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!