Author: awmalloyadmin

Aurora Lane, Docklands

It seems my hosting provider has eaten two weeks worth of posts. They were there this morning, I had a comment, but when I went to look something up just now they had gone. Apparently an upgrade to their MySQL install went awry and they lost some data.

Thankfully I wrote them all in Windows Live Writer so I have local copies, and Google’s cache resurrected a beautiful post Rae had written for Bert but I’m not happy. I moved back to this host ’cause they were more reliable. Good one Tony.

I have a recurring dream and have no idea what it means. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have dreamt of a plane crash. Generally I will be outside and hear the noise of a plane, as the noise grows louder I will spot it and begin to watch it cross the sky. Suddenly the noise will change and the plane begins to fall from the sky.

Sometimes, although rarely, the plane will cartwheel and crash in to flames in the distance but generally it manages to somehow gain a little control, or simply defies the laws of physics, and drops gently, in one piece, to the ground nearby.

I have absolutely no idea why I dream this. I love flying, I love watching planes and have never seen one crash but at least once a month that jet will come flying overhead as I sleep and only vanish when I wake. I wish I knew why.

We no longer need a clock in this house, we have the cats.

9.00 pm every day Bella will make herself know with a meow and start brushing around your leg and Tom will thump to the floor off whichever bed he’s made home and come jingling out. He won’t rub your leg, he just paces from the lounge to the feed bowl and back until I get up to feed them. Half the time they’ll just stare at the food and disappear until we go to bed.

Fussy, yet regular. That’s our furry kids.

We picked up the car this morning. Uncle Rob came with us as he was an integral part of the whole car shopping experience. It was all fairly quick; the car is in Rae’s name so she had to sign about 10 times, we handed over the cheque (ouch) and away we drove.

To give the car a little test we drove to Queenscliff for a coffee and morning tea then gave it a good going on the freeway back home. It’s a lovely car to drive although I find it a bit odd sitting so high. “Look at me, I’m driving a car.” is how I feel. We’ve Scotch Guarded the seats, put a cover on the back seats for the kids and tucked it away for the night. Now we just have to dispose of the Magna and our car story is hopefully over for a while.

And as Jen and Rae have pointed out this means Rae will be flying a broomstick to work every day. I fear for my life so I’m not taking that thought any further…

Happy birthday to my lovely wife.

I love you. xox

One of the dubious pleasures of living next to a railway line is that occasionally you’ll get a freight train idling while it waits for god-only-knows-what. On still nights with the windows open you will inevitably wake up as it screams back in to life and moves off.

Last night was a still night with a freight train. Of course I woke up and once awake I made the mistake of wondering if I should get up and go to the loo. Of course once that thought enters your head you’re not getting any sleep until you do get up and go to the loo.

I dragged myself out of bed and shuffled through the house. My brain was in a deep sleep fog but it woke up pretty quickly when my foot landed fair and square on a cold mass of cat chuck-up in the kitchen. Of all the experiences one could hope for on the way to the loo in the middle of the night, stepping on regurgitated cat meat is not one of them.

Somehow even though my brain was busy dealing with ‘revulsion’ I managed to get it to concentrate on ‘cleaning’ even though all it really wanted was ‘sleep’. I wiped the mess, cleaned the floor, cleaned my foot and made it back to bed where I lay there trying to get the memory to go away.

This morning Thomas was no where to be found. I think he surfaced when I was under the shower and Rae let him out. Now that’s a cat with a strong sense of self preservation.

Well, that took a little longer than expected. Lately when I’ve redelegated a name the change has happened within a few minutes, this change of hosts took almost 24 hours – back to the bad old days. Mail is flowing again now and the blogs are showing so things are good. I never should have left this host – rock solid performance for years but I thought I’d check out another local provider.

What a mistake.

They almost cost me a client when one of their servers went down – and stayed down for three weeks. I didn’t move the site straight away because they were always promising in emails and on the phone that they were hours away from going live again. Idiot me for believing them. When they did come back my client lost weeks of work as the host, despite their assurances, had no back ups. Lucky I had only the one client site with them and after a quick trip to Sydney to sort out the problems in person all was well.

If you are reading this post…it means the switch to my new host has been successful.

I’m a recent convert to Google Calendar, it works great for me and I’ve moved my calendar from Outlook to be online. I found a Vancouver Canucks Google calendar and have added that (it converts Vancouver time to Melbourne time, which means I don’t have to do it in Excel any more) but couldn’t find any local sporting calendars.

In the spirit of share and share alike here are two calendars I’ve created and shared out :

The Richmond Tigers 2007 season fixture for Google Calendar.

and

The Melbourne Ice 2007 home game schedule for Google Calendar.