Sorry, this will be a short post. I just wanted to let everyone know that we are in the new place, broadband is working and all is right with the world…
Seriously though, we are still finishing the cleaning at the old place as well as cleaning and unpacking at the new place.
I hate moving but being 500m from Hornsby station kicks ass…
Well, the countdown to the move (M Day) progresses well.
We signed the lease and paid a big wad of cash to the Real Estate Agent this morning.
Viv will pick the keys up on Thursday morning while I supervise the movers loading our crap into their trucks.
By the way, did I mention
Just to be clear on this
Anyway, even though the new place is nowhere near as nice as our current place, the location (500m from Hornsby station) is unbeatable.
I’m not sure how many more posts I’ll have time for before we go offline, so if not before, I’ll catch y’all after the move.
The Drysdale Collective is on the move..
After a little over a year in beautiful downtown Baulkham Hills we’ve decide to move.
We’ve found a place in Hornsby only 500m from the station.
We’re currently scheduled to move on 22/09/2005.
I’ll be email the new contact details out shortly so if I miss you, please drop me an email.
If this product is real then I’m buying stock in the company…..
A quick rundown of the specs..
I don’t know about you but I’d like a 6.8GHz machine with 1TB or RAM and 2TB or storage.
Or even just to buy one of the 2TB compact flash cards.
I guess we’ll have to wait for the CES show in Las Vegas next January to see if it’s legit…
It looks like Apple have added a new baby to the iPod lineup….
I saw a video of steve jobs pulling the iPod out of the change pocket in his jeans…. Man, that thing’s tiny.
At the same time Apple have updated iTunes to 5.0, I’ll try it out tonight and add my thoughts to this post later.
And for those who like the “My phone does everything….” mindset, we have the …
I must say the Nano is tempting, I already have the 15Gb iPod but a tiny 4Gb jobby would be nice 🙂
Last night at approx 5:04pm my sister Rachel gave birth to her second child.
Lachlan John Whyte
The usual statistics
Mum and baby are doing well.
( Is it just me or does Lachlan look like a clone of Michael?? )
I haven’t seen them yet as I had to work last night 🙁
I’ll add to this post after I see them tonight.
There seems to be a trend developing here, let’s look at the events to date
Rachel has a boy – Michael
Viv has a boy – Seth
Viv has a boy – Callum
Rachel has a boy – Lachlan
Who will be the first to have a girl???
Watch this space 😉
(2005-09-01 10:05) UPDATE: I’ve added a picture and, no I still haven’t seen them 🙁 I’m set to pop around for a visit tonight.
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original “Star Trek” TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command “Beam me up, Scotty,” died early Wednesday.
He was 85.
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.
I know I join Star Trek fans around the world in mourning the loss of a much loved character that has a special place in all our hearts.
My thoughts at this time are with his family.
I admit that I didn’t know much about James Doohan beyond his work as Scotty on Star Trek, from what I’ve been reading today, he was a kind, decent and well loved man, and interestingly a World War II veteran with the Canadian Army.
Below is a posting from Slashdot that resonates strongly with me
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Here’s the lines from the TNG episode “Relics”:
Scotty: “Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.”
LaForge: “Yeah, well, I told the captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour.”
Scotty: “How long will it really take?”
LaForge: “An hour.”
Scotty: “You didn’t tell him now long it would really take, did you?”
LaForge: “Of course I did.”
Scotty: “Laddie, you got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!”
And those words are one of the guiding principles in everything I do professionally. I always undersell and overexecute. RIP good man, RIP.
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and another outlining a incident between James Doohan and a suicidal fan…
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Damn right. Not only did he expertly play the character that hooked many a kid on the idea of science and engineering, but was also a decorated war veteran and a genuine class act.
He was always warm and receptive to his fans and a beloved fixture of the convention circuit.
This is an important point. Doohan really gave so much back to the community. In the fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) documentary Trekkies [trekdoc.com], Doohan relates the story of a suicidal Trek fan who confided in him.
Doohan took it upon himself to nurse this poor soul back to health. He told the fan that he wanted to see them at the next convention.
To his amazement, the fan was there and Doohan graciously met with them, allowing them to come backstage and the whole deal. Doohan tried it again and again the fan showed up at the next convention.
They kept this up for a long time (I forget — it might have been years) when suddenly the fan stopped coming. Doohan feared the worst had happened.
Years later Doohan was stunned when the fan showed up at a convention out of nowhere! The fan told Doohan that they had turned their life around, enrolled in school, and become … an electrical engineer.
If you haven’t seen this film you should definitely rent it. Watching Doohan come close to tears as he tells this story is worth the rental fee right there.
GMD
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Below are some links to press coverage of James Doohans passing….
James Doohan, ‘Star Trek’s’ Scotty, dead
Obituary: James Doohan
Star Trek’s Scotty dies
one to beam up . . .
With those six simple words I started a journey into darkness and despair that lasted two days.
I was at home last week to spend some time bonding with squeaker ( see “Squeaker in Da House” and “It’s a boy….” ) and helping Viv cope with “the boys”.
I had taken a netgear box home to test our wireless product and noticed that it seemed to have lost wireless connectivity on Monday, I tried power cycling the netgear but it refused to connect to the wireless network.
Hmmm I said to myself, the firmware on my ADSL modem/router/access point is quite old, I wonder if there is an update?? As it turns out, YES there was, I applied it and everything look fine except that I could no longer connect to the internet!!!!
Bugger, now what do I do?? I didn’t have the previous firmware as the router came with it, and no way to get to the internet.
I tried everything I could think of, even tried downloading the firmware onto my mobile phone…. No luck.
In the end I hijacked my mothers dialup account using my iMacs internal modem, I downloaded all the firmware versions I could find and tried every one of them….. No luck.
My ISP Exetel, who am I very happy with in general, have no after hours support so I couldn’t ask them to check it for me, in the end I gave up, set the ADSL modem into “Bridge Mode” and setup a dedicated firewall machine to do the firewall/NAT functionality that my modem seems to have forgotten how to do.
I’m now running IPCop and all seems well so far. I have at least as much ( if not more ) functionality with this setup in terms of firewall/NAT, unfortunately I have lost my wireless access point as it doesn’t work in bridge mode.
I could try and debug this with Netcomm and Exetel, BUT I’m never at home during business hours and I can live without the wireless for now at least.
So, boys and girls, sometimes updating firmware when you don’t need to can be bad…
No, this isn’t a safe sex message.
Last friday 2005-07-08, I tried to send an email out about our family’s “Secret Santa” draw. Imagine my surprise when one of the receipients bounced my message back with the following explaination.
XXXXXXXXX@team.telstra.com: host
mailbo.vtcif.telstra.com.au[202.12.144.19] said: 554 Service unavailable;
Client host [220.233.25.199] blocked using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org;
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=220.233.25.199 (in reply to RCPT TO
command)
( Recipient name sanitised for their protection )
So, I proceeded to check the URL listed above and found that I was listed for sending spam??? WTF!!!
I found out that I was in fact listed on 3 separate sites and that the cause seemed to be that a host with my IP address ( which is static ) had been caught sending spam.
incidentally a few days earlier I had changed my antivirus software on my one and only windows box to AVG from Grisoft and discovered a Trojan called Boxed.3.am, apparently this charming piece of code hijacks your box and turns it into a spambot.
Now, my network at home is protected by
the Windows box in question uses Thunderbird and Firefox to avoid the dangers of Outlook and IE.
My wife, the primary user of the box has heard ( and heeded ) my “Don’t open attachments” and “Don’t download programs” warnings.
Even with all these precautions, we’ve still been hit.
How are the “Joe Sixpack” users supposed to keep their machines Virus and Trojan free??
According to the article 12 Minutes to PC infection an unpatched machine connected to the internet has a 50% chance of being compromised in the first 12 minutes……
Scary thought.
For the folks at home
Lately I’ve been getting three or four emails a day claiming to be from administrator, webmaster, postmaster, admin etc from my domain (which I administer) saying that my account is invalid or some nonsense, in all cases they contain an attachment that I’m sure has a virus or trojan in it, so BE CAREFUL !!!
I know it’s late again….
On Saturday Viv and Callum ( aka squeaker ) finally returned home, now the fun begins 🙂
Viv is well, tired and sore, but well.
Squeaker is, well, alternating between being asleep and squeaking for the boobie..
It’s great to have the family all together. Seth doesn’t seem to know what to make of Callum, he basically ignores him completely unless he’s actually crying at which point Seth will look in his direction to see what’s going on.
I have noticed Seth peeking his head over the edge of Callums cot at times so he probably is a little curious.
We’re looking forward to watching the boys grow up together ( perhaps with another brother or sister in the not too distant future ).
Watch this space for the further adventures of Teeny and Squeaker…..
