Photos from The Great Ocean Road from my 2007 trip to Victoria with Joe, Cicely and Brian. I still love the look of E-6 on a lightbox :)

• 11 January 2009 05:36pm: Beach in January is hot, wet, windy and sandy.
• Yesterday at 11:28am: I'm feeling as though much of my work before hols was a bit sloppy due to my wanting to get the heck out at that time.
• Yesterday at 11:30am: I just noticed that there is an overgrown graveyard across the street from my new windowd cube.
• Yesterday at 12:07pm: I need to better organise my digital photos. Right now they are spread over six computers. At least if one dies I only loose a fraction.
• Yesterday at 12:21pm: Arguing with Kim about digital vs. film. Well. She's arguing I don't give a flying...
• Yesterday at 12:38pm: Also: it must be nice to be so sure of everything. Seeing the beauty in things that everyone else seems to have discarded is exhausting.
• Yesterday at 02:05pm: Not hungry, so for my lunch hour I took a stroll through the creepy overgrown graveyard.
• Yesterday at 02:17pm: Realising camera set to ISO 3200 after taking pictures during sunny 16 weather irritates me.
• Today at 10:01am: Narrowmindedtwat er... I mean Kimbot is not at work today.
• Today at 03:59pm: Haven't been able to see season 2 of This American Life yet... anyone know when it will hit the iTunes and/or DVD?
• Today at 04:00pm: Andrew decides to tone down his snarky comment when responding to a client. I'll be glad to see the backside of this project.

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• 12 December 2008 05:37pm: Listening to Paul Simon's kodachrome on the way to the camera repair shop.
• 17 December 2008 04:56pm: DJabberd is a high-performance, scalable, Jabber/XMPP server framework where everything is a plugin... and nothing WORKS! Way to go guys.
• 18 December 2008 09:22am: This year "going home for Christmas" doesn't involve any plains trains or automobiles.
• 19 December 2008 01:15pm: Typical aussie party divided on gender lines.
• 19 December 2008 01:58pm: Steal your co-workers chrissy presents day.
• 20 December 2008 03:44pm: New WWI aerial combat exhibit at the war memorial was pretty good and reminded me of playing Red Baron in high school.
• 21 December 2008 10:16pm: Happy Chanukah :)
• 24 December 2008 08:45am: Today I am the dev team.
• 26 December 2008 09:35am: Chrissy at the beach was awesome. Now I'm going to try and find some 120 film for my Rolleiflex so I can take some square pictures.

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• 5 December 2008 08:58am: Day 3 of "don't have to go to work for three days" conference. Internets and my notebook. I'm too shy to boot my notebook into windows here.
• 5 December 2008 11:57am: Talk on Klingon programming (in Perl) was surprisingly entertaining.
• 6 December 2008 04:53pm: heading off to the beach wheeee!
• 6 December 2008 10:31pm: I am bored of the Internets, but I keep clicking anyway.
• 7 December 2008 10:18am: I had my twitter hyjacked accidentally.
• 7 December 2008 10:25am: I am glad it is only 24 today after it being 30 yesterday.
• Yesterday at 09:30am: Pancake and pear sauce with fresh squeezie orange juice for breakfast. Was raining but now stopped. Pretty good start for the day.
• Yesterday at 03:04pm: I'm frustrated by how difficult it is to find film and equipment for film cameras now a-days.
• Today at 10:51am: I'm happy to report that at least one of my MF Nikons appears to be back in working order and the other will be within ten days.

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Finally got paid. Well, exactly when they said I would, it just seems like it has been forever waiting. Also: it always seems like a lot of money when it comes in, but as soon as I start adding up the bills and taking out the savings it starts to approach zero. Tyler joked years ago that one day if he worked hard enough he’d be worth nothing. It’s good to keep your sense of humour when you are in debt. I am well past being in debt, but it still feels as though there is never enough. The future is a tangled mess in my mind right now.

Things that I did over the weekend:

1. Switched from sendmail to Postfix. Wish I had done it sooner.
2. Upgraded my file server to FC4. Ditto. Although AFS authentication doesn’t quite work anymore.
3. Set up a heterogeneous distributed compiler system using four computers, five processors, six cores and three different operating systems to build FC4 applications. Why am I doing this? So that I can issue commands like make –j 12 (dork) and expect good performance.
4. Went to Terrigal and floated in the ocean for an hour. The water was awesome.

By far the best use of my time was going to the beach. A big part of coming out to Australia was the idea that I’d be able to go to Terrigal just about anytime I pleased. Years ago I had this perfect moment there. There had been some files and it had been smoky for days. Then on the last day we were in Australia the wind cleared it away and I was at Terrigal on top of the skillion. The colours were intense. It was beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that anywhere else.

This morning I was talking to e on the phone, and she told me that after seven months down under I “have a slight accent.” This made me happy, although I doubt I would fool any Australians. This and the call directly proceeding it to Joe (to plan Project NYE2006, wherein my friends are coming to visit), was the first time I had talked to anyone in America since I got here. I finally bought myself a calling card, and it costs me like 4¢ a minute, which is less than it used to cost me to make a long distance call in the US. That is shocking.

Australians no longer sound that odd to me. I expect when I go back to the states that Americans will be the ones to sound odd. Not my friends though. e and Joe don’t count because they just sound like e and Joe, not like Americans, since I know them well. It’s only American strangers that I expect to sound funny.

Today I went to the coast and took a walk along the ocean. It was nice, and it sort of reminded me of February 2005, when I came to Australia for a visit and had this strong desire to just stay after spending a few days in Sydney and Collaroy by the beach. Although now I have a bit of a sunburn, which is no good.

It's murder having to live this close to the beach.