but none of the retailers would allow it to be sold outside the USA. Therefore I just searched eBay and found one for bid. Only one, and no buy-now button. I guess since the device sells for only US$99 there is not much of an after market of people wanting to buy the device. What does it do? Well, mostly instant messenger. It is a small 802.11 device that runs linux and runs only a small MSN type program. With Linux added you can then use SSH to connect to a server, and then maybe have a text based web browser so I can surf the net without a PDA or a laptop.

I got the PCB dinished. It must have taken about two hours to make what appeared to be small changes. I just need to change two connectors, and move around some components. I expected it to take a while but not that long. Still, if I was more experienced it would have taken a lot less time.

Now I have some programming to do... TeamTrack needs an upgrade to allow me to do proximity based reporting. That is, when someone is within 100m of a location then use it for reports rather than the suburb day. But only when you are close.

As a short break I have been watching some Mythbusters, produced by 'Beyond International'. This is a cool program shown on Discovery, and also SBS. For those who have not seen Mythbusters, it is two Hollywood Special Effects People looking at Myths such as if it is better to walk or run in the rain. Qantas shows this on some of their long haul flights. Great show.

Enough of that. I need a break. I have just been working on a PCB for the last hour, and it is one of those activities that needs really high levels of concentration. And since I am not all that experienced with the software I am having a few hassles getting everything working. I will probably end up getting a friend of mine to fix a few things That I have not yet managed to do in the software. But it is getting there. Unfortunately I am not sure I will be able to charge the client for it all. C'est La Vie.

Before working on that I went for a short run. I thought it was a bit cooler than I thought it was... I did about 3km I would guess. Not as much as I would like, but enough to at least keep my general level of fitness. When it cools down a bit I intend to do a lot more running... And I might even do the City To Surf if I can find anyone to run with.

I did get a chance to think about some software during my run... Maybe a new product - not sure yet. The software would be fairly simple, but I am just looking for some more applications before I spend a huge amount of time working on the a piece of software with limited appeal. If I can find other uses for it I can then justify the development expense to myself with fewer caveats. Anyway that is something to mull in the back of my mind. Time to get back to the PCB

Our freinds at Google have released the Google Pack. This is a packaged download of a number of common programs for your PC, such as Norton's AntiVirus, Google Toolbar, Picasa and more. Looks really interesting, and might speed up installing software onto new PC's. They have also released a screen saver... Very cool.

I have a few things to do today... Work wise. Catching up on some projects, and writing some emails. The good thing is that one of my clients paid me a rather substantial deposit on some work so I guess I should get the hardware out ASAP for him. I can assure you that it did help my bank ballance rather significantly... Although there will be a nice GST bill as well out of it. But I am not complaining. Really I am not!

This morning before church I had some excitment... One of the women from my church rang to say that she was unwell. Quite dizzy in fact - and she was concerned that she could not even call the ambulance if she got worse since her front gate was locked. So I offered to go down and climb the fense and unlock it. Little did I realise it was going to be an 8 foot fense. I had planned ahead thankfully and put a fold up ladder in the car before leaving home - which was enough to get over the fense. Or at least onto the top of it, when I realised that I could unlock it without jumping over. I can only guess what people would have thought if they saw me whilst driving over. Criminal record here I come :-)

I do not normally post this late at night, but I have just got home and I thought I would post here as I wind down from what has been a long day. Where to start? First this morning we were working on the system to rotate the plane at will. Think of this as a way to do aerobatics on the ground without the engine attached. Well, maybe not. It is actually a way that we can move the plane around to move it more easilly so that we (I) do not need to crawl under the plane as often into cramped conditions. We (I) will still need to do that, but less often.

First job was to extend the engine stands we had purchased. They were great but were about 15-20cm too short. So we cut the stand in half, and put a block of wood in to extend it. Well, we would have if the block of wood was not too big. About 5 minutes on each block of wood with the scanner led to lots of dust, and engine mounts which fitted the wood. Then it was more work to attach the 2nd engine mount to the tail. This must have taken a good couple of hours, and I am not sure it is finished yet. But things are now good enough for one person to rotate the fuselage by themselves.

Following lunch we started installing the control column joystick. This ended up being much harder than expected since the washers needing to be installed are a complete pain to attach. So after a few interruptions that was it for the day. Lots got done, but very little appeared to get done if that makes any sense at all. Tomorrow (today, sunday) is a day off... Although I have some work that I need to get done... Anyway I think that is enough for me...

This russian site has a list of what have been voted the top 10 experiments of all time. I did some of these at highschool and at univesity like the double slit diffraction of light one. Some I would like to try like the Milikan oil drop experiment. These experiments told us a lot about the world, and allowed us as a society to develop things like the transistor and the IC, or even to measure the circumferance of the earth.

I love building things. If I did not there is no way that I would be helping my best friend build a plane just about every weekend. I would not be an engineer either. I found a great How To on how to build a really nice desk. Lots of instructions are given with a complete design. One to keep in the back of my mind. Another of those sites is this one which contains a photo of a person who found a working DVD player in a skip and built it into a toolbox as hopefully a joke.

Securiteam has an interview with Ilfak Guilfanov who wrote and released the unofficial patch for the Windows WMF vulnrability. Short article, but enlightning.

It never ceases to amaze me what some of the SPAM that I get suggests. I had one this morning just come from 'Ukrainian Folk Instruments Sales' wanting someone to handle transfers of money for a 5% commission. They class the job as a 'Financial Manager', but looking at the job description it looks like it is little more than a money laundering system. It is much harder to trace money if different ammounts come in and go out. Particularly when there is an un-related middle-man in the middle. Doing a tiny bit of research suggests that this activity is being used by phishers who send those dodgy emails from banks to process the money.

Last night I was trying to use my printer and it was not working. Typing its IP address into the browser did not work. Pinging the printer did not work. Nether did a restart. Looking at the back I realised that the light next to the ethernet port was not on, so I went downstars to look at the switch. There was one plug not fully inserted into the switch. As soon as it was pushed in everything started working. Simple cable issue.

According to DefenceLink, a radar device has been released that can see through cement walls. The Radarscope is designed to detect if there is a person hiding behind a wall, and runs on AA batteries.

Microsoft's Channel 9 has a story on recording the sounds for Windows Vista. The audio is being done by Robert Fripp who is apparently a great musician. I have put my feelers out to work out who he actually is. Apparently, he's the famous guitarist and composer, known for his founding role in the band King Crimson. The Wall Street Journal has a story about the person behind the Microsoft MediaCentre.

The SMH is reporting that the body of a man who died in Antarctica has been returned to Australia. The Australian Federal Police have been investigating from Australia, and they believe that the death was not suicide as first believed. There are approximately 60 people who could possibly be suspects...

I have just got home... Richard and I worked on the plane this afternoon, and got some work done on accessability... That is, one of the problems when working on the plane is that it is hard to get in and out of the fuselage if you want to do any work on it. So we worked on a system to rotate the plane when we need to. Richard picked up a couple of 'Engine Mounts' that allow you to hold the engine on one end and rotate it at the same time. However in this case we put the mount where the engine normally goes.

We used some wood to create a bracket to mount the plane on. This probably took an hour in total. There was another design we had seen using angle iron on the firewall, bit I think that this actually worked better. A couple of spacers were needed to get the edge clearance on the vertical pieces of wood.

We worked out that the plane can be held from the front of the plane. Tomorrow we will be working on the rear mount... We might even get a chance to actually sit in the plane...

A couple of links... There is a cute story on Wired about how hacker reprogrammed his cochlear implant so that he could hear music in it's former glory. The quote that I love from the article is "My hearing is no longer limited by the physical circumstances of my body. While my friends' ears will inevitably decline with age, mine will only get better. ". BoingBoing has also linked to a site called ParentHacks.Com which is by the partner of the person who edits all the O'Reilly 'Hacks' books. It is a site for geek parents with tons of tips...

Anyway, back to working on the plane.

Friday afternoon... Time for some time off... There were once again issues with the work that I did this morning. Why will things not work when I need to test the? I hate it when that happens. ARGH. Seems that tuesday I will be helping my brother put in some new lights in his unit - I promised him to help with this a while back... and he is now ready for me to help...

And the PCB that I delivered had a few issues. I expected this. Not surprising really... PCB's are something that I have not done much of recently, and I really just need to get some practice. There are a few changes to be made, and then I need to get my friend to make me another board... Better go... Lunch time.

The good thing about waking up in the middle of the night is that I tend then to sleep longer. I am not sure why this is, maybe there is just enough momentum in being that extra bit tired to stop me waking up quite so early. Regardless of why it is good. Before going to North Ryde I am hoping to pick up a PCB that I designed from the Post Office. If it is there it will be a pain since I then need to take it to near the airport before continuing on. We will see how things go there...

Given the issues with the XBox 360 power supplies, it comes as no surprise that someone has come up with the ultimate solution... Using a normat ATX power supply to run the XBox. The details are on the HackADay Web Site.

The Register is reporting that another user is selling posters of plasma screens. When they were caught they cancelled the auction suggesting that the bidders did not realise that they were not bidding on the poster but on the real thing. Also A florida SPAM organisation has been fined US$11b for sending Spam. The ISP does not expect to get a cent, but they like the message that the judgement sent.

Yes, the time on this post is correct... It should say it was created just after 4am. Yes, I know I should be in bed, but I could not sleep, so I came out to check my email rather than count immaginary sheep. I plan to get back to bed in the next little while, and hopefully I will fall straight to sleep. After all who wants to be awake at 4am :-)

This morning... In a few hours... I have some more work to do at North Ryde. The weather is looking not bad for this - at least it is not hot. Light rain will not affect me - but heat does. I am not sure how long I will be at that meeting... Since I am near the Macquarie Centre anyway I might drop in there for lunch and shopping afterwards. I will just see how things go. I would drop in and see my father who lives just around the corner from there too, but he is still in indonesia.

Finally, CNN is reporting that Bill Gates have announced a music download service called 'Urge'. This service will be like the iTunes one, but will also allow a subscription model where you can pay by the month. No news yet as to if this will be compatible with the iPod. I would guess not since Bill does not own one, and from what I can gather is anti-iPods. Anyway time to get back to bed. Goodnight to all.

I have just put a Pizza in the oven... In 20 minutes or so it should be cooked. I have not made myself a Pizza for ages... This one is a fairly healthy recipe - and Pizza's are fairly easy to make. They are also one of those foods that you can do anything with. At least in Australia... [As an aside, I once PDF'ed a PizzaHut brochure and emailed it to a friend in Italy. He was frankly amazed at the type of Pizza that was available for sale here... And said that you would never get many of those Pizza's over there]

The Courier Mail has a story suggesting that Telco's arround the world are going to start making VoIP data a lower priority on their networks, meaning that the traffic will be subject to delays and distortions. There are some regulatory domains that have actually ensured equal access, but this is in the definite minority.

These days using the internet can be dangerous. The current issue is a bug in the WMF file viewer on most Windows PC's that allows arbitary code to be run on the PC. That is technical speek for hackers being able to do what they want to your PC. But it is not why I am talking about using the net... But someone has worked out how to datamine amazon.com. The author devised a method to get access to about 100,000 users 'Wish Lists', and did basic analysis on this data. And analysis on who wanted what books in common. Since the guy is an author he searched for the people who had one of the books he had written on his wish-list and sent him a signed copy.

I have been putting back a task for ages. Basically my mapping system interfaces to the OziExplorer software, and adds text to the text that would normally appear as a 'tool tip'. Now, each client it seems wants different information in this field. Some want nothing, and others want tons of information.

Hard coding this data is easy for me as a programmer, but is a real pain if we need to change the information that is displayed. This afternoon I finally worked out how to make this a user configurable option. Basically I place a line like the following ine into the config file.
ID:[VehicleID][CR]Company:[CompanyName] [CR] [TimeLog] [Driver][CR] Spd: [Speed] Hdg: [Heading][CR]

This converts anything in the square brackets into the variable with that name. A while back I worked out how to use the system.reflection class in VB.NET to extract the paramater names and values for a structure. What I ended up doing was something like:
line.replace ("[VehicleID]", "1234")

This mostly worked. The one thing I forgot was that the .replace is a function and returns the changed string rather than changing it internally. So I actually did something like:
line = line.replace ("[VehicleID]", "1234")

This ended up giving a result like

I have spent some more time working with 'Updater' from The Code Project, and the more I look at the program the more I can see that it has issues. I actually could not work out how to actually get the software to work. No installer should be that hard to use. Maybe I should just pay for a commercial program to do this.

WHat I was able to do was to shut down my old PayPal account. I removed a credit card from my other account, and paid $2 to verify it on the old account. Then sent the money to my other account. And closed the one I wanted to shut down. Then attached the email and card that were attached to that account to my other account. Sounds complex, but it works. And now I only have one account, and it has both email addresses.

The following photo was in the SMH today, and I thought it was cute. It was under the caption of "Snapper's Choice: Herald Photographers on their favourite unpublished shots". It came with the caption "The Lonely Station are underground activists who use gradffiti to make their point. I took this shot of them on George St [In the city] about 6:30am. They understand that if they dress the part, they blend into their surroundings and people won't know if they are meant to be there or not. The piece they were working on stayed up for about 4.5 hours"


CNN is reporting on a legal case in Italy. This one reminds me of the hillariously funny 'The man who sued god', although the subject is slightly different. In this case the plaintif is trying to have it proved that Jesus did not exist - by arguing that the church 'abused the popular belief' and misled the public over the existance of Jesus. Regardless of peoples belief in god, a lot more people believe that Jesus did exist, even if he was not the son of anyone important.

The Comp.Risks digest contains some interesting notations. The first one is to suggest that it is not a good idea to write a cheque on your birthday since you will probably enter the date of your birth on the cheque rather than the date of the day. I can understand that. More of interest is this issue which details some of the issues with the United computer outage in the USA. According to AP and Reuters, "Computer Glitch Delays United Air Flights In US, 3 Jan 2006 United Airlines' domestic flights were delayed up to 90 minutes Tuesday night because of an outage in the computer system controlling United's check-ins and reservations, which went down for about five hours around 5 p.m. CST Wednesday.

There were huge problems according to the Comp.Risks WWW site. TSA security personel would not let people to the gates even if they had reserved seats on planes if they did not actually have an issued boarding pass. They were allowing planes to leave half full since they did not prioritize the checkins depending on which flights were leaving. Basically it appeared to be a huge disaster for all concerned.

I am not sure if anyone else saw the Google header logo in the last day or so, but I thought it was cute. It is what appears to be Braille...

One of my friends commented that he could not work out what it said since 'it was in braille and his screen was flat'. I am assuming here that he was kidding me. Well, I hope so. My guess is that this says 'Google' but I have been known to be wrong. Personally I think it is a better logo that most of them since the coloured balls are actually being used in the logo.

I have just finished a program for the OzFlarm Glider device that I have been working on. This program was written in VB6 since I wanted it to be a smaller download, since the .Net runtimes require about 25 MBytes. That is a bit much for many people. Also, I suspect that many people will have laptops that do not run fast enough to use the .Net framework. So I used VB6. And then I could not for the life of me work out how to actually make an install program. It must have taken 15 minutes for me to find a seperate tool called 'Package and Deployment' to generate the install program. This program is not great, but it does work. If I was enthusiastic I would find a copy of the third party software that I purchased rather than rely on this software. Maybe I will do that when I need to compile the software next.

The SMH is reporting on a National shortage of engineers. This is a real worry for the nation. Numbers are going down... It will be interesting to see what is done to fix this problem... Finally, My inbox has got down to 28 email messages unread. That is fairly good. I do not think it will be possible to get much lower than that. I will try though... It is a good exercise.

A friend of mine MSN'ed me this morning from up north... He was looking at buying a Garmin GPS 100 on eBay for $200, thinking that this was a good deal for a GPS. I had an idea it was a horrible deal. Doing a bit of searching I found the Garmin Wikipedia page. This was enlightening. It turns out that the GPS 100 was released in 1990 as Garmin's first product. And for something like a GPS receiver, 15 or 16 years is a LONG time.

The other thing that was noted in this page was that the Shuttle Accident in 1996 delayed the GPS satellites by two years. They ended up re-designing the satellites so that they would fit in a Delta II rocket rather than going up in the shuttle. Probably a very wise move, and a more appropriate use of resources I would guess.

The Unread Email list has less than 50 entries now. I hope to have it down to 20 or so within an hour. I will see how that goes. But do not hold your breath!

One of the things I want to get going is to set up rSync on my server. rSync is one of the great backup programs available - it allows you to synchronize two different directories and keep them up to date over a network whilst minimizing traffic. Getting it working is fairly simple, or that is the hope. I suspect that there will be some complications... That is to be expected.

The SMH has a facinating story about how the man who captured Mousilini as he was trying to escape Italy at the end of WWII has died. What is truely facinating is the back story about suggestions that Mousilini was dead already before his 'execution' having been shot in a struggle. I guess the story has probably died with the soldier.

News.COm.Au has a story about the 10 best day trips away from Melbourne. If I was being funny I would suggest anywhere interstate, but that would be rude. The list looks quite interesting. I had planned to visit the great ocean road at some stage.... A business partner had owned a helicopter company which had tours of the 12 Apostles , but the business was sold.

A friend of mine in Brisbane was wanting to know how far it is between two points on the globe. I have worked on this before, and had the code already. So here it is. It returns the distance between the points in meters.

p1 = Math.Cos(lat1 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Cos(lon1 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Cos(lat2 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Cos(lon2 * 0.0174532925)
p2 = Math.Cos(lat1 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Sin(lon1 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Cos(lat2 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Sin(lon2 * 0.0174532925)
p3 = Math.Sin(lat2 * 0.0174532925) * Math.Sin(lat1 * 0.0174532925)

temp = Math.Acos(p1 + p2 + p3) * 6378

It makes some assumptions about the shape of the earth - assuming that it is a sphere from memory. Since the equator bulges out a bit this equation does not hold perfectly, but it normally holds very very accurately - maybe 40m in 10,000km I would guess. In most cases this is not an issue. If it is then this is not the equation to use. And changing the multiplier will convert to statute miles or normal miles, or even meters.

For the use of working out which of a series of points is closest I cheat. I use pythagorus' theorum to work out which is closest. This does have a minor error north/south, but it is so close when you only need to deal with relative distances.

I am slowly getting though my to do list. One of the issues that I was working through was that I was getting some really strange position reports uploaded to my database after being sent through email. I traced this to two different report formats being used. One of them has a timezone correction in-built, and the other does not. When they are imported they overlap in the wrong places causing issues.

The HardOCP WWW Site has a story on how to water cool the XBOX 360. They were planning to try this even before the issues with the 360's power supply came to light. This unit keeps the internals of the 360 much cooler allowing a longer life for the unit with fewer failures.

News.Com.AU has a short story about how the world is moving to Electronic Ticketing for airline flights. The first internet booked flight was conceived only 10 years back in an english pub, and now accounts for 35% of all tickets world wide. IATA want this to increase to 100% within two years, saving the industry about US$6.5b annually. SITA and BMI were involved with the first trial where tickets were sent out or available for pickup at the airport.

And onto the Bizzare, the SMH Arts section has an article about the Castrati Opera Singers from Italy. A museum is now trying to track down paintings of the most popular six Castrati singers from the beginning of the last century, and the end of the century before. Some audio recordings do exist from memory, on the Edison Photograph. The important thing to note about the Castrati singers is that they are a cut above the rest...

Finally, in VisualBasic 2005, microsoft was unable to include the Refactoring tool in time for the production. They have therefore made a deal to provide a Third Party Product for free. Refactoring is an automated method for breaking up functions and subroutines, changing the order of paramaters, adding paramaters and the like, but doing this automatcailly.

I have now got down to 60 unread email messages in Outlook. I have looked at most of the unread messages - having them there is sort of a to-do list for things that are not on my to-do list. It is just how I manage things. Within the next few hours I hope to have got through more of these messages. It will be good to have a clean in-box - it does not happen all that often, but it does happen.

I released a new version of my TeamTrack software earlier today. I had not released a copy since before christmas, and this one was needed to allow people to add their own positions to the locality database. That is, if you were installing equipment at the local shopping centre you could add the position of the centre into the database, and then when you did reports it would work out when you were at that centre. Simple concept but really really powerful. I also managed to get a few minor bug-fixed included too.

I need to get to writing a spec for the WebService back end at some stage soon... The job is on my to-do list... I just need to actually do it. It is not a critical thing, but is something that I should get done this month some time.

Anyway time to get back to my email...

I surprised myself by going for a run this morning, and actually running for about 22 or 23 minutes. I was not expecting to be able to go so far or so fast having not run for a few weeks, and even not spending any time on the treadmill since before christmas. To be fair there was some sprinkles of rain which made running more pleasurable, but still, I would not have expected to be able to do about 3km today. I impressed myself I must say.

I think some of this had to do with having plenty of sleep last night. Also good was the random play songs. I had Dido's HERE WITH ME playing on the iPOD at one stage, and I seemed to get lost in the music - amazing what a good mood, some endorphins from running and great music will allow you to do. When that finished on came the extended mix of DJ SPILLER'S GROOVEJET featuring SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR. Come to think of it I do not remember hearing any lyrics so it may not have actually had ELLIS-BEXTOR performing, but it is the same music.

I just got my latest Vodafone Bill. Once more they have stuffed up my bill. As part of their promotion of 3G they offered 3 months of 'Free' 3G and also a free modem. This would be nice if their bills actually reflected this. But they charged $99.95 for the service, and then refunded the base amount before GST of $90.86. Meaning that they give me a bill for $9.09 which is totally GST. This is a pain to enter into MYOB. Once more they stuffed up. When I rang up Vodafone to ask, after being on the phone for 25 minutes I found that the bill had already been fixed.

And finally, Jennifer Anniston has been told by Shirly McClain that maybe Andrew Peacock might be good as her next boyfriend. Anniston had no idea who he was... This was all at a press conference, talking about their new movie.

I found a page that lists some of the options for Automatic Update of installed software. None of the options look allthat great. What annoys me is that Microsoft tends to indicate that AutoUpdate is available in the standard windows installer. Ahh, I get it. AutoUpdate is not what I thought it was. It is 'Update from Web' that I want I think.

Looking at the Code Project, I found a program called Updater which appears to do what I want with regard to upgrading files. It is a seperate program which updates as required. This is a bit clunkier than I had hoped for but it will at least work, and the price is about right - FREE! Every time microsoft releases a new version of Visual Studio they manage to stuff up the Installer somehow. The version in VB6 from memory was horrid. VB.NET 2003 was good, but it is missing some features. But in VB.NET they managed to stuff up version numbers of programs. I cannot even now work out how to correctly version files.

One day Microsoft might actually get it right. Until then I am stuck.

I slept well last night. Best all year in fact. I guess I was tired after a busy day at work yesterday. Today will probably be busy too, but maybe not quite so busy. Maybe I can get to actually crossing things off my To Do list. Very few got removed yesterday, but that is life.

I cannot believe some of the strange email I get. Overnight I got about 20 copies of an email from 'PicSender_75@friendster.com' which is obviously a virus. I am not sure why anyone would think that this would get people to open the zip. Ok, yes, I know how it happens. But it amazes me that it happens so often. The other stupid email type is where I get an email from someone asking about an item I sold on eBay. Something that I am likely to be selling, like a wheelchair. I am guessing that this is some type of dumb advertising for an auction using SPAM. All I can think is that this must work since it continues to happen every now and then.

There is a cute site that suggests ways to turn your Toyota Prius car into a generator for your house. Interesting concept, but I am not sure it is quite the best use of resources. I am sure an auto-start generator with some batteries would be actually cheaper... Then again, what do I know. I am only an engineer.

I did a bit of research over the power usage from Sunday. Apparently the morning and evening power usage were the highest on record for a sunday. From what I can work out if the temperature had been on a business day then there would have been significant blackouts. I can just imagine the chaos that this would have caused everywhere - we are so reliant on power these days, and turning the power system back on is a long and involved process. Not something to look forward to. Unfortnately a black start would probably be a good thing for the entire electricity industry.

Useless information... I found out who Angelena Jolie's father is. It is Jon Voight. I had absolutly no idea. None at all. Not even when he appeared in the first Tomb Raider movie playing Angelena's characters father. I will have to pick up a copy of the movie at some stage...

Australian IT has a story on how intel is changing their slogan from Intel Inside to Leap Ahead. From memory, Intel has an internal sales and marketing conference on in January. It will be interesting to see what happens following the conference. I can assure everyone though that you will not hear about the results of the conference - the results are shrouded in many NDA's...

Note to Self: Do not have a hot shower when you have sunburn, even if it is a mild case. Doing so will lead to some discomfort. Trust me on this. Please!

I did more looking at the Web Upgrade features. This is called Click Once and I do not think that this was really what I wanted. Maybe when I think about the problem it might be, but I will have to see. The problem with Click Once is that it installs from a URL, and relies on the Web Cache to work as far as I can tell. For persistent applications this really is not what I want. I want an application that installs as normal, and upgrades any new componets when they are replaced.

I have found the gadget for the person who has everything - it is a whiteboard for use in the shower using a mirror and crayons. It is designed for those people who do their best thinking in the shower. I like to think in the shower, but find I think better driving or running. But it is a cute device

I have probably spent 30 minutes trying to find an issue with VisualStudio 2005. I was getting an error about 'icachedreport being not definied'. This was an error with the Crystal Reports functionality in the program. I just could not work things out. There are something like four different reports in the program, and only one was returning this error. I could not work out what was happening. It was just strange.

After about half an hour I found something. The problem was with CacheTimeout, and it appeared that VS.NET 2005 was not finding the CrystalDecisions.ReportSource.ICachedReport.CacheTimeOut on the definition on the CacheTimeout line. What I did was remove the data type definition and retype it. That fixed things. I believe that the new compiler did not correctly compile the line, and would not recombile it, and this created the error. The code was correct, it was just that the computer did not realise that it was correct. Well, that is what it looks like happened.

The reason I am using VS.2005 is that I want to try upgrades over the Web for my software. With the CrystalReports runtimes my current software package is about 10 MBytes long, and I want to make it easier on my users to keep current. I will report how that goes

I was going to say that things have been so busy today that I have not had a chance to update my to-do list, but that is wrong. I have it updated, but I have not really been looking at it. It seems that everyone is back at work today - and I have had two firm orders today already, and a few more enquiries which look as if they are going to turn into orders. This is quite impressive really. If this continues for the rest of the month I will be really really happy. I suspect though that it is more just the post christmas thing catching up. Also, some people have thought about projects over new year and now are wanting to implement them.

My cordless phone had a good workout over lunch. Having the headset allows me to do things (like prepare lunch) whilst speaking to clients and potential ones on the phone. I really did not realise how useful a headset was on a cordless until I got one. All in all I think that there is going to be a busy year ahead. This is a good thing believe me.

Just got off the phone with another new client. More work! Things are exploding

The SMH has a reference to some changes at the SCG. They have story on how the SCG has moved to light beer in all areas apart from the members areas to cut down problems with the fans.

It is really amazing how productive you can be when you do not need to be dealing with other people on things. That is not right. I meant to say it is amazing how unproductive it is at times when you start needing to deal with phone calls. And whilst it is unproductive, it is probably usually part of the most satisfying part of the job. Whilst working from home is usually great, it does come with negatives, like not being able to lean over to a workmate and chat about how the weekend was. But I guess that is what MSN, skype and Email are for.

One other thing I have been meaning to do is to combine two PayPal accounts. I set one up when PayPal opened using a USA address, and now someone has sent me money in that account, and since i have associated my only credit cards with my other account I cannot get the money out of this account. It is security I know, but it is a pain. Thankfully the Australian WWW site has a number to call, and the call got sent to the USA where it is being looked at right now. I have a solution now. Remove a credit card from one account and add it to the other. Then move the money and close the account.

The News.COM.AU Web Site has a creepy article, about how can give of themselves, literally. Basically there is a service that allows people to have a small amount of jaw bone extracted and made into a ring to be given to their partner. This is not cheap, but is obviously seen by many to be the ultimate expression of love.

One job out of the way and complete. I needed to do a PCB for a client for use at Sydney Airport. This has been going on for a few weeks - and I have now completed it, and sent it off to a friend to be built. It should be made in the next few days meaning that my client will hopefully have the PCB next week. One of my friends has a machine that will engrave a PCB into the copper covered fibreglass which allows very quick prototyping. It is also significantly less expensive than getting a production PCB made when there will probably be errors in it. There always are.

I have found a new feature in Google... It is music search. If you search for someone like 'Kelly Clarkson', you can be given a link to her Google Page. This page can then give a link to an Album, like Thankful, which has links where you can buy the CD. Then the next step allows you to see all the tracks. If you click on one (In this case Beautiful Disaster) you will get a link to all the Lyrics sites, as well as to shops offering to sell you the music, even a link to the iTunes Music Store.

Back to work for me. One job down [and anther phone call made... Many more still to go!]

I could say I was back at work today, but that would be a lie. The truth is that I have been sort of working the entire Christmas/New Year period. Just that right now the public holidays have finished, and everyone else is going back to work so I need to get the things done on my 'To Do List'. And there are quite a few things to do. I really just need to work through them in a logical manner and I will soon be caught up. Over the past little while I have been taking some time off doing other work to spend time on the plane.

Despite this being work, I think that spending time on the plane actually is quite relaxing. It is something different, and stimulates different parts of my brain. Having to work out how the parts all fit together is interesting, and I am always having to think several steps ahead so that we do not box ourselves into a corner. Not that we are always successful in that, but we are fairly good. And if we box ourselves in we do seem to be able to escape most of the time without too many problems.

I was reading the SMH today, and it appears that I will have to go into the city one night in January to look at 'Hyde Park'. They have set up a large piece of artwork there - a war of the worlds type of thing. I am not sure how I could do any better than the SMH. I trust this would not be too scary. A few years back when I was in the USA I visited the "Grinch's christmas Grotto" at Universal Studios, and I must say that I almost used the 'scared child exits', since I found it yucky. I guess the pride of being an adult stopped me and made me grin and bear it.

Anyway that is enough for this entry. Time for work!

I have a new definition of torture. Yesterday I got slightly burnt on my shoulders and upper back. Fine, it was not all that sore. It is just that at one stage I needed to hold the back of the plane whilst some drilling got done. But it was just that the plane was above my head, and so my hair got filled with aluminium filings. There were described at being like tinsel in my hair. But unlike tinsel, this aluminium was coarser and thicker. What also happenes with this aluminium is that it breaks into small coarse pieces.

These coarse pieces are really sharp. When I shook my head to get the filings out some of them went under my T-Shirt and rubbed on my sunburn. And I can assure you this was not nice. Fortunately shaking my shirt got most of the filings out, leading to less pain. Actually the sunburn was not bad except when I put a bag over my shoulder or with the filings.

So what did I do today? We hit a number of rivets - probably about only 40 or so; not all that many really. Then we put on the top plate at the rear of the fuselage - although this did invole me making up two small adapter plates according to the drawings. Fairly simple work actually. Then some more holes got drilled to attach it. Then we put all the top sheets on the fuselage for the first time. This makes the object look like a real plane. It really does. And finally we built a platform to get the perspex fuselage out of the way for storage.

All in all it was an enjoyable day, although after I finish this entry I can assure you I will be going straight to bed.

Some links...

The NY Times has a list of the 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year. Interesting list. The BBC has an even better list of 100 things that we did not know last year. This list had some things we already knew - like that some polling places here in Oz have BBQ's during elections. Also included is that Bill Gates does not own an iPod, and that the Queen has never used a PC (but does have an iPod).

The SMH has a great photo of the F3 yesterday. Well, it looks like the F3, and is of a street sign pointing to the Pacific Highway. The photo and article is available here

One or two people expressed doubt that I might really have gone to the beach yesterday. Sure it was hot, but isn't that when you go to the beach? One of my friends took this photograph whilst I was at Norah Head beach. At this stage I had come out of the water having been in for about an hour, and put on an old T-Shirt to protect me from the sun as we walked back to the car. I guess I was slightly sunburnt by that stage, but mostly not. It was one of those days yesterday when you really did not even need to worry about taking a towel. You dried off so quickly. Having just got out of the water, and the hot wind does explain the spikey hair, which I should say is not my normal style!



I think right now my neck and sholders are slightly burnt - although I think that was from sitting in the small pool waiting for the F3 to re-open rather than when i was at the beach since I did not add any more sunscreen and probably should have. We were mostly in the shade anyway, only getting in the water at about 5:30pm. All in all it was a great time. I am sure that working on the plane today will be just as enjoyable.

Today was fun... Everyone surfaced at about 9AM today, and we decided to all go to swimming after breakfast 'before it got too hot'. Since there was my friend from Pacific Power and her family, and one of her friends from school and his family, what sounded like a quick task turned into a major undertaking, particularly since the kids were aged 6, 4, 3 and 9 months. We eventually got to the beach at about 12:00. This is after looking for ice for the esky containing just water for everyone.

The third shop we went to had ice... This was actually the fishing co-op, and when they found out we were 'locals' then we were only charged $3 to fill up the esky. I think that is great value. We endued up at Norah's Head on the central coast, just near toukley, and found a couple of parking spots just near the boat ramp. This was just amazing - and perfect. Getting to the beach we set up a small tent for shade, and ventured into the water.

The sand on the top of the beach was fine, but the sand under the water was really course. Whilst setting up the tent I made the mistake of walking on the dry sand without shoes as the sand was really hot. Getting into the water was a pain since there was seaweed blocking the shallows. Getting past this was simple, and pretty soon it was moving south of where we were anyway. As the beach is in a bay there were no breaking waves, just swells coming into the beach. This meant that swimming was not as much fun as surf beaches but it was fun none the less.

I ended up swimming for probably an hour, which we all decided was enough. So we packed up and found a club on the lake just north of The Entrance to have lunch. This was a great place to relax in air conditioned comfort. There was actually a great view to the south to the Gosford area where we could see the smoke building up. Then after a couple of hours we headed back to the house where we heard the F3 was closed.

Nothing more could be done than to check the RTA www site and then go into the pool monitoring things until the F3 re-opened. Which I guess was an hour later. All in all it was a fun time. I will have to go swimming more often - both in the pool and in the ocean. I forgot how much I loved it.

I have just got home from the Central Coast. The trip back was basically uneventful. I did see the witches hats lining the side of the F3 going south at Ourimbah. I passed them at about 7pm, and the reports noted that they were going to close the road at 8pm. When I got to the Mt White area with the RTA heavy vehicle checking station I could actually see the flames about 500m to the left of the road. Thankfully the wind was coming from the right. There was also a fire on the right side that I did not see.

At one stage I saw the heavy smoke coming across the road - although it was there for only about 1-2 seconds. Following that things were fine. The road was not packed at all. Actually it was fairly devoid of trucks and everyone seemed to be mostly on the left lanes in case anyone wanted to get past. The traffic seemed to flow really well, but there was more than the average number of cars broken down on the road.

All in all, I was mostly driving at the speed limit for the entire length of the trip. This is outstanding and amazing. After everything I am really happy to get home.

Just after I posted the last message I was stranded... I think the F3 has opened south bound. Might be time to look at heading home

I am not sure how much I will write... At the moment I am in the central coast, and it is hot. I have just checked the weather at Sydney and Bankstown Airports. 44.6 degrees and 43 respectively. That is HOT. Too hot actually.

The Rural Fire Service WWW site is dead right now. No activity at all on it. And the RTA www site does not list the closure of the F3 at all. The F3 camera on the net does show the actual police road block. 131700 gives an indication that everything is busy.

I am about to think about leaving. I guess I will give a good report about 7:30PM subject to traffic. We will see!

I know it is too early to be awake on New Years Day, but I am awake, and did get a reasonable amount of sleep last night - not quite as much as normal, but I did get enough. I spent the night with some friends - with a nice dinner followed by watching the fireworks at The Entrance and Toukley simultaniously in the distance followed by a game of 'Polly Pool'. Then came watching the Sydney fireworks on TV at midnight.

The TV coverage of the fireworks was far better than many previous years, with channel 9 finally working out that people were wanting to watch the fireworks, and not an announcer talking about the fireworks showing a crowd of people looking at them from the Opera House. Radical thought I know, but it took Channel 9 years to work that one out!

Poly Pool was interesting... This is a variation of Pool where the idea is to have your numbered ball being the last one on the table. Of course for this to work you need to ensure that no-one has any idea which ball is yours leading to some interesting tactics where people intentionally miss shots that would sink their ball just for appearences.

What is on the cards now? Well, firstly we plan to all visit the beach sometime later today... I have not been to the beach for a while and I really love going. I cannot even remember the last time I went. Given the weather report I will definitely wear lots of sunscreen. Anyway it is now time for some breakfast...

Happy New Year to all!

More later, but I just want to wish all my readers a best wishes for a happy new year...