Kazza the Blank One

Sunday.  6th. 

Had some leftover lamb which I dug out of the freezer for dinner.  DS9 2.13.  20:00 is bed time right?  Well that's 21:00 in old time so I guess that counts.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got like 9 hours sleep or something. Hurray. Still woke up early though. Went to take out the recycling this morning and saw all the neighbours' cars were gone and everything looked neat and tidy. Yup, they'd moved out. They're off to New Zealand. Maybe for just a year. Unless they love it and stay haha. Spent half the day (it felt like) on the phone today blerf. Cooked sausages and two big zucchinis I got at Chris' yesterday for dinner, then watched DS9 2.14. Interesting episode, but it's never answered how they know right from the beginning.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly okish, but still woke up before 5:30 (at one point I guessed 5:30 - it was 5:26!). Busy day evaluating doco and rules for a big change. Neighbours' friends came over to put the bins out. I'll still take the rubbish that's in their recycling bin and put it in our rubbish bin haha.  Went with T/J to the Shine Dome for the AI Science talk which was quite interesting.  What we heard of it.  For the start of the second speaker (which was recorded) they couldn't figure out the audio so it was super quiet, and they couldn't figure out how to take it back to the beginning.  So missed like a quarter of the second talk.  

Wednesday. Slept mostly ok I think. 

Almost there!

Busy day, including being NEIL for some of it.  Late home, DS9 2.15, backing up the NAS to one of my lesser used drives - backed up more stuff from Mum's computer from the last time I was there.  Also started backing up David's America masters again.  I have them on my little holiday drive but that's raw, not rotated or renamed, and I might need space on that drive for the next trip.  Only got up to about day 9.

Thursday.  Restless sleep.

Super excited to pick the first two of the mini capsicums!!

Pretty busy day I think.  Super quiet drinks sadly - just our group and two others.  Pizzas for dinner.  DS9 2.16.  You'd think they would have learnt from literally the last episode not to both beam down to a planet by yourselves.  Odo said noone was interested in him, clearly he forgot about Lwaxana Troi just a few episodes ago.  And I was thinking the little kid looked familiar - she played Dylan's little sister in 90210.. haven't seen her in thirty years but still recognised her!!!  Early night.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.

Got pissed at the ANIMAL that ripped off the third mini capsicum which was not quite ripe.  Didn't even eat it, just put claw/teeth marks on it and left it on the ground.  #grunt.

Day of all the crap and all the interruptions.  Did get some documentation done though.  Leftovers for dinner - finished up the leftovers in the fridge.  DS9 2.17 and Death in Paradise 14.5.  Why didn't they just test them all for GSR?  Would have saved them all a heap of time.  Sheesh.

Saturday.  Woke up at Dentist Time, only got maybe 3/4 hour more sleep.  Sigh.  Climbed Mt Rogers.  In a vain attempt to be healthier.  Sigh.

Black and white on blue

Brown

Didn't end up going to Cypher at lunch, which was a bit of a relief, on account if it would have taken up much of the day, plus trying to be healthier and all that crap.  Instead I spent much of the day doing holiday planning.  Also food shopping. 

We won't mention the "breakfast raclette" I had for lunch - leftover roast potato with raclette that I bought like two months ago and really needed to be used!

Steak and salad for dinner.  Pretty much one of my favourite easy meals - just make a salad and fry some meat.  I might even convince the sweetie that steak is good m'kay? ;)

I would like to point out that I only ate half of this rather huge steak - the rest I sliced up for cold meat snackages.

Then watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Sunday.  Slept fairly well.  Climbed Mt Rogers again.

Grey

Spent the rest of the day on holiday planning.  Up to Slano.  Did put on some pork at lunch and a heap of veggies for dinner...  while the sweetie is on holidays.. hrmmm... 

Last year or whenever it was, when they cancelled the work ball a few days before the event, we all agreed that we should go out somewhere anyway.  We never managed to arrange it and then it became Too Hard so that was that.  In January we again brought up doing it due to Bar 59 being the perfect place for it.  So last Saturday night we did it.

We got there at 18:00 to get a view during the day as well as at night.

LAKESIDE SPLASH - Vodka, Rum, Tequila, Gin, Blue Curacao & Lemon-lime Soda

Parmesan & Truffle Chips - Served with Aioli Sauce

Sunset over Belconnen

Margherita Pizza - Fresh Tomatoes, Mozzarella & Fragrant Basil. Drizzled with Olive Oil

Mixed Charcuterie & Cheese Plate - Combination of Cheese & Charcuterie Plates

The gang

COSMOPOLITAN - Vodka, Triple Sec (Cointreau), Cranberry Juice & Fresh Lime Juice

The gang

MARGARITA - Tequila, Cointreau & Fresh Lime Juice

Belconnen by night

Confit Garlic & Rosemary Pizza - Slow-Cooked Confit Garlic & Rosemary, Mozzarella. Drizzled With Olive Oil

So it was a perfectly pleasant night out.  But given that people forgot about it, double booked, or just didn't turn up, we only had seven people in the end.  If someone else organised another one I might go, but I dunno that I could be bothered organising it again myself.  Organising people is worse than herding cats.  And I'm allergic.

Thought I'd get this little guy to hang out at work.  $3.30 from Daiso!

Petit Block is another in the line of nanoblocks and miniblocks (I've never actually tried to see if the pieces are interchangeable, but they look like they could be).

His head and tail are articulated on a ball and socket joint so they move.  Except, being Not Lego, it'll disintegrate if you don't hold it together because it's so flimsy.

But he's pretty cute :)

These were the leftover pieces.  Maybe I could use some of them in the nanoblocks church heh.

Sunday.  30th.  Had Jenn over for dinner, wherein we cooked up a huge vegetarian feast.  Stu cooked his miso mushrooms.  I did a potato bake, a blue cheese broccoli/cauliflower/onion bake and brussels sprouts with hazelnuts.

We debated how long it had been since we saw Jenn last.  I looked up my blog and said April 2023, which seemed way too long, but I do remember taking a photo of her hair, and the date on that was April 2023, which pretty much confirms it.  We're such slackers at keeping up with people.  Watched DS9 2.7 after Jenn left.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Got to hand back over the NEIL job back to Neil hurray!!!  Leftovers for dinner then DS9 2.8.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep #grunt.  Did a bunch of analysis of some catchall rules so I can put in some more specific ones so we can get rid of the catchall.  

I tried feeding Stumpy today.  He's still being lethargic and not basking, but he did eat a blueberry and some food which was good.

I'm always suprised how quickly the COLD hits in Canberra.  It'll be 30C for days on end, and suddenly it's 5C overnight and leaving the windows open makes for a very cold house.  Decided April 1 should be close up all the windows day (several are left permanently locked open over summer).  In the afternoon I was cold and hungry so had a cup of tea in our fancy Cunard tea cups.

Luv-a-duck for dinner which was very nice.  All. The. Garlic.  !!

DS9 2.9.  After dinner was watching a video Dave2 linked to on living without a smartphone.  Yeah I literally can't even remember how friends and I would meet up without being able to text each other updates or issues.  Like what if a train was late, how would you tell who you were meeting?  Navigation is another big thing.  Nowadays I can turn up anywhere and use GPS on my phone to navigate (except that one time in Switzerland when I had to pay more for a car with satnav because the esim I got didn't work in Switzerland).  I can't even imagine the paperwork you'd need to cart around to try and do the same thing with maps.  Don't get me wrong, I love maps, and I like navigating, but they're damned heavy and more often than not I'm doing the driving not the navigating, and I can't imagine Mum would have much luck navigating me around European cities.  Having said that, we did manage to navigate our way around the USA and Canada in 1983 and 2004 before phones.  But for the most part we stayed out of big cities.  And the USA is literally designed for road tripping.  Signage is way way better there than in Australia or Europe.

Wednesday.  Second night in a row dreaming about toilets.  I have this bizarre thing where I stress about finding a clean/usable toilet.  And not even when I need to actually pee in the middle of the night, it's just this weird obsession I have.  Bizarre.  

Somewhat busy day.  Late home.  Stu had had a day so we got KFC hmmm.  DS9 2.10.  

OneNote is trying to force me to upgrade to Office 365.  It's already upgraded itself from the old Technet version I've been using for years AGAINST MY WILL I might add (apparently there's a way to turn off automatic updates so I might try reinstalling it and do that).  So now it says I have 90 days of free usage.  Well I can tell you that there is no way in HELL I'm going to pay to use it.  I will NEVER get an Office 365 subscription.  I'll rip everything out of it and use LibreOffice and Notepad if it comes down to it.  Which is a shame, because OneNote is actually quite a good product.  I like how it keeps different groupings of notes together and you can easily password protect sections.

Thursday.  Late getting to sleep, then awake from 5:30 sigh.  Went out to put a few things in the recycling bin before it got collected, only to find two big bags of RUBBISH in it!?!  WTF!?!  I pulled them out and raged for a while.  Messaged the neighbours but didn't get a response.  In the end put out our bin (which only had one bag of rubbish in it so wasn't worth putting out) and put their rubbish in it.  As we were leaving for work neighbour's Dad was out there and I asked him and he said he did it.  Sigh.  Simon was sick at drinks so if I get sick early next week we'll know why.  Pizzas for dinner then DS9 2.11.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day - put in a heap of those firewall rules which took me all afternoon to do.  Kievs and veggies for dinner then DS9 2.12.

Saturday.  Awake from like maybe 1 til 4.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Spent a chunk of the day photo picking from "other peoples photos" and trying to sort out what backups I have of Mum's computer. I'm definitely missing a few years worth from 2015-2017 where I just haven't had the time during visits to get it all copied. Debating a trip to Sydney to do that, as well as sort out the mess they made when they built her a new computer and didn't transfer all the files. Luckily she has all the photos (I hope!) on an external hard drive that has a snapshot backup I made her do some years back. In the evening we went to Bar 59 for an "antiball" but it was a bit of a fizzer really. People forgot or double booked or just didn't turn up, so there was only seven of us there in the end. I tried a few cocktails just for a bit of fun. So it was nice enough night, but dunno if I could be bothered trying to organise another one. Neil very kindly gave us a lift home.

Sunday.  Awake for maybe an hour or so in the middle of the night - from 2:27, but the new 2:27, so didn't get to watch the clock go from 2:59 to 2:00. Still pretty tired though. Finally managed to setup SMTP on my iPhone using CloudLoop. Optus is flaky as hell for sending SMTP mail through, plus I get SPF softfails with them because I don't have their mail servers in my SPF records. Did a bit of house stuff, and started thinking about some holiday stuff. Tried again to add my Qantas frequent flier number to my Emirates flights, but I kept getting the error:

Warning:
Sorry, we`re unable to save the changes. Please check all the information and try again.

So I tried their online chat. It was quick and they just did it for me. Unexpectedly quick and painless! Not that I know why I bother really - Qantas expire all my points before I can use them. Then did some other holiday planning.

The Windows 11 Explorer trash is really pissing me off.  I have an in tray where I have all the photos that I post to this blog.  I update it every week when I'm processing my photos, and when I've posted them they get moved to Done.  I sort this folder by date (in reverse to what windows likes to set it to) so that when I'm blogging them I can see and post the photos in order.  Every time my computer reboots this setting is lost.  I have to go Sort By -> Date (twice to get it in the right order) not just in Explorer, but in Chrome as well.  Every damned time.  But lately it's gotten worse.   Tonight I did an experiment.  I had the folder set the way I wanted it, and copied the path to clipboard.  I closed explorer on this desktop.  Opened up again and pasted the path.  Folder view was reset to default.  So did it again, this time by navigating manually to the folder.  In this method the folder view is retained.  And it's repeatable. 

I also epic hate how Explorer collapses all explorer folders that you've had expanded whenever you insert or eject removable media.  Like WHYYYYYYYY????

I hate Windoze SO MUCH!!

And suddenly the weekend is over. hrmmm.

Capitalism at its finest.  A store is puttering along.  Gets bought out.  Parent company goes bust.  Takes a whole bunch of brands with it.  

And so ends Millers.  And Katies and a heap of others.

Not that I shopped at Millers much.  I don't shop anywhere much for clothes.  I HATE having to buy clothes.  It's a painful process, sometimes ends in tears, and almost never leaves me with clothes I actually like or look good in.

Twenty five years ago, Millers used to sell plain-dyed tshirts.  They had them in a big variety of colours and I had a lot of them.  

I still have them.  All of them.  They're practically threadbare now - really thin fabric, and some of the seams have gone but they're still hanging in there.  I wear them as my "winter" tshirts - under jumpers - because after twenty five years deodorant stains are a thing.

I took this photo in 2018 and resized it for my blog back then, when I was still only doing 400 pixel photos

Millers stopped selling those thsirts years and years ago.  I was super annoyed that I couldn't get them anymore.  They were made in Australia, only like $13 at the time.

And did I mention how well they've lasted?

My theory is they stopped selling them because noone was buying them.  Because people didn't need to buy any more of them once they had them because they lasted so well.

But here's the thing.

After twenty five years, the collars on them are still intact (ok this photo was taken in 2022 but nothing's changed)

Nowadays if you buy a tshirt you'll be lucky to get a couple of wears out of it before the collars go crinkly.  The one I got at Target last year - maybe six washes.  The one I got at Target last week - literally one wear/wash.  WTF??  Target used to be good.  Now it's utter TRASH.

The whole world has been enshittified.

Sigh.

I think Duncan might have brought this one in, can't remember.  Wasgij so you don't get the picture to work with.

This one Duncan definitely did, picked up at a garage sale or similar

This is one Duncan brought in ages ago (his brother had given it to him years ago) but at 1000 pieces and a lot of black I didn't think we'd ever do it. But Sachin decided we should, so we did.  It was quite decent quality and a lot of piece variety, so it was tricky, but not evil.

I got this recently at the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction for like a dollar or two.  Complete too which is impressive.  I sat down one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago and did the thing in an hour and a quarter flat!

This was another one I got the same day for a dollar or two, again it was finished which was impressive.  And a bit of fun, done quite quickly.

After seeing all the dead pixels in my (Dad's) old 600D thought it was time for a new one.  The new one has a dead pixel right in the middle.  But we won't talk about that.

The first photo I took on it I didn't even realise I had taken it.  It's fast and silent!

Second shot was of the sweetie of course.  Quite soft though

Obligatory Lego shot

I think at this point I'd set the date wrong on the camera so fixed that.  We won't mention that the time was actually 12 hours out as well. 

Not bad at fish photos, with a fair bit of zoom

A couple of shots of the sweetie later on - super shallow depth of field here, I'm wondering if that's cause it focussed on him being a human

Next up the true test - under the house with almost no light.  It did really well here - quite bright - a lot brighter than it looks in real life!

Went outside and took a bunch of photos of flowers which turned out quite well

Had a play with the "art" filters.  Yeah nah, none of them are any good.

A closeup of a fish - not bad

I went back downstairs to try out more options.  I tried the "hand held night scene" which supposedly takes like three photos and stacks them.  But this turned out all fuzzy.  The simple single shot (below) worked better.

This was using the "food" filter which is supposed to make things look more vibrant.  I guess it did maybe?

The next day took it to Annie's and got a nice, fairly candid, shot of her

And then the real test - comet photos!

If you can get past all of Elon's space junk cluttering up the sky #grunt

One without satellites

Thanks Elon

Thanks Elon.  This shot has TEN satellites ruining it!! (hard to see resized)

Thanks Elon

I did get a nice shot of Orion.  Well one, the others were ruined by Elon's space junk

A couple of weeks later took some more photos of the fish

And other random stuff around the house

Fern closeup

Did I mention the super shallow depth of field, even with only a modest zoom?

When I took it to Adelaide the other weekend, all of my photos on it were rather dull and lifeless compared to my phone photos.  

Like.. compare the pair..

Seriously WTF??

Hoping it's just a setting somewhere.. will have to do some more playing.

I'm also frustrated with the lack of zoom.  And I knew I was going to be.  I stand by my opinion of many years ago.. L series lenses are like twice the cost, but they're not twice as good.  Things are still soft at raw pixels..

I miss the old 18-135mm lens I had (~24-200 equivalent with crop).  I only get half that now. Sigh.

Yeup.

I saw this at the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  Because of the red dot special it was 50% off so only $2 so I figured I could give it ago.

When I opened it I found someone had made a start on it, but most of the pieces were still in orginal (opened) bags

So I pulled it all apart and separated the pieces

It became evident fairly quickly that there were missing pieces - the little meeples out the front of the church were missing (the bits in the photo below I reused elsewhere where they were missing)

Other pieces were missing too, but I made do with spares that Nanoblocks sets always come with plenty of

The spires on either side couldn't be completed, but this was really the only obviously visible bit that was missing

As complete as I could get it!  It's very cute!

A shot of the rear

By the time I used up extra pieces in other places, this is what I was left with

And a fun shot of the stained glass windows

Not bad for $2 worth of entertainment!

Sunday.  23rd.  Leftover chicken feast for dinner.  DS9 2.1.  Recopied all the MOVs I have on my phone with Windows.  

Monday.  Early night, slept ok.  NEIL again - did a bunch of rearranging of mail routes and holding areas to make my life easier.  Salmon and salad for dinner, with a creamy lemon dill dressing, although it was very runny because it was cream - next time I'll use yoghurt.

DS9 2.2.  I reckon Frank Langella totally looks like Christopher Lee.  Google that crap, I'm not the only one that thinks so!  Finished culling/adjusting/resizing Adelaide photos.  All the photos taken on my new camera are a bit .. muddy ..  Will have to check the settings and see what other options there are.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Noticed that Windoze 11 brought back the ability to right click on a directory in the left pane of Explorer and choose New -> Folder (previously you had to right click then Show More Options -> New -> Folder)..  That had been pissing me off since day one of using Windoze 11, so that was nice.  NEIL again at work, doing more policies for sorting mail.  Steak and salad for dinner with creamy garlic mushrooms.

Once again I managed to cook it nicely.  I may convince Stu to like steak after all haha.  DS9 2.3. Talked to the mother type person.  She's doing better, and said they pulled up the security video which showed her fall (she fell right at the entrance to her retirement village) and you could see that it was in fact just simply tripping over a raised bit of concrete, not a blackout, so that was a huge relief!  Mum photo picking - from all the weddings we've been to, so that was a bit of fun, lots of looking through photos of our wedding too.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok. Windoze 11 has recently started randomly moving windows off to my other screen overnight.  So I'll turn on my right screen in the morning only to find some of my windows aren't there anymore, they've been shoved off to my secondary monitor on the left.  Why is windoze 11 so TRASH?? WHY WHY WHY????  Less time having to be NEIL with my policies in place - less time picking through big mail queues.  Dealing with other crap instead heh.  Leftover lemon pepper dill chicken for dinner.  DS9 2.4.  Mum emailed through a video taken on a phone of the security video and yeah you can clearly see her trip rather than pass out.

Thursday.  Went to bed at 22:00.  Went to sleep at 01:00.  Sigh.  NEIL again for the day.  They're threatening to go back to managed desktops at work, which will be a massive pain in the @$$ because in order to use my own computer (you know, to actually work productively with a proper keyboard and two large screens) I'll need a dock or kvm just to use my own computer.  So dumb.  Ok drinks, although bartender was late so we were wondering if the bar would even open at all.  This cockatoo was hanging around behaving rather strangely.  I went over and it was quite tame (even let me hand feed it).  Wonder if it was someone's escaped pet.  

Pizzas then DS9 2.5.

Friday.  Early night and slept well hurray.  NEIL again, hopefully the last day for a while!! 

Had this miso ramen for lunch - $5.80 for two servings from Daiso.  Wasn't too bad.  Needed some pork belly though!

Kievs for dinner.

DS9 2.6 then Death in Paradise 14.4 - another ridiculous episode.

Saturday.  I knew that because I slept well on Thursday night I'd sleep badly on Friday.  Sure enough, awake from ~1:30 to ~4:30 sigh.  Zombie morning, pretty much a complete writeoff.  Tried to pay tax (last time I tried the site was down for maintenance).  Why do they make it so damned HARD??  Why can't they make it like utilities where you get a nice clear bill and details to pay.  Tax you're *lucky* to get a cryptic "You have mail in mygov" email (or in my case, the first you hear about it is an sms that it's overddue).  Then when you login it's still not even clear what you're paying.  Like is this PAYG for this quarter? Next quarter? What?  Just make it EASY FFS!!  But.  All the rain today!  Hurray!  Blogged my recent trip to Adelaide.  The new light I got for the two foot tank looked rather.. dim.. and flickery.  I tried replacing the starter (of course I opened up the wrong end first didn't I??) but no luck.  Tried another bulb, it seemed ok, and tried the bulb in another fitting, still dim.  #grunt.  Windoze 11 Notepad sux.  If the file you have open is too big (like maybe a couple of hundred KB) it will literally just skip entering keys you've typed.  So you have to back and keep reentering them.  So dumb. Most likely it's all the spell checking and autocorrection crap.  I'm still on the fence whether to give up on it and go back to classic Notepad.  I do like the state saving - you can reboot and not lose anything you have open.  Handy when Windoze REBOOTS AGAINST YOUR WILL whenever it feels like it.  Sausages and salad for dinner then watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  Even though we put it on at dinner time it still finished after 21:00. hrmmm.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Definitely had a lot more energy today.  Although mostly just house stuff, food shopping, returned the fish tank light and got a new one which seems better, cleaning etc.

We're worried Stumpy is dying.  He's not been himself the past couple of weeks.  Lethargic and not basking. hrmmmm.  He is around 18 years old though, and typical age for a blue tongue in captivity is 15-20 years.....

I've been a zombie today and have achieved very little.  I have, however, blogged my recent trip to Adelaide.