Author: virtualwolf

Ugh

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We had a car accident on Wednesday night. Turning onto Pacific Highway to go to the gym, and a fuckwit teenager wasn’t paying attention, went through the red light, and smashed into us. Thankfully he hit the very front-right of the car, in front of even the driver’s side wheel. I was completely fine apart from a slight graze on my forehead, but we had to take kungfupolarbear to the hospital because her chest was excruciatingly sore where the seatbelt had grabbed her.

Thankfully it turned out to be only bruised ribs and not anything broken or fractured. My poor car is a write-off though, the entire front frame of it was bent to the left and the engine is completely mangled. I made my statement to the police last night (Thursday night) and the officer I was speaking to (who was at the accident on Wednesday night) said there was a witness that she needed to contact, but it was likely to be ruled in my favour. Which I would bloody well hope so, since it wasn’t my fault! The idiot teenager was claiming that he had a green light, despite the fact that there were two lanes of traffic next to him that had stopped.

We only had third-party insurance on our car, so the car itself wasn’t covered, but the other guy’s insurance will. However, his insurance company can’t do anything until the police make their final report and confirm that it was his fault, so we’re basically in a holding pattern at the moment. Fortunately mum and dad are able to give us lifts where necessary, and we don’t have to use the car for getting to work. We’re going to just get a new car of the same model and somewhere around the same vintage – the old one was a 1993 Corolla, and they can be had for between $2000 and $3000 now. If we used the car a lot more we’d probably get something newer and fancier, but with our usage there’s really no point.

So yeah. Pretty fucking shit week. 🙁 On the bright side we’re having bad movie tomorrow night, so that will be good.

Melbourne!

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kungfupolarbear and I went down to Melbourne last Sunday and Monday for our belated anniversary weekend (the actual date of our anniversary was a Lily weekend). It’s only an hour flight away, but is totally different to Sydney. So good to just get away for a while.

Naturally we look lots of photos. 😀 These are some of my favourites, the full set is here.

Abandon hope all who enter here

Flat white

Looking down Centre Place

Crossing

Moon sea jelly

Gentoo penguin

Looking out from Southern Cross Station

A new design

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One of the things I’ve done with my website is design and add an entirely new design, and the ability to switch between the current design and the new one. Check it out!

The “Dark” style is the current one, and the “Light” style is the new one. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, design-wise, even apart from managing to implement a style-switcher that stores the current selection in a session cookie so it’s remembered next time you visit. 😀

Oops

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Yes, I’ve forgotten to update LiveJournal for another several months. 😛 I keeping remembering at random useless times to update my LJ (like when I’m nowhere near a computer or am about to go to bed). I’ve now added a category to Things on my computer and iPhone so I can hopefully at least quickly add a reminder to blog things and there’ll be more frequent updates. 😛 (Yes I’m a massive nerd).

Biggest thing is that today is our third wedding anniversary! \o/ (Squee wedding photos squee). This is actually a Lily weekend, which was slightly annoying, but we went out to dinner last night after work, and I got some beautiful roses sent to kungfupolarbear‘s work which she spent the whole day squeeing about. 😀 Next weekend we’re going to Melbourne on Sunday and Monday, so we’ll eat lots of delicious food and take lots of photos. I can’t wait! It’s crazy, things just keep getting better and more awesome! BEST WIFE EVER.

In other news, Lily turned five last month. O_O And she’s already half-way through her first year of school. WHAT THE HELL HOW WHY WHAT.

On the subject of nerdy things, someone posted an epic rant back in April on how shit PHP is. My website was written in PHP, so that rant gave me the impetus to find something else. I discovered a Perl web framework called Mojolicious and have totally rewritten my site with that. It has all sorts of useful functions for reading JSON and such, so I’ve hooked my website into my Flickr, Tumblr, and it has my Last.fm stats too. 😀 It’s really been a lot of fun!

I was looking at my slightly older LJ entries, and saw the one from Christmas about the guitar input… I’ve basically not touched it or the guitar for like four months now. 🙁 I think the DVD that I bought (learning the chords by themselves) just doesn’t work for me, I end up losing interest far too quickly. That’s probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve attempted to learn, and I just can’t do it. I suspect I need to learn actual full songs, but I also have far too many another things vying for my attention that I totally forgot about the guitar input until I was writing this entry, heh.

…and holy shit, I also just realised that today not only marks our third wedding anniversary, but ten years TO THE DAY since my first LJ post! 😮 God damn. I’ve also been registered and posting on Ars Technica for over eleven years, and have been going by “VirtualWolf” online for a good thirteen years now. All of those numbers are more than a third of my life, which blows my mind.

Payrise!

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We had our salary reviews yesterday, and I got a 5% payrise! Even better, it’s backdated to the 1st of January. \o/ So payday next Wednesday, I’ll get a bunch of extra money.

Woot!

Wow

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I went to the Factory Theatre in Marrickville last night to see Devin Townsend and Meshuggah, neither of which I’d seen live before.

Meshuggah was the headlining show, and they were excellent, but Devin Townsend stole the show IMO. He had so much interaction with the crowd and you could completely tell he utterly loved being up there. I was right at the very front on the right side of the stage, and he made a point to come over to both sides of the stage and amp up the crowd. At one point he was individually looking at and acknowledging people and saying “Thank you”.

The songs were absolutely epic, and I was headbanging as hard as I’ve ever done before. It was absolutely one of the best shows I’ve been to. It ran a bit later than I expected, and so I ended up running more than half-way from the venue to Sydenham train station to catch the last train of the night (11:52pm), and I didn’t get home until a bit after 1am. I was definitely stiff today and I suspect will be even more so tomorrow!

Also, kungfupolarbear is the best wife in the world. I came home to this on the kitchen counter. 😀

My semi-regular two-month update.

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An update! Mostly brought to you by velvetrhapsody updating, then me realising it’s been ages since I updated mine. 😛

Work is mostly the same, but far busier. We updated about 8000 customers to JIRA 5 last week, and it’s not so much that there were massive bugs but the sheer number of people raising support cases about either minor bugs or just questions about functionality… argh. I’ve been absolutely non-stop flat out the entirety of last week, and this week doesn’t seem to be slowing down any.

I’ve had to get an ergonomic keyboard at work, because my left wrist has starting feeling… weird. It’s that feeling in the muscles on the underside of the arm towards the wrist that you get after an evening of ten-pin bowling, where you feel like you’ve been using muscles you don’t normally use. I don’t know why it’s suddenly come on, but the new keyboard seems to be helping. (It’s a Microsoft Natural 4000 if anyone is interested).

On Saturday I went for a flight in a 1950s de Havilland Chipmunk! I took some photos prior to the flight. It was actually rather nerve-wracking because I was flying it for most of the flight! I’m not sure I want to do it again, to be honest… I spent it mostly concentrating on keeping the plane level and so didn’t get a chance to do much sight-seeing.

Lily has started school this year, which is crazy. I have no idea where that time went! Apparently her teacher is nice.

New Year’s Eve was excellent, kungfupolarbear and I went to a co-worker’s place in Kirribilli, and the view was insane. Witness:

The full set is here.

Speaking of photos, I’ve been on quite the black and white kick lately.

Cottage

Glass

Light from above

Broken

We’re going back to Boston in August for kungfupolarbear‘s 30th birthday, which is very exciting! I loved Boston, and it’ll be great to go again now that we actually have a decent camera. \o/ OH THE PHOTOS WE WILL TAKE

…and I think that’s mostly about it!

Merry Christmas all!

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Christmas was quite good. Lily didn’t wake me up at arse o’clock in the morning, which was lovely! We went over to mum and dad’s for Christmas lunch, as we do every year. It was delicious, all the presents were given, and it was generally very nice.

Mum and dad bought me (at my request) this guitar input so I can plug my guitar into my computer and iPhone, and hopefully it’ll encourage me to actually get around to learning how to play the damn thing. I also got some gift cards, and the Halo 1 anniversary edition.

\o/

Oops

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Nearly two months without an update! D’oh. I’ve completely forgotten to even look at my friends page for the past few weeks. 🙁

Work has been going very well. At the end of October we launched a whole new platform for our hosted offerings, called OnDemand, and it’s been very well received by everyone. There’s been a massive uptake of it, but our support load hasn’t exploded.
The three of us in Hosted Support are currently sitting next to the other two hosted platform teams, which is really nice. We can just turn around and ask questions, or we know immediately if something’s going funny.

Speaking of work, we had an awesome Melbourne Cup Day lunch last month. Everyone dressed up and we left work at 11am and went to this really nice venue on the harbour. We had absolutely delicious food, plenty of beer and wine, and it was all paid for by work! I brought the camera and gave it a good workout, and got a bunch of great photos. In fact, this particular one was used as a presentation slide by one of the CEOs in the last all-hands meeting we had! 😀 (It was the “Questions?” screen, so nothing major, but I was pretty chuffed).

We’re currently twelve days away from moving house. We were wanting to stay in our current place until we saved up enough money to buy a unit, but it turns out the owners want to move back in. They had a baby and had just moved closer to the city while she was pregnant, but the douchebag real estate agent neglected to mention any of this when we signed the lease originally, and assured us that it’d be fine to renew the lease when the time came.
The new place is in Turramurra, about ten minutes closer to the city than where we are now. It’s a bit bigger than our current place, and it’s actually an investment property. The owners wanted to make sure we were going to be staying a goodly while before they agreed to get flyscreens installed (there aren’t any right now), so that’s a good sign.
We’ve done a reasonable amount of packing already, and not having to de-mould every goddamn thing in the place is making it so much faster.

I completely forgot to mention that we went down to Melbourne for the weekend on the 9th/10th/11th of September, and it was great! We stayed in a really nice hotel on St Kilda Rd so were able to just wander up to Flinders St and get to wherever. And oh, the food! Man, both kungfupolarbear and I would be SO FAT if we lived in Melbourne.
I’d been there once before to visit Xenex but that was many years ago now, and I don’t even recall what we did. 😛 It was so different to Sydney and I can’t wait to go back. Naturally, I took heap of photos. 😉

A friend of Kristina’s came over from the US and stayed with us for a week. The ENTIRE TIME, the weather was absolute rubbish. 🙁 We went up to the Blue Mountains and literally couldn’t see anything. I’ve never seen fog anything like it.
The shitty weather has pretty much continued since then, and it’s feeling more like we’re going from autumn into winter, rather than already being in summer. Supposedly it’s meant to be a cool wet summer, so I’m not holding out any hope of the weather improving. 🙁

Lily starts school in about two months! 😮 And she’s turning five in May. Holy shit. I have no idea where that time went, it’s crazy. She’s doing really well with her letters, she knows the whole alphabet, and I set her up with WriteRoom and my old iBook G4, so she can spell words from her books and see them right on the screen. She actually asks me if she can “do letters”, which is good! I just looked, and my Lily set on Flickr has 226 photos in it. 😀 It’s fun looking through all the old photos and seeing her getting steadily older.

/salute

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I just shut my Power Mac G5 down for what will likely be the last time, after nearly six years of flawless operation.

I realise it’s just a computer, but I’m a bit wistful at the moment. I ordered it the day the quad-core machines were announced, and it arrived on the 17th of November in 2005. It’s been my computer through rather a lot of changes in my life… from the mundane like Apple moving from Frenchs Forest to the city, to Lily being born (and all the drama and psycho-ness from her mother, ugh), to the best thing that’s ever happened to me: falling madly in love with my beautiful kungfupolarbear, proposing, and getting married. 🙂

I used the hell out of the computer through that whole time, and never once did it skip a beat. Farewell, G5.