For some reason I am but tired at the moment.. I should have had an afternoon sleep I guess but I had a few phone calls... and I did do the run which took time.. Maybe I will have an early night... I will just need to see how things go... I almost fell asleep watching some TV a bit earlier

Australia has some interesting laws. One of them requires that schools pay a license fee for photocopying, which gets paid to copyright owners. Now, there is a federal court case wanting a fee when students get told to visit a particular Web Site. Obviously the schools are not happy with this. Since web pages are designed to be accesses for free commonly this whole thing is a bit ridiculous.

Also, Montreal Airport is cracking down on laptop users using power outlets. They are claiming it is because of fire hazzards... And according to this story the authorities only backed down when it was revealed that the first class lounge people were using laptops under the same conditions... And if they forced the person to stop they needed to do the first class people and that would not go down well.

I just did a nice little run... 4.57KM which was not bad since it was a lot warmer than I thought it was going to be... and I did it in 33min 13sec. Not a bad effort I must say, although I was a bit slow at 7.25KM/H. Still what matters is that I am exercising, not that I beat records each time. When I had a shower following the run I weighed myself, and I had lost another kg. That actually impresses me more than the running.

My server is now back and running well... It was off the air for too long, but we now have connectivity again, so the world is good. The vehicles are busy dumping their history data into the database and clients are now able to see where their vehicles are. Life if good. And plans are in place to ensure this does NOT happen again!

I have repaired a few trackers today. This is to be expected. Most were just simple things. What I did not expect was that some of the GPS units had locked up - and required removing the backup battery to get them to reset deeply enough. I had never seen this before ever. Strangely doing this to most of the units fixed the issue - something for me to keep an eye on.

I am planning on going for a run in a few minutes... Subject to no major phone calls and the like. I have no idea how much exercise I will get done!

I did something new today. Something I have *NEVER* done before. I buily myself a capacitor... It is one of the three main electronic components, and I have built the other two in the past, but as far as I can remember I have never built a capacitor. It is for a consulting project so I can not say much about what it is for, but I am impressed with myself

I had an email overnight from a friend in the USA. He had been reading my blog, and had seen my post on dog names, and wrote to say that it 'Reminds me of the comic Stephen Wright who named his dog "Stay" just to mess with his mind -- "Come, Stay".'. I dont think I would be that mean to a dog myself... After all, Dogs may rule the world one day.

The Risks Digest details some of the issues with using computers, as I have mentioned before. There was a report in the latest issue noting that students at Canterbury University had their personal details exposed online. Unfortunately this report was submitted by someone in Australia, and the editor had assumed that the Uni was in Australia and ammended to article in that way. OOps. And the report referenced a New Zealand Herald report so that should have been a clue.

I could have slept better last night... I woke up at 3AM and I could not get back to sleep for ages... So much so that I came out to check my email (boring) before going back to bed... I think the email actually bored me back to sleep... Not to friends. Please do not send me really exciting emails in the middle of the night if you think I might not be unable to get back to sleep... It will only make things worse... :-)

Someone has created some cute Lego figures of the Mythbusters hosts. These figures just look so lifelike. Well, maybe not lifelike, but they certainly do look like the real Mythbusters. Any fans of Mythbusters should do themselves a favour and have a look at the link. Really cool.

A friend of mine put me onto a piece if mail software for windows called MailEnable of which a basic version is available for free. I have a few issues with the GUI, such as being required to right click on things to edit the properties, but once you get used to it things do make sense, and it looks like a decent product. It is certainly easier to use than the software on my Linux box.

I just had a telemarketing call from 'Lifestyle Dynamics' which tried to sell me accomadation vouchers. The call was from overseas somewhere... Not sure exactly where... They said that they were a 'Fortune 500' company on the Australian Stock Exchange. I was not sure that there was such a thing on the ASX... A fortune 500 company would be one of the smallest businesses on the Australian Stock Exchange... Needless to say I did not buy anything from them...

For some reason I just feel that I have not got much work done today. I am sure that I have done work... It just doesn't feel like it. I actually did not manage to get lunch today either. Argh. So right now I am feeling a bit hungry... The Register is reporting about issues with Daylight Saving and the Commonwealth Games. Apparently there are some issues with microsoft patches and timezone issues.

The former owner of Domino's has decided to start a University in florida - the first catholic Uni to be started in over 40 years. On top of this he is setting up a community around it, based on his devout catholic beliefs. There has been some minor oposition, but people are generally positive.

Tonight Commander in Chief is on TV... I know I have seen it on before, and I have it recorded, but I plan to watch it again... maybe even with ads... Should be fun. A great show.

My server is due back at any moment. We are just waiting for a bit of paperwork to go though and then things will be up and running again. About time let me tell you. I hate these type of stuff ups. It will NOT happen again... I have some work planned for later this week to ensure that it does not!

I finally found some maps for MidTown Madness 3 on the web. There are a heap of cheats too... I decided for the little time I spend playing games that I would rather have access to all the cars than fix the tasks. So I unlocked them all, and I can assure you that it is fun driving an Audi TT in the wet in Washington DC when you don't care about the damage to the car. In fact I seem to quickly loose the back tailgate to the car - although that might have to do with the fact that I have mastered turning 180 degrees using the brakes.

I finally now, having done some driving in the game understand the line in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT where Anette Benning complains about being lost around Dupont Circle. In the game I have got lost working out what lane to use around that same intersection!

I have to be rather careful today and tomorrow with my broadband... I am over quota for the month, and since it is for business, I decided to pay $10/GByte excess usage. Right now I am about 1.5 GBytes over. It is a business expense, and $15 is not bad. But I need to make sure that I dont download something like the beta of Windows Vista from MSDN... It would become quite expensive.

One of my tasks today that I want to do is work on some changes to my tracker with how they operate in a networked environment - moving towards a internet stored database of where trackers should send their data. Basically using the DNS system to configure the trackers rather than storing the IP addresses in the device themselves and having them able to re-configure themselves. DNS give a single point of administration, and of course a single point of failure. But I believe I know how to manage that process.

But to do this I really need to register a domain just for the purpose of dealing with the trackers - and then need to get the DNS hosted. Should be fairly easy... But may take some work. A nice job for this morning when I get a tiny bit of paperwork done.

Yesterday I was watching some of Spooks, which is a BBC drama that is shown on ABC in Australia. At one point they were looking for some bad guys, and came up with a company called 'Cardassian Financial Services'. Through some investigation they confirmed that these people were bad guys - but they spent a LOT more time than they should have. You see, a Cardassian is a baddie from the StarTrek universe... One of the big major baddies...

Later on they had been trying to break out of the building whilst being held hostage. They managed to get a hole the size of a person on the concrete work, apart from the steel re-inforcing. But since it was a former team member who was taking them hostage, they decided to cover it up in the end. Why am I explaining this? Well, there was the following exchange at the end...
'How do you explain a hole in the wall to internal services?'
'Mice'
What I loved was how it was delivered in a deadpan tone...

Today my first battle is with Telstra. We have had a connection out since 9AM on friday and we need to get it restored this morning... I cannot believe how slow Telstra are at fixing thier problems when they stuff up!

My mother heard about her doctorate today. She basically needs to do revisions before re-submitting the doctorate to be examined again. This obviously is not a great outcome, and will take some time to fix. Not good. She can appeal this, but it is likely to be better for her to just do what they want. It is likely to be less stressful and it is more likely that she will get the doctorate out of it. But this did mean lunch at Sizzlers to commiserate the decision...

Last night when I was driving home I saw a strange car... I was going to say on the road, but technically it was not on the road. It was going westbound on the back of a truck on the M7... It was a Police Car. What is special about a police car. This one was Black and White. Like from the USA. I am guessing that this car is being used in a movie. I am not sure what movies are being shot in Sydney at the moment though.

The other thing is that this morning I realised I had left my iPod in the car overnight. By this morning, I can assure you the battery was somewhat flat. Now, there are a few different solutions. The correct one is to work out how to wire the interface cable into my iPod, including the ignition power. That way it would stop when the car gets turned off. I just love having my iPod in my car...

The one pain of having the XBox in the loungeroom is that the XBox does not have an ON/OFF switch on the remote control. This is a real pain since it is one of the only remote controls I have ever come across without a power switch. I guess this is because the remote receiver is a USB device and therefore does not get powered until the device is turned on. And there is not much way to fix this unfortunately. Not even with major hacks... Strange really, since this is the pnly issue I ahve with the design. [Well apart from lack of memory on the XBox and some things like that]

I heard about a new product... I will not be betting the family fortune on this one - I would not even bet all the money in my wallet on this one - it is, would you believe a toothbrush a replacable tip so that you dont need to replace the handle when the brush needs replacing. This might make sense if the handle of a toothbrush was not so cheap, but why bother.

And in the UK, someone is selling a number plate on eBay for about 9000 pounds. The license plate is 'HN51 FLU', but there is a minor problem. Bird flu is actually 'H5N1 FLU', so the poor seller slightly dyslexic... Oops. I seriously doubt that there are that many people who would even want the correct license plate.

There is a whole lot of designer water products around. Probably the most over the top is O18 from a company in Chatswood. They are selling water which is derived from apples and oranges, and then purified. Sounds rather expensive, and basically 'over-engineered'.

Mitsubish has a strange report on how LED's can be used to sense the ambient light level. This is strange since LED's are supposed to be output only. I think I understand some of the theory as to how this works, but it really is a bit beyond me. More information as to how this works in practice is available here.

OK... So maybe I am a bit tired... I probably just spent 20 seconds searching for the Internet Explorer window on this PC. I have 12 things running on my PC at the moment, and I could not find IE. What makes things worse is that not only could I not find Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer was the active windows. In other words it was staring right at me!

A bit earlier I was having what must have been one of the strangest MSN conversations I have ever had. A friend of mine from interstate messaged me, from his wifes MSN account. And then she messaged me from her husbands account. And I would say something to one account, and I would get the reply from the other account. And I could not keep up to date who was who. And they would lie if I asked too... I think I worked it out in the end but I am not sure...

Time for bed... The winter olympics is interesting to watch but I really am tired... Tempting to fall asleep in front of the TV... But I think sleeping in a bed is more civilised... Good Night

I love this... This site allows you to do your own Einstein Blackboard Scene!

Today I spent the day working on the plane - we worked on getting the steps installed so that we could actually get into the plane since it is somewhat off the ground. This was a task that we expected was going to literally take all night - or actually potentially all night. I think we had been procastinating on this job for at least six months...

In the end, it did not take all night - nowhere close. I would not be here sitting writing this at home if it had. Things just seemed to work really well installing the steps. Getting the holes drilled into the steps was not too hard, and neither was getting things lined up. Really there is not much to say about this. Most of the rivets just went straight in without issue - I think there was only one or two that needed drilling out.

We also installed the strobe controller unit under the floor in the baggage compartment too. This was fairly simple - with the exception of having to reinstall a nut plate that had failed. All in all it went in really quickly too...

Getting home I just needed to ensure the pain of crossing Old Windsor Road on Norwest Blvd. The issue here is that entering the M7 takes you through a chicane that would be amazing on any F1 course. I am always scared that I will actually cross to the wrong side of the road thanks to the poor markings on the road. Thankfully even if I did cross there is usually no traffic there... But the road is yucky at the moment!

According to PR Newswire, Apple has sold it's billionth iTunes song in less than three years. The billionth song "Speed of Sound" was purchased as part of Coldplay's X&Y album. I have purchased one or two songs on iTunes to see how it works, but that is all.

As a kid I can remember getting into arguments with my brother and cousins about the fair cutting of food. I knew there had to be a better way - and there is. According to PopGadget, someone has released a cutting board with measurements for length and also angles. I can see that the board might be really really popular, particularly anyone with kids I would guess... Maybe a great christmas present for friends...

The Times Online has an article on how Mozilla was contacted by the UK Trading Standards people concerned that people were selling CDs containing the free Firefox software. When told that there was nothing wrong with this, the trading standards person commented that this made her job really hard if people could pay for software that was being given away... The underlying idea that they should not allow this to make her job easier.

I forgot how tiring playing the XBox is... And how addictive it is. The only game that I have is 'Midtown Madness 3', and although I do not play it all that often, I am getting a bit board of it. Really, I dont think I should be playing the games on the XBox because it does make me so tired... Hmm...

I just had the Simpsons on in the background, and they had a clip show. At the end they did a parody of Billy Joel's 'We didnt start the fire', titled something like 'We`ll never kill the simpsons'. They had to change the tune, but the concept was the same. I guess that has to do with royalties and copyright and such. Most of the simpsons episode I saw was pretty boring unfortunately.

Tomorrow I will be working on the plane. I have not heard what we are working on, but I am sure it will be fun. I have to whip over to my father's place beforehand to grab an ADSL modem of mine from him... Since he lives at North Ryde next to Macquarie Uni this should be a fairly small detour.

I hate phone companies at times. When they work it is fantastic. When it does not... Well. You know. Right now I am waiting for a phone company to return a network connection to a server. They 'accidently' disconnected an ADSL line. And it is taking some doing getting it reconnected. I will not mention the name of the phone company to protect the guilty... But they should be hung, drawn and quartered.

I also am now getting mail in on my radioactive.net.au domain. Most of the messages are SPAM that are being sent automatically to the bit bucket. But there are also real messages for the previous user of the domain. This user was getting Heinz recipies emailed weekly to her. The message says that if you want to unsubscribe you need to click on a certain link on the site and they will delete you. But the link does not exist. When I found the option to unsubscribe they wanted the password, which I did not know.

The Lost Password option wanted the name of the suburb which the user was born in. The Web Site does not have an email address or a phone number. I just replied to them saying unsubscribe in large unfriendly letters, and I hope they deal with it. Thankfully none of the addresses getting mail are ones I will want to use so I might as well just reject mail to them...

I have been reading the SMH and it appears that the Ravens at the Tower of London have been placed into quaranteen to protect them from Bird Flu. What interested me was the names - Branwen, Hugine, Munin, Gwyllum, Thor and Baldrick. Hmm. Baldrick. Sounds familiar. Yes. That is the name of a character from Blackadder. These days you can see all about Baldrick in Wikipedia.

The Law Journal in the USA has a bizzare story about cellphone call records in the USA are effectively freely available. Effectively in the USA all you need to do is to say that you want access, provide the phone number and pay money, and third parties will hand over the records. What really shocked me is that according to the article, cellphone records in the USA are not confidential. Thankfully here in Oz they are protected under the Telecommunications Act.

I just had a strange one on a server. A TCP service that I wrote somehow crashed overnight. Not sure what happened, but the TCP service basically stopped accepting any information. What was worse, restarting the service would not stop it. And my supivisor program refused to restart the service too. I needed to manually stop the process, and then the service restarted and everything fixed itself as it should. It has been probably 10 minutes, and things are starting to settle down. I like to see things automatically restart after a failure.

I will have to adjust my server to self-detect problems too, and have a suicide option if it thinks that it is not working correctly. I just need to work out how it should detect that there is something wrong. Like no valid position reports in five minutes or something. I will look into it.

A client was telling me about all the data he has avilable, like all the pubs in the Hunter... and I told him of the FFF system of measurement. Rather than Meters, Seconds and grams, we have Furlongs, Fortnights and Frankins. 60KM/H becomes a more useful 100 214.746 furlongs per fortnight. Or close enough to 100K F/F. I can just see the road signs now. Anyway time to get some work done.

I did go on a run this afternoon - and I did reasonably. I ended up running about 4.7 or 4.8km all up. I think I did it in a fraction under 35 minutes which is not too bad. I was not really up to the 5km, nor to 7KM or more. The distance that I did was far enough. After all I did do the 7km yesterday or the day before so I am still recovering from that a tiny bit. Not much. If the weather is cool tomorrow I might go for another run - We will see.

I grabbed my other laptop out today - the first time since the weekend. My neighbour wants to borrow it tonight so I needed to log in and install software on it. The strange thing was that there was a pink tinge on the screen... Thankfully it recovered after a few moments. For a while there I thought that the screen was totally screwed. But it aint so I am lucky.

Finally, I am watching the british show SPOOKS... This is a great show. Series 4 has the woman who plays Hugh Grant's girlfriend in Love Actually as a unwitting assistant to MI6 who are trying to protect London from a series of bombs. Looks really interesting... And she is doing a great job as an actress in the series from what I have seen

Sometimes it would be cute to have a themometer in the office. Provided you are not concerned about the power usage. This project creates a DVD with a number of pictures each containing a temperature and some graphics. They are accessed by pressing keys on the remote control. But the temperature sensor emulates the remote to choose the correct page based on the current temperature. Cute idea I think.... Not quite as cool as my XBox, but right now I dont have a temperature sensor connected to it either.

MobileMag has a press release for an add-on for Motorola Cell Phones. According to the site, this device allows you to add up to 8 GBytes of Flash Memory to a phone. I am still trying to work out why you would need so much memory on your phone... 8 GBytes. My cellphone has 32 MBytes and I am not used 31 of them, so I think this is slight overkill.

I am looking at doing another run this afternoon. The weather looks fairly good for it, and I am not feeling too bad. I dont think I will be able to go another 7km, but five should be little problem I would guess. Like normal though it really does depend on how I feel when I get out there... And exactly what the weather is like. I am feeling absolutly great from the exercise. Soon I will be able to build up the speed in addition to building up the distance that I am running. But that is a little while yet. When I went to pick up the mail earlier I grabbed some morning tea - yeah, I was being bad. Anyway I found that the morning tea was actually too sweet and filling - in other words I am eating less which is good.

Australian IT has a story about a Western Australian City that has some issues right now with a broadband company that is trying to put up a tower in the town. The council has rejected the tower on the basis that they have not provided the information requested. And now Telstra have started installing ADSL. Sounds like a real mess. I can see a company going bankrupt over this one. The strange thing is that they started installing the units in houses before the base station.

In other words there was no way to test things which sounds realy dumb to me. Something funny going on there. Unless the company intended to go bankrupt as soon as it got it's grants from the federal government.

One of my clients wants to export vehicle data out of my TeamTrack application to a text file for some reason. Not sure exactly why, and I am not sure I am allowed to know why. Anyway, There is a way - export to Access MDB, and then export to TEXT file from there. But this is messy. I then thought about the correct way to do this - use crystal reports to generate a report, and then save this to a text file, or to Excel.

The only problem with this at the moment is that I am having an issue generating the reports when the source data is an access database rather than a webservice. I am not sure what is going on - it could be a scoping issue, or it could be one of many other things. I need to resolve this, but so far I am just hitting a brick wall. I do not seem to be getting anywhere. ARGH. I will look at it later.

I also had a phone call from another client this morning... He was telling me that the GPS system he installed allowed his business not only to keep up with the christmas rush when the other people in his industry were too congested, but it also allowed his company to expand. That is a fantastic cost benefit for my client. And good news since he is looking at buying some new tracking units too!

I have just finished bringing my accounts up to date; the second half of the accounts were a whole lot easier than the first half. I am not sure if that is because I just was up to speed, or what. All I know is that the accounts are done for the period, and I promise to do my accounts once a month from now on. Yeah, and pigs might fly :-) I make that promise every time I do my accounts, and I never keep it. NEVER.

Things are not finished though. I still need to file the paperwork, pay some bills, and do the actual BAS. The BAS takes commonly a minute or two in order to complete. Anyone who says that it takes longer is obviously not using an accounting package or is also adding in the time it takes to keep their books up to date. All I need to do is select the period the BAS is for and say go. That easy. Really is.

I heard a good joke today... Did you hear about the extroverted engineer? He looks at your shoes when he is talking to you.

According to News.Com.AU, AAPT suffered another blow, with a massive network outage halting fixed-line services in Queensland. Water damage at the company's Riverside exchange in Brisbane "has caused wide scale disruption to our residential and business customers in Queensland". From what I can gather this is as a result of maintainence to the air conditioning system. And caused the data centre to loose power with some significant damage.

I have just spent probably three or four hours doing my BAS. Am I finished? Yes. No. I have managed to get it finished to the end of the calendar year, but I still need to do the data entry up until today. That will take a few hours tomorrow I would guess. The worst thing was remembering what deposits were for into my bank account - I know people paid me for things, just who and what for. Normally there will be an invoice, but sometimes they just send a cheque or do a direct deposit without asking me first.

At least now the accounts balance. I am just glad I decided to divide the task in two... So much easier this way. But it does mean that tomorrow the fun begins again. Welcome to my life. So, why dont I get an accountant to do this? Well, most of this stuff needs to be done by me anyway because I would need to give the accountant the data... Fun.

I have not had much success getting my BAS done. I did log into my account and get the bank statement downloaded and printed out, but that is all that happened unfortunately. Some other things came up, like getting trackers out the door. Right now I have almost all of them sent out... But one is misbehaving. Isn't there always one. Just one. I have tried too many things and I am getting nowhere... Well, that is not true. I have worked out that the unit is rebooting for some reason. I just need to find out why, and how.

And some good news... I got a purchase order today for some work. Well, actually I do not have the purchase order, but the client has it in his hand as soon as we can confirm that we can do the work. I am getting a friend to help me with this, so that will make things easier on me. I do the admin tasks mostly, and I get most of the money. That is what I like - a fair division of labour. Too many times I am on the other side of that unfortunately.

I think I am going to have to get rid of the reclining rocking chair out of my office. It is too dar comfortable. Thankfully I can use the laptop in it, and get usable work done, but it is a grand distraction. It is oh so tempting to close my eyes for just a moment and wake up an hour later... Sounds really tempting. Anyway I had better leave it there before I actually decide to close my eyes....

One of the things I have found about debugging GPS issues is that it is VERY hard to work out exactly what is going on. Is the issue because of a satellite issue, an antenna issue, a connector problem, a receiver problem, or a software bug. Working out what is going on can be an issue. Right now I have two GPS antennas and I am trying to work out if one is faulty, and if it is then why it is. This is not as easy as it might sound. With so many variables sometimes things just do not work out as expected. Then you need to do a cost benefit analysis. How much is it going to cost me to work this out?

Oh, the other thinng with GPS is that sometimes it is the angle of the antenna so one more thing to consider. In the end I think I will call this antenna marginal, and basically throw it out. Things will be more reliable that way. And there is less chance that a client will be annoyed when the ^&$*^8 tracker does not work. And given how much these things cost it really is not worth it. The main issue is the fact that I do not have any other antennas in my office... Time to get some in...

Time to pack some trackers up (after the obligitory nail polish) and then back to the BAS!

I made the mistake of watching a show called 'Brainiac' from the UK on the TV this morning... It is a show that is somewhat addictive, but at the same time I have somewhat of a cringe at. Brainiac is sort of a mash up between mythbusters and comedy central I think... Made up of lots of short pieces testing scientific questions... Like will a petrol filled balloon in a microwave oven explode. And which will save you better from a home invader with a crossbow - a loung cushion or a steel wok? Important questions I am sure, but ones where I start shaking my head wondering when I can see the next episode.

This mornings work? Getting some trackers out the door and doing my BAS. The first should be fun... The latter... Well... Lets just say that I could have done this on january 1st if I had wanted to :-)

Tonights meeting was not too bad... Any meeting that lasts only two hours cannot be bad can it - at least when I expected it to be three or more hours long. I really was not sure what to expect. Right now though I am starting to get a bit tired. For some reason I have not caught up fully from the weekend. Some of that is probably the fact that I did a reasonable amount of exercise today. Whatever the reason, I am sure that I will sleep well tonight.

Today I got some of my TAX done... My business tax at least. Tomorrow I will work on more of the BAS... Oh Fun, Oh Joy. I also need to get some new trackers out to a client tomorrow so I guess that will be at the top of my agenda.

Meeting at the child care centre tonight. ARGH. I have some other things I could be doing tonight, like watching TV... I have an idea what I want to get out of this meeting... I will just have to see how it goes... I hope it does not go too late either.

News.COM.AU is reporting that some of the motorways in Sydney are incorrectly detecting some smaller cars as trucks. According to the story, when the cars are too close, it detects the car as a longer car based on the length and says that it is a truck. The report mentions 2m being the magic number. Two meters is too little separation for my liking...

TecheBlog has a a list of the top 10 strangest MP3 players. The Register is reporting that Transprt For London is making available logs for Pay As You Go transport cards available on the net if you know the persons mother's maiden name. This does not sound all that secure.

According to The Business Online.COM, Microsoft is about to release a free VoIP service to challenge the mobile carriers. One assumes this is VoIP over GPRS... And it may as well be running SKYPE or any other VoIP software...

Is this me?


This was created by the Simpsoner. So Cool! And if you try it, send me a copy!

As mentioned a little while back I did a run just before lunch, and managed to do 7KM in 50m 25s. I am pretty sure this is the furthest and longest I have ever run. This was about 8.33 KM/H which is a bit slower than I had hoped, but frankly I do not care. I was trying to do the distance and I did it!!! 7KM is about half a City to Surf Fun Run.

I forget what course I did... And frankly it is hard to work out by looking at the plot from the run without going to each point, which I have not done. I did have a look at the course gradient, and found that it was mostly flat... The details are in the attached photo... But frankly I do not trust it all that much. Looks cute though. I weighed myself when I was having a shower after the run and found that I have lost another half a kilo. I am impressed with myself over that.



When I grabbed my lunch I also grabbed a new belt... I certainly need it... I only have one hole left on the belt... and I can use that one if I need to as well.

Oh... And I got a parcel from the USA today... Some stock that I had ordered... It was sent on the 15th in the USA, and got here today, which is the 21st. That is what I call good service. Now I just need some people to buy the hardware...

7km run in 50 minutes and 25 seconds. WOW.

My BAS return needs to be in by next tuesday which means it is definitly time to do my accounts. This involves entering all my purchases, any payments that have come in through direct deposit or through cheque, and generally getting the books in order. I have decided to do this whilst I am fresh, and I am working through the accounts as we speak. Well, I am having a short break from it to protect my sanity, but I am getting the accounts in order. The pile of un-entered paperwork on my right is getting smaller, and the folder with all the entered stuff on my left is getting fatter... And the pile of receipts where I have paid cash is getting higher.

Seince more than 50% of the receipts are for Australia Post I think I really need to apply for an account with them. It would save so much time...I know I am missing some receipts for some other things - I just need to find them. I am sure they are on my desk here, somewhere. I hope I have not filed them... That would be bad :-)

Doing this work early has its drawbacks... It is too darn early... I just entered an invoice for $245 and tried to say it was paid, but entered the $245 in postage... OOps, I almost had a $490 problem to fix.

My list of possible dog names is slowly expanding. A friend suggested BYTE would be a good name for a dog, and since then I have come up with a few more...

• Byte
• Bit
• Unix

The names Bit and Byte should be clearly obvious. Unix may not be so straight forward. It could only be used for a desexed dog. To understand the reason for this you need to understand the derivation of the word Unix... You can see that here under History.

I am feeling a whole lot better right now - it is 8:30pm, and I am watching last nights CSI:Miami on video... I had been watching Mythbusters at 7:30pm on SBS, and I just could not keep my eyes open... And I fell asleep for at least half an hour. I guess I was still exhausted from the weekend still. I am feeling a whole lot better now after the sleep and a shower. The CSI:Miami episode is an episode I saw when I was in the USA in September. With some luck this will be the last of the shows I saw when I was over there.

I was doing a bit of research about Commender in Chief today, and found that the show has been 'delayed' in the USA for about three months so that they can have all the episodes run in a row. According to the makers they are delaying things since in the past there have been major issues ensuring that the episodes have all been available for showing, and this has caused eratic programming on TV. Thankfully this means that the program has not been canned.

Tomorrow provided the weather is good I think I will go for another run. If the weather is cool I will see about doing 6-7KM. I feel like doing a good run and I think that sort of distance is achievable

I find accounting reports strange. Today I have spent a small amount of time going through some statements - and they were not bad until I went looking for the accounting charges, and found that the numbers did not add up. I had a statement for July to December, one for January, and one for July to January. The problem I had was that the first two statments did not add up to the third. I think I have traced this to an issue with items being backdated after some of the reports were run.

I find it hard to work out how some government entities operate. Some require everything to operate in a set order. Others are slightly more 'flexible'. I am working on one job at the moment - and although I have not yet received a purchase order from them yet I have been shipped some software which will be needed to write the software. By this I am guessing that things are in motion, getting a purchase order approved, but that it is not yet there. As soon as the order comes in I need to then send a whole lot of orders off myself.

Apart from that things have been reasonably quiet today so I have started working on getting my books up to date for my BAS. Happens four times a year, and I hate it. But it is better than waiting 12 months I can assure you... Actually a monthly BAS would probably be a good idea for many small businesses as it forces them to keep the accounts in shape...

I have not had a McDonalds Hamburger for some time... Some of my friends are threatening to take me there to break me.... Well, maybe not after reading this article in the SMH that reports that their french fries contain wheat and dairy products. Not sure how you can actually do that, but they are added to improve the taste... Very Very strange....

Not a bad mornings work. I think I have basically just made about $500 on a small deal doing a bulk purchase... Now I just need to see if I can get a few more people to buy some hardware so we can get the price down lower. I doubt that I will have too many difficulties... I am starting to build up a fairly good list of contacts... My address book in outlook is worth its weight in gold.

Going through my emails, on saturday I got an email from a potential client, who unfortunately afraid that his partner of six years is being unfaithful. From the email I can just sense the hope that his partner is not being unfaithful, but at the same time is wanting proof if she is. He wants to prove that she is not... And wants GPS to do this. And I am torn. I cannot make money out of a client like this... at least without charging too much, and even if I can supply what he needs I am not sure it would be legal. But I can just feel that this poor guy is being torn apart too... I suspect that a private investigator will be his best option.

A few weeks ago I posted some comments about Pherotones. It turns out that this is a marketing campaign for Oasys Mobile of the USA selling ringtones, according to the NY Times. This advertising campaign cost them under US$250,000, and is bringing in over 10,000 users a day to the pherotones site. Oasys Mobile is now giving away the Pherotones ringtones... Ha, they cannot actually work, even if you want them to...

I am feeling somewhat more human than I did yesterday. Sydney was too hot and humid, but the central coast was really nice with the sea breeze. Being under cover when I was up there helped too I think... I got myself to bed about 9:30 last night, and woke up about 6am. I could have done with some more sleep I think but I think with the overnight temperature I was slightly in need of a glass of water. And I am one of those people who rarely needs a drink during the night, so I dont have a cup on my bedside table. And I can just see what would happen if I decided to put a cup there... It would have been knocked over by the 2nd night I can assure you...

Right now I have a couple of days worth of emails to catch up on. I vaguely scanned my emails during the last couple of days and I am sure that there are things there that need my attention. I dont think there is anything glaring, but I may have missed things in my sleep deprived condition.

Oh... Whilst trying to type this entry I had a MSN from a friend and we got talking... And he told me about a conversation he had with his wife... He was saying how he wants to donate his brain to medical research... and her response was
i said i was going to donate my brain for medical research "You may as well, you are not using it for anything else". On that note I think I will finish up...

The show today at Wyong was OK.. It was a bit smaller that last year but not too much smaller. The car boot sale area is getting smaller each year I fear - which is one of the reasons to go up there - to try to grab a bargain. In the end I did not end up buying anything much apart from a CD-ROM and a couple of CD-ROM drives. Apart from that I got some food but that was it. I sold a few trackers but it was fairly quiet. This was good in a way in that it allowed me (and the others) to spend more time with each person.

We also handed out a whole lot less information sheets that previous years which was a bit dissapointing. But then again that might just mean that the market is partially penetrated. Who knows. But it is an enjoyable time up there showing people what more they can get out of the hobby. The same thing with my talk... It was more of a 'here are the possibilities' type of talk rather than a 'here is how things are'.

Also at the thing was the Uni of NSW Satellite guys... Interesting catching up with them... They are still trying to get their satellite a finished as well as a launch date. With the lack of shuttle launches, and in the increase in microsatellite programs at unis they are finding it hard to get a launch. Poor things. I doubt that it will ever fly... But we will see...

Enough foe this entry. It is 9:32PM and it is definitely past my bedtime!

Here is a photo of me during my presentation... It was at 10:00AM today, which is too early for a talk I think... Anyway my talk lasted about 45 minutes with questions which was really good. The people asked questions which were appropriate, and the detail seemed about right. And GPRS worked allowing me to actually sort of demo the software.

The photo is not great, but at least I got a photo for once.



Here is my stand. The laptops were around the wrong way.


More later!

I am now home, and let me tell you I am somewhat exhausted. By somewhat I mean really exhausted. I am not sure how long this post will be, but more will follow soon after I get rehydrated. Put simply building yesterdat was great, and the event today was good, and my presentation went well...

Anyway, yesterdays plane building... We were working on a couple of things - electronic flaps, and inspection panels in the baggage area. We did the initial install of the electronic flap position actuator that sits between the two seats. This required some muching around, but basically just working on getting everything to line up. Not hard really. This was followed by putting a couple of inspection panels into the based of the baggage compartment. This required some design work since it was not on the plans.

We followed this by building mounting brackets for the strobe lights for under the inspection panel. Strangly none of this sounds like it is much work, but actually involved most of the day. Anyway I think I might leave it there... More later.

Dateline: Wyong Racecourse.

I spent three minutes looking at my presentation last night... Three whole minutes. AT least I know what it says... I certainly did not get a chance to edit it. It will be interesting to see how it goes - I am slightly sleep deprived having got up at 5:30 to get up here, and having got to bed late last night under the effects of caffiene.

My car right now is covered with DOG fur... Not inside, but outside... There was hail yesterday and we used my friends dog's blankets to cover the car... So now the blankets are clean, but my car has fur :-)

Anyway I had better get going... Things are about to get started...

New Scientist has a story how it is better to sleep on major decisions. The thinking is that your subconscious mind makes better decisions... and evaluates options better. The Register is also reporting that great dancers may be genetically disposed to dancing and keeping time.


I saw this cute site that lists the "The Many Unusual Looking Buildings On Earth". They have missed some buildings like the new MIT lecture hall...

The SMH is reporting that Coldplay may be splitting.

Finally, chocolate loving gamblers will love this. It is a chocolate roulette wheel, where one of the 12 chocolates contains a really really hot chilli.

I have done some contract programming in the past - and there was an issue with the software during the last week... So I started investigating this, getting the data together to debug the problem. Then something dawned on me - the program was not mine. I had thought that since I was sent the bug report that it was my software, rather than a similarly named product by one of their other contract programmers. OOps. Fixed now.

I think I got one of the quotes I put in this week too... One of the clients actually edited my proposal (with my OK) to make things clearer to those in his management chain. Looks really hopeful. Most of the work is being outsourced though which is not too bad... I will get a percentage...

XM Satellite Radio in the USA have released their current profit and loss figures. In the last 12 months they lost something like US$670m. That is a LOT of money. 80% of this was spent on advertising. The previous year they lost a similar amount. It intrigues me how companies can continue to keep moving like this - spending so much money. The problem is that there are two companies competing in the same space, and neither are winning...

The docking station on my iPod has been playing up on my bench. The left speaker has not been working well... I grabbed some contact cleaner and sprayed it on the dock, and things have improved dramatically. I think some tarnish has built up on the connections - and being a small connector there is no pressure behind it to keep it pressed together. Still, it is working now.

I finally have the three SIM cards set up... It has been a hassle. Firstly not connected, and then when they were connected they had locked SIM cards. And then when that was unlocked the units did not even work then since some dopey sleep deprived engineer placed the wrong settings in the units and had them connecting to Optus instead of Telstra.

Some of my clients are good to me. One of them bought a copy of the book 'Crystal Reports 10, The complete reference' on eBay, and then realised that it was not what he needed - and at 930 pages it was too big for his needs anyway so he is givng it to me. My client bought it for $2 + $5 postage. It ended up costing the pour guy paid $6.90 for postage - so my client is going to send some more to cover the fees and cost of the actual auction. And I get a nice shiny second hand book on Crystal Reports.

Sometimes I love SIM cards. Some times I really hate them. The problem is that there is no consistancy how they are set up. The last ones I got did not require the PIN code to be entered before use. This current batch did need that to happen. And if you put the wrong PIN code in a few too many times you will kill the SIM card until you enter the PUK code. And of course I do not have the PUK code for these sim cards since they are not in my name. And neither does the client. And I cannot ring telstra on their behalf since I do not even know the name of the client since they are being sold through a reseller.

Thankfully this is the business part of Telstra so it will be a case of the end user emailing Telstra and the numbers will be provided. But this is still a PAIN! Personally I like the idea of unactivated SIM cards not having a PIN number, or having a scratch off area with the code. The later are aparently in production but I have not seen them yet. I just need to put all SIM cards in a phone to test them before use - seeing if they have PIN numbers. Welcome to my life...

One of my friends suggested that I have a look at the Audacity Sound Editing Software. Not sure why he thought I might find it useful... I probably will sometimes, but I also suspect that I will not use it very often. But I keep that sort of thing in mind just in case I need something like that in the future...

Today I MUST work on my presentation for Sunday. It is mostly done, but I need to read through it to make sure I know what it actually says - after all I have not even looked at it since September, so if I want to do a good job I had better at least look at it. The one thing I will not be doing is removing my glasses during the talk. A friend suggested that if I felt nervous that I should remove my glasses and then I would not have to deal with all the people.

Only two things with this. Firstly, I do not tend to get nervous when I talk to groups. I have given lectures to 2-300 people with no problem. The other issue is that I cannot see without my glasses, and would not be able to see the screen which would be an issue, since I use the screen as notes. So I will probably not be doing that... Still, I will keep it in mind if I ever do get nervous...

One of my clients from Canada reported an issue this morning (and no, that is not why I am up so darn early... I just woke up just after 5AM for some reason and could not get back to sleep). After some debugging I found the following code which was meant to only run DoSomething once at a time...
If intick = False Then
intick = True
DoSomething
End If
intick = False
WHat it was doing was running DoSomething every 2nd time the code tried to run. The InTick=false should have been inside the If/Then... Quick Fix once found.

This evening I have been watching some more of Rough Science, and I have been really loving it. In the current challenge three of the scientists are making antiperspirants and deodorants... and washing soda and a washing machine. Totally bizzare, and totally fun. Great TV really... Pitty it is not a mainstream program but I am not sure it would really appeal to the general population either. It is really what I would call a fun show though... The washing machine that they made was amazing... it even changed direction during the wash cycle.

I had an interesting phone call from a childrens hospital today... From a GAIT centre... they were interested in tracking children inside as they walk working out how well they walk. I really could not offer much off the shelf, but gave some ideas of where to look for informtion - some keywords and the like. Since I could not offer a product this seemed to be actually helpful... As we talked I did get some other ideas on how to do things... I might investigate some of them later...

Finally... Here is a cute art project... here... An LED enabled paper lantern...

I am torn with the operations of the Child Care Centre... Right now I am trying to do a good job on the board of management, but realistically I am being stymied at every turn. I am trying to get the information so that I can make informed decisions about things, and at every turn I am being obstructed. And this takes time to resolve. I go looking to get copies of the files so that I can work out what is going on, and I get told that I cannot have access for what seems like specious reasons.

This is disconcerting to say the least. My own business has a simpler and more understandable structure. Most small businesses I know of have a simpler structure. I guess I am slightly disillusioned. I suppose all I can do is keep working on what I know about, and keep at it, ignoring any total rubbish that I am told. Trust but verify. And keep pushing... It is NOT supposed to be like this.

Thankfully some things are going sort of OK. I have had a bug report when you export to a database using a FILE BROWSER helper button. When you use such a button to choose a file to save to, the default directory for the application is thrown off. This causes all sorts of issies. It took me ages to find how to correct this issue. And when I thought I had fixed it I really had not... The answer was...
Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.ExecutablePath)
What this does is gets the full path to the executable and then throws away the local filename of the executable. So simple. Well, maybe NOT!

Some days things just happen, and I get really busy... I have not had a chance to thing since I got back from my run... actually since before my run, but that is another story. My run today was really good... I didi something like 5.5KM in 39 minutes. This means I was averaging about 8.5 KM/H. And I felt like I could do another KM at the end of that if I had wanted to. I felt great. I think I ended up doing two loops of the oval, and two loops of the bottom end of the creek. I really like the fact that my endurance is increasing. Apart from wanting to cool down at the end I felt wonderful. I grabbed a screendump out of OziExplorer as proof.


Well it does not prove anything except to me. And in the end that is all that matters - that I am satisfied that I have done what I wanted to do. I feel like running this afternoon, but I know that I should probably wait until tomorrow before going running again - wait until my body has caught up a bit.

Lunch time today I met with a client - great catching up with him. He has been loving my crystal reports functionality, and has been asking for more features all the time. It is bit of a double edge sword. Empower the users, and the users want more. And with him I am getting more feature requests all the time. And this is good in that it helps me improve the product, and bad since it takes time to improve the product. Still I love doing this so I guess it is not too bad!

In a little while I plan to go for a run... Assuming I can find a GPS with batteries I think I will take that with me so that I can test out that GPS to GOOGLE software that I Blogged about a few days back. I just found a GPS... I just need to find some batteries for it. I guess I will steal the batteries back out of my digital camera... The same ones I stole from the GPS to get the camera to work.

Yesterday I was having hassles trying to get a GPS tracking system working. More correctly my client was, and kept telling me what he was finding by eMail, and I kept asking questions. Last night I was going though his last email of the day and I found the results he sent me rather interesting. Firstly the unit was sending out identical position reports every few seconds - down to the time stamp not changing. If nothing else the timestamp should have changed. But each of the lines had a flag set saying that the data was garbage - that there was no GPS lock. So it looks like the two of us wasted half the day looking for issues with software or hardware at the receiver when it was transmitting side.

Quote written... Or at least sent off to a business partner to work on. Sure, there are a few other projects to work on... I have some hardware to get shipped here - I shipped some hardware to the USA and it is not working. So I need to ship some more units. So I need to order them. Correction - I have just ordered them. On the same subject I think I have just some some of the tracking units I ordered today... Sounds like they might be popular.

Instructables has a story on LED Throwies which are LED's connected to calculator battery, and magnet. The LED is then thrown up to the side of a building or something and lasts a week or two, as a piece of public art. Cute idea. Ari Shamir from RSA has determined that a cellphone can be used as a key ingredient in cracking RFID locks. Interesting read of the technology.

The SMH had a couple of money stories in the last day or so... First came a story about a Man at the mint who stole $2 coins, at least $6000 in them... And was caught when he tried to make a major purchase with them. They also reported that since yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Decimal Currency being introduced that the national archives released a press release noting that they had found an old press release advising people not to put decimal currency in puddings as this would make them poisonous.

PointlessWasteOfTime lists the Top 10 SciFi films that were never made. This includes the real Aliens 3, the other three star wars films and the single sequel and prequel to The Matrix. I think I actually agree with the analysis.

Right now I have a proposal to finish writing... I have been waiting a couple of days to finish it, and now I have the data I needed I guess it is time to finish writing it. Great thing is that I can do this at the same time as watching TV...

I think I just managed to get out of a trip to Tamworth. I have been having some software issues, and I think I traced the issue to bad settings. It seems that the hardware that has been having issues did not have the correct settings loaded, and I have since uploaded new settings. I will see tomorrow how this has affected things. I am hoping that things will be much better of course. If not I will just be working through the issues to come up with a solution.

I found an interesting tool on the web... It contains a page that works out the distance between two points on the globe. Seems to work. The numbers make sense at least. They wanted the numbers as Latitude, and Longitude, and I could not remember which was which. I was told that Longitude is the Longer number... Makes perfect sense here in Oz where Longitude is somewhere between about 130 and 155 degrees.

And CNN has a story about how love is a drug as addictive as food and exercise... They suggest that Romance may be tied to reward system that can cause addiction. Interesting read actually... The quote at the end of the article was good... "You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it's wonderful, In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion."

I came close to thinking I had a major problem with my trackers a few minutes ago. The management console tells me what is happening by VehicleID. I had two units returning data, one with 83 and the other being 88. These units should return data in order, and I was quickly looking at the data and saw that the time went backwards. [Expletive Deleted]. When I then looked more closely I found that it was two vehicles reporting, and one was slightly behind the other one.

And one of my clients rang with an issue - He commented that he could get a serial cable working only when it was plugged into the serial port and the USB port through a serial converter... But unplug from the serial port and the data input into the USB port would die. Really strange. I think that there might be a cable problem there - maybe the ground wire has come off. That MIGHT explain some of the issues. Without going into the clients office it is hard to see what is going on.

A friend of mine just MSNed me asking where to get memory for his DELL laptop... A quick search of my blog reminded me that Upgradable.Com.Au was the cheapest when I looked at this a few weeks ago. I saved us both so much time being able to just simply look this information up - provided of course that the prices have not changed much over the last few weeks, and assuming that the company is still in business.

I have just become a reseller for Scott N1VG's OpenTracker. This is similar to the Byonics TinyTrak III, but includes other features, and is open source. My units will be available in the next week or so, and I am selling them slightly cheaper than the TinyTrak III. My OpenTracker page is here

Today I have a few things to do. I have a presentation to give up at Wyong on Sunday morning at the Race Course (10AM)... This is a Ham Radio and Computer festival for the day... and I am talking on GoogleEarth. Should be an interesting day. I need to get some handouts written so that we can get them printed off. And I have a few other programming tasks to do too... and a proposal to finish writing...

I just needed to place an order in the USA for some hardware to sell on my Website. This involved registering for the web site, which I do not mind about. The problem I had was working out what state to put in. Each checkout basket is different. Some want you to not enter a state if you are not in the USA, some want you to find the I AM NOT IN THE USA option, and some want you to just go away and not bother them. In this one I thought it was the select any option case, but then when I answered the next question which was asking about the country, it changed the state pulldown into a freeform text area. If only the two options had been in the other order.

Not that SONY has ceased production the AIBO robotic dogs - I was going to say Killed Off, but that sounds mean - a programmer has come up with an AIBO for a mobile phone. I think the functionality is limited to total control, but I can just see someone taking this further and turning this into something similar to a tamogochi. Maybe if I got this software I would have a pet dog to call 'BYTE'.

I also found some software on how to run the MythTV linux TV playing software on the XBOX. Personally I am not sure why I would go this concidering how good XBoxMediaCentre is getting. It seems to do everything I need - at least at the moment.

The SMH has an article on 'How well do you know your culcha', which has a 20 point questionaire attempting to show how australian the reader is. Things such as asking the source for "How long can we look at each other down the barrel of a gun?", "Who defeated whom in the final of Australian Idol in November, 2004" and "Whose kiss in a collapsed mineshaft was seen by 2.5 million Australians?". Most people could not work out most of these apparently. I certainly did not manage to work out most of these.

I saw a great project which can read most proximity cards used for security purposes and play back the data on demand to open doors and the like. This just shows how insecure most of the cards actually are.

Finally, GoogleRunningLogs is a cute program that takes GPS logs and uploads them to a web site for use with GOOGLE... I might have to drag out a GPS and try this the next time I go running. Should be some fun.

I have just got back from running, and a small job. Let me explain. About 3km into my run I was feeling great... I felt like I could do another 2-3km. I was feeling great - and everything was on track. I had gone the full length of the reserve with a loop around an oval on the way, and was about to do a return loop on the oval when I got a phone call. ARGH. It was from the church, and they needed a light switch fixed. ASAP if that was possible. Yeah. So instead of doing another loop of the oval and a loop of the creek and maybe a lot more I did a quick run home and then the work at the church after a quick shower.

I suppose I really should get hydrated in a moment - I have just not had a chance since I got back from the run. I can assure you that I do feel a like some type of snack too - something healthy. I had a salad for lunch, and will probably have the same for dinner with some fish or something. Apart from feeling slightly hungry at the moment I am feeling great.

Since seeing Peter Gabriel in the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I have been chatting with a friend in New Zealand about him and the Fairlight Synth. There is a lot more to the story, but as far as I can work out he was about to ship Peter a Fairlight but then had to deliver it to Kate Bush instead... and got another one for Peter. So cool... Although I really did not realize that Kate Bush was in that much need of a synth. Then again, given Wuthering Heights I am not surprised!

Blogger.COM has been unreliable today. Timing out and generally not performing well. This entry is being written in Wordpad rather than with the Web interface since the interface is having problems loading at the moment. I would guess that Blogger.COM is having some issues with expansion, and that they need to upgrade hardware and software to rectify the issues. When it works it works well. At other times it is a pain. It just seems to time out returning the page or returns an error. Still for a free service with no advertising it is remarkably good. Thanks Google.

This morning I needed to send an SMS message on my phone urgently - and when I tried I got an error message saying that the memory was full, and to close some programs and try again. A reboot fixed this. But what was going on? The phone should be able to cope when programs crash or do not return all the memory that they used. I should not need to restart the phone to get it to work. I guess I need to start looking for a new phone.. .I will have to see what is available out there.

A bit later I am planning on having a run - maybe 4km depending on how I feel. The weather is fairly good for running so I dont think that will hold me back. If anything it will be fitness levels holding me back. But I will see how I go. I do not expect to break any land speed records, but I do expect that I will be able to run reasonably well.

I have had some minor hassles with eBay... One of the sellers from the USA thought that the $10 postage was for shipping to the USA, forgetting the AUSTRALIA ONLY on the postage price. I offered to reverse the transaction in PayPal, and just after I had done so he changed his mind. And then paid the additional postage. Total screwup of course... But it was just one of these things that happen with international commerce. His antennas will go out later today... And I am sure he will be happy - he is getting then for a good price.

On the valentines day theme, SomethingAwful has some StarWars cards that are, shall we say, awful. Therefore there is no link. Google is your friend if you want to look for them. I think they are things only a dedicated Star Wars fan would love, and that is not me. I have not even seen Episode 3. I will have to see that, eventually!

Oh, yesterday the domain Radioactive.Net.Au became available after a few years. When I first tried to register the domain I found it was registered a few days before, so I registered the radio-active.net.au. I have now got my original intended domain, and I am in the process of getting it set up. I am not sure how I will use it... Both will probably work in paralell for the moment. I need to think about this somewhat longer.

Being valentines day I thought I might include this photo that I found somewhere on the web a little while ago. It is of a teddy bear obviously, and is titled 'Mad About You'. Too Cute in his little straight jacket. I have forgotten where I actually found it...

Also on the subject of Valentines Day comes how to make heart shaped fried eggs.

The GoogleSightseeing WebSite (Why bother seeing the earth for real) has some pictures of StoneFridge or a replica of Stonehenge made from fridges. In the comments there is also a link to 'Carhenge' also in the USA... Guess what it is made of!

Right now I have a heap of emails to work through from overnight. Seems like things were busy around the world.

Some links ... Monorails.org has a cute instructional article on a monorail for puppies in a back yard. Looks so cute... Not sure what the animals really think of the monorail.

According to the SMH, Philip K Dick is missing. More correctly, his andriod robot is missing after being placed onto a flight and not arriving at the other end. The American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall died more than 20 years ago. "We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics Research Institute at the University of Texas at Arlington and Dick's friend Paul Williams.

Finally, Deals Direct has a HP 6365 PDA with GPRS, Bluetooth and Wifi for only $599. The only thing is that it does not have GPS making it an older model. Not a bad price if you are into PDA's...

I had dinner with an ex-boss of mine tonight - rather an enjoyable evening sitting outside just catching up. For some reason it has been well over 12 months since we had caught up... So this was well overdue.

I am just watching 'My Life in Film' which contains the idiot from 'My Family' and 'Love Actually'... They are doing a spoof of Top Gun with a car driving school where the idiot actor cannot pass his driving test. I will grab the guys name later. It is absolutly hilarious... It is Kris Marshall. The episode is actually called Top Gun in tribute to the film. They even used 80's music throught the episode that was similar to that used in the movie.

There is a story on news.com.au about how sending people to gaol Reduces the number of burglaries, but not because people stop committing crimes when they come out, but because the people do not commit crimes when they are inside.

Not sure when they are on, but I know that the Commonwealth Games is coming up. I got a request from one of my clients for some hardware for the Opening Ceremony. I found some hardware off the shelf that will probably do what they need. Actually I have no idea how what they were asking for will be used, but I do have some suspicions. I guess I will just need to wait a little longer and see what happens there.

I am currently listening to Blondie's 'Picture This'...
All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
All I want is a room with view, oh-oh
I will give you my finest hour

The CIA is trying to get all warm and friendly, trying to take over the hearts and minds of kids everywhere. They now have a blue Teddy Bear called 'Ginger' who can take you on a tour of the CIA. Ginger is named after Virginia where the CIA HQ is located. You too can follow Ginger as she gets her ID photo take, visits the staff canteen and the secure document destruction facility!

I found an Article that shows how the Random Play in iTunes actually allows higher rated files to be played more often than lower rated files. This only works in the random play in iTunes, but not on an iPod itself.

And Yahoo is reporting that a house in the USA was valued at US$400m rather than $110k, and this has caused real problems to the local community as budgets were based on the proposed income from the property taxes. So this has had a flow on to schools and other organisations who have had their budgets significantly reduced.

For once work has been quiet... Only a phone call from a client at 7:30AM asking if I could make some changes to a report sometime in the next 24 hours, and an email or two. So basically I am just catching up on other work at the moment - it is good getting a chance to breathe for once.

I also managed to get in a run - I think I did about 2.5-3km. Short course in other words. It was starting to warm up when I went which is why I did less than I have in the past, although I could have run further if I had needed to. It was probably better not to totally exhaust myself. When I went to go running I realised that I needed to put the belt on my pants in another notch - which is important for a couple of reasons.

Fist, it means I have to wear a belt otherwise these pants would fall off - not a good sight I can assure you. Secondly it means that I am loosing even more weight. When I had my shower after the run I weighed myself and found that I had lost about a kilo in the last week or so. It is amazing what can happen when you eat properly and exercise.

As a diversion from real work I just spent a few minutes working on the XBox, on the forlorn hope that I would find a business use for the device. Anyway, I have managed to do a couple of things which are fantastic. Firstly, I managed to FTP to the XBox. To do this running the EvoX software was simplicity itself - I just needed to type in ftp://192.168.1.101 into my explorer. But this said it could not login, so one of the menus had the option for Login, so entered that with xbox and xbox and it worked. I could then create a directory on the F:\ drive and copy in the files from the new copy of XBoxMediaCentre.

This time this worked, and appeared at once under the AvaLauncher list of applications. Perfect. Actually two copies were there so I ran the 2nd one. It took some time to load, but once it did it worked this time. I was able to go to the setup menu for the network and enter the IP address of my SMB server, and then all my videos and MP3s were available for viewing.

What is cool is the visualizations. As soon as I put a network cable next to the antenna in the lounge room, I think the XBox is going up stairs. This will also stop me from playing too many games. Probably a wise move. Oh, the visualisations are great when playing music too... Anyway, time for a run!

Working on the plane went yesterday - and once again the engine mounts allowing the plane to be rotated more than showed their worth. It seemed as if we were always turning the thing upside down and right way up. I did make a discovery though - if you have the plane upside down, it is MUCH harder to drop tools onto it damaging the plane. But, and I did not find this out, you also have a much bigger chance of dropping things on yourself.

Yesterday we finished getting the weldments installed for the Landing Gear which was really not all that painful. A mildly annoying job really in the scheme of things - but an important job to do correctly. The last thing you want is for the landing gear to fail on landing. The brackets are certainly VERY solid, and I guess this is a good thing.

We also worked on the panel between the back of the baggage compartment and the back of the plane. These two pieces of metal are sort of like a concertina with ripples for strength. This caused some hassles, mostly because the parts were not cut to shape or match drilled. Putting the back on the compartment certainly gave a great feel to the plane. Makes it look even more serious. And also points out how little room there is for baggage!

I somehow did not expect to be waking up at 9AM... And I was not disappointed... Thankfully I did manage to wake up at 6:15AM, which allowed me to get close to seven hours sleep. Maybe not enough to catch up on my sleep from the past few nights, but enough to mean that today I will be feeling a whole lot less tired than I was yesterday - or at the very least will not need to drink tons of Coke.

Watching the opening of the Winter Olympics the other night they had Peter Gabriel on performing the John Lennon song Imagine. Two things struck me about this performance - firstly how much Peter Gabriel had aged... and the other thing was how good he was at performing this song. He is truely a professional performer, and did a fantastic job with the lyrics of this song. You can just tell how much work he had put into arranging this piece of music for the event.

The latest Worth 1000 contest is interesting... It has photoshop-ed photos of what things would be like if Canadians ruled the earth... The one I love is the electric light globe in the shape of the maple leaf. So canadian. I wonder if there is a market for selling them :-)

11:15PM and all is well... Apart from being dosed up on Coca Cola that is. Well, last night I managed to get to bed about 12:15AM and for some reason woke up at 6:15AM and could not get back to sleep. And it is now late and I am slightly hyper. I grabbed a 600 mL bottle just before lunch, a can just after lunch and another on my way home, and although I know I am tired, I feel somewhat energised and wanting to type. I probably should have left earlier, and without the coke I would not have survived. An afternoon sleep would have done wonders I think.

When I checked my email earlier I saw that my USA buyer had completed the eBay checkout for the antennas, paying Australian based shipping charges. The charges to the USA are an extra $30 and it will be interesting to see what his reaction will be... Shipping can be a gotcha unless you are careful with eBay. Most of what I am putting on eBay is selling... I guess the rest is just junk.

I do have more to say, mostly about the plane, but that can wait until tomorrow. With some luck I will surface around 9AM to start work, but I somehow suspect that I will have done at least a couple of hours work by then...

Strange... last night I had an eBay auction won by a person in the USA for some antennas, and now I have to get the price of shipping. The shippings is likely to be more than the antennas, but thankfully I do not need to pay that myself... the package is just over 1m long, and 7cm in diameter so is reasonably horrible to send. I am waiting for the Australia Post web site to load as we speak...

Yesterday in the workshop attending to the plane was fun. Not that we managed to do much since the task we were working on was a real pain. We were working on the landing gear weldments, where they attach to the wing spar. Installing these weldments are like a 3D jigsaw puzzle where you need to keep adjusting the pieces to make sure that they fit.

Part of the fun is that some bolts need to be attached to the bulkhead, but the nuts are somewhat hidden from easy access, so the spanner needs to be placed onto the end of a screwdriver for access. We have got to the point where we can actually work on this without too many issues, but it did take some time. Today the plan is to finish getting these installed.

There is something somewhat civilised about sitting outside in the fresh are listening to the world go by - contemplating life. What is more civilised is when you are sitting there with an internet connection, and have nothing better to do that just write - reflecting on and observing life. Sure it would be better if there was not a dump truck operating across the road, but that is a minor inconvenience, and in a way it is and indicator that things around us do not stop even when we stop.

Just listening to all the sounds is enjoyable - working out what is happening... The sound of the hose washing something down, the sound of a jackhammer in the far distance, a police siren even further away, all mixed in with the sound of a gentle breeze and the occasional car. Sounds of modern life in fact. And then there are the echos, multiplying the sounds and creating new phantom sounds from every direction. I was going to say that the only thing that was missing was a dogs bark or a birds chirp - but having though that I can now dicern the birds singing on this summery day.

Sort of reminds me of Louis Armstrong's What a wonderful world which featured in the movie 'Good Morning Vietnam', but more importantly closed out the TV series 'Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy'. In that series, this song closed the loop between science fiction and reality...

I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I noticed when I dropped in at Aldi yesterday that they had 'XB Remote Controls' on sale for only $14.99. Some research revealed that they were actually XBox Remote Controls, and although they are not genuine they are a great deal for that price. So I picked up a couple... I am just waiting to see how they are...

According to Think Secret, apple is about to release a real video iPod. That is an iPod that has a touch screen the entire size of the iPod device - a 3.5" diagonal screen. There are suspicions that it will be released about the beginning of april for the 30th anniversary of the company. If this is true the product is likely to be revolutionary...

And just to prove that people have a lot more money these days to spend on their children comes the Posh Tots web site. For instance they have a great custom 'tree house' for sale for only about US$5,600. This inludes a spy periscope to keep an eye out for tresspasses, and sliding peephole in the door to keep out 'pip squeaks'

Business Week has an article on The RIM Blackberry Case and their workaround. RIM have been sued becasue their blackberry service stores emails on ther servers if the device is out of range. This is in violation of a patent. So they are intending to have emails stored on the sending end if the device is not in range to get around the patent. And thankfully RIM is working on getting the patents overturned.

I read an interesting short article on CNN which mentioned how Target in the USA actually has a crime lab similar to CSI, and offers their services free of charge to government agencies who often are not as well equipped. The lab was actually set up to investigate personal injury in stores, theft and the like.

And time magazine has a story about the five rules when covering the Vatican. Laura Bush is in Italy right now, and the reporter made some interesting comments about the clash of cultures. The one that I loved the most was how the press corp was seperated from the presidential motorcade, and took back streets in a move similar to The Italian Job in a bus, and actually beat the presidential motorcade there.

I just looked up a phrase in Wikipedia - Fourth Estate. I had no idea what this actually referred to. The Fourth Estate is actually the Press. The first estate is the Clergy, the second is nobility, and the third is everyone else, obviously meaning that the fourth estate came at a much larter time.

The setup of the software went really well. There was one hickup installing the serial port driver thanks to windows absolute love for wanting to install drivers for some devices more than once. There are probably two drivers needed for USB to Serial drivers, and both need to be installed seperately and in order. Once we installed the driver a second time things worked really well. We just needed to tell the loader softare which COM port to use and away it went. Sometimes things are just too easy.

It was good having a headset telephone whilst doing the support - it allowed me to be doing some general tidying up at the same time - I guess you might call this multi-tasking. I am just wishing that my VoIP phone had a headset so I could also walk around whilst using it. I really do need to get the VoIP PABX up and running - it will make things so much better here. Right now I have three phones on my desk... My mobile, my cordless with its landline, and my VoIP unit. I will not be able to get rid of the mobile but I can dispose of one of the other two I guess.

I am getting a bit concerned about one of my auctions - for a solar cell. Actually I would prefer to re-list it rather than have the person buy it actually since I think I an get more for it if it is re-listed. But I have not heard from the buyer since the auction was complete over 72 hours ago. I guess I will hear on the weekend - Maybe.

I will be building tomorrow but I will be having a later start. I think we will most likely just be tidying up a few areas that we have been putting off until now, and getting them done. You can only put off things so long, so I guess tomorrow will be a tidy up day. Not as exciting as putting the two haves of the plane together for the first time, or putting the wings on, but important none the less.

Right now I am just waiting for a support call. It was due a couple of minutes ago, and I dont really want to start any work since I know it is going to be interrupted. So I am here, at least for the moment. I will hopefully need to go at short notice.

The call is sure to be interesting - I need to, over the phone, take a client through the steps of installing a couple of pieces of software, and working out how to install firmware onto tracking devices. This would be bad enough if he was a programmer, but this client is not a programmer. So I need to take him through the process of getting everything working and set up. If it goes well it should only take 10 minutes. If something is not working it will take a bit longer than that. Of course I am hoping that it does of course go well.

One proposal has been sent out the door today. Well, I guess proposal is not really the right word - it was three pages of hand written drawings and notes scanned and emailed. Which was really what the client wanted more as a way to remember what we had talked about on the phone rather than wanting a 30 page proposal on glossy paper. There are a few other parties involved so he is also trying to manage the process there, which like many other things has some politics involved.

The other propsal is more straight forward, and has bits added to all the time. I am still feeling my way through the product offering - matching the client needs with what they really need. I am sure that I would be better in this job if I could more accurately read minds. Well, that is not totally correct - it is also working out what the real needs are as opposed to the stated needs. Always fun.

Sometimes in the vehicle tracking industy you seem to get suspicious data that turns out to be somewhat innocent... Case in point - a client was looking at some data of one of their clients... One of the new reports lists the maximum speed and maximum average speed. This report gave a particular journey being 158 KM/H followed by a stop for five hours. My client almost sent a rather interesting email off to his client suggesting the boss look carefully at the driving practices of this person.

Well, thankfully he decided to plot the journey on a map - and found that the journey ended at a local hospital. Those sorts of speeds are cetainly more acceptable in order to get to the emergency room inside a hospital. Just knowing the speeds did not tell the story. In this case not even the suburbs that the journey started and stopped at told the story. It was the map that actually said something.

Memo to Self. Stay away from the XBox. I love it but it does horrible things to my eyes. Even 10 minutes is bad for them - I guess I am staring too intently at the screen. When I am at a computer screen I am not staring so intently, keeping my eyes on the keyboard, and the screen and things on the desk. But when I am playing video games I just stare in one place. So I really need to keep myself away from the darn thing...

Another thing I need to do today is write a proposal for a council for some equipment - we are slowly working on a specification for this work, and then I need to work out the charging. The good news is that I am pretty sure I will get the work provided we can get a proposal that they like. If not then we are stuffed.

The Orange County Register is Anaheim, California, has a 3D virtual tour of Walt Disney's Private Apartment at Disneyland. It is rare to get a look at the apartment, and it is an amazing view into the life of such an amazing person. I would love to get a tour of that part of the park. Actually I would love a behind the scenes tour of the entire place. I think it would be so interesting...

I have a few things to do today... Pre-sales call this morning, and some phone assistance to give for some people doing installs. And I have some debugging and documenting to do. One of my users suspects that there is still an issue with the reporting interface, so I guess I need to look at that and see what the situation is.

I still have not got the trackers out the door. Our friendly telephone company still has not fixed the SIM cards. Why does this not surprise me? There are about 20 million SIM cards. I would have thought by now that they might have got things to the point where they worked most of the time. Actually, I think they do work most of the time - I think it is more when they get something other than the generic phone service to do that they have issues. Telcos... The bane of my life - or one of them at least!

Time to put my feet up... Definitely. I have just put a couple of phone sockets in, and installed an ADSL modem. Let me explain. The first bit involved installing another two sockets in another room in the church manse. This was probably only 2m away from the closest socket, but that is still a long way. It involved drilling a couple of holes in the floor to put a cable in. This was fun in itself as the 2nd room needed a 20cm long drill bit to get through the wood of the floor.

Then I needed to feed the cable through. This is the part I hated most. Whilst under the house seemed to be cool once I got further under it conditions got worse. The height got lower, and the number of cobwebs did not get any better. The cobwebs were the worst bit - I really really hate them. Cannot stand them.

Once I eventually got the cabling installed I needed to install an OptusNet ADSL modem. This was a pain as well. They have a CD to set things up, but it did not set up correctly. So I rang up and I was amazed to get connected within 30 seconds. They said 'you should be fine now' and five seconds later I had a problem.... One where they said I needed to call Optus. This time it took about 15 minutes to get connected, and I think they just told me to try again and it worked.

All in all I think it took me 90 minutes to do everything; quite productive really.

The Child Care Centre meeting went really well. And it only lasted an hour which was good. Decisions were made, and I got a taste of the regulatory environment that the centres operate under. And what seems like useless paper shuffling between departments. There is a theory that as a civilisation matures the size of the government grows to meet the size of the workforce. I certainly hope this is not true, but I certainly can see instances of it in real life.

I did some more playing on the XBOX, although this time I remembered why I do not play too many video games... I tend to get a bit of eye strain when I concentrate on playing the game too much. I just need to relax my eyes I guess... This is not a recent development... I have had it for ages...

I have realised that it is rather a bad idea to have an XBox in your office. Too much temtation to play games. I probably spent another 10 minutes playing Midtown Madness, and I found it hard to escape this and turn the machine off. I think the thing is made to be addictive. I copied some videos onto my laptop HDD and shared the directory. The media player allowed me to play these without issue - and I did like the quality of the video. Now I just need to get the software so that it is logical in the user interface. That is, so I do not need to go through half a dozen strange menus when I start the XBOx in order to use the media player.

On the subject of Midtown Madness, there is a version of this at Disney's Californian Adventure. I think it might be called 'Manhatten Madness' but the concept is the same. In this case it is a roller coaster set up for younger children in small red cars. I was unable to ride any times when I was there last year since it broke down every time I went to ride it. By 'every time' I mean that it would break down as soon as I was about to get into a car! Not good.

I have a childcare centre board meeting soon. Some of what will be talked about there is covered under a confidentiality policy unfortunately. But given that this is my first meeting I am sure it will be rather interesting. I have some ideas on what I want to acheive at the meeting, but we will see what happens. I really do not want to be on the board, but they needed a church person and I managed to convince another man from the church to join if I would. At least I am not alone.