• 17 February 2009 09:53am: Waited for the train just one minute after, skipped the arm pit to nose treatment and scored a seat on the bottom right out of town hall :)
• 17 February 2009 10:16pm: Saw a guy go out of his way to step over a homeless guy instead of walking around him.
• 18 February 2009 10:08am: Bristol want's to be, like, an advocate on the, like, issue of teen pregnancy, but she doesn't, like, want to get into details. like.
• 18 February 2009 07:16pm: Sun comes out and it's hot again all of a sudden. Dear Mr. Weather, we're at war. Pick a side.
• 19 February 2009 10:02am: Laughing at my boss' inability to write hello world in C without help.
• 19 February 2009 01:22pm: Whoohoo we're #1 we're #1 we're #1 http://tinyurl.com/d2dgr5
• 20 February 2009 11:59am: My work is blocking port 70. No Gopher! Aaaieieiiaiaaaa!
• 20 February 2009 01:47pm: slicehost has a debian lenny image now. Think it might be time to migrate iacon to dallas. already?
• 22 February 2009 10:08pm: Shouldn't gopher, and not http be the default protocol for server that starts with "gopher"? I'm only saying.
• 23 February 2009 07:23am: Last night I dreamed the Capitalists were going to turn everyone into credit default swaps.
• 23 February 2009 09:20am: My Australian hosting provider blows.
• 23 February 2009 12:03pm: I'm installing perl4 so that I can compile black perl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl I'm a dork.
• 23 February 2009 02:46pm: Allison apparently thinks that the universe revolves around her. "Where's OB? Oh he's in that meeting."
• 23 February 2009 05:14pm: No mention of Heath in the mX. Must have gone to press too early to call it. The mX and I were the only ones didn't know it was sure thing.
• Today at 05:24pm: It amuses me that practically the entire Australian Navy has to skip town in order to make room for a cruise ship.
• Today at 05:25pm: It's the largest ocean liner in the world, but still.

twitter.com/plicease

I'm not sure if people here are usually glum and I don't notice because I'm usually in a good mood, but the ride home in the train was grim tonight. On my way home picking up the mX, which I usually look forward to, I felt dread about what was inevitably the main story. Every now and then I refresh my browser to confirm, yes, there are more confirmed victims. s-mart has promised to match employee donations to the Red Cross, so I threw some anonymous cash into the pot. If I find a ATM tomorrow, I plan on putting some more in tomorrow. The PM has compared it to mass murder on the (probably likely) speculation that at least some of the fires were deliberately set. None of my family lives in Victoria, and thankfully none of the fires in this state have had any fatalities, so I am thankful that none of my loved ones were affected.

Tonight on the way home, Town Hall station was sweltering awful humid hotness on both sides of the platform like the innards of Hades in a bad mood. It does not bode well for the weekend when it is supposed to top off at 43 degrees in parts of the city^[1]. Since I got a train pass that goes out to Bondi Junction this week ^[2] I might go and hide in the mega mall with the AC for at least part of the weekend and maybe go see a movie.

I started writing this journal to keep my writing skills fresh. That was in 2004 and seems like forever ago. I didn't have any delusions of being some grate writer or anything^[3], but I think being able to communicate clearly is a pretty worth while skill even if one is simply a particularly cleaver monkey banging out source code on the keyboard. Then this year I started posting more photos because I've been taking more photos. Now I am thinking that balance is in order.

I am relieved at the ease of migrating my email server today. It took a long time to copy inboxes and folders and stuff, but the actual configuration and updating of the DNS MX records was a relative breeze. Since I ditched sendmail dealing with my SMTP server has been difficult but possible, a significant improvement over trying and impossible. The new server^[4] is going to save me a lot of money which is a good thing given that we are all going to lose our jobs and subsist on stealing gasoline in the desert using revved up muscle cars. I'm still losing money on it, which is okay, because I get a lot of utility out of it.

1. read it in mX so it must be true^TM
2. at the price of $3 more, which is pretty good because even one trip out there will save me money over getting a round trip ticket
3. ...any more
4. Actually the new server is really three (virtual) servers, which is good because it builds some redundancy and backups into the system

• 19 January 2009 08:10am: Forgot the memory card for my DSLR today but remembered my TLR with film.
• 19 January 2009 03:39pm: With all the dire predictions of web(bubble) 2.0 corps folding in the recession it's nice to work and an unsexy corp with actual revenue.
• Yesterday at 03:39pm: It's so cute that to install APC (a PHP module) that you need Perl installed.
• Today at 04:35pm: New toy hopefully arrives tomorrow: Nikon D700 DSLR and Nikkor 16-35mm f/2.8 lens.
• Today at 05:28pm: Obama got the first five pages of the mX today. Hard not to feel the excitement even on the other side of the world.

twitter.com/plicease

In four years in Tucson, I remember it snowing exactly once. Actually I don’t even remember the snow itself, but reading about it the next Monday morning in the Wildcat, because I had slept through the snowing (and immediate melting) and it having snowed was newsworthy enough to be on the front page. Not that the front page had to be terribly newsworthy when it came to the Wildcat. Although I think the Wildcat probably had more content and journalistic integrity than mX does, and I always pick up a copy of mX if I am going through Town Hall station at the right time of day. The price is right.

I have been rewriting bits of my website in PHP in order to improve my PHP coding skills. It’s painful because Perl (on which most of my website is already written) is about a million times more powerful in almost every regard. It’s sticky to configure I guess, and is horrible to maintain if written by someone who is unskilled in the ways of the Perl. This is why companies that do OpenSource web development tend to stick with PHP, which bundles itself with everything and dumps everything (including kitchen_sink_faucet_on()) into the same global namespace. Hence the need to brush up on PHP and the loathing of said PHP.

I have also been introducing Tristan 賢 to some of my music. Some of it seems to be taking. I have this dream that he won’t be as conventional in his approach to things artistic as my dad is. He has to figure out what he likes on his own though, and he will do that, but it is fun to show him things that he might not otherwise see or hear :)

• Someone asked why Таня pronounced something in a certain way today and she said “I don’t pronounce it that way; it just sounds like I do.” (Russians often spell things one way, but then pronounce them another, to the bemusement of Australians who pronounce them the way they are spelled regardless of what language they came from: witness news anchors saying “junta”).
• The young bloke in the front row with a Guns and Roses T-Shirt didn’t know who Юрий Гагарин was.
• I was watching the Colbert Report today and I got the munchies for Doritos. I know I am a couple of weeks late.
• There was an article in the Sydney mX today about Stephen Colbert’s (Стефан Колбер) run for the White House. mX is brought to you by the same corporate overlords that bring you Faux News. It did mention it was a joke, but it didn’t mention that he was only running in South Carolina.
• I wonder if Sydneysiders even know where South Carolina is. Then again, I know Americans have no idea where New South Wales is.
• My Internet is for shit tonight speed wise :(