September 2008 Archives

Had a bit of a financial "moment" today.  Found out my other mortgage account has been frozen - a couple of weeks earlier than we thought it would.  Had a bit of low level panic cause all my money is tied up in that account.  Had enough change for lunch, then got some money out of my "internet" bank account, but there's not much in there til pay day this week.

So now have to chase down all the automated payments that come out of that old account and stop them.  Then there's a tonne of paperwork to read and sign for the new mortgage.  And we haven't done our tax yet.

It's all a little stressful :(

(oh, and then realised we were meant to be going to Newcastle with friends at the beginning of November (not to mention going away with Scott and Kerry the weekend before), but we're likely to be moving that weekend.  And I'll probably be on call.  It's not shaping up to be a stress-free couple of weeks....)

I realised tonight I hadn't downloaded my photos in over a week.. oops!!

Last weekend was very springy...

A few of my mint seedlings survived the winter and are starting to thrive again..

This currawong sat in the back yard for quite a while, which gave me time to get a photo of it..

A young (pink) daisy..

A few shots of Canberra/Gungahlin..

I'll never tire of the blossom trees around here..

Not sure what this is..?

I like the cutlery they have in the Thai place we went to for lunch on Wednesday (Lemon Grass I think??)..

Of course the big news of this week is that we exchanged contracts for a house!! Terribly exciting for us :) Turns out our new house has a beautiful weeping cherry which is in full bloom at the moment..

Saw this on the ground on Friday afternoon, which I deemed stop-in-the-middle-of-the-city-to-take-a-photo-worthy..

Friday evening saw a bunch of us go to the Wig and Pen for after work drinks. It was a good fun night, although the place is far too pricey to be wanting to do it too often. At one point we got one beer, a plate of chips and a plate of wedges. For $21.30 ?!?!? Friggen rip-off. But the beer is pretty good.

On Saturday, Annie and most of the rest of the family came over with French champagne to celebrate our house-buying (actually the champagne was given to them when Little Squishy was born, but they hadn't gotten around to drinking it.. so we celebrated both occasions :) )

With our dinner (home-made pizzas) we opened another one of our wedding wines - a very nice Coonawarra shiraz. Quite delicious.. for a red wine ;)

Today we spent much of the day cleaning up the house in preparation for moving out.

And we went to the book fair :)

We filled up a shopping bag ($10 worth) with 38 books, so think we got our money's worth :)
Here's the ones I grabbed..

I'm most excited about "The Final Countdown". Dad and I saw this movie years and years ago, and then couldn't remember the name of it for the longest time. I've not seen it again since, so will be cool to read the book.

And so that's pretty much the last week and a bit.... :)

ok so this was totally a blast from the past.

I was standing there outside the newsagent with our shopping trolley while Stu was inside looking for magazines.  And on the radio (or cd player?) came this song..

While riding in my Cadillac
What to my surprise
A little Nash Rambler was following me
About one third my size
...
Beep beep beep beep
His horn went beep beep beep

etc...

which was surreal because my dad always used to sing this song, but of course only the beep beep beep lines.  That's all I ever knew growing up.  (he always used to sing it "Beep beep. Beep beep.  His horn went beep beep burrrrppp!" heh)

Anyways, so I heard the whole song outside the newsagent today and was entirely amused.




Relatedly, one of the "related" YouTube searches was for "They're going to take me away ha ha".. which was another song dad used to sing the chorus line of...

I noticed recently that Google Maps had added some beautiful high resolution sections of Canberra.  These were taken very obviously on a weekend, and apparently around March.

What I hadn't noticed until tonight was the Terrain button.

!!!

The hills at the northern end of the ACT..

This might be my next phone....

The contract on my blackberry isn't up for another year, but after then it'll be a tough decision what to do.. :)

We got home late tonight, so we couldn't resist the call of the pepperoni puff pastry pizza ... mmmmmmmm..!!  And only $7.40 because of Tight-ass Tuesday.. woot!

A couple of people have done this meme...

it's the "take a photo of yourself as you are *right now* and post it on your blog" meme...

*shrug* :)

So we finally went and saw The Dark Knight last night.

But first we went to get some snacks/drinks while waiting for the movie to start.  We toddled off to My Cafe Espresso in Garema Place.  Apart from the "Tall Italians" that the boys all got and raved about how good they were, the rest of it was pretty crap.  We got two servings of nachos, but there were only like half a dozen corn chips to eat with.  So I asked for either some more corn chips, or some forks (either one).  And some serviettes.  Well they did eventually bring out some more corn chips so that was ok, but no serviettes.  So we all had to lick our fingers or use the drink-soaked serviettes that came under the drinks (when they finally arrived - we'd pretty much finished eating by the time our drinks arrived).  So a couple of thumbs down from me.

Anyway.

So yeah we finally got to see The Dark Knight.  It was pretty good, as indicated by all the hype and the IMDB ranking.  Great mix of action and drama.  Heath Ledger (and indeed everyone else) did a great job.  I knew it was long, but felt like I couldn't tear my eyes away to check my watch heh.  Although I did feel quite tense the whole way through it, to the point of feeling a little blah as we went home.  Weird.  Stu liked it, but the others not so much.

• the utterly bogan neighbours
• the front door which you need to SLAM to close
• the sink which is just festy
• the toilet that splashes onto the seat when you flush it
  

Sorry sweetie!!

Poor JJ was much worse off than me... even though we prolly drank the same amount all up..

and I need to be up early for a big breakfast tomorrow... hrmmm....

I really have the bestest sweetie ever... :)

So James is in town this week!!  Very cool.  So tonight met up with him and his colleague Eldon, and we wandered around til we found somewhere nice to have dinner.

We found Ardeche.  And because it was in my Entertainment Book, we thought that sounded good.

I had a duck thing, and James had a veal thing, and Eldon had a barramundi thing.  And we all had desserts too :)

Food was all excellent (garlic bread at the beginning was divine), although the veggies we got as a side with one of the meals were a little bland.

The waitress we had was lovely, great service there.

The only downer of the place was they didn't give us the full discount the Entertainment Book card offered.  So their tip wasn't as high as it might otherwise have been.

So it seems we bought a house today.

At least verbally anyway.  We have to put in a deposit overnight and hope that we don't get gazumped.

But we're both pretty darned excited :)

To celebrate, we opened the bottle of Mount Majura Pinot Gris that we'd been saving for a special occasion...

So.  Nat and Andrew came over on Friday night.  They stayed relatively sober while Stu and I got a little sloshed.. oops.. hope they don't hate us...

This was the second bottle of wine we drank (after a sparkling cabernet)..



Natalie had fun with my Russian Dolls..

Rule #74 - don't mix wine with ovens  .....

Trying to make pizzas after several glasses of wine.. not such a good idea.. ended up with a rather blistered hand from the edge of a hot pan burning me :(

Other than that... and, well, Stubie having a little too much wine and suffering the consequences badly.. we had a very lovely evening with Natto and Andrew .. attempted to watch Veronica Mars but got distracted.. then the Lion King but Stu had to, er, disappear .. and we never did get to Jurassic Park.. heh

my poor hand... and Stu's poor tummy.....

Tony came over tonight to discuss finances.  Apparently we could borrow an insane amount of money for a house.. but don't think we'll be borrowing anywhere near that heh.

So now house hunting begins in earnest....

A *very very* long time ago (read: 1996), Guy introduced me to Laserwar.

Well it never worked from Windows 2000 onwards, so I haven't played it in a *very* long time. 

But was I was backing up my computer tonight I noticed it again and asked Stu if he had dos 6 on disks anywhere so I could setup a virtual machine to play all my old games.  He said just use dosbox.  So I did!  And dredged up the memories of playing this rather fun little game...

We did a roast lunch and had Scott and Kerry and Stu over.  So that was all very nice.  Had plenty of meat, but not enough veggies.. oops..

Waking up in the mornings is lovely at the moment.  We look at our window and see trees covered in cotton wool...

While trying to publish my previous entry (Synthy), I was getting horrible permission denied errors.
Grrr just got another one and will have to redo this post :(
It wasn't the usual /tmp full problem this time.  Looks like you can't use i f r a m e code in MT posts... hrmm...  
hell you can't even *say* it... most disturbing!!  And very frustrating given that I've just had to redo this post *again* :(

The other bit of nonsense I was looking at while trying to figure this out, is that since August 4, I've been getting several core dumps a day in my MT cgi directory.  I looked through the logs at these times and sure enough, comment spammers were hitting my blog at the time :(  Might have to upgrade a dot point or something...

193.53.87.83 - - [04/Aug/2008:12:13:02 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/2004/09/fq-topic-posession.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060612 Minefield/3.0a1"

193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:21:21:19 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:21:21:25 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 200 2247 "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:22:33:50 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Some time ago I mentioned Microsoft's Photosynth.  Well I have been waiting patiently for them to release a version that I could use my own photos with.  Well a few weeks ago they released it.

My first attempt was a series of photos I took of my flat in Sydney before I moved out.  But it was only 28% synthy.  The next attempt was a group of photos I took up Black Mountain tower last year.  It was much better at 83% synthy (although no idea why it couldn't make 100%).

The third attempt was with 212 photos I took up Sydney Tower last year.  It got a 95% synthy rating, and got 10 views over a few hours today (!)

Lots of fun.. :)

View from Sydney Tower

I've just finished reading the Deathly Hallows again.

And I must say I think I enjoyed it much more the second time around.  The first time I got bogged down in the middle where they were wandering aimlessly in the forest and got a bit bored of it, but for some reason I didn't feel that this time.

I still didn't like how you never find out what happens to everyone afterwards.  If it weren't for some of the online interviews I read, I'd still be wondering.

Anyways, I guess I'll start reading the Little House on the Prairie books next, as the rest of my to-be-read pile is in storage at the moment..

Went to a trivia night tonight with Natalie and Andrew, and even Stu got back from Melbourne in time to come.  We came last the first couple of rounds, but made a comeback and ended up coming third.  Which was pretty good considering we only had six people on a table that could have had ten.  So per-capita we probably won ... heh

Sunday Stu arranged another breakfast out and about. Although this one at the slightly more civilised time of 9:30. Met up with Pauline and Brett at Satis (where yet again we were forced to perch on tiny stools while we waited for the others to arrive, but did manage to squeeze onto an (outdoor) table eventually). I swear that place needs to invest in some towels to dry up the back section which has been wet every time we've been there >:(

Had their "big" breakfast this time ($12.50).. rapidly running out of things on their menu to try...

Had a fairly quiet rest of the day before heading over to Potty's for cocktails and nibbles.

How many people do you think it takes to make pina coladas? Four apparently - three workers and one supervisor ;)

The end result was pretty cool though...

And the other ones they made were even nicer..

And Kerry had a nice selection of finger food too..

So it was all very pleasant.

We were planning on going out to dinner afterward, but Stu came down with a migraine, so we ended up just going home. Whereupon we ordered a pepperoni pizza on puff pastry... omigosh!! soooo good!! (we've had them before but had forgotten their evil goodness heh). Stu suffered on the Monday for it, but claimed it was totally worth it ;)

As an aside, on Saturday night we made home-made pizzas and opened another of our wedding present bottles of wine - this time a Pepperjack shiraz, which went surprisingly well with the pizzas.