Dubstep

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I don’t get it.

I like my music to have a solid beat and rhythm to get into, be it electronic for grooving to or metal for headbanging to (there needs to be more than just that, hence my loathing and hatred for R&B, rap, country, etc. but that’s a start). Dubstep just sounds like random beats without any particular groove to get into.

Take this song for instance. A couple of friends were going on about how awesome it is, but I’m just not getting it. The beat keeps changing and there’s nothing to just rock out to. One of my aforementioned friends was claiming that it’s all in 4/4 time, which I suppose is possible as I don’t have enough of a musical ear to pick it up, but I’m really not hearing it. It’s just thump-thump-pause-thump-pause-thump-pause-pause-thump-thump for me.

I am confuse.

And with that off my chest, I should probably get to bed considering it’s 00:10 and I have to be up in less than seven hours. 😛

Relaxing!

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On Sunday afternoon/night we went up to Dreamwood International, which is a very fancy name for a little B&B about an hour’s drive away from us. It was so nice, though. The owners were really friendly, the place was absolutely spotless, and when we got there they had freshly-baked scones with fresh cream and home-made jam waiting for us!

They breed border collies, golden retrievers, and alpacas. We got to play with the border collies, and went for a walk with the owners as they were feeding the alpacas on Sunday night. They are such ridiculous-looking animals! kungfupolarbear got a few really good shots of them. My photos were mostly of the border collies.

We timed it very nicely, too… on Sunday the weather was nice and sunny, but yesterday when we woke up it was all wet and dreary. All in all it was a really nice and and relaxing weekend. We’ve had a five day weekend due to Easter Friday and Monday, and Anzac Day falling on the Monday as well (Anzac Day is a public holiday too, so the public holiday from Easter Monday got pushed over to Tuesday). \o/

Blargh

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Naturally, naturally, right before a five day weekend I’m coming down with a horrendously sore throat. OF COURSE. I bought Betadine sore throat gargle and hopefully will be able to nip it in the bud before it turns really bad. :\

In happier news, since we have a bunch of photographer-type people at Atlassian, we organise semi-frequent walks to just go out and take a bunch of photos. We had one today at lunch where we wandered up to The Rocks, and I finally managed to break my photographical drought (the last photo I’d uploaded to Flickr was over a month ago)! \o/

Another birthday!

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Yes, I’m now 28!

We went to Limani’s for dinner, and oh my god it’s amazing. We’ve been there before (most notably for our wedding lunch), but it’s consistently fantastic food.

Anyone who is even vaguely within driving distance of Narrabeen owes it to themselves to go there!

A year on

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Wow. It’s been exactly a year to the day since I started at Atlassian! I was looking back at my LJ posts when we found out we were getting made redundant at Apple, and they were understandably bummed out, but holy crap did everything turn out nicely. 😀

In the year I’ve been at Atlassian, I’ve gotten a total of 11.5% in payrises plus a bunch of share options, I’ve been able to get my geek on massively, and am working in an even more laid-back and more awesome environment than Apple had!

I love my job. 😀

That was new

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Lily just announced that she was tired and asked to take a nap. Of her own volition! She’s not been having a nap during the day for the past few weeks, and going to bed at 7:30-8:00 at night. Previously if she was looking exhausted and I put her down for a nap, there’d be a lot of crying about it.

Hopefully this is a long-term change. 😛

Busy busy busy

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Man, since I’ve been doing Studio support I’ve been pretty much flat-out every single day. Some days it’s good and I get lots done and I’m very productive. Other days, like today, I have about five things going on at once for the entire day and can’t concentrate on any of them. My brain was leaking out my ears by about 2pm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the hell out of work, but some days are definitely more draining than others.

When we first moved up to Hornsby, it really felt like Katoomba but I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly that was. I’ve realised now that it’s because the air is so much cleaner here than the city or even Lane Cove (Lane Cove is only ~10km from the city). It’s so nice stepping off the train in Hornsby after work and just having wonderfully clean fresh air. Even more so now that the weather is cooling down and the air has that autumnal coolness to it.

Oh god

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Oh god, Robowar. OH GOD.

IT. IS. TERRIBLE. IMDB’s rating of 4.0 is about twice what it should be. At least The Room had quotability… Robowar was just plain terrible. It was physically exhausting watching it.

We’ve discovered that after watching a truly terrible movie, the next one has to be a fair bit less awful. Cue Beowulf! It has Christopher Lambert, who is always hilariously awful, and was enjoyably cheesy. I don’t know why it got only a 3.7 on IMDB… it’s certainly no masterpiece of cinema, but dear christ was it vastly better than Robowar.

Of geekery, and bad movies

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I’ve been getting my geek on in a big way.

Since I’m supporting JIRA Studio, and it’s a lot more sysadminy (lots of command-line work, SSHing into hosts, etc.), I’ve signed up with Linode and have installed CentOS on it (CentOS is what we use at work for just about all our server machines) to get my learnings on.

I’ve got my own JIRA instance running on it, it’s also running Subversion, email (postfix and dovecot), and I’m using SVN for my web development as well (this is my regular website, and I test out everything on here). I’ve integrated JIRA with my Subversion repository, and have OpenLDAP set up for authentication for Subversion via Apache, email, and JIRA.

In another news, we’ve been doing bad movie night with gypocalypse on a semi-regular basis, and oh it’s such fun. So. Much. Snarking! We’ve covered a lot of video game movies (Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Double Dragon, all the FUCKING AWFUL Uwe Boll films, etc.) and our movie of choice for tonight is Robowar, and if we have enough time, BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR.

😀 😀

FINNNNNTROOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL!

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(Link!)

We just got back from seeing them at the Manning Bar. I saw them in Boston for the first time when I was visiting kungfupolarbear, and they fucking rocked. They didn’t disappoint this time either. The two opening bands, Bane of Isildur and Claim the Throne, were excellent as well. SO MUCH HEADBANGING.

Of course, I’m not going to be able to move when I wake up tomorrow, but it’s so worth it.