Cheap Therapy

Morning, hotel breakfast (the morning rendezvous only a little bit later than planned, although still too early). Taxi out to the install site. It occurs to me that Melbourne cabbies have got more gung-ho than I remembered (driving like Canberra cabbies, but through heavier traffic with trams).

We go through the process of introducing ourselves to about 14 different people, which offers lots of scope for confusion (Just call us both Shane). Then it’s time to set up our gear. The local network and airport appears to be pretty well locked down. Later I discover it’s possibly my privoxy install that’s making life more difficult for me, despite the best efforts of UCS to assist me.

The install goes well and content goes end-to-end, something that wasn’t expected to happen until Wednesday. Yay! Unfortunately our test location is down 2 flights of stairs and up 4, in a hot little cupboard surrounded by builders intent on chiselling concrete. Note to self: PC will not boot off the iPod Shuffle.

Lunch was at a little caf?ɬ©, complete with 2 plasma screens. and a giant lasagne. It seems all the caf?ɬ©s here have them. I expect it’s for the mandatory continuous display of sport to the Victorian public. At the student caf?ɬ© we notice someone drinking a Coffee Chill, so they’re obviously on sale over here (although I couldn’t find them at the local Safeway).

After work it’s off to another of our workmate’s sister’s place for some most excellent seafood, all the way from Broome.

I find myself in Canberra, in mud. I’m regretting not having had a chance to change out of my dress shoes and into my boots. My gracious host has taken me to the Farmer’s Markets where I can ogle the produce. Cherries for $20 for 2kg! Sigh. I think Canberra is currently experiencing a wet period, which is probably really only a lead up to another fire season. In the meantime they get to reap the fruits of the rain. Yummy chocolates, fresh veges, peaches etc.

Then it’s off to dump my gear (once again, no checked luggage). This time the evil computer put me in the middle seat of a 3 seat row in an A330-200, so I have to attempt to sleep without leaning on either of my seatmates. I obviously manage to achieve this as I wake up while they’re both eating dinner. Fortunately I wasn’t feeling like a second dinner of airline food this evening anyway.

The in-flight movie is “Must Love Dogs”. For added realism a large dog has been loaded into the hold of our aircraft. It barks while we taxi. Fortunately it also barks after we’ve landed, so we know it survived the trip. I did enjoy the movie though, John Cusack getting to throw a Prius around in the wet, although it looked suspiciously like they had to speed some of the driving up (probably can’t disable the ABS or something

After dumping the luggage it’s off to Tilley’s, which besides having my friends drop in also seems to have a lot of people who look very familiar. One person spots my shirt, stops me and talks to me about World Solar Challenge. He was with the Lake Tuggeranong team.

Patrick, Margot and Karen show up, and exchange tales of Canberra and their various public sector employers. Patrick seems very enthusiastic about the orchestra he’s performing in tomorrow with the ballet. (Which unfortunately I didn’t make it to in the end). Went for a bit of a walk around the various park-like bits and then returned to Nicky’s place to attempt to keep Zoie occupied, then dinner and bed.

My photos will appear here (only 2 so far), once I recover some Flickr bandwidth (next week :). Tag is fandomedia. There are also photos from Grant and Sonia’s Wedding and some other random shots if you’re bored.

My gallery installation is currently stuffed as far as uploading goes., will attempt to fix it in a week or so. If you’re bored you can check out the photos here, until the server falls over due to its dodgy disk(s).

Realisation today when using the work photocopier: not only does it copy, but it scans, and e-mails the scans as PDF attachments. I suspect the potential for embarassment at the office Christmas party is almost unlimited.

Despite driving off in a recent BMW and claiming he’s “not that sort of person”, Dion Quintel of Perth Western Australia owes me several thousands of dollars in rent, which he has not paid as of 1st September 2007.

For those who missed it the first time around, the series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World is being re-run on the ABC on Tuesday nights, 9:30pm

Went to see 2/3 of The Goodies (Still Alive on Stage) on Friday night. Bill appeared via pre-recorded video. Thanks to the secret workings of The Goodies fan club we had tickets in the 3rd row. Although Tim and Graeme had obviously suffered the ravages of time and they played lots of video clips they were full of energy, and still obviously enjoying themselves even though it was the second show of the evening, starting at 9:30pm (for us). They performed some of a radio play, showed an old B&W skit with John Cleese, (a very manic) Tim and Bill, and performed some (well, not original, but still funny) material.

Lots of fun, ran into lots of friends for coffee after the session, and everyone seemed to agree it was a great evening.

But the question remains, what did Tim Brooke-Taylor get up to in the back of the car with Germaine Greer?

If you want to look very cool on your excessively noisy motorbike after you rev it up in the heart of the capuccino strip in Leederville , you should make sure that that you’ve undone the security lock on the front disc brake before you try to drive away. (Not to mention parking it in a car bay rather than the motorcycle bay next to it).

So, post-Fandomedia I’m reading A Word A Day where there’s a link to the Wikipedia page on Palm D’Or. I realise I’ve seen all of about 5 of the films, and one of the winners in 1970 is MASH. Who was in MASH? Well, one of them turns out to be René Auberjonois, then playing Father Mulcahy and more recently known as Odo from Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, some 23 years later.

Today: Now even the bus driver is wearing an iPod (safety concerns?). Had some screen scraping success with Perl’s WWW::Mechanize (yeah, I couldn’t find anything like it in Python :). Server is giving me dodgy filesystem errors. Need to clear 250Gb or so. Beware the upper lawn outside Hackett coffee lounge, it’s full of prickles. Plotting the next fortnight and a bit’s activities, which is rapidly running into Christmas activities. Got ‘invited’ to a full day of meetings and the Christmas party Uniclub has an Elvis impersonator tomorrow. Fixed my status/phone-home scripts, I think (sometimes gmail doesn’t POP everything it’s meant to unless you poke it). Puggle’s Aunt is corrupting him. No writing, but some ideas, duly noted.