Settlement
Filed under: General - Mark @ 6:42 am
Woohoo! Today is settlement day! Angela is doing the final inspection this morning, and settlement will happen around midday. Tonight, we pick up keys. Yippee! I’m so excited!
D-Day
Filed under: General - Mark @ 1:16 pm
Settlement is approaching! 3rd of July, next Friday, it happens, and then the place will be ours 
Got a call from the bank today to let me know that everything from their end is complete, all t’s have been crossed, all i’s dotted. Exciiiiting.
Another hit
Filed under: General - Mark @ 7:12 am
Twice in four months - Another Armaguard truck was robbed at gunpoint just outside our building again this morning. Missed it by about three minutes, the police were already there but because this time it happened on a cold wet winters morning rather than a summers morning there was almost nobody for them to interview. The poor detective lady had about three people in total to interview.
I wonder if it was the same people from last time? Hmm…
I hate iTunes
Filed under: General - Mark @ 7:28 am
I know I write about this regularly, but iTunes really really really gives me the shits.
iPhone OS 3.0 is out today, and I want to upgrade to it. Simple in theory - open iTunes and update. But nooooo. Task manager says iTunes is running, but there is no visible window for it. It’s just dissapearing off the face of the planet.
Slaves to the man
Filed under: General - Mark @ 2:42 pm
Well, we’ve finally finished all our mortgage documents I believe. Mortgage: done and submitted, First Home Owners Grant: Done and submitted, Stamp Duty: In the solicitors hands. Hopefully we’re done signing things for the moment!!
In other news, I’m hopelessly addicted to www.serverfault.com. I’ve got 521 reputation and if I go back after 60 minutes and see it hasn’t moved up, I get upset. But I guess that’s what happens when you live in an opposing timezone to the majority of the sites inhabitants (Australia vs USA). By tomorrow morning it will have gone up by 40 or 50, I hope. Usually does.
Contracts, here we come!
Filed under: General - Mark @ 8:44 pm
Well, after waiting almost three weeks for delivery, the M-Audio Delta 1010LT has finally arrived! And after a little bit of farting around in Ubuntu Studio, it works a TREAT. I’m really impresed by it.
We can finally record things properly at the church, do post-recording editing, everything, and on an incredibly tight, penny-pinching budget. Oh, I love you!
Woohoo
Filed under: General - Mark @ 9:15 am
Yay! In a few weeks we get a Work Experience kid! Haven’t had one of them in years. I love Work Experience kids.
It’s always better after it’s gone
Filed under: General - Mark @ 8:06 am
I finally took my car for a service on Tuesday. It was 2,500km and about 3 months past its service date, but I just was either too busy, or plain forgot, to get it done. The actual service interval clicked over halfway between Sydney and Adelaide, that’s how far over service due it is.
It was starting to run really rough, and I decided it’s time to stop farting around and get it serviced. I dropped it off at the mechanics at 6am and walked to the train station.
That afternoon, driving my car was like a new experience. The clutch was smoother, the gear changes were seamless, the power delivery was smooth and even.
Irony being that during the time when my car was past service, I have been wishing I could trade it in and up, but there’s no way we can afford that now that we’ve bough an apartment. Now that it’s had a service (which was really just an oil change, nothing more) I wonder why on earth I wanted to trade it in.
So the lesson is clear: if you’re ever really wanting a new car, let your current car run down, and then get it serviced. It’ll remind you of how good you really have it.
Running out of material
Filed under: General - Mark @ 7:40 am
Since I started working at North Sydney again, I have two hours a day to kill on the train. I started working back in this office about 4-5 months ago, and in that time I’ve ready pretty much every single book on Angela’s book shelf. I knocked over all the Steven King books she has, as well as a whole bunch of others. I bought myself an old Jeremy Clarkson book to tie me over recently until I find something else to read.
At the same time, I also bought Angela the boxed set of the Twilight series. Does it make me less of a man if I decide to read them after Angela has finished with them? We don’t have a library in easy access, and in any case I would likely forget to return the books.
Can someone tell me if these books are mostly romantic, or if they’re mostly vampire suspense? I can deal with vampire with a bit of romance, but if it’s mainly romance (”Her heart blossomed at the sight of his classicly handsome chiselled features, and she felt a throbbing piece of vomit eject from her mouth before this paragraph is finished”) then I don’t know if I can handle that…
P.S. I just realise that I got ripped off. I bought the box set FROM Dymocks but its sticker price was more than it’s RRP on the website!
What are the chances?
Filed under: General - Mark @ 3:25 pm
Who’d a thunk it. The 599 I saw last night was driving past our office at nth Sydney this arvo!
Manhood
Filed under: General - Mark @ 1:26 pm
Last night I was at the BP near my house, filling up with petrol, as you do. It was 10.30 at night, and I hear this rumble from behind me. I turn, and what do I see? A black Ferrari 599 pulling in to the bowser right next to mine.
This makes it the fourth Ferrari 599 I’ve seen. I’ve never seen a black one before (two red, and one silver). It looked mean.
But the worst part? A guy who can’t have been more than 5 years older than me hops out of the drivers seat. After, that is, waiting for me to move away from his car before opening his door (don’t worry, I would do the same thing if I were driving a car worth 3x what we just paid for an apartment).
One Hit iWonders
Filed under: General - Mark @ 8:40 am
I decided to update my music collection. I’ve been listening to the same songs over and over and over and over and over again for the last few months and I’m getting really sick of them.
So, courtesy of some Canadian Apple community site, I went through their compiled list of songs from the iTunes ads and decided to give them all a go.
Good news, is that the people at the marketing company from Apple have spectacularly good taste when choosing songs for their ads (but we already knew this).
The bad news is that, apart from the Ting Tings (who have had many other successful singles in Australia anyway) the only good songs by most of the artists are the ones that were on the iTunes ads.
Still, you win some, you loose some, and at least my iPhone’s album view is looking more healthy with some new faces.
Coherence
Filed under: General - Mark @ 8:00 am
I’ve noticed a pattern recently. Most of my writings in here have been very poorly structured. They’ve been more like a spoken conversation, written down verbatim, unedited.
For example, when you’re talking to someone, you can’t backtrack to where you forgot to mention something, so you go “Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention XYZ”. That’s sort of what I’ve been doing recently, and it makes it very difficult to read. What I should have done is simply entered what I forgot to mention in its correct place and everyone will be happy.
I guess that a lot of the things written here are personal musings as well, and maybe that excuses some things, but I promise I will try to be better.
iFriend
Filed under: General - Mark @ 3:42 pm
I’ve made a new friend today.
I picked up 5x 1TB Western Digital “Green” drives for the church’s NAS that is part of the system I’m building for them. When configured in RAID-5 and formatted with UFS, you get about 3.5TB of usable storage. Should keep them going for a little while, I think.
Anyway, the network throughput I wasn’t so impressed with, so I decided that, for the first time ever, I would mess around with this iSCSI thing that I’ve seen for ages but never done anything with.
The NAS is running on FreeNAS. It’s a standard Pentium 4 3Ghz with 1gb of RAM and the aforementioned hdd’s.
Setting up iSCSI turned out to be simple. Create a file that will be used as the drive (like you do in VMWare), then set up a collection of files that will become a target for the iSCSI.
Then, on the guest machine (in this case, Vista, but in the production system it’ll be a Windows 2008 box), start iSCSI, point it to the NAS box, and it lists all the valiable ‘targets’. Connect the target, and it appears as a physical disk in the Device Manager. From there, do whatever you would normally do with it.
When copying over SMB (Windows File Sharing) I was getting fairly poor network utilisation (around 10mb). Over the iSCSI I was getting more like 40Mb (It’s a gigabit network, so that’s still not great, but it’s also still building the RAID-5 array, which doesn’t help).
I’m very impressed. I should have used this years ago, but I never really knew what it did, or understood how to use it. Sure there’s a million other complicated things you can do with it, but for fast, remote storage it’s brilliant.
We’re on the way
Filed under: General - Mark @ 7:25 am
Well, we signed the contract of sale and paid our 0.25% deposit on the property. This weekend, get the unconditional approval, and then wait and pay the full 10% deposit.
In other news, I have received precisely 0 emails between leaving the office yesterday and coming in this morning. Exceptionally rare, but a good thing.
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