Moved in

Wow. Such a trial and tribulation this move has been. The removalists office fooked oop and only sent one truck instead of two, hence the guys had to make a second trip and that cost us $$$ that could be better spent on better things! All the stuff is here, but most of the boxes are still boxed up and sitting in the garage until we start unpacking and rearranging.

The living room is repainted and it looks lovely. The walls are "shooting star" which is a greyish-blue, and the feature wall is "christallis" which is a dark purple. We got fancy with the feature wall and got one of those newfangled textured paints -- in our case, suede and Sam painstakingly painted the herringbone pattern. It's come up a treat though -- might post a pic if I get the inclination.

Sleepy time now. Tomorrow is do the usual vacating cleaning bizzo then we can drop of the keys and be free!

Oh yeah. Had to resort to modem tonight! How quaint.

Hitch Hiker's 20th anniversary and Infocom

The BBC have put the Infocom adventure of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy online for all to enjoy. For anyone who survived the 80's (and even the 70's) if you were involved in computers it was only a matter of time until you were exposed to these. The idea was that you used you imagination (does anyone have one of those anymore?) and from a brief description and some luck you worked your way through puzzle after puzzle until you solved the adventure, typing in commands for you adventurer/character to perform. Most of the adventures were notoriously difficult, but usually with perseverance they could be solved.

Infocom were bought out by Activision in '86, who didn't do a hell of alot with it, instead trying to morph the text adventure into something more glitzy and graphical which didn't sell all that well, so they let the game genre die. The games are still kept alive by some cult followers of "Interactive Fiction" on the internet. There's a good history of Infocom that is worth a read if you were wondering what happened to these guys.

Watch out for the grues when you turn the lights out!

Day of disconnection

Tomorrow we move all our worldly possessions into our new house. We've already spent a few days back and forth already, taking over gear we don't require the removalists to move such as the more delicate things such as pictures and computer gear.

Tomorrow is also the day that we will loose our ADSL connection, and will probably be without until Wednesday as the ISP says "three working days" to ADSL-enable the new phone line.

Whatever did the world do without 'net.

First day as a home renovator

Today was the first day as a home owner/renovator. We bought seemingly endless things, including paints and paraphernalia, putty/filler (to fill a large hole) and various other things we did not plan for. We bought an orbital sander to assist with preparing one of the walls for painting, and as you know, one can never have too many power tools. :)

Clio came over with us, and along followed the wave of destruction...

The keys!

It seems this blog has become about moving into our new house. I'm not sure if that was the original intention, but it has worked out that way. :)

Annnnyway, we got the keys. Or should I say "the key". There was only one, and it was purple. We have things to do in the house:

• remove horrid cork wall -- DONE 25th Feb
• prepare and paint
• fix garage door
• wash/replace curtains
• map out kitchen for a remodel
• get rid of a horrid tasteless shelf/bench in the kitchen

Settlement date

Well, today is settlement date on our house. So I'm basically waiting until I get the call to go pick up the keys and start moving things in.

It's a little sad leaving this place, it has after all been good to us. The estate agents are less conservative here and allowed us to have pets and they never bothered with inspections. It allowed us to save for our house that has today become a reality thanks to the hard work put in by Sam and the valued assistance by our valued friend & mortgage broker.

At the same time, it's very exciting moving into a new place that we will own -- or will be paying off... :) We'll need to find new take-away places, local supermarkets & shops, and dog-walking parks.

We'll be without internet until I wrestle with the ISP. :( I don't expect it will be noticed though as we'll be too busy moving things!

Inspection successful

We had our inspection, albeit delayed by a day. The power & gas company came through and had us connected. All the appliances seemed to be in working order, the only thing we couldn't test was the central heating as it had a control panel that is going to require some figuring. The double garage contains a second stove & sink, and there's a garden/tool shed up the backyard that will serve as a workshop nicely. There's plenty of well established fruit trees that are bearing fruit in abundance.

Whines for the day

• Cyclists who don't stop at red lights. I'm a cyclist myself, and I have a great disdain for "fellow" cyclists that expect the road rules don't apply to them. A cyclist this morning, adorned in the usual colourful lycra and shaved legs -- let's not get into that discussion -- sailed past me through a light that had been red for a number of seconds -- through an intersection on a major road.
• Cleaning ovens. Yeah, I know it has to be done. So it's done.
• ANTS!

Invasion!

Nope, it's not GWB looking for WMD's.

The ants are still invading! Please tell me why, in the name of all things great and small, ants would be congregating en masse, in of all places, the bathroom! There is no food, nothing sweet, nor anything that would attract ants in that room. All I can think of is maybe they are regrouping in there, in preparation for an attack to be mounted elsewhere.

We have no defensive weapons available. They're all packed! We do however have bathroom cleaner that is made with orange oil and that seems to be effective in stopping them and clearing up their scent trails.

Blogging, and electoral obligations.

Entering blog entries with blogger is ok, but I found the interface to be a little messy and slow. I found a nice application called Ecto that interfaces with blogger and is much nicer to use. They even make a Windoze and Mac version. It may be worth a look-in to anyone wrestling with bloggers' interface. It has other features too, like iPhoto and flickr interfaces that I am as yet unsure how to use.

We both received an "Apparent failure to vote notice" yesterday. Voting is compulsory in this lovely land of Oz -- even useless local council ones, and it seems they wish to ensure we know it. It seems we "apparently" failed to vote in last November's local council elections. The elections were held via postal vote, so they mailed you a voting slip and you filled it out, got someone to witness it, and sent it back. The only thing is I recall filling them out and posting them! I don't know exactly when, but I know it occurred. So, we shall put that on the forms as the "detailed explanation to support your response" on the back of the form and hope they don't fine us. Acording to the Monash City Council's website, it's a $50 fine... which isn't a huge amount but it's more the principle of the thing!

House woes/annoyances

There's been an annoyance with the house. We were "supposed" to have our final inspection before settlement tomorrow afternoon, where we walk around the house and "kick the tyres" so-to-speak. This includes testing that all appliances are working and functional. Well, the tenants have left (yay) and as one would expect, they disconnected the utilities. One would've expected the owner to take them on in the interim and make sure the new buyers (us) are happy that all is working. This apparently has not been the case, and *WE* have had to get onto our providers and try and get the utilities connected so the inspection can proceed. Because the providers typically need *some* notice, they can't connect until Thursday, so our inspection is now shifted to Thursday afternoon. *sigh*

We don't expect there to be a problem, and like all tenants (including us!) they would have bitched if something was less than functional.

I hate ants!

I have a loathing fascination of ants. I think it stems from my childhood where I had a number of negative experiences with ants' nests. I can appreciate them, and they are fascinating with their social structures but they nevertheless cause me much annoyance when they traipse through my house!

Overtime

It was a looong day yesterday. I work as one of two senior network tech's for a large organisation and we had a major network design upgrade scheduled yesterday. I won't bore anyone with the technical details, suffice it to say that it was a big design change that would provide much advantage to the organisation. Unfortunately our upgrade didn't fully succeed. We ran out of outage window for troubleshooting and had to (mostly) revert back to our previous configuration. There's obviously disappointment in that, and annoyance in yourself that you couldn't make it work.

However, after today I don't care! I will be off-call and on three weeks leave and shifting into our new house and the priority will be shifted there!

Broadband and its usefulness

The state of broadband internet access in Australia is abysmal. I have a 512/128Kbps ADSL service at home (that thankfully work pay for) and it's barely passable for doing anything other than browsing the web. Elsewhere in the world, the entry-level broadband bandwidth is 24Mbps. The government is not encouraging the ISP's to provide faster service -- they've only just got Telstra to provide ADSL services to rural areas.

Telstra (the largest ISP here) are looking at embarking on a pay-per-view video over IP service in the coming months, and at the abysmal speeds of the service they provide I don't see how it can be sustained. Imagine this; you are at home and decide to watch X movie. You pay your $5 (or whatever), and six hours later it is ready to watch -- only on your PC screen. No instant gratification -- you'll need to plan ahead. Then after that download, your "soft quota" on your "unlimited download" account is filled for the month. How useful is that?

They'll have to make some changes...

Stalkings

As new "home owners" we have taken every opportunity to drive past our new home (or stalk the house as we have termed it) whenever we were in the area. The house currently has tenants and we were concerned they may become difficult, pushing back the date when we would be able to move in. Today we "stalked" the house and saw a big blue removalist truck in the driveway. Hoorah!

Things are finally on track.

Clio the destroyer

I have decided to keep a list. A list of things our 10 month-old Labrador pup has destroyed so far (in no particular order). Here is the evidence of the no-goodness -- I have provided photographic evidence where possible.

• discrete rear entrance to veggie-patch
• small shrub, freshly planted
• electrical plug ducted heating
• more pot plants
• towels down from washing line
• unserviceable fan
• several bags of potting mix
• various doggie toys
• pot plants (several times over)
• various plastic pots
• garden plants
• two netballs
• daily water dish relocation
• pottery food dish
• bottle of charlie carp plant fertiliser
• expensive flea resistant doggy mattress
• snooza bed (only slightly chewed)
• "clam shell" toddler wading pool
• garden rake
• watering can
• new roll of masking tape
• various buckets -- this is of one of two
• kitchen tidy -- there's not much left!
• potatos & safeway carry bag
• hose fittings -- we now have brass ones!
• more pot plants bought the previous day
• the garden hose as the fittings weren't tasty

This is, by no means, a complete list!
Check back soon -- chances are there will have been an update.

World and local happenings

The furor over some published cartoons in Denmark continues to occur throughout the world. It is difficult to believe something as simple as cartoons in a newspaper can cause such a backlash, and cause people to resort to violence. It has been reported that the cartoons published differed from a pamphlet that was handed out to the some of the protesters, the pamphlet containing more offensive cartoons -- so you can understand how it may be possible that these protesters were misled by "leaders" with their own agendas.

Locally we have our own scandal. The Australian Wheat Board is being investigated for $300M being paid the former Iraqi leadership in the form of payments to a bodgy transport company. Australian diplomats and senior ministers have also been implicated, with the former Australian Ambassador to the USA swearing to US Senator Coleman, that it was not occurring at the time. If they come out of this squeaky clean this time then there is something seriously wrong.

The AU Federal Senate has just voted to remove the Health Minister's veto over the controversial drug RU486. Meaning the minister no longer will be able to force his (and most of the non-female members of his party's) view on the Australian public.

Packings

There has been lots of packing that has gone on in the past few weeks. We've packed most everything away in boxes that we don't deem as immediately neccessary in preparation for the move. Of course, there's still more to be done but the vast majority it done for the moment. It would help if we had the keys to the new house -- we could at least move a few things over before the removalists arrive to shift the heavy stuff.

We continue to drive by the house to make sure things still look ok and to continually remind us what the house we've just bought looks like!

Early adopting has its price

I was an "early adopter" of Digital TV here in Melbourne. I had first bought a standard definition set top box almost on a whim and realised the benefits it gave in the quality of the broadcasts I could view -- lovely crisp pictures with 5.1 sound. I soon realised this device had its limitations -- yes the quality was wonderful, but if I wanted to record programs then I had to resort to my VCR that could only record inferior analogue TV. For anyone reading this who has moved forward to a far superior product will realise it is all but painful to have to take that step back.

I coped with this situation for a time, but did the research and finally purchased a Topfield 5000pvrt SD box with a 80GB hard drive. Now we were able to record TWO channels and watch a prerecorded show off the Topfield -- impressive. There were issues though. Not only would shows not record after the had recorded the previous week, but the timer would disappear from the list! Frustrating at best.

This seems to be now solved due to a recent firmware upgrade I have installed. The saviour of many a recent device. Whilst they allow flexibility, I've always been of the opinion that firmware-upgradable devices give manufacturers license to release beta-quality electronics on the unsuspecting public. I can expect this in equipment that has reason for upgrades, such as networking gear, but consumer electronics?

Expectations of service quality have been lowered. Even the mobile phone comes with a price. Next to the land-line, the quality of service is abysmal (it is getting better). PABX's (for land-lines) are rated with "five nines" reliability -- that's 99.999%! Yet we've all watched someone (or been there) wander about from one side of the corridor to the other like a crazed individual shouting into their "firmware-upgradable" mobile phone "can you hear me now? can you hear me NOW?".

West Wings

The West Wing is refreshing. It has dialogue. It has storylines that can sometimes be thought-provoking. It also can be remarkably close to current world events.

It was moved from a reasonable time to the 11pm timeslot by the commercial channel that was showing it here in AU. It's workable, but it means recording and due to the late night timeslot the start time is invariably pushed back (sometimes as much as 45mins and more) by the overrunning more popular shows that are screening earlier. This means any recording has to finish up to two hours later than it originally should if you want to ensure you catch the end.

The ABC just announced it would be screening the West Wing this year. Whilst the ABC can also be lax with their time schedules, there is the added benefit that the ABC has no ads... At least for the moment! This is indeed good news for all Oz West Wing fans..

TV and the Internet

I was never a huge TV watcher as an adult. Mostly my interests lie with the "boring stuff", documentaries and the quality TV that is available on the ABC and SBS networks in Oz. There does occasionally come TV programmes that do peak my interest, and this season it is "House". Perhaps it's due to the "English" satirical humour that shows through.

In addition to this I must put the free-to-air TV stations on notice. Get your act together guys or you'll be done out of business and no one will be left to watch your cruddy botflpybofl ads and the like. The internet is coming of age and becoming useful to the masses -- by having the latest TV shows available. Ok, so the picture quality is not exactly broadcast quality, and with our current abysmal broadband connections in Oz they take hours to download, but at least they are available and watchable. The consumers shouldn't be taken for granted, or left in the lurch by having their show left in mid-season with no explanation or they'll find other means. Indeed, some already have.

Housings

Every day I get a reminder (I think I hear voices). *grin* A reminder that the day of moving shall once again be upon us. However, this time, we don't just move into just another crappy agent-controlled rat-infested hovel, we move into our own rat-infested hovel! And with our own outdoor toilet!