Sunday.  16th.  Not backdating for a change :)  Pic of the kale chips I made as part of dinner.  This was 15 minutes, some bits were a little overdone.

Monday.  17th.  Woke up around dentist time for like an hour and a half.  On the weekend I got back into collecting some extra data from Dad's slides, to help organise them better.  Because he would mix up rolls to put things together by subject.  Which is fair enough, but some slides don't have dates (I still need to find out if he ever digitised his slide labels from the books he had which have been lost) but do have processing dates sometimes, or can be linked together by the type of slide etc.  He also mixed like three trips up north into one collection, and bushwalks to the same area together.  I want to be able to get them back into chronological order for filing.  So more of that before work.  Tried to do one thing, which took all day because of everything else I had to deal with.  I tried to talk to the optometrist about whether the strain for distance is good strain (help reverse the myopia) or bad strain (make it worse).  But the receptionist called me back, not the optometrist, and said the optometrist said just not to do it.  And I'm like that doesn't answer the question, but of course she didn't have the answer, and wouldn't find out because he'd just said Don't.  Fricken sigh.  Hate.  Cranky all afternoon.  And I was cold and hungry ALL DAY (well except for briefly after lunch of nice warm noodles and a walk in the sun).  Leftovers for dinner.  Tried emailing some peeps to confirm their email addresses before I emailed photos, but Gmail intermittently wouldn't accept mail from Internode:

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 550-' This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for [kazza.id.au] did not pass with ip: [--]. The sender should visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for instructions on setting up authentication.

Some went through but others bounced.  So then I had to fight with Vodien to get an SPF record setup.  Internode is super helpful (https://www.internode.on.net/support/guides/email/spf_records/) providing the text to use for their mail servers.  But Vodien support was like, do it through cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't "own" the domain per se.  Of course that didn't work.  Then the actual Vodien DNS manager kept complaining about an invalid name.  They actually want you to put a name which is daft because TXT records don't have them.  I hate EVERYTHING.  Too cranky and depressed to do any Titanic.

Tuesday.  Slept okish I guess.  Well, after I finally got to sleep, which took like two hours because my feet were cold and wouldn't warm up.  Mail policy staring day.  Weeding at lunch.  Music, cheese kransky and cabbage for dinner (finally finished the cabbage that's been in the fridge since probably January - that stuff just never goes off!!).

Blogged the week before last, which took up most of the evening.  Then finally finished watching Avatar.  Only took like two weeks hehe.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep again because my feet were cold.  Lots of work with Neil.  We're probably going to end up deleting half the ruleset on one server because of things either no longer in use or things can be combined.  

Saw these at the chicken place and drooled.. but didn't buy any.. this time..

Herbert's for dinner for a tap takeover by Big Shed.

I tried all six beers on tap (half pints each of four of them which were good, not much more than a taste of the Brown (too dark for me), and most of a pint of the hard lemonade which tasted like Solo - yum! dangerous!).  

This was the rep and their Golden Stout Time - which smelt exactly like Golden Gaytime - but didn't taste really like it at all.  Weird.  

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Had breakfast with the sweetie at 54.

Had a look at a routing alert from last night.  Learnt a bunch of stuff and actually got to see some OSPF which we don't have much of.  Also started thinking about some more cleanup work. 

Managed to get a photo of the eclipse.  Not helped by the iPhone not actually using the lens you tell it to.  I wanted to use the 3x lens, which works until you put something in front of it, and it's like, oh you wanted to do macro did you, and changes the lens.  So retarded.  But fought with it and managed to get a couple of pics.  It certainly wasn't very exciting from Canberra!

Quiet drinks, pizza, and finished season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett.  We didn't see who was in the tank at the end, so asked Siri, Hey Siri, who was in the tank at the end of the Book of Boba Fett?" - and she actually answered correctly!  Pretty incredible really.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Laid out all of Dad's 1969 Grampians and Great Ocean Road photos.  There's two rolls that cover that part of the trip, and you could tell from the processing date printing which were which.  You can mostly see the frame numbers (Dad wrote all over them obscuring parts of them). 

Looking at cleaning stuff.  TV dinners for dinner and Rocky Horror Picture Show (because it's fifty years since the show was first performed on stage).  Also found a bunch of Disney Singalong movies.. that could be a lot of fun hehe.

Next generation of turdburgers that will probably eat the house again over winter

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Continued sorting of the Grampians/Great Ocean Road photos.  I think I managed to get them all into the correct order.  It helped having a bit of local knowledge (from having done the exact same trip ourselves last year).  There's a few slides where the dates are clearly wrong, but not entirely sure what the correct date is.  They could have been taken late on the first day, or early on the second.  Got some house stuff done as well and got some holiday blog entries online.  Gmail is still intermittently blocking my emails.  Went out for lunch, got the loaded fries at Pattysmiths.  Their fries are actually really good, don't even need the bacon and cheese sauce

Then went to the chemist/pet store and did our food shopping and suddenly it's two and a half hours since we left home.  #grunt.  Some getting organised, music and Titanic and suddenly it's 17:00.  Sigh.  Sausages and wombok for dinner.  Then into season 3 of The Mandalorian, and some Death in Paradise.  

Sunday.  Woke up some time before 3 and stayed awake for at least two hours, then restless sleep.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Hurray.  Did mostly house cleaning stuff, bit of Titanic, and lots of blogging.  Also finally fixed my SPF record - you need to put the domain name (kazza.id.au) as the "name".  So dumb.  Also dumb: if you open a html file (that loads in Chrome), or a text file (that loads in notepad) it won't open in the desktop you're in, no no no, it opens in the default deskop, or whichever desktop you were using those apps in last (not sure which).  Windoze is so hopeless.  Is it beer o'clcok yet?

Sunday.  2nd.  Backdating because life got in the way.  

Monday.  Woke up at dentist time, barely got any more sleep.  So it was a zombie day.  Went to a new optometrist at lunch.  The dude is actually the son of the optometrist I saw a couple of times when I first moved to Canberra.  He spent a good while testing my vision and coming up with a prescription, optimised for screen distance.  But parking in Dickson sure sux donkey balls.  $3/hour!  In the suburbs!!  Gross.  After the optometrist it was getting really late and I was starving, so went through maccas drive through, but there I sat.  FOR 16 MINUTES!!  Pretty much just after I got there the line just stopped.  Fricken sigh.  After work I went into town to pick up the sweetie and we had dinner at Kinn Thai which was very nice - first time in over three years - we were last there just before the pandemic hit.  

Chicken Pad See Iw and Chili jam cripsy pork at Kinn Thai

Got a couple of days of geotagging done in the evening, although was a bit dangerous doing it so tired, likely to make mistakes.

Tuesday.  So went to be early (like 20:30), but didn't get to sleep til after 22:30, and then awake from 3:45 for ages.  *sigh*  Cleaning day at work.  Cooked a salmon curry out of last month's Coles magazine which was delicious.

More geotagging in the evening (and morning too).

Wednesday.  Got to sleep ok, but then was awake half the night.  Sigh.  Spent all morning deleting things which is always fun.  And worked with Neil on some rules.  Pizza for dinner.  Fighting with my phone randomly changing time zones is making geotagging painful and is driving me mental.  And windows is dumb too.  Say I have some jpgs on my computer that I've backed up to an external drive.  If I copy those files to the NAS for storage, and then run the backup again from the NAS to the external drive, it'll recopy every single damned vertically rotated file again.  But just the vertical ones.  So fricken retarded.  

At least I can get these whenever I want now!

Although Champion Chicken and Tea is DUMB because they won't sell a single drumstick.  You have to buy two.  They have a single one on the boards for $3, but that's as an addition to a burger.  So I said screw that and went next door to KFC to get a piece of chicken.  Hate.

Thursday.  Crap sleep again.  Sigh.  But did have a somewhat productive day getting things done and having discussions with people about design decisions.  

Friday.  Good Friday.  Well maybe not for Jesus a couple of thousand years ago.  I actually slept reasonably well for a change.  It was cold and wet and miserable and I literally didn't set foot outside the house all day.  The phone changing time zones is making me crazy.  It would often change time zones right after taking a movie file.  And the movie and png files were always correct, it was just the exif data on the photos that would be wrong.  Took All Morning just do do a few things that I had on my todo list.  Then I found the NEXT bug with Apple.  On day 23 of the trip I found the numbers of the files on my computer didn't match up with the numbers on the phones on the phone.

!!!

Apple had literally presented the wrong file names to windows.  In fact 8772 and 8773 were the exact same file.  So all the photos after that, right up til 9999, were a number out (but again, the movs and pngs were fine). 

After lunch I downloaded iMazing, which David has been recommending for ages.  I did some tests with it.  The good news is that the created/modified dates that iMazing shows for files are in fact correct.  It's literally Apple being a dick and presenting the wrong date/times to windows.  Problematic files that wouldn't copy in windows will copy off ok in iMazing.  I did tick "preserve file names" so it wouldn't make up random file names.  The bad news is the times on the files taken in a different time zone didn't transfer as is - they came across with the wrong times on them.  Well that is, the movs and pngs were wrong, photos seemed ok, go figure.  Dunno how that would work during a daylight savings change either.  

In the afternoon there was a big storm so shut everything down and disconnected the computer.  Pulled it all out, cleaned, and reconnected the UPS (the one that died a few years ago, and I tried to buy a new battery for it in February 2022, and it only arrived about a month ago after a lot of back and forth with UPS Solutions (they couldn't get stock from APC)).  Did jigsaw while waiting for storms.  And talked to Mum for a bit.  And more jigsaw.  The poor house battery never got over 25% charged all day.  Leftover chicken and veggies for dinner, Simpsons, Boba Fett, Death in Paradise.  

Oh another thing with iMazing - you can actually see the file system.  And in the photos view, you can see all the files as HEIC.  But every so often I'd see JPGs.  Turns out if you take photos while you are taking a video, they get saved as JPG :)  I couldn't tell in difference in quality between jpgs copied via windows or exported at 95% in iMazing.  Yet iMazing saved files are actually a bit smaller than those saved in windows.  

Saturday.  Awake from ~1:30 til after 5:00.  Then somewhat slept til 8.  Went out for breakfast with the sweetie.  We were going to go to Stella's but it was super crowded and there was a big queue of people and I didn't know if they were queueing for a table or to order food and there were people pushing past in all directions so I noped out of there.  We walked all the way up to 54, but it was closed, so ended up at Cup of Joy.  Which wasn't too bad for a mall cafe. 

We'd put in online orders for the chemist, but they're notorious for just not doing the online orders at all when they're busy, so we went and said, hey we're here.  Hoping to get at least put in the queue (which for the person in front of us they said half an hour).  Then did some food shopping.  We were all set to go for a drive to fill in time, but got our smses about 45 minutes after we went in.  So back to pick up our stuffs.  But it meant we didn't get home til nearly 12.  My entire morning gone :(

I recopied the 1226 misnumbered photos off my phone (this time when I attached it, the phone was presenting the correct numbers).  I finally also got around to CLI-ing exiftool to actually pull out the timezone data from the files, which made it a whole lot easier to tell which ones were wrong, rather than finding which ones were out of order and figuring it out from that.

exiftool.exe -filename -offsettime -T *.jpg > output.txt

Basa bake, potato bake, brussels sprouts for dinner, then watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was super bizarre but also kinda sweet.

Sunday.  He is risen!  Slept ok for a nice change.  Processed all the photos I'd had to recopy - resize, file, fix times, geotag.  And jigsaw.  I wasted a whole heap of time looking at the design of the Epcot ball.  It's based on a pentakis dodecahedron, like I've made here.  If you look at my little model, the Epcot ball is like that, except every one of those 60 triangles is divided into *64* little triangles!!  Actually that makes it a Class II 8 frequency icosahedron.  Like this.  You asked.  And each one of those has a three-triangle pyramid on top of it.  Total on the Epcot ball is 3840 points made up of a total of 11520 triangles.  Well it would be if there weren't supports and doors and crap cut into it.  I pointed exiftool at my iphone "masters" directory.  None of those had random time zone changes.  All perfect.  It was just the holiday photos that were all stuffed up.  Well other than the two photos I took a few days after I got home which were taken in Houston time.  Did some music for first time in a couple of months.  Chicken kiev and veggies for dinner and then watched 127 Hours.

Monday.  Woke up after 1 with hurty and stayed awake til after 4 with added insomnia, and then restless sleep til 7:30.  Bit of house stuff.  Wasted half the morning solving the maze on the finished jigsaw.  More house stuff in the afternoon.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers thinking maybe exercise and sun would help with sleep.  Hmm.  But then it was too late to do photos and blogging before dinner.  Made another yellow curry for dinner, and then some more The Crown.

Monday.  27th.  Backdating because ran out of time last weekend after blogging the previous two weeks.  Belly still hurting.  Managed to get an appointment with the doctor at 14:00.  APNIC training online for most of the day.  Doctor was like, eh, not sure, probably diverticulitis.  Don't have any fibre for a few days.  WTF.  I can't do that.  Especially since we just brought home a fridge full of salad stuff from the club.  

Tuesday.  APNIC training led training for the middle of the day.  It was a bit of a disaster really.  I struggled to keep up with the learning part, and the labs were a disaster, because they wanted forty people in two groups to configure twenty routers per group to all talk to each other with not very clear instructions.  The online learning and labs were much better structured.  Oh well.  John parked on our side again.  All fricken day.  Vodien got back to me about the perl/mysql issue.  They looked at it in https and said the problems I was having was because of mixed content (Movable Type hard codes my image urls as http://kazza.id.au/whatever and it's too hard to change it).  And I'm like, NO, it's a http site and you're not listening to me.  Sigh.  Stu reckons I should change blogging platforms, but my blog is such a behemoth nothing would be easy.  In other news I found if I sit close enough to my monitor I can see it better with my reading glasses.  And my main glasses are losing their coating and look all scratched up, so it's like trying to look through a dirty scratched window.  Sigh.  Had yoghurt for breakfast and a liquid diet all day.  If you google liquid low fibre diet, it's all crap like sugary drinks.  Gross.  Good luck if you're a diabetic.  So milk, oj, solo and some beef bone broth I found, and ended up with furry teeth and need to brush my teeth mid afternoon.  Beer for dinner, along with a bit of white rice and kewpie.  I went back to the beginning of the trip to try and figure out if other days had been affected by the time randomly changing on my phone.  Sure enough, it did.  Sigh.  My thought (at the time) was that maybe the phone was getting mixed up between ship time and gps time and just changing when it felt like it.  I. Hate. Everything.  

Wednesday.  So it's an epic disaster!!  Pialligo Estate has gone broke!!  No more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!  Completely traumatised trying to get a poop sample for the pathologist.  Nearly died.  But then forgot the form for the other tests.  Sigh.  Cleaning day at work.  Pizza for dinner because the sweetie wanted it.  It's low fibre right?  Watched some more of Avatar.  Turns out the Hallelujah Mountains are held in the air and float in the magnetic vortices due to the Meissner Effect.  There's a whole Avatar wiki page about that crap.  It was fun seeing the scene where they were flying around on the Ikran/Banshees because I'd just done that at Disney ;)

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - stressing about All The Things.  Ok day at work.  More cleaning and working with Neil on cleaning policies.  Leftover pizza for dinner and watched episode 3 of Boba Fett.

Friday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  But!  THEY FIXED THE PERL/MYSQL PROBLEM!!  They never told me what was wrong, or what they did to fix it, or even admit that yes, they HAD in fact broken it.  I don't really care because my blog is working again hurray!!!!  Figured out that it's actually the time zone changing on my phone photos.  Most would be (say) GMT-5, but then others would be GMT-4.  If you look at the details of a photo the "top" time would (mostly) be correct.  If you drag it up, down the bottom you see the exif time, which would be wrong.  If you click Adjust, you can see the time zone, although you can't actually change it.  Sigh.  Watched You've Got Mail.  But just generally cranky and stressed about everything.  It's been a thoroughly crap week.  

Saturday.  Woke up early.  Cranky.  Stressing about phone photos.  There's no easy way in windows to see the time zone of the files in explorer.  I do have exif tools that show it, but nothing in a nice list.  I should probably script something to pull it all out with exiftool.  In the end what I did was do a dir /B, put the results in a spreadsheet, then use a simple formula to check if the numbers are out of order.  If the file number of one file is less than the one before it, it's out of order.  The first photo of the trip that was out of order was taken on the deck 9 forward deck.  Just one photo that day.  But more on subsequent days.  I have an exif editor that can do batch fixes.  So I have to pull out the photos that are wrong, run the tool over them to change their time, then use RenameMaster to fix the file naming.  Such a tedious process.  But the first few days that I'd previously geotagged had the old Date Taken hard coded in the files somewhere (in the XMP according to irfanview) and it was still using that, so for those ones I had to use Geosetter itself to adjust the times on the incorrect files before I could re geotag them.  Sigh.  By the time I got back to doing St Thomas on day 10 again (where I'd first discovered the problem and had already made some changes) it was a painstaking process to find the ones out of order, moving them out, fixing them up, and regeotagging.  So I spent all morning just fighting with iPhone photos.  Hate.  Apple is such a POS.  House stuff in the afternoon, and had sausages and salad for dinner (first real fibre all week and it was lovely).

Watched Simpsons (finished season 33) and Death In Paradise 4.3  Tried to watch Avatar on our tv, but Disney forced me to upgrade the app, but it wasn't quite at the right place and neither Stu nor me could find how to do any sort of seek other than in ten second increments.  Hate.  So gave up and watched it on my computer.  Not that I watched very much, then had an early night.

Sunday.  Woke up at ~4am.  Sigh.  (5am old time).  Had breakfast with the sweetie at U&Co which was nice.

Did a small food shop, then home to slog my way through the todo list.  No time for fun.  And too stressed about All The Things to feel like starting the next section of the Titanic.  But I did start a jigsaw.  Even though I don't have time for fun.  Roast chicken for dinner.

Monday.  20th.  Backdated cause of blog sadness.  Woke up at 4:19 on account of going to bed at 20:30.  Sigh.  But I'm only going to bed so early because I can't SEEEE anything on my computer in the evenings.  Had a look at the errors on my blog with Perl and MySQL.  Even my addressbook is broken with a similar perl->mysql error.  I'm just hoping that someone else running Perl/MySQL complains about it.  For now, we wait.  

Tuesday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  I started geotagging my holiday photos.  Also did some APNIC training on routing.  It takes ages when you stop to take notes, check mail queues, have to talk to people etc.  More geotagging after work.  Just before bed I was doing day 10 iPhone photos in St Thomas, and realised the phone had been an hour out in the morning, and had changed time half way up the cable car we did in the morning.  So I'll need to go fix the exif times and file names for them.

How good are these?  Mini toasts with cream cheese or blue cheese, quince paste, slow roasted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, salami and strawberries.  Doesn't take long to make and super tasty.

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Fixed up the St Thomas morning photos, only to find it's jumped back an hour part way through the day.  FFS Apple make up your mind.  Good thing I have the Canon to note what time we were *actually* in places.  #grunt.  Before we arrived it was an hour early.  It changed half way up the cable car.  Then later in the day it changed back again, and later again it went forward again.  Sigh.  And my eyes got tired very early today which didn't help.  It was raining after work so no weeding.  I can't SEEEE at night, so can't do any photo work because I need to stare at file names and figure out what's going on with them.  What else is there to do in the evenings if I can't work on my computer?  Drink and watch crap on the internet??  Sigh.  Started watching Avatar.  I first/last saw this at the movies in 3D and totally hated the 3D experience.  It's like watching a movie with sunglasses on.  So started watching it again since had just been doing a bunch of Pandora experiences at Disney recently.

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  OMFG epic storm!!!  Lightning everywhere and it was so dark at 9am lights were turning on outside (I shoulda taken a photo!!)

Did some training, some Neil, quiet drinks, pizza, episode 2 of Boba Fett (really need to rewatch the first episode though, because I was so jetlag tired I can't remember much of it).

Friday.  Did one of the APNIC training labs.  Took a few hours oof!  Some tickets, documenting servers etc.  Pork and salad for dinner.  Then watched Glass Onion which was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  Got ready, cleaned the kitchen then went out to the club for a working bee.  With sore bowels hmm.  Not many people came and it was threatening to rain.  John gave us the job of cleaning the office.  He'd replaced all the insulation and so there was bits of the old stuff *everywhere*.  So we pulled everything out, Stu cleaned every surface, then I put everything back all neat and tidy, and threw a bunch of stuff out as well.  I should have taken a before photo, because the place was such a mess (not just with insulation but from several years of people dumping crap in there).  The after looks pretty impressive though!  It won't last though!!

The social was Mardi Gras themed, and someone said a rainbow vomited in the shed..

Dinner was build your own burgers.  

Noticed during cleanup that someone had left the small oven on.  hrmm.  After dinner was lots of fun music and karaoke, but I was finding it too loud so went to Ian's for whiskey.  Bit of a late night but not too bad.

Sunday.  Belly still hurting.  hmm.  I wanted to be gone by 8, but by the time I'd gone and spent over an hour cleaning up the shed (and noticing someone had also left the big oven on all night *sigh*) it was nearly 11:00 by the time we got home.  I brought home a tonne of food (mostly the salad stuff).  Since my blog was still broken, I decided to email Vodien support.  They basically tried to fob it off "did you get an email about any changes?" "no, and I never have in the past either but it seems unlikely that you *never* patch your systems".  Gave them some evidence of things changing on their end and all the errors I could find.  I did catch up on writing up the rest of my holiday blog entries, even though I can't post them yet.  Started a jigsaw too because too stressed to enjoy doing more of the Titanic.  And my belly hurts.  Chicken kiev for dinner and The Crown.

Friday night we met up with EffanC for dinner at Hachiko.  I just said "bring food and I'll eat it" so it was decided to go for the $60pp banquet.  A little pricy but very nice!  Spelling mistakes are theirs, I've literally copied the menu ;)

Pacific Oyster - Pickled water chestnut, serve with lime

Duck Breast Taco - Sous vide duck breast, jalapeno slice, pickled onion, chilli hoisin sauce

Chicken Gyoza - Citrus ponzu, kale

Tempura Platter - Seasonal vegetable, prawn, oyster tempura, server with 3 dippings: nori salt, coriander ponzu, shichimi pepper

Double-Cooked Pork Rib - Slow cooked pork ribs with salad, grilled with garlic soy glaze, serve with dipping of citrus miso, chili, onion relish

Australian Wagyu 6+ Striploin - Serving with 3 dippings: Japanese chimichurri, wasabi, nori salt, serve with saute potat

Ice-cream of your choice (Hoji, Sakura, Matcha, Black Sesame)

Wednesday.  8th.  Arrived home mid morning.  Had a shower and put on a load of washing.  Then spent ages unpacking and putting everything away.  Then I went into battle to get my photos downloaded.  The SD cards are easy enough, they "just work", well, when windows recognises them after inserting/reinserting several times before it'll read the cards.  The iPhone on this computer does seem to be at least presenting all my files (when I was away, I was finding that the phone simply wasn't even presenting all the files to windoze so I couldn't actually even back everything up properly.  Very frustrating).  At least they seem to work on my home computer.  Well, except for the odd jpg and mov file that refuse to copy - they copy with 0 bytes for jpgs, or simply unreadable for the movs.  At least I got most stuff off.  Managed to stay awake all day which was actually pretty impressive.  Washed my hair before dinner because I didn't think I'd feel like it after.  The sweetie got Chong Co for dinner which was nice.  Then I went to bed.

Thursday.  Slept from about 20:20 to 5:12.  Got up and backed up files to memory sticks.  Also got the last of the GPS tracks off.  Had breakfast with the sweetie at 54 Benjamin which was nice.  Had a good chat about a few things.  Had to be Neil at work, as well catching up on the over 500 emails I got while I was away.  Sausage sizzle at drinks so didn't need dinner, so the sweetie made himself a pizza.  Another early night.

Breakfast Roll at 54 Benjamin

Friday.  Went to bed at 19:30 and slept til a bit after 3.  Tried to get more sleep for another hour but gave up and got up after 4 to continue backing things up and catch up on RSS feeds.  Continued being Neil and catching up on emails at work.  In the afternoon a big disk array had a sad which took a bunch of stuff offline which kinda wrote off my afternoon.  And I couldn't see either so that wasn't much fun.  Called it at 16:15.  Tried to do some weeding but it was too hot.  Went through holiday receipts to start sorting out our holiday expenses and what David and I owe each other.  Chicken kiev for dinner.  We started watching the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett but I was struggling to stay awake because i was so tired.

Caught this super cute little gecko hiding under our recycling bin

Saturday.  Went to bed early again, but this time woke up around 1am and never really got back to sleep.  Sigh.  Used the fact I was awake to go see the balloons.  Except by 6:50 there were still no balloons aloft, which wasn't a good sign.  Sure enough, they weren't flying because the wind was blowing towards the airport.  Oh well.  So went and said hi to Neil.  Also stopped at the arboretum to see the commercial balloons that were out there.  Then home to do All The Things.  Did some washing and got the problematic jpgs and movs off my phone.  Also fixed the timestamps on all the movs and pngs because Apple messes with them.  Had lunch at Pattysmiths with the sweetie then did our food shopping.  Unboxed the Titanic and made a start on it.  Had Asian style salad for dinner, since we'd had such a big late lunch.  After whatever the last patching did, Notepad in windows is now tabbed.  But.  If you have multiple Notepad windows open, windows doesn't actually tell you the name of the file, they're all just labelled "Notepad".  Far out I hate windows.  Turns out this new "feature" is in fact a bug.  Sigh.

Crispy bbq chicken burger at Pattysmiths

Sunday.  Went to bed at like 7:50 and slept til after 5 hurray!  Still awake early enough to go do balloons take two.  It was quite breezy so I was surprised they took off at all.  And it was quite cloudy so not great for photos, but did get the sun a couple of times here and there so got a few nice shots.  Worked on photo renaming and filing (and fixing exif time data on photos where the time zone hadn't been set right).  Also did a bit of weeding.  Stu cooked a Japanese curry for dinner which was quite nice.  Then watched When Harry Met Sally. 

I decided to use the tin of blueberries in the pantry before they were like ten years out of date.  This tin was only six months past its best before..

Stu made Japanese curry for dinner

Monday.  Slept from about 21:30 til around 5:44 which was nice.  Had another day of doing All The Things.  Lots of house/fish stuff, photo processing, cooking, and a couple of sections of Titanic.  Such a busy day and nowhere near done on my todo list.  I don't have time to go to work there's just too much to DOOOOOO!!!  Super frustrating.  

Sunday.  Our basa bake dinner (with sweet potato and beetroot for another night)

The Crown in the evening.

Monday.  Blerf meeting all morning.  Electricians finally came to replace the inverter.  My eyes got tired mid afternoon.  It was a dark and rainy day, but the solar system does appear to be working.  The battery got up to 84% in the afternoon without any direct sunlight.  Frustrating evening because I was blind and headachey from not being able to see all afternoon.  

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep then woke up around 5.  Sigh.  The battery went completely flat overnight.  It's not supposed to do that, it's mean to sit at like 10%.  So I got super stressed and grumpy.  Then I couldn't get Redactle out because it wouldn't accept "Earth's" even though I'd put that in and it had matched two other incidences, but not the one in the title.  Clear the cache they said.  It'll fix it they said.  Yeah right.  I lost my entire browsing setup.  Which means all my streaks and stats for all my online games are gone.  The waffle one upset me the most.  And I can't see.  I had a full on meltdown because it was all too hard.  And I haven't played any of those games since.  Meh day.  Stu did get Solar Edge to change the battery settings to not go flat.  We're meant to be able to do that oruselves, but as with everything else by Solar Edge it hasn't worked properly.  Had a drink and watched Star Trek IV in the evening because my eyes were too tired to concentrate on anything that required seeing anything on my computer.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  Was having a nice quiet morning then All The Things demanded attention at once.  Made a nice salad for dinner.  The sweet potato and beetroot I cooked the other night, with goats cheese, toasted pine nuts and bacon, with an honey, oil and lemon juice dressing.  Annoyingly the bag of rocket I was going to use (that expired today) had gone all manky.  So this salad really wasn't the same.  It really needed the lettuce to lighten it up.  It was still quite nice though.  We won't talk about the heart attack I had on Friday when my poo was a burgundy chocolate colour!

Thursday.  Did a bunch of planning for a big project at work.  Did up all the doco and passed it onto the others to do when I'm on leave.  Also looked at what logs we might be able to trim down to save space.  Then had to be Neil all afternoon while he had bits removed.  Made pizzas for dinner.  Talked to Kit and Pete for a while in the evening (still too hard to do holiday planning in the evening because I can't SEEEE).

Friday.  Woke up at like ~3am til like ~5am.  Sigh.  Did a bunch of holiday planning before work while I could still see.  Had to be Neil again, and did some cleaning.  I had a good eye day, and I could still see in the afternoon so did some holiday planning after work.  I also went into battle with Optus.  Last year when they put my number on a different plan, they set it up in a new account.  But left the shared data plan number behind.  Shared with nothing.  I'd forgotten to stop the automatic payments on this account, so it was in credit.  But the credit was not being used on the new account.  Dumb dumb dumb Optus.  So needed to get the credit transferred to the account which is actually costing money (the shared data plan is "free".. go figure).  And figure out how to access both accounts.  Because I can only access the old one on the website, not the new one.  Turns out I can manage both of them from the app.  So lame though.  Made some creamy mushroom and bacon fettucini for dinner.  Bad for the sweetie but he'd had a crap couple of days and needed the comfort food.  Watched Star Trek VI together in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at like 4:30 and never got back to sleep.  Super busy day doing All The Things - house stuff and holiday prep.  Overdid it on the computer though and ended up with tired eyes.  Cooked butt beef cheeks for dinner and watched second episodes of Spy Among Friends and Death in Paradise.

Sunday.  Today.  Woke up at 4:30 and didn't get back to sleep again.  Another super busy day doing All The Things.  We I even cut the ivy back from the ensuite window..

Really need a longer ladder though.  The sparkies had one that went right to the top of the tip of the roof.  

Both days this weekend the Solar Edge inverter has lost contact with the server, so we haven't been able to see the stats in the app (or website).  We have to go flip the switch on it to reset to reconnect.  Solar Edge is CRAP!!  The other annoyance is when it was sort of working briefly last year the panels were doing over 11kw.  But I haven't seen them get much over 9 since they got it working again.  I don't know if that's just because the angle of the sun is different or what.  We'll have to wait til December to find out I guess.  We had an inspector come Wednesday morning and they found the sparkie hadn't done a couple of minor things.  So they were back again Friday to finish up.  I asked him why, once the battery is charged and we're maxing out the 5kw back to the grid, does it say we're consuming ~3kw, when we're *actually* only consuming about 1kw.  He had no idea.  He said he'd find out and get back to us.  He hasn't.  #grunt.

Oh, and the neighbour parked on our side yesterday morning while he was shovelling gravel from his trailer.  And hasn't moved his damned car back since.  At what point do I pile a whole bunch of crap behind his car in protest??

Went on strike this afternoon because I'm sick of everything, so the sweetie is getting Chong Co for dinner.

Sunday.  22nd.  Here's the turkey roast from last week.

Monday.  23rd.  Took forever to get to sleep then awake at 4 for an hour with hurty.  And it was so cold in the house I put a jumper on!  Super tired all day.  Picked something new to clean and worked on that at work.  Made up some tomatoey mince and salad for dinner and blogged last week.

Tuesday.  Took quite a while to get to sleep but then mostly slept ok.  More cleaning.  Music after work and leftover turkey for dinner.  I setup a simlink to fool iTunes into backing up my phone to my D: drive, and backed up the new phone (and moved the backup of the old phone across too).

Wednesday.  Cleaning.  Also figured out how to replace a certificate on one of our appliances, and updated doco for it.  Watched Onward in the evening which was sweet and magical, enjoyed it.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Did a bit of house stuff in the morning.  Did some organising of crap the rest of the day.  Realised, due to covid, I don't even have a complete set of circulation coins from 2019-2022, cause I just don't spend cash anymore.

There may have been a lamb roast for dinner.  Not Un-Australian.  Although if it were we could live in a land of lamb forever!  haha.

Friday.  Spent like All. Day. going through finances - downloading statements and sorting tax and crap.  Watched the first episode of season 3 of The Crown.

Saturday.  Checking receipts off against credit card statements.  Which took like All. Day.  Had to fight with booking.com and paypal.com and tripadvisor/viator dumbness.  Terrible web interfaces and they make it so damned difficult to find details on transations.  Paypal by default only shows you 90 days of past transactions.  To see more you have to click on the Date button (it's not obvious you even can) to choose dates.  Wtih Tripadvisor I booked three tours in Rome.  One on paypal and the other two just credit card direct.  Well at least the paypal one sent me their own email which had a reference number I could cross reference.  But the ones on credit card had literally nothing.  No email confirmations.  No invoices of any sort.  So I have two entries on my credit card, both for the same amount, but no idea which one is which.  Why is that a problem, since they're the same value?  BECAUSE THEY WERE DIFFERENT PRICES ON THEIR WEBSITE!!.  They've totally ripped me off for one of the tours.  I WOULD NEVER BOOK ANYTHING THROUGH TRIPADVISOR AGAIN!!!   It didn't help that I was having a bad eye day too.  Screen was out of focus all day.  I couldn't even do music for very long because I kept missing notes because I couldn't see where they were.  

For dinner we had a Luv-a-Duck Peking Duck kit.  omfg it was epic amazing!  I scoffed half of them (sorry sweetie! haha).

In the evening we started on season 4 of Death in Paradise.  We had stop watching this series a few years ago when the buttplugs at Netflix pulled it.  So we're watching it on Prime now instead.  Then watched the first episode of A Spy Among Friends.  Which was funny after seeing another of the Cambridge Four (Five) in The Crown the other night.  Maybe that was Stu's inspiration for watching this series.  

Sunday.  Pretty much the whole day consolidating receipts for our holiday last year.  Today's drama was with booking.com.  There were five hotels that didn't charge me directly, but charged through booking.com.  But booking.com only emailed me about one of them when they were about to take the money off the credit card.  The other four were a mystery.  And there's nowhere on their site that gives you invoices or anything actually useful.  You have the "estimate" in the booking, but that's not exact.  Two of the hotels actually gave me printed invoices, but they didn't line up with what I was charged either.  So I basically had to guess which one was which based on the prior guesstimate.  Fricken hopeless.  I also strained a muscle in my back helping the sweetie move the bed to vacuum behind it.  I don't think seriously, but I think it's going to hurt tomorrow.  I washed towels today and hung them out under cover.  But with rain on and off all day and Oh The Humidity they didn't dry.  And we got a whole bag full of new guppies!!  Music then cooked all the food for dinner.

So really a blerf longgg weekend dealing with finance crap.  I really need to be better organised and do it a bit more piecemeal so it doesn't take up an entire long weekend to catch up.  Sigh.

Sunday.  8th.  Backdated.  Had pork and turkey fried in pork jelly with salad for dinner.  Then The Simpsons and The Crown.

I actually forgot to get these shapes out for Christmas.  This to me is the flavour of Christmas - Savoury Shapes with french onion dip.  Yum yum yum!

Compare the pair!  No forced perspective here - these are side by side!

Monday.  Got the house down to 16C with just the fan running overnight.  The blog publish was still going.  Did half an hour of weeding before work.  That makes it beer o'clock right??  Oh, did I mention I cleaned out the Dyson?  Pulled it apart and cleaned everything I could.  And it worked again!  Hurray!!  Cleaning at work.  Basa bake for dinner.  Then started watching A Christmas Karen.  This came on after the carols on Christmas Eve but it was way too late to start watching it then.  

Tuesday.  More weeding in the morning (pruning out the front).  Went back to my work on certificate management.  There was an email from Digicert the other day that said something like 80% of companies have had outages because of expired certificates.  And I'm like.. pfft.. more like 100%.  If 80% were true it'd mean the other 20% don't use certificates for anything.  Anyways, I'm working on not letting it happen to our team.  Sure we have tools, but they don't cover everything so it's good for a human to just keep an eye on things.  I made a tuna casserole for dinner using up stuff in the pantry and freezer that needed using up.  I'll post that separately I think.  We also started a new anime series - Bocchi the Rock.  And then I finished A Christmas Karen.  Which I actually thought was rather sweet.  As well as filing of photos.  Also, the blog publish finished.  This is why I hate doing any sort of design changes that require republishes of the whole site.

Wednesday.  Mostly finished my certificate management stuff.  Music after work.  Dug out some leftover chicken out of the freezer for dinner.  Also the ftp backup I did of the snapshot of my blog finished (that took multiple goes as well cause the ftp client would grind to a halt).  

Thursday.  Working through the test plan for the weekend's work.  Went looking for a drink after work with Dave 5 and Neil, but the Pot Belly was closed so we went to the Bavarian.  Because it was closest.  Because it was HOT.  Bavarian wasn't too bad.  I'd never actually been in before.  Had a couple of German beers which was nice.  Into season 32 of The Simpsons.

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am and couldn't get back to sleep until like 4:30 then kept waking up.  Sigh.  Which was a bit of a shame because I had an RDO.  Went and did a bottle and cardboard recycling run first thing.  Then dropped into Bing Lee to ask about the oven (whenever you turn the dial past a setting that has the top element, even when it's cold and there's no power otherwise, it trips the entire circuit).  They reckon there's only a two year warranty.  The thing is nearly three years old.  Epic #grunt.  Spent the entire rest of the day pulling out all the fish tank stuff downstairs, sorting it all out, pulling out stuff to give away or throw out, and putting it all back together again.  The corner looks pretty good now, but I didn't do some of the work I really wanted to do, and ended up hot and sweaty.  More leftover chicken for dinner, then watched The Social Network, which I hadn't seen since i saw it on a plane somewhere.

Before I stated

Everything spread out for sorting

Part way through

Finished!  

The pile of stuff to give/throw away

Saturday.  Loaded Echofon and got a popup saying I needed to authenticate with Twitter.  But that brought up an error page.  hmmmm.  Went into work to do some firewall upgrades.  Went fairly smoothly but took all morning.  Pattysmiths again for lunch.  Then spent most of the afternoon looking at all the shore excursions for my cruise.  And only looked at three ports.  Sigh.  Lamb for dinner then more of Origins of Us - on Guts.  Only they didn't mention what I thought they would - that our guts are shorter than a lot of animals because we cook our food.  And started on Brains as well.

I had the Crispy Chicken burger at Pattysmiths this time which was quite nice

Stu might have also bought himself a new toy!  Just so long as he lets me play it too haha

This is three seconds hand held on the phone.  I really need to try and find a tripod mount and test it out properly

Sunday.  Spent most of the morning looking at shore excursions.  Then we did our food shopping.  Then some music.  Then All The Cooking.  And suddenly the weekend is over.  Sigh.

For dinner I cooked roast chicken.  Except as an experiment I decided to cook it "upside down".  That, is, with the breast down and the back up.  I really don't know why this way isn't the preferred way to roast chickens.  This way all the little fatty bits on the back render down, while the breast stays moist at the bottom.  I reckon it turned out better than the traditional way.  Although it does look rather disturbing in photos.

Monday.  12th.  Backdating.  No notes other than "blogged".

Tuesday.  Super crazy busy day all day.  Went with the hills to another Surprising Science talk.  The first talk was by Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths about uses of colour in nature, not just for visible light but also near infra-red, and how that might have applications in heating and cooling control.  The second one was by Professor Drew Evans and was a lot more physics-based, looking at invisibility, and he did mention about how most butterfly wings that look blue aren't actually blue from chemistry but physics.  

Wednesday.  Had a go at picking up some work I started before my last holiday (that I had to stop looking at cause the proxies blew up).  Went into town and had dinner at Chez Kimchi.  They've simplified their menu which is *much* nicer.  Then went to Coles to do some Christmas shopping.

Thursday.  Work.  Christmas party planning.  Posted a package to Potty.  $16 for regular, $20 for express.  They said regular *might* get there by Christmas.  hrmm.  Last drinks of the year.  Cheese kransky and salad for dinner.  Then it was getting ready for the Christmas party and cleaning the house.  Into season 31 of The Simpsons.

Our non-functioning solar setup.

Is Don!  Is good!  I miss those things, we used to have them all the time when I first came to Canberra.

Friday.  My Christmas party!!  Had about forty people come.  Once again I overspent on booze, although did bring home quite a lot of leftovers so hoping it'll even out.  It was slightly windy but otherwise it was a very pleasant afternoon.  That was my tenth year running it!!  Didn't catch any ducks, but did catch a honeyeater in flight, so to speak.

Went and picked up Mum from Jolimont.  Had toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner then pretty much just collapsed.

Saturday.  Proxy upgrade first thing.  Still haven't fixed any of their bugs.  Lame.  Had a look at Mum's last two holiday slideshows which was nice.  Then headed down to the Burns Club (had to join #grunt) for Kellie's family Christmas lunch.  They did a Kris Kringle thing where the budget was 5c to $30 .. and I was like.. um what?  Weird.  Stu ended up getting some cash and I got a bottle of Apple Pie Baileys yummm :)  And I ate too much.  All. The. Food.  !!

This time like three.. whoops..

Came home and collapsed in a heap from too much food and too much people.  David/Kellie/Hayley dropped in on their way back to Junee after they'd been to Ikea.  Had a super healthy dinner, then an early night.

Sunday.  Decided to drop in unannounced to see Chrissie.  I haven't seen her since before Covid!!!  It's been a running joke over the last three years that whenever I messaged them to see about catching up one of them would be sick.  And sure enough, Chris was sick this time.  So we all wore masks.  And had a nice long chat.  Dropped off Mum at Jolimont then headed home.  Stressed about people drama.  Stressed about the solar system not working properly and noone responding to our emails/smses.  #grunt.  But forgot about all that for a while and went to Herberts with Frank and Karen and Tony which was nice.  

Watched the third episode of Picard in the evening.