Saw this super cool light wall in the Canberra Centre the other week.  It's interactive - you can press the lights and they change colours and turn on/off.  I totally want one.

Also saw this and thought it was pretty cool.  Is there anything more you need in life?

Towards the end of the first tour in Germany, I was eyeing off the tour guide's book that he was reading - Raise the Titanic!  This guy reads through books every couple of days on tour, and was happy to give me not only that book, but also the next book he finished - Gray Mountain.  So those books kept me going til the end of the Scandanvia trip (I read a lot less on those because SCENERY!).

I was actually reading Raise the Titanic! on the ferry between Stockholm and Helsinki.  Another surreal book reading experience right there. I mostly enjoyed the book, except for the several-page long tidy up of answering all the questions of everything that happened at the climax - much like in the Harry Potter books.  Quite a few "yeah right" moments along the way too - like they seriously thought they could not only seal up *all* the holes - that includes all of the top decks which were never meant to be sealed - but not have it all implode from the water pressure at that depth??  hrmmmmm.  Still, it was an enjoyable enough read.

The other was John Grisham's Gray Mountain.  Somewhat depressing knowing all that stuff is going on in real life.  And like real life, the story really doesn't end.  It would have been nice to have some sort of epilogue to find how how some of the bigger stories ended for the characters, if not for the real life situation.. but I suppose that's life ..

I think it was Thursday night that we watched Star Trek Generations.  I can't actually remember.  Could have even been Wednesday.  Or even Friday.  No don't think it was Friday.

Friday morning I woke up at 3am and never got back to sleep.  Damned insomnia.  Annoying too because I had a *lot* of work to do on Friday.  Didn't really get it all done either.  Had lunch with Doc and Neil at Chatterbox though because I had a voucher I won last year.  On Friday evening the little brother and Kat came to stay.  We worked on a jigsaw and I had an early night.

Saturday I was at work all morning replacing firewalls.  It actually all went fairly smoothly.

In the afternoon I was all set to settle down and *get things done* when EffanC called us up and invited us over.  Which was lovely.  But it did mean I was out all afternoon.

Went home before dinner.  Had pizza for dinner.  Watched Footloose on tv (because I'd never actually seen it!)

Sunday morning was the Airport Open Day.  Spent all morning there.

In the afternoon Dave and Kat left, replaced by Graham and Pam.  We chatted for the afternoon (Pam has grand plans for our garden.  I'd rather not have a garden at all).  Then because we hadn't had any time to ourselves all weekend, and therefore no time to do any shopping, we went out to Dumpling Inn for dinner.  

Today I just felt like I needed a weekend to recover from my weekend.  At least Stu got a bit of down time.  

Today started off ok at work.  No dramas from the firewalls.  Just the proxies.  *sigh*  Got quite depressed about the whole thing actually.

Came home exhausted, hungry, tired and grumpy.  Had dinner, then helped move Kit's lizard (and associated large tank) down to Chris's.  Then just trying to catch up on life.  Have now finished geotagging all my Canon and iPhone photos from the last trip.

I'm tired.

I hate Logitech's Harmony remote control software.  

Twice in the past I've had to reprogramme the Harmony One remote we have.  Yesterday I had to fight with it again for the new TV.  It's an awful clunky piece of software (admittedly better than it used to be).  You need to have an online account with them which stores your remote info (why they can't store it locally I have no idea).  They've changed the software in the past few years which means old accounts aren't compatible with new ones.  And the software has changed completely and they say if you had previously programmed it with the old version you should keep using the old version.  After I'd already donwloaded and installed the new version.  

So after digging up my account details, I finally managed to get onto their site and load all the remote info in the correct version of the software.

Only to find that they don't have remote info for our tv.

Tried using something it thought was compatible, but after reprogramming everything to use it, I tested it out and nothing worked.

What a piece of crap.

Then I thought I'd bricked the thing because it kept popping up the software when I wasn't touching it and then went completely dead, but I think I'd just managed to flatten the battery on it because it had been on for so long attached to the computer.

So next up I'll have to see if I can manually teach this peice of crap software to learn the most important buttons on the tv remote.

Sigh.

I don't need this crappy drama in my life.

Wednesday Kit came over briefly after work for a bit of a cool off (not that she actually went *in* the pool - just her feet!).

Thursday the little brother and Kat came up with the tv and stayed.  Kit and Ben came up as well.  Stu was a little anxious about *stuff*, Kit had decided to quit her job, and all the extra people in the house made for a very strange night.

Friday the sweetie and I had a random day off.  Stu went to the doctor, then we had brunch in town.  Came home and started pulling out stuff to give away and throw out.  Took a whole heap of fluoro lights and old magazines to Revolve and had a walk through the Big Green Shed which was fun.  Also took several boxes of books to Lifeline.  But didn't get too much else done.  Watched Back to the Future II in the evening.

This morning went along to the Mint Open Day.  I'll leave that for a separate post, but their event management and crowd control was just plain awful.

Friday night we took Chrissie out for her birthday - she now joins me in knowing the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  We went to the Dumpling Inn and had some of our favourites (shredded beef peking style and three cup wine chicken) and some dumplings (still can't compete with Din Tai Fung).  Went back to her place afterwards and Kit came down as well.

Lacked motivation this weekend.  Had a big todo list, but barely any of it got done.

I did manage to clean the kitchen and the spare room.  And did some washing.

Other than that, about ten hours on the jigsaw.  And all I've got to show for it is some sorting (about three hours), the edge, and a tiny bit of the jigsaw proper.

Well, also went for a longish (well it took ages, but that was cause of the kid and the dogs being special, it was actually only 4.85km) walk with Chris.  And the sweetie cooked dinner and did *heaps* of work in the garden.

I was having trouble deciding what to blog first tonight.

If I'd blogged last night it would have been about my trip to Sydney to see mum and her brothers and two Lego shows.

There would have been mention that we went to Aunty Di's on Friday night and remembered the January 1994 bushfires of January 8, those twenty two years ago that day.

If I'd been home to blog on January 8 I certainly would have mentioned my thirteenth blogiversary (my little blog is a teenager!).

And as part of that I would have said happy birthday to David Bowie.

He was in my thoughts three days ago.

And sadly, he was in them again today.

For once I didn't hear it first from the internet.  As in 1997, when I heard about Princess Diana, it was my little brother that told me.

Rest in peace David Bowie.  You were one of the greatest loves of my life.

All up a pretty decent year.  Nothing too life shattering.  Quite busy as always.

We didn't manage to get overseas this year.  Stu's work was being a bit special and didn't want to give him one of the weeks off in November.  We could have pushed a trip back a week, but then would have started missing Christmas parties, so we decided to postpone.  The only flying holiday we did was to Queensland to visit Chay and David which was a lovely relaxing long weekend as always.  We did get down the coast a couple of times.  Firstly in March, where we also went down to Bermagui, and over the June long weekend as well.  I only went to Sydney once this year - in May to inspect my flat, go to a body corporate meeting, and stay with mum.  We also did a weekend in Junee to visit the little brother.  And did a two night trip to the snow in September, after a failed proxy upgrade, and I was so flustered I forgot the charging cable for the GPS, *and* couldn't find the android.

At work I started the year busy but "comfortable" - in that I knew what I was doing most of the time.  We changed proxy vendors in May - and traded one set of problems for another.  At least the performance of the new ones is generally a lot better (I was still sad when we finally turned the old ones off for good).  At the end of June our team was restructured out of existence, and I lost most of the work I'd been doing to another team (I could have gone with the work to the new team, but decided I'd rather pick up new work with a more local team). Neil was away for the first month after the restructure, which mean I was literally the only person doing half the work of our old team.  So that was a super stressful month.  Then I moved desks away from Neil which made me feel even more isolated.  I spent several months in the new team really having no idea what I was doing.  But towards the end of the year I've been fairly well immersed in some new firewalls and am starting to get the hang of them.  Just before Christmas I organised a BBQ for fifty people which was pretty cool.

Healthwise I've been ok, but starting to notice the whole getting old thing.  It seemed I blogged quite a lot about insomnia.  Not able to get to sleep for no good reason, or waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.  I had a one-day cold in April, and a one-month cold in October.  I was at home for a full week in October, and was coughing for another three weeks after that :(  I started monitoring my blood pressure again, and noticed it was high *all the time*.  I tried a low-salt diet for a time, and it did come down, but it was pretty much impossible to maintain.  Go out for dinner?  High sodium.  Go out for lunch?  High sodium.  Pretty much anything in a jar or can?  High sodium.  Cheese?  High sodium.  I started taking my lunches into work several days a week which helped for lunches.  And was a bit more careful about dinners too, as well as buying low-sodium breakfast cereals.  But I was getting sick of the same boring stuff all the time, and let's face it, I can't live in a world without cheese, so I went on medication.  Still working on a dosage that will suit, although what I'm on now I think is causing some skin issues, so will see the doctor again in the new year to see if it's related, and maybe try a different medication.  I also realised in March that my bottom two wisdom teeth have finally fully erupted.  And my eyesight is getting worse.  Next year will definitely be an eye/teeth/skin/blood pressure sorting kind of a year.

We spent a lot of time with our "whisky" friends earlier in the year - dinners and movies etc - but less later in the year.  We only saw Nat and Andrew once this year in January which is a bit sad-making.  We had games nights at Mishi's in March, June and November, with a special party for her in December.  Met up with @phonakins when she was in town for Eat, Drink, Blog, and @Chrispycon and Anne when they were back from Hong Kong briefly.  Doc came over in September for some MarioKart and Singstar, but the TV died in the middle of a race, and we still haven't gotten it fixed because we're slackers.  Had dinner at the Dumpling Inn with Damien and Amanda in September.  Various people came to stay including Jo and Marc, the little brother several times, Chrissie a few times, and Mum in January and December.  Chris applied for a job and had moved to Canberra (in stumbling distance of us) within the space of a month, so that's pretty cool.  We've spent quite a bit of time with Kit and Ben over the year too which is fun.  It's nice having cool neighbours.  And finally we've still been enjoying our visits to "the club"  and going to the social occasions.  The pool exploded there earlier in the year, and we helped build the new one.  We also provided a Christmas in July feast there, and did pork again for the proper Christmas party.  Any excuse for me to do a big roast pork with crackling ;)

In the fishy world, I've been making better attempts to maintain the health of the fish and the fish tanks, although not until a bunch of disasters (and still had disasters after).  The original AR-620T had some small angels in it, but they had died over summer.  The last one had been in there a couple of days, and we only pulled it out just before putting in the last remaining duboisi and sucking catfish in there.  They died within two days which upset me rather a lot.  Tank of Death living up to its name :(  So the big four foot remained empty for a while.  My AR-620T also remained empty for a while.  I gave it a good cleaning out, and left it running with just plants for a couple of months to try and stabilise it.  Eventually I got five danios for it, which have survived, and later four baby angels which are also still alive.  That tank is actually looking really good at the moment, and I'm keeping up the regular water changes in it (it helps that with all the heat the potplants need a lot of water, so fish tank water goes onto the plants).  Stu gave his four foot a cleaning out and later in the year, and has set it up with really bright lights, and a soil-based substrate to make a planted tank.  He has some native fish in there too and it's looking pretty good.  The two foot tank has massive issues with this black slime algae, and I think it's pretty toxic.  The two nine-year-old black neon tetras and five rummy-nose tetras are still going ok in there.  I had five new danios in there which I've since taken downstairs to avoid the worst of the heat.  And then I bought five cories for that tank, hoping that maybe they'd eat some of the algae.  They started dying off pretty much straight away. :(  I moved the last two into the angel tank.  One continued to deteriorate and die, but the other one recovered and is still going strong in there.  The light in the two foot also just died the other day, so I'm going to completely clean that tank out and start again.  Downstairs the ten-year-old krib is still going, but she's looking pretty old.  I put five danios from upstairs in with her for the summer.  When Chris came down from Sydney she had nowhere to put all her platies, so I filled a spare tank for them.  I put four of them, and the big sucking catfish, in with the krib and the danios and the rest are still in a small tank awaiting their new home to be ready.  Stu also has two small tanks on his desk.  One has two endler guppies and a cherry shrimp, and the other has four teeny shrimp he just got the other day.  So currently seven tanks with animals in them at the moment!

I got two Lego sets this year - both from the Lego Movie.  I got the Double Decker Couch and SPACESHIP!!  I also made mosaics of the Ingress Enlightened logo in two different sizes (32x32 and 48x48)

I continue to do jigsaws.  I seem to have a never-ending supply of them.  Once they're done I usually give them away.  I still want to have some sort of jigsaw exchange going in Canberra, but I'm allergic to organising people, so good luck with that.  I finished a paint-by-numbers set of a fox earlier in the year, and bought a much larger one which took me months to do, but looks really good.  At the club I finished a longstitch that I'd inherited off Nana *years* ago.  It looks pretty good too but I've not done anything with it, it's just sitting downstairs.  I spent December evenings filing digital photos from the past year into folders by subject.  With a clean slate, it might now be time to start tweaking the folder filing system a bit.  Really the goal is to make it easy to find stuff, and obvious what things are in case I go and cark it.  Although if I go and cark it, noone will care about *any* of my photos .. or mum and dad's .. Speaking of which, I scanned three of mum's photo albums, and so far nearly a thousand of dad's photos this year.  All of my own scanned photos (from my own cameras) are all now digitised, labelled and renamed to include the date, roll and frame number.  I haven't filed those into folders yet though.

Weatherwise, the pool didn't fully freeze over much, but did form some beautiful ice flakes a couple of times.  It snowed once in September.  We've already had some quite hot days this summer, and I'm somewhat worried about the fish over January in this El Niño year.  I'll be doing a bit of fish tank rearranging to try and minimise casualties.

New food/recipies I tried this year included honey mustard chicken, made with actual ingredients, not out of a jar (except the mustard); duck breast fillets which are expensive but yummy; chicken kievs made from scratch, which were nice enough, but lacking the *salt* of the pre-prepared stuff (why does everything that tastes good have to have so much salt and fat???); a failed attempt at a lemon meringue pie, which was still tasty, just very goopy; various recipes trying to use up a kilo of white beans, the best being a cassoulet (salt and fat anyone?); a chocolate cake to celebrate Neil working at the same place for forty years - I haven't baked a cake in years!; a couple of things using wombok out of our garden (well, a planter box, to keep it out of reach of snails); and gingerbread cookies.

Didn't eat out as much this year.  We went to Kinh Do a couple of times.  Tried the degustation menu at Mezzalira which was pretty awesome.  Discovered Italian thick white hot chocolate in a hug mug at Max Brenner.  Finally got back to the Dumpling Inn after it had been closed for like a year.  Had dinner with Stu's dad at The District in Crace which was pretty good.  We tried the Wig & Pen at its new premesis, but it lacked the atmosphere of the old place.  Also tried its offshoot - Bentspoke which was nice enough.

Shows:
* Of Mice and Men

Movies:
* The Imitation Game
* The Theory of Everything
* Citizenfour
* x+y
* Cinderella
* Jurassic World
* Spectre
* Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Books (I really stopped reading because I pretty much never catch the bus anymore, and tend to just play on my phone before bed):
* Conqueror of Darkness by Phyllis Garlick
* Letters to Karen by Charlie W. Shedd
* Pollyanna by Elanor H. Porter
* Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Other stuff:
* Started the new year at the club but weren't very inspired by the whole evening and struggled to stay awake til midnight
* Started doing the FridayQ again for a while. Stopped when I got stumped and never took it back up again :( 
* Spent the summer watching Dad's documentaries while doing jigsaws and the like
* Finally fixed up our wedding photo book and had it reprinted
* Watched all three seasons of Veronica Mars
* Went to Costco for the first time
* Wandered around Mount Stromlo with the sweetie
* Almost quit Candy Crush in February, but took it up again.  Am currently within seven levels of the end (until they move the goalposts)
* Accidentally siphoned a huge amount of water out of the pool. Twice.
* Japanese culture night with Stu's Japanese class, which he has since stopped going to
* Came second in a work trivia night
* Went to the Balloon Fiesta on Canberra Day
* Got Netflix
* Scotch Malt Whisky Society tastings in March and in June
* Watched all three seasons of Rake
* Got Israel trip photos from three years ago online
* Finished scanning all my analogue photos
* Lost our really cool number plate and had to get a new set
* Watched all of Sherlock
* Got frustrated that you can't buy quality denim anymore for ladies' jeans
* Been with the sweetie for ten years!!
* Saw Nick Davies (investigative journalist who exposed the News of the World phone hacking scandal) at the Library
* Went to Whisky Live
* Chris and Zac came to visit in July. Went to the curry festival and went ice skating in Garema Place
* Cleaned out the "winter" hobby room in July, although didn't actually use the room
* Whisky night at work in July
* Cooked a Christmas in July feast the club - including four kilos of pork and two kilos of turkey, which all got eaten
* Watched all the Harry Potter movies
* Played through all the working maps I have for Unreal Tournament
* Celebrated turning 21 again, and recreated a photo taken on my 21st birthday
* Won a work trivia night. Busy planning the next one.
* Started a new blog for my Australian holidays, but haven't added much to it yet
* Saw "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson at the library
* Freecycled a bit of stuff, but still a lot more to go
* The watch I got for graduation died, and Mister Minit in Belconnon could not fix it, even after replacing the movement three times. Still pissed about it.
* Stu bought a battery-operated whipper snipper and a hedge trimmer and spent many evenings attacking the weeds
* Upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1. There's a couple of things I like about the new OS (most especially the logical numbering of the photo directories when you attach the phone to your computer, photo sorting in general, as well as being able to manage attachments in SMSes), but mostly things are uglier and clunkier and it makes my phone chug, especially after unlocking the screen.
* Went to an Ingress First Saturday event
* Saw First Dog on the Moon at the Library
* Did a first aid course. Apparently now I'm qualified.
* Went Go-Karting for a vendor event
* Wore a dress to a wedding
* Hosted family Christmas lunch here
* Hosted a Christmas day lunch here
* Used the holiday break to do some thorough cleaning of the garage and fridge

So there goes 2015.  Have a happy and safe 2016!

Christmas eve we got to come home a little early and pretty much just chillaxed - most of the hard work of cleaning the house having been done the weekend before.  In the evening Kit and later Ben came up and we watched Life of Brian, and Holy Grail, and the very end of the carols after Kit went home cause she's allergic to carols.  We'd missed the Hallelujah chorus, so Ben and I found Christmas carols on YouTube to sing along to hehe.

Christmas day I vacuumed a heap of algae to waste - I felt bad about doing this again this summer, but I suppose Adelaide will thank me (and I needn't have worried - Canberra got something like 16mm of rain yesterday which gave Canberra a thorough soaking).

Then it was a bit of food preparation.

Chris and Zac came up first, then mum arrived, and we had roast pork and epic potato bake and veggies and junk food and bubbly.  It was all quite lovely.

A little while later Annie and the family turned up and did some presents stuff for the kids and had dessert - lemon meringue pie that Chris made, and pavlova that Annie made.

In the afternoon we had a swim, and in the evening we watched Die Hard 2.

Quite a lovely day!

So I upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1 on Sunday night.

Yeah yeah yeah, shut up.

I spent ages and ages on the weekend making sure I had everything backed up.  Because given my history with iTunes, there was no way I was going to trust my content to Apple.

As it turned out, I did get errors.

I tried upgrading iTunes (my phone was a brick at this point).

And in the end it did in fact want to completely wipe my phone.

But then it upgraded ok, and restored the backup ok.

So far the only thing I've noticed that I've lost was all the gold I'd spent months accumulating on Candy Crush.  So was pretty pissed off about that.  But at least all my other rewards and my level were maintained.

So. 

iOS 9.

Having not ever used 7 or 8, the "new" interface is new to me for the first time.  The calendar and photo sorting differences have been around for a while, but are new to me.

Things I like:

* I do like the photo sorting.  Rather than one big folder of thumbnails, now they're separated by date and location.  Much easier now to find and clear photos.
* the predictive text feature that I've seen on Android is there, although I've not really used it.
* the clock actually works on the home screen now!  And it even has a second hand!
* it *seems* like the battery life is a lot better
* EDIT: OMG! You can see all the attachments on SMSes!!  Will be easy to go through and remove excess crap

Things I'm not sure about:

* not sure I like the new icons
* the music player is no longer on the left of the home screen, and doesn't come with a double click from the lock screen unless you already have it open
* reminder alerts don't go away from your lock screen until you've actually swiped them to unlock/read.  But at least swiping to open an SMS actually opens the messages app and doesn't just unlock the phone and then expect you to load messages after that.

Things I really don't like:

* the notes application has now split up my notes based on some arbitrary decision about whether they're in my mail file or on the phone.  Dumb dumb dumb. Just give me a notes file.  I'm constantly having to switch between the two views of notes to see the notes in the two different locations.
* lack of consistency in switching between *stuff*.  Want to switch between an app?  Scroll left and right.  Want to switch tabs in Safari?  Scroll up and down.  Completely retarded.  Plus the animation is too enthusiastic and you end up scrolling past apps, or accidentally closing them when you meant to scroll left or right instead of up or down.
* lack of response to clicking the home button or scrolling.  Previously when I clicked the home button to unlock, the screen popped up straight away.  Now it can take up to a full second before the screen comes up, making me think I haven't pressed it properly.  And previously swiping between home screens was quite sensitive and responsive.  Now sometimes it just doesn't swipe until you've *really* swiped - otherwise it'll just bounce back to the screen you were on.  Super annoying.  EDIT:  This mainly seems to be after unlocking the screen.  Presumably when unlocking the screen it starts up a bunch of processes to do *stuff* when unlocked.
* I've really not liked the calendar interface since iOS 7 (when seeing it on other phones).  iOS 6's calendar let you show a month at a time, and when you clicked on a day it showed you the events at the bottom.  Simple, and it didn't change layouts around.  Now you *can* get a month view, but if you click on day you get taken to a list view that shows all events in a list.  Yuk.  And actually part of the reason I put off upgrading my phone.
* photo location map.  This was a super cool feature that showed you on a map where all your photos were taken.  I have photos all over the world on this phone and it was cool to see on a map.  Don't know if this feature is still there but hidden, or gone forever.
* EDIT: really not liking the reminders anymore.  Just clunky and awkward to use now.

Really the main reason for upgrading was just too many apps these days need iOS 7 or later to work.  So I had to bite the bullet and do it...