We have got ourselves some new lounges, well, not new, used. They look new though =)

The removalist comes Tuesday!

I "persuaded" the old 3 piece set down three flights of stairs and I'm not feeling too good about it. A little lower back pain. At least it's just a strain, not a pinch or anything nasty. Just dull pain. It's bloody amazing what you find behind the lounge after it's been there for 2 years!

Days before I had lost the TV remote, it just disappeared off the face of the earth! I even looked around in and between the lounges. It was not to be. I *did* however find it's battery cover which had been missing for over a year, replaced by a square of gaff tape. Eventually I found the remote, albeit once I put everything back together and pushed it up against the wall. It was sitting on  the lounge under a bloody pillow!!1

1 Year Anniversary! Kel and I have been married for One Year!

Mum, Dad and Jen came over for a BBQ to celebrate. We had some chicken kebabs and some nice thick butcher's sausages. Excellent. Kel also made her french onion dip which I love!

Big  cleaning day! I may have several blonde spots or streaks in my hair after today. I don’t know how strong this stuff is. I’ve been cleaning some mould from the ceiling in the bathroom. It kind of crept up, last week there were only a few spots then BAM! There was a few large patches and even some on the walls. I just did what I did when we moved in and I cleaned. Filled the bath with about 2” of water, poured in about half a bottle of “exit mould” and used a mop on the ceiling. That is how I got some on my hair. Drips.

I've found places to stow a lot of my "crap" (as Kel calls it). I've been meaning to sort out the top of my desk and server stand for ages. A lot of small sundries have collected around my work area, heasinks, screws, cds, dvds and various other bits and pieces... I need to sort it out. A lot of the larger things have been sorted into their various containers and put away.

Well bugger me, it appears that Fedora Core 5 *will* install on a PERC2/SC drive array [on the monolith box]. We will see, knowing my luck I've just wiped out the Ubuntu 5.04 ("Hoary Hedgehog") install for no reason. It was "sort of" configured to replace the current webserver zBox. It's burbling away now installing the first CD as I burn the second CD! =P

The Little Liamlet is doing well, we've moved from Formula + Thickener to a Formula for bubbies with reflux that already has thickener in it. It seems to be doing a better job as the poor bugger couldn't get the mixture of standard formula and thickener through the teet, even with the next size teet up.

Weekly blogging seems to be the emerging pattern =(

I've been working on my stair climbing buggy again. I haven't changed the design that much, rather, the structure of the assembly. The previous arrangement had every single individual part dumped in the one assembly. Pins, Nuts, Bolts, Split pins and parts all together. The tree of parts was massive. I have started from scratch building smaller assemblies with detail parts like nuts and bolts already on them. These "sub-assemblies" are only possible where I don't need them to interact with parts that make up the sub-assembly, only with the sub-assembly as a whole. For example, the spring pack. I had to break the spring pack into two halves so it would interact with the movements of the suspension arms. It's made the overall assembly tree much clearer. Some images later.

Work has vastly improved with the return of my proper area manager. We have staff, we have everything we need pretty much. The stand in area manager completely lost me a $10-15K a week customer, for which I will never forgive him. I can't even contact this customer now. It was over something stupid, that, if he had explained himself properly instead of just getting pissed off with me, could have allowed me to retain the customer. Thinking I was doing something wrong, I told the customer that we could no-longer sell that particular product to him. I figured it was something serious as he was really pissed off, turns out he was just pissed because I didn't go to him and ask him first... I hate that bastard, he needs to feel pain, that's what he's caused me...

On a much happier note Liam is doing much better now with a formula thickener. He has a little reflux and doesn't stay satisfied long if he throws up part of his feed. He keeps it down and as a bonus, now sleeps longer. He's learned to press the foot of one of his toys to make it light up and speak and he's also learned to hold a rattle!

Man! What a week!

I've been struggling with un-reliable staff and short-of-staff type issues all week as my Assistant (Little G) has been "Floating" around the area helping out other stores, for which I hope they compensate him. I've just started getting my store back to standard since getting back from holidays. There have been a number various problems, issues and events that have managed to thoroughly screw up my return to work and work up to this point.

Oh Shit! I was supposed to be overseeing the DSE store too, I must have crossed wires or something, I didn't even visit there! Well, after a deserved and thorough reaming from my area manager I got started there after work at about 6 PM. We had a one staff member pike out (read previously mentioned un-reliable-bastard staff) at 6:00. Barely 30 mins after I sent them at 5:30 to help in the other store and after he committed to 1.5 hours more when I asked him to help out! I've given that fucker so many chances now, he can go jump off something. I could go on, but it would get ugly. Expressing my distaste for this particular individual would probably not be wise at this moment. Some left at 7, like the staff that had started at 9 and the 3IC, I feel for him, he'd already pulled a few 12hr shifts this week. We had some good staff to 9:30 PM when we had most of it done, then it was just Little G and I until about 11:30 PM when we finished, cashed up and left.

The reason for all this: The stores brochure hadn't been tied up. A brochure is a pretty important thing in Tandy, it has limited effect. In Dick Smith, however, it's up there with like, well, breathing and eating. DSE brochures tend to up sales $10's of 000s and it's relied on to have that effect. It's bloody important. I can say though, I am at least proud of that store now, Little G and I really brought the team together and got it done. The store looks damn sexy now. We tidied, faced, ticketed and put out the last few touches on the brochure. It's two days late, but hey, at least it will have an awesome effect and when the real manager gets back, he will make his budget.

Me, I got home at 1:20AM after clambering onto a train. I was so tired I almost felt drunk. I could barely read my Silicon Chip mag. Little G got home about 10 mins later at  1:30AM. I bought a Kebab on the way home. I was surprised my favourite place was still open. I got a beer and had my Kebab. Nutritious!

Poor little Liam... He had his shots yesterday, he's come up in a little bit of a fever and he's in a little pain from the injections. I've had probably 1hr of disjointed sleep if you combine all the small times where I dozed off between 1:30AM and about 6:30 when I get up. Little Liam has been screaming, not his fault though! I would be too (and probably did) at his age after having my first needles! It annoys me enough with injections and I'm an adult. That dull pain in the middle of your shoulder that you can't rub or do anything too because it's too deep to have an effect, little Liam prolly had his injection in the butt though, I don't know, I haven't spoken to Kel yet.

Whoa! It's been ages, I will have to pay more attention to my site! I've been so busy since getting back to work and looking after little Liam!

I've been shooting some macros in my parents garden, there is one image that shows me in the reflection of a water droplet.

CRW_1861_2

Little Liam is doing terrific, he's moved up to the next nappy size and is in the “crawler” nappies now. He also now enjoys baths a lot more than before. He splashes around and giggles. He is a lot more vocal now. He has also learned to smile and giggle now. Today he held a rattle briefly and shook it about a bit. This is pretty impressive for an 8 week old bub. The sleep situation was doing terrific but seems to be decaying lately... He's up and down a lot, sometimes 5 hours, sometimes 2 hours. Kel is doing a lot better now though, now that she gets more sleep!

In other news. More stuff discovered stolen when I got back from holidays. How much fun it is to return from holidays into a crap stock take. Normal stock take, sure, but a crap result because certain ex staff want to take stuff when they leave and also don't give two shits and incorrectly process cyclic stock counts writing on stuff we never had, contributing further to administrative loss; sucks arse. Fscking excellent. I love it. Nothing better than being put through the ringer because of someone else. Then theres the additional run through the ringer because the store was looking crap. What the bloody hell do they expect when they throw the keys at a part timer and say "Here you go, run it, we will 'let' you" like it's some honor. The poor bastard has no training and knows only whats essential to keep the store running.

I've got myself a copy of World of WarCraft and I play that occasionally. I have a level 23 rogue at the moment.

zBox got a minor upgrade from a P3-733 to a P3-1000. That's increased the performance of the back-end systems such as the gallery post-upload processing and resizing for the gallery. It hasn't really done much for the database side of things. I haven't yet got the MySQL back end for Postfix email working on the PowerEdge yet. The PowerEdge also got a major upgrade from 2xP3-733s to 2xP3-1000s and 1024MB of RAM. I haven't benched it yet. I also added a GigE card to it so that I can create a small rsynch network. It's storage system hasn't changed yet although I have managed to procure a U160 SCSI card and some VERY nice U160 SCSI cables. When I say nice I mean the nice Amphenol Spectra Strip with twists between the plugs!

ultra160_cable

zTop has been upgraded, replaced actually. I am now using an ASUS M6N which is a Pentium M 1.6GHz with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. The only boggle with it is the battery, it's rooted. $220 later I will have a new one... But that's OK considering it's second hand and also considering what I am paying for it. This laptop has more bells and whistles than... well... something with lots of bells and whistles! It's got a nice video card too, a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64MB on board. It's also got IR, an SD/MMC card reader, on board GigE, Modem, PCMCIA slot, DVD Reader/CDR combo drive, 6 USB 2.0 Ports and on board 4 speaker sound.

I am currently running a dual boot system on it using GRUB. SuSE 10.0 and Windows XP. SuSE is my primary OS. I have installed XP on there for the few things that I need it for like WoW and AutoCAD/Autodesk Inventor.

I CAN'T WAIT TO GET A BATTERY!

I've finally sorted the wireless in both OS' it turns out the old wireless router I have just can't hack it. The router had crashed but the Ethernet and config sections of the router were still working. I changed the configs then power-cycled it and BAM wireless worked. I then re-enabled access filtering and WEP encryption so that no buggers can access my LAN wirelessly. Well, not easily anyway.

I've also been working on a HTPC [Home Theatre PC]. I used a spare box to make a box. I bought a 250GB hard drive, TV tuner card and a DVD burner. This will allow me to watch DVDs and also to record TV. However, it's too slow. I need a better spec box. I tried it out recording some of Dad's videos from Europe from a few years ago, he gave them to me to digitize. It's going to be much better to have them on DVD rather than analog 8mm because currently he needs the camera to watch the videos.

Yesterday I had a beer with Josh and Sandy after work. It was good to see them again. I rarely go out these days!

That's pretty much up to date now!