Today I helped Richard resurrect his dead computer: the connection to the memory modules must have gone bad (occasionally beepbeepbeep on boot, random crashes during the startup sequence). I had scrounged up some spares (old motherboard, some graphics cards, a known-good power supply) and on return home had to put the power supply back to its normal purpose which is to drive my wireless access point (in a somewhat messy setup).

Now I have a wireless non-access point. Because I plugged the fucker in with the polarity reversed, the silly thing is misdesigned to draw 2A at 5V, the leads can sustain that and there is no over-current or polarity protection. Beyond the components going frzzzpop, that is.

And now I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side...

Spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Killarney flying in the comp: the days wer blown-out, too strong for my liking, and good, respectively. Monday I managed to get a late thermal on a refly five minutes before the launch window closed at 1500 and did 32km (of a task of 75km). Had a big scare some 15 klicks out, with thermal bullets of 6+m/s up throwing me around, then a big full frontal collapse with a stomach-lifting plunge, reinflated fine but violently, and on I went getting chucked around a bit more in 4-5m/s up...I didn't enjoy that at all.

Then either the air got very squirrely overall or I lost my nerves totally, (still don't know which) and things felt going rough and rougher to me. After a screeching eagle close by, another few big whackers and wobbling around in rough crap for another 40 minutes I decided that it's enough and landed. Pretty scared I was...

Tuesday and today I worked. Bah. Planned to drive out to the comp for the remaining three days tonight but I'm too beat: will leave at 0530 tomorrow. Let's see if I enjoy the remaining days better (I very much hope so) and I'll try to give some update on life, the universe and everything when I come back on Sunday.

Quote from the windows helldesk droids today at work, in response to my complaint about the "preferred browser" registry entry being locked:

"Firefox should not have been installed onto your citrix session. Unfortunately for various reasons we do not support any other browser other than IE within the citrix environment."

Well, thanks for nothing fellows. Massive brain atrophy is clearly involved here...like with the guy at the supermarket yesterday, who needed about 2-3 seconds per item to scan and bag; I was wondering whether his brain had actually died from lack of oxygen between his very...slow...and.....slower.....breaths.

In other painful news, my luck currently sucks somewhat: somebody cheated me on ebay (for the first time ever), took my $50 and vanished; one of my xmas presents seems to have been lost by the Austrian or the Australian postal services and another xmas present seems to have been lost by the American or the Australian post.

The first week of the teaching semester is over, without major gotchas. 2x2 hours of lecturing on Tuesday left me somewhat stunned (and with a throat getting sore) as usual. The weather sucks, rain and/or storms almost every day in the last week or so. My recent switch to wired ethernet at home still produces some TV/FM antenna trouble (unshielded TP), my hiking boots are about to give in (the foam/rubber sole is desintegrating) just before the Killarney comp, my car is about to die as well and I should do a lot of things I've got absolutely no impetus for.

On the positive side I've managed to shed almost three kilos which gets me back closer to the preferred weight level that I left sometime around the trip to .at last September.

Just got the word yesterday that my paper for the ARES 2006 conference in Vienna in late April was accepted, and it looks like the bosses will properly pay my registration and airfare. Great!

Less wonderful news is that tomorrow the teaching semester starts again, with me having both my main lectures tomorrow. Ah well. At least I had a good weekend with a fair bit of flying, a short XC flight on Sunday (short due to my own stupid tactical mistake) and a tally of 122.7 hours of airtime. I managed to reach the 120 hours on the very last day of 2005, and roughly kept up my average of 1 hour a week since then.

@pantheon, this whole "my life"-thing sucks at the moment.

At work the cluons are leaching away even faster than usual, the "Management by Magazine" (aka "if it's written in CIO, it must be good/true") gets worse and worse and the climate sucks. One of the head dimbulbs saw need to remind everybody in one of those all-staff spams that one of the last new rule-inventions was to be Followed By Rote...never mind that it makes no sense, is counterproductive and as stupid as the idiots behind it.

Writing up the PhD thesis sucks and consequently I'm having a hard time motivating myself. Got a paper in for a conference in Vienna in early 2006, mebbe for once I've produced bullshit shiny enough for academentia. But I doubt it: too honest and inept at waffling.

The Jolly Season is upon us yet again, and I hate it. Also, the weather currently sucks, it's very stormy with thunder and downpours every 2-3 days and lots of humid heat inbetween.

Drank too much yesterday, didn't go to bed until 0300 because White Squall ran as late night film and I liked it; didn't get up until late, weather looked stormy (but it hasn't rained yet) and I didn't drive up into the hills for flying. Felt sufficiently anti-social to not attend the chgc's christmas party (didn't even pick up the phone for the same reasons). Ah, Fuck It, I would only have hung around depressed anyway.

But there is nothing new about that, so I guess I should shut up now....

I'm sure &rw has been thinking about holding me over open flames in the last few weeks. My current/old colo at the company-that-was-cool-once is to be scrapped: the last oldschool techie has recently thrown the towel and the people running the show do not deserve any nostalgia or loyalty anymore.

The plan was that I'd get a cast-off ultra1 when he exchanges that for an ultra2 when my box joins his at the colo facility in Austria, and he'd be doing the actual installation as I'm geographically challenged.

Trouble is that his colo box is in a doomed building and mine will have to go somewhere else, and moving his to the new building means a new address: migrating his current ip address is a nogo. Fun! as his is a nameserver for lots of domains. So the decision was that the ultra2 goes in there first as my box, takes over dns duties with his new ip address in order to migrate his system, then his u1 is moved and the hardware gets swapped, done.

The disk I had sent him didn't boot on the ultra2, lots of tinkering later things work for a while only to have the PSU go boom. Next Friday the box needs to be installed, and I'm not going to be around between Sunday and Thursday (going to MEL) so anything that needs a console must happen before or 4-6 weeks later when the machines join each other finally.

But good friend that he is, he managed yesterday to scrounge up another complete ultra2 for me and set up remote access for me (console and net). Whoopee and Thank You! Lots of Beers I solemnly promise for the next time I'm visiting Austria...

(Anybody got a 170MHz ultrasparc CPU and 4x64-or-more Sun memory for cheap/sale?)

First I slept like a stone, couldn't get out of bed. Then it became obvious that the living room ceiling needs another coat of paint. Bah. Then the weather was good, but westerly - with the forecast being as usual totally wrong, saying nice easterlies.

So I drive up to Tambo, and have a shocker of a lousy flight: rough, got tossed around and shouted at by a hangie (something about getting out of the way - buddy, you can fly circles around me if you need! at that time I was happy to keep my glider roughly above my head and you don't want me put that thing anywhere close to you when things are as roller-coaster as I felt it...). After ending in the bombout, cursing myself for being a bit unstable today and chicken, Phil gets on the radio how ecstatically beautiful conditions he's having up over there where he is. Waaaaaah!

I get back up top with Geoff and another few ground grovelers but don't like the looks of the air: still looks rough. Quite a few people launch eventually, and I still don't like the looks (but start to get pissed at myself for being undecisive). Eventually most of us give up and drive down to Canungra for a cold drink; I'm pretty annoyed at myself and everything. The wind changes to the NE (but a bit strong according to the windtalker).

So I decide to give Beechmont another quick try, Richard and Jessica do so too. Get there, almost no wind. Stupid windtalker has been enthusiastically exaggerating the wind strenght as so often. But it looks just about doable... So I set up, launch in a bit of a puff and somewhat laboriously work myself up to about 75m above launch in light lift. Quite nice! Jessica was still sweating at launch with not a breeze there, but after she did finally launch she joined me superquickly at altitude (doing her usual feather-flying imitation). After half an hour the lift gets a bit lighter and we do perfect facelandings, with Richard taking pictures. I'm a lot happier now!

A small chat shows that the undecisiveness and annoyance aimed at yourself that plagues me a lot is common for the Cancer starsign. I'm still happy about having had a good flight.

Back at home, I find out that I forgot the sunscreen today and look like a silly owl in the face and like a jackass elsewhere (white torso, dark lower legs and arms). I then destroyed two screws while fitting new door locks and knobs in both my external doors (don't ask - all I can say is "cheap construction") but eventually manage to fix the problem (hammers, brute force, swearing, repeat). One key only everywhere now! (Never mind the cheap locks. Nothing hereabouts is crowbar-safe, so any intruder diddling with the locks is an absolute idiot.)

Finally I topped the day off with hitting myself hard in the face while closing a cupboard door. How clumsy can you get...

I've been spending all of today fixing the ceiling plasterboard in my house to stick to the ceiling trusses again. The boards in the living room were bulging down by about 7-8cm... About 300 screws later I've got two (small and unproblematic) rooms left completely undone, and the rest waiting for one more run with spatula and sanding block and, of course, loads of fun painting all over those spots. Bah.

More on this when I'm finished and when I can lift my arms again.

Sage advice. To enjoy crap rainy weather: come to sunny Queensland.
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This week we had the Canungra Cup comp on, but the weather sucked big time. Saturday and Sunday were sunny but blown out. Monday we flew the first task, but I didn't do too well in that: only got into the next valley (Flying Fox), 6km. Tuesday we started a task at Tambo, but it got a bit very windy; so the comp director canned the day. Wednesday was interesting: thunderstorms were developing but we flew from Tambo. I got to Gleneagle, north of Beaudesert, 19km. Shortly after I landed the wind started howling though and the task got stopped; Shane threw his reserve (it worked) and a few pilots landed going backwards at 20+ km/h. Marble-sized hail in Canungra. Thursday we flew off Beechmont again, but I bombed (together with almost a third of the field). Friday it was raining but with the top guns desperate for a fourth task (to make the comp count towards world ranking points) we sat around, and even drove up to Tambo later:

This is how a AAA-grade competition field rarely looks like. The weather was crap, windy and drizzling; behind the stands it was more comfy.

Saturday we spent hoping at Hinchcliffe's launch, but the low clouds didn't lift enough for a task. Some people then went for a free ridgesoar / galehanging flight but I was too lazy for that.

Nevertheless I made it into 3rd position in my class (DHV 1-2 gliders). Not too bad for my first AAA competition I'd say :-)

...something starts failing intermittently. Over the last few weeks my wireless access point has started acting up: the clients got more and more disconnections during the night and things like that. I suspected a dead client card at first or a bad antenna connection, but today that prove wrong.

The thing stopped working about every 25 seconds for 5-10 seconds, repeat a few times and then it would work again for the next hour or so. I tried everything on the logical level, even investigated if somebody was playing silly tricks with the thing remotely...nothing helped. Resync, connect, a few seconds of activity, bang. It looked like the thing reset itself continuously.

Eventually I ripped it apart to see if it had blown any capacitors, nope. Switching it on again, the LEDs looked weird...kind of spastic. Trying the AP on a different power supply: it works. The original one: nope. The multimeter told me that the wall-wart PSU would produce +5V unloaded but under load it had less than 3.2V to give. No surprise the AP fell flat on its face whenever there was a bit of activity. Ripping the (dinky) dead PSU apart I found a voltage regulator looking very much cooked on a circuit board that also looked quite fried. I didn't have a matching PSU around that would meet the old specs (+5V but up to 2A), so I took an old ATX PSU and soldered a connector. Ugly But Works.

What I also hate is hearing about flying accidents. We had one today at my favourite flying site. I know not a lot of the specifics, but it must have been very ugly. Truly confidence-inspiring for next week's competition. Not.

Smoke detectors are useful. Mine usually tells me that eating toast is unhealthy by scaring years off my life expectancy with a Big Bad Jolt just few minutes after I take the toast out of the toaster.

Today, however, it was useful. After coming home from flying I wanted some food - quickly. So I got the microwave to heat up a meat pie straight from the freezer. Mmmmm, Pie! But it incinerated the pie. Pie tastes of donkeypoop!

Picture dark clouds of smoke billowing from my microwave....and the resulting mess. The microwave is now white(outside) and dark yellow(inside). My google-fu tells me that acetone will help, but as I'm not a nail-polish freak and without girlfriend I have no acetone at home. Monday then.

I realised on Friday that this week I had spoken only about 50 words to people personally, maybe another 200 words on the phone. This can't be healthy! (I also sent 37 emails. Some of which the suckers on the other side totally ignored. I hate that.)

The weekend was blown out, with a few of us being hopeful and spending most of Sunday parawaiting at Mt. Tamborine. To no avail, of course, but it allowed me to catch up with last month's rumours and flying news.

Monday was better, I had one short but nice flight from Tambo: while I got to cloudbase without major troubles, I didn't make the transition across the valley to Mt. Misery and thus didn't go XC; only Richard and Ben did. A second try later in the arvo didn't work out as the sea breeze came in over the back of the hill just as I was waiting ready on launch, and rushing to Beechmont, the easterly site, was in vain as there was not enough wind over there.

Given that I'll compete(hah!) in the Canungra Cup in a few weeks, I decided finally to replace my old Garmin 12 with a mapping GPS, a 76CS. After long deliberations I ordered it in the USA, but made a mistake with the expiry date of my credit card. Got an email from the shop asking for correction (not surprising), and also a call from the credit card company for confirmation of "recent account activity". A nice feature, actually, given the fact that I'm using the cheapest company there is hereabouts, which doesnt't earn any interest from me.

Saw Mullet on disc yesterday, enjoyed it very much. I'll have to hunt for a soundtrack or some stuff by the featured bands soon.

In other news I've got a motivation problem: I urgently need to finish a paper (about my PhD stuff) I'll be presenting at the Open Source Developer's Conference in Melbourne in December but the writing just doesn't flow...

...time for some recap/wrap-up.
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This week didn't work out the way it was expected to.
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I do not miss at all in Oz. One of them: the Viennese weather.
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Bloody goddamn fucking flying around - and I'm not even in the air yet, let alone done with the three flights it'll take me to VIE.
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...and I'm off for a few weeks in Austria. The schedules for meeting people are firming up already :-)
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"Satisfaction guaranteed - or your rubbish back"
Now that's going to make an unsatisfied customer happy...

The Sarah Blasko gig tonight was so-so: the two support bands were ok, nothing special, and unfortunately Sarah had a bad case of the flu and had to stop the gig after a few songs. Bummer. But (little consolation that it is) her voice is really as good and beautifully haunting as on her CD.

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yesterday i watched the element of crime again, for the first time in at least 6 or 7 years: still as sick and intriguing and haunted a film as in my first impression. (lars von trier is a weird person.)

today i felt the need for speed and saw sin city - and it rocked! a blood opera of epic film-noir dimensions, done comicky and really cool. i loved it. that's one dvd i'll have to get when it comes out.

...include the fact that a broken headlight glass sets you back $35. This is the beast in question (which by now looks a lot more bent and used up).

Apparently I caught a stone the other week: the driver side headlight has a small hole, tiny on the outside but big on the inside. The deluges on thursday made it into the casing, and I saw the water beads on the inside yesterday. Went to one of the cheap spares shops today, and they got the thing in this arvo. Tomorrow I'll have some fun replacing the lens.

The "joys" of driving an old car of course also include the creakiness and general decrepitude of the thing. And with its worth estimated at about $2000, spending more than a few hundred bucks on fixes isn't real bright. Time to look for a replacement in the next few months...

Flooding everywhere. Couldn't even drive through to work: too much water on the roads around here. Uni has cancelled all classes today. The Pacific Fair shopping centre is closed. No mail. About 7000 people on the GC without power. 300mm of rain in the last 24 hours...

This here is not a lake but my back yard. I'm somewhat lucky to be on reasonably high ground, but I get all the crap flowing down from the hill and one of the storm drains (of course the most crucial one!) is blocked. The neighbours down the creek, a meter lower than me, are not in an enviable position.

I don't know when before (if ever) I slept as badly as tonight; got up and out at about 0200 to clear two storm drains of leaves clogging the covering grid, then dozed until about 0830. My attempt at getting to work at 0915 wasn't successful: after driving around a bit trying to avoid the worst obstructions, I gave up: the water was just a bit too deep for my Falcon. At least I made it back home without getting the car flooded, and my net connectivity works still fine :-)

Last sunday was pretty crap - (this weekend, too, but in a different way): rain, rain, rain, drizzle, rain.
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Today was my birthday.

This is how I felt today: Today was an absolutely shitty day and bloody tomorrow is about as promising. And I hate all of you bastards who do not have to work for a living!
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Well, they may need this capability in my care. But more on the plants later.
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The EU-constitution is going dead and the Oz dollar surges against the Euro (but of course two months too late for my most recent transfer). ATS 8.50 per AU$ is the highest in a few years... And of course there's these rumours of the Euro zone breaking apart.

Some of the newly planted shrubs around the house are dying rapidly. Others thrive. No pattern; my non-green thumb strikes again. I've got a new toy, a standalone DVD/DIVX player. And I'm done with the kitchen tiles, just did the silicone around the joints. Photos when I'm finished rubbing off the remaining grout haze and the silicone is cleaned.

The usual global stupidity abounds, the Murkins now make laws worthy of bad old Stalin: be as stool pigeon - or be a jailbird for 2 years. Samizdata has a nice discussion on that.

In local breaking news, the Tenterfield Shire (about 250km SW from here) has noted that hanging dead dogs from trees offends the tourists and that people therefore shouldn't do this anymore. What a surprise.

Over The Hedge, one of my favourite comics is no longer readable via RSS stream. dailystrips comes to the rescue.

And, to really top off the Interesting Times stuff there's lousy news at work: group A has just borged group B. I'm a part of group B. Uni council favoured group A's appetite for power. Council via group A may or may not want us to run any of the Group B stuff anymore in the medium future. Which would make the place smaller by a good third or so, and us minus jobs. Which obviously sucks.
Stephan Pastis ran the career counselling theme recently in Pearls Before Swine. That strip (a/v up to a month) fits a bit too closely for comfort.

Had a lecture before noon today, not too bad. On my way back to the office I'm very much ready for a mug of coffee and a trip to the toilet.
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Great. Now I'm stuck in the elevator and there is no power (just the emergency dimbulb). Campus security tells me everything is out and just wait a bit. About 10 minutes later the diesels kick in and the elevators wheeze back into action. A trip to the dark potty later and I'm ready for the rest of the day. Most of the campus is without juice, as are some of the surrounding suburbs. I'm doing some stuff on paper, because dead trees do not fail.

The plan for the rest of the day? Another lecture, supposed to happen at 1400. In a lab which is pitch-black right now. With no more than an extremely vague idea of what I was supposed to talk about, because my notes are on my desktop box. Which is power-less. (And on the web, which I can't access banging rocks together - maybe I need to learn to whistle V.34?)

About 15 minutes before the lecture is supposed to start the power comes back. Everybody rushes to the kitchen - think coffee deprivation in a place with electric kettles without electricity.

Back at my office, my desktop refuses to turn on. Fritzed PSU in the Dell piece-of-shite. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKIHATETHISTDAY. Ok, no lecture preparation then. I'll get my slides off the web (as all the students do, too) and start talking, seats of the pants operation.

The lab (which we were stuck with as Central Services are a bunch of headless chickens) is a lightless dungeon (therefore disliked for lectures; lab-work is fine). At least that lab is under my full control (including wiring cabinet and firewall).

The firewall is dead. Everything else blinkenlights fine, but not that box. And without it, no login (LDAP) and no net. Having had enough go wrong already, I had such premonitions and did bring the key to the cabinet where the firewall resides - and it does turn on (not a given; two weeks ago its mainboard had gone fritz and the Dell idiots took 3 days to come up with a spare - despite everything being on 24hrs support contracts...SEP).

I survive the lecture, with (as usual) lots of content uncovered.

My desktop is still dead, Dell promises some sod coming on-site tomorrow (as if that promise was worth a damn) to replace the PSU (not as if we couldn't do it, but the gear is leased so we're supposed to keep our grubby fingers off it). In the meantime I can't do any prep work for tomorrow which is - of course - the busiest day of the week. Great.

On a more positive note: I've finished tiling and grouting my kitchen tiles yesterday night. More on that later.