Category: Diary

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.

I think there were three pages of footy stuff in the Hun today. After weeks of tennis and cricket and scouring the sports pages for the one paragraph on summer training there are signs the season is getting closer and, just to confirm this, an email arrived today saying footytips.com.au was open for business again!

So, The Tony Malloy Memorial Tipping Competition is on again. The fight begins now for posession of The World’s Ugliest Trophy and the glory of taking it from Marita’s hands (or from the top of a cupboard in her house).

So to be in the running, and on the list for the Grand Final BBQ, head on over to footytips.com.au and join the competition called “Tony’s Tipping”.

Go on, you know you want it.

As Kenny would say,

“Australians all let us ring Joyce,
For she is young and free.”

We spent Australia day traveling to and from Shepp to say hi to mum and Helen. It’s a two hour trip each way but with a good lunch and lots of good chats thrown in, the day and its kilometres was well worth it.

Coming back we rang for fish and chips (Blackshaws Rd Fish and Chips, consistently the best fish and chips I have ever had) and after hanging up I realised I had stumbled across one of life’s great mysteries.

Why do fish and chip shops never ask for your name and a number when you place an order for pick up but pizza shops always do?

Ah, midway through summer and the migration has already begun. Last night as I drove home I noticed my first Grand Prix truck trundling up Blackshaws Rd from its home in Newport. The concrete barriers on its tray tell me it won’t be long until Albert Park is all fenced in for the race. Good thing is this means the footy season isn’t too far away.

Oh, and speaking of cars. Mr, if you’re rich enough to buy the latest model Mercedes, you’re rich enough to buy a headset for your mobile phone. Idiot.

I’m a man living on a borrowed pod. Over Christmas my trusty (?) old 40GB, 4th generation iPod gave up the ghost – every time I connect it to my machine it wants to format the hard drive and start afresh. I’ve managed to get all of my music back on after one disastrous time when I said ‘yes’ but now I’m stuck and can’t update.

I realise now that I didn’t use my pod that much for music but it had become indispensable for listening to podcasts as I drove to and from work. No more Boag World, no more Crazy Canucks, no more Cam on G’day World or The Movie Show. After suffering through a week of radio I got down on my knees and begged Rae to lend me hers until I can scrape enough together to get another. Rae, being the wonderful wife that she is (or maybe it was because she was so tired she didn’t realise what I said) handed over her Nano.

The Nano is fantastic. It’s probably what I’ll aim for when I re-enter podland. 2GB is more than enough for my podcast selections and leaves ample space for music should I feel the need. I loved being able to carry my entire music collection with me wherever I went but with no stand-alone widescreen video iPod on the way it looks like downgrading is the best approach.

And this is them getting ready for the footy season.

Really, I’m not. If you didn’t check the link in the last post this link about our new babies will explain a little.