Last Tuesday.  Couldn't get to sleep again last Monday night so Tuesday was another zombie day.  But came home a bit early and had quite a productive evening doing housework and photo stuff.  Did most although not all of the things on the todo list, but actually felt pretty relaxed about it all which was good.

Tuesday night slept really well, which worried me I'd ruin Wednesday night's slep heh.  Did a bunch of planning work at work.  In the evening was blogging USA 2000 photos, and had another quite productive and fairly relaxed evening.

Another good night sleep Wednesday night, and more planning Thursday.

Well the good sleep had to end.  Friday morning woke up at 3am.  At 4am I got up and blogged.  Went back to bed and got a *little* bit more sleep.  But pretty tired Friday.  Finished of my planny plan plan and sent it around for review.  Got home and started watching Clutch Powers which Chrissie lent me forever ago, while waiting for Kit and Pete to arrive up from the coast.  They came and got me and we headed over to Pete's Mum's place.  We walked to the Labor Club only to find that Kit had been banned... fifteen years ago!!  And she didn't know.  Because she'd been to the Labor Club *multiple* times over the years.  Weird stuff.  My theory is that for years they would scan your licence, but probably there was nothing electronic to tie it back to a person, it was just as evidence.  Nowadays they OCR the licences and look people up electronically so it's finally linked her back.  Anyway so Kit was pretty upset and Leisa was hungry and Carol didn't want anything too salty and Kit's not a fan of Asian so we're all like.. um.. Anyway we thought we'd try Charnie's Noodles and Dumplings.  So the girls sat down while Pete and I went to the bottle-o.  When we got back they said it was an hour and a half wait for food.  And we were like WTF.  There were like three other people in the restaurant.  But apparently they have an epic takeaway/delivery service.  So we said forget it and walked out.  Back to the drawing board.  So we ended up getting Crust takeaway which we took back to Carol's.  A bit of a debacle, but we ended up having quite a nice evening of chatting.  And there was a puppy.

Slept relatively well Friday night, but didn't end up getting much done on Saturday.  Did a bit of USA 2000 photo stuff but not a lot else.  Watched Skyfall in the evening.  No good quotes from that movie or iconic one liners (at least from Bond).  

Another relatively good night's sleep Saturday.  Finally finished getting our tax organised to be posted off to the accountant.  Did a bunch of processing of the scans I have of Mum's photos (for future blogging).

Also saw this wild blue tongue lizard in the back yard twice on Sunday.

Dropped Stu off at the airport, then did food shopping.

Also.  Oh no, not again.

Monday I went to cook lemon chicken using some of the lemons that dropped over Christmas, but sadly they don't last forever and most of them had dried out.  Sadness.  Did find a few to use so that was nice.  Didn't get much else done though.

Tonight managed to get the photos off my phone without ending up in tears which is always a win.  Helped by not having any videos this week, and none of the pngs had had their timestamps screwed with by Apple.  Also watched the Dirty Dancing episode of The Movies that Made Us.

And look, it's before 9:30.  Although I still need to wash my hair.  Dammit.

This day twenty years ago I signed the lease for the little flat in Marrickville (yay for being accepted for a rental property first try!!).  I took the keys and went over and had a look at the place and took a heap of photos.  

This was the living room.  The buffet came with the place.  I moved it under the window and used it for storing plates and glasses.

Looking across the living room into the kitchen.

The fridge space and one of the benches

The kitchen

The bedroom.  The dressing table also came with the place, and I used it for linen storage.

Another view of the bedroom.

The shower/bath had some staining which didn't ever come out.

The bathroom sink.

The loo

It was surprisingly easy to geotag my photos from twenty years ago!  Who knew!?  Mostly because they were of fairly obvious things.  And to be fair, I geotagged the flights back in 2005 when Google Earth first came out.  There were only a few that were a bit tricky, and only a couple I couldn't get at all (eg some brownstones in Brooklyn that had no photos half an hour either side so could have been literally anywhere in Brooklyn, or a couple of photos in Sonoma wine country that could have again been anywhere, and the one of endless fields in Nebraska).  Some were a bit of a fudge (the ferry to Alcatraz).  I was also a little disturbed that I could so the World Trade Centre photos with precision as well.  Not sure why I felt so strange about that.  Also freaky just how much *hasn't* changed in twenty years.  Like Storybook Land in flowers in Disneyland.

Twenty years ago today I took these photos on the Cooks River.  I have no idea what I was doing there at lunch time on a Thursday.  Weird stuff.  It does seem to be showing the construction of the M5 East, but still no idea why I would have been there on a Thursday .. 

Man the insomnia last week was horrendous.  I think I only got about one good night's sleep all week.

Tuesday night I woke up at ~3am for a couple of hours.  So Wednesday was an even worse zombie day than Tuesday.  On Wednesday evening I finished fully labelling my USA 2000 photos (everything had been labelled previously, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.

These things were so good!  Just like cheese kranskis.

Wednesday night I actually slept quite well.  I think I started culling down the USA 2000 photos for blogging on Thursday evening.  Note that all these photos have been online for nineteen years on conspiracy, but I've never put the photos and the blog together (actually I only digitised the blog a couple of years ago).  Rewatched first two episodes of Picard because David wanted to see it too.  Struggling to get stuff watched now cause noone's ever around at the same time.  Haven't even started the Mandalorian.

Friday morning I woke up at 1am and never got back to sleep.  Worst zombie day of the week.  I couldn't deal with people at work, you know the ones that don't actually understand basic networking, so they have no idea what they're even asking for.  My brain was just too mushy to deal.  So spent the day deleting old firewall rules which was a bit of fun.  Met up with the sweetie for a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar, then we had dinner at Kinn Thai.  Both the chili jam crispy pork and the papaya crispy chicken were "one chilli" rated, which you'd think would be mild, but it was at the upper limit of my tolerance.  I'd hate to try anything hotter there...

The sweetie dropped me off at the airport which was lovely of him, but when I arrived I found my flight had been delayed over an hour and a half - apparently due to the bad weather in Sydney.  I chatted to Rob and Fiona briefly who happened to be there.  Then I tried to see if I could get on the earlier Sydney flight, but apparently it was full.  Had to ask.  So went and bought some overpriced wine and sat and read my book.  The original indicator board said boarding was at 20:25.   So at a bit after 20:15 I went for a bit of a wander.  Saw the indicator boards that said my boarding time was 20:10, but there was nothing to say go to gate.  So that confused me a bit.  So I kept walking, and then finally heard the announcement for the final boarding call for my flight (I couldn't hear the announcements properly where I'd been sitting).  So then it's like crap.  I'm basically at the Qantas end of the terminal and I still need to pee.  So did that then basically had to run the entire way down the terminal to gate #3.  #grunt.  Turns out I wasn't the only one to get screwed over like that, we still had to wait for a few more people before we could take off.  Of course then I was coughing most of the flight from the exertion.  hrmmmmmm.  Still, I had the seat to myself, and got a few cool timelapses of the path out of Canberra and again in Sydney.

So it's nearly 10pm by this point, and the buses don't run all that often, according to a timetable I found the next one was in half an hour.  So I thought it would be quicker to get the train, even though it costs about $15 more #grunt.  But there were no trains.  And the indicator boards had *nothing* to indicate how long to the next one.  In the end I waited over half an hour for a train to Wolli Creek.  Shoulda gone for the damned bus.  At Wolli Creek a Waterfall train pulled in as I got there, but it was 19 minutes til the next Cronulla train.  So was going to go to Sutherland and walk, but messaged Mum and she said she'd come get me which was lovely.  

So got to Mum's place and crashed in a heap.

Slept relatively well - and quite late - til 7:30!!

Had breakfast with Mum (cardboard flakes with liquid cardboard on top - yeuch), then we went for a wander (in the rain haha) to the shops for some supplies.  Came back and gave her computer a bit of a health check and uninstalled some crap and allowed Kaspersky to delete some dodgy toolbars.  After lunch I culled down Ryan's photos a bit.

Then headed off to the party.  I was pretty anxious to start with due to such a big crowd of people and not knowing so many, and the people I did know I hadn't seen in years and I was all a bit freaked out, until Luc saved me with some wine.  Then we got the morph video going and downloaded all my photos, so they got played through as well.  Lots of food and most everyone else seemed to have a good time heh. 

Trained it back, just missed a Cronulla train so Mum picked me up from Sutherland again.  Isn't she a nice mother type person? :)

Slept reasonably well again, then got up, got ready and Mum nicely dropped me off at the station (it was *pouring* with rain heh).  Got to Central, went to the loo, then straight onto the coach which was waiting.  No announcements at all to confirm I was definitely on the right bus tho heh.  It was mostly full when I got there too, but someone was sitting on the aisle so I got a window seat yay!!  Not that there was much to see other than rain... Left fifteen minutes early, got into Canberra five minutes early.  I did finish my book an hour early though. Whoops.

Stu met me at Jolimont, then we had some lunch at Wild Panda which nice enough (some hot peanuts, tofu salad, and two sorts of dumplings).

Tried to do food shopping at the Spar in the city, but they had about three trays of meat and that was it.  So dropped into Coles on the way home.  In and out in ten minutes haha.

Didn't get home til mid afternoon, so then of course got depressed about not having any weekend.  And too late to start anything.  So just did a bit of Picasa tagging.  and cooked a pork roast.  But forgot to turn the oven down after half an hour, so the crackling was ruined (too hard).  Then I spilt most of the jelly everywhere.  I'm such a failure.  BBT, Fuller House, then bed.

Today I woke up thinking it was Saturday and got really sad that it was Monday.  But did a bit of planning which was good.  

A solid day of rain and the lake is full again!

Tonight I wanted to get the USA 2000 photos into the blog.  But at ~7:15 I started downloading and processing photos.  Two hours later and I'm still going, and still blogging (this has taken half an hour so far and I haven't even inserted any photos yet).  So much for getting anything else done tonight.  

Stop the world I want to get off.

Early in 2000 I started looking for places to move out of home into.  Primarily I was sick of the commute (an hour driving each way), and I wanted to be closer to my friends in Kogarah, and CIA in the city.  So I was looking for one bedroom places around Marrickville and suburbs around.  I'm pretty sure I looked at a few places, although I only have memories of one of them (possibly in Belmore??), which was ok, but not great.  Then I saw this place in Marrickville.  I had a look around, then walked out.  But I hesitated.  There wasn't anything too glaringly wrong with it, so I indicated to the Real Estate agent I was going to have another look.  So I did.  And thought it could work.  And it was only (!) $135/week.  It was at the back of a big old building that had been split into four flats.  It had a living area with kitchen, then a bedroom, then a bathroom behind that.  I decided I'd see if I could get it.

This would have been on the Saturday.  Two days later, on the Monday night, I have photos of the flat with Mum in it.  Presumably I must have asked the Real Estate agent if I could go back with my Mum for another look.

So yeah, twenty years ago tonight I took these...

More of this story to come.. ;)

In other news.. it was six years ago that Dad went and carked it...

.. or not..

Thursday we watched the live action Aladdin.  It was pretty underwhelming.  None of the charm of the original.  Will Smith's genie was probably the best thing about the movie, and he ain't no Robin Williams.  It felt like watching a Bollywood movie rather than a Middle Eastern one.

Friday Neil and I tried out Malatang Hotpot.  You choose your ingredients, pay by weight, choose a sauce, and they cook it for you.  ok value - my 275g of food was $7.95 or thereabouts (I can't remember the numbers).  They have four sauces in the built in sign above the food, but there were five on the counter (with spiciness ratings).  The ones above don't give any indication of spiciness, so I went with big bone broth, which sounded pretty mild.  And it was.  Neil got the spiciest, which was too hot for me.  I'd be happy to try a mild or maybe even a medium next time.  Biggest problem was the *huge* bits of spinach which made it super messy to eat.  They really need to cut things a bit smaller.

In the evening I watched My Brilliant Career, which was to be honest pretty boring.  Full of unlikeable characters behaving badly.  Meh.  But with a stoopidly young Sam Neill and Robert Grubb.

Friday night was stoopidly hot and I just could not get to sleep.  Epic grunt.  Might have had a meltdown around 1am.

So was pretty tired on Saturday.  Did a bit of house stuff, and a bit of photo stuff.  Did some food shopping, although I was nervous about leaving the house because it was super hot and very windy.  

As I was cooking dinner (beef stronganoff from an old packet of Mum's), EffanC called, so they ended up coming over for dinner and chatting and snackages.

Slightly late night but not too crazy.  

Sunday I spent the entire freakin day trying to get caught up on finances, getting bank statements etc to get organised for tax.  Yeah didn't even finish.  #grunt.

But the sweetie did cook a slow cooker chickpea curry for dinner.

Monday I took a random day off, had a super productive hour or two of housework, and processed all Ryan's morph photos.  Made several videos for the party.  Later in the afternoon I pointed Picasa at my work photo directory and had it see who was in photos.  Interesting stuff.  It did find a lot automatically once tagged, but the majority it wants confirmation on.  It rather nicely saves all the people in each file into an ini file in the directory, to make for easy extraction later.  But I did forget to do my washing.  Whoops.  Cooking chicken teriyaki for dinner with a packet that was best before the exact same day Dad went and carked it..

Tuesday.  Even though last night was *much* cooler, I *still* couldn't get to still til some time between 12 and 1am.  So frustrating.  So zombie day today.  Salmon for dinner.  And then Stu challenged David to fix our two digital radios which stopped working last year.  And he did.  Because he's the most awesomest brother ever.  Also fun: we were both labelling photos from flights across America.  Me from late 2000.  Him from early 2020.  Fun times.

And there's a reason I don't tell Certain People stuff - cause whenever I do they basically tell me I'm doing it Wrong and make me feel dumb.  Le sigh.

On this day thirty years ago I started year 11 in high school.  This meant a new uniform.  This meant mum had to document the occasion ;)

I like those photos more for all the stuff in my bedroom, noting what I still have and what has been given away or thrown out.. fun times..

So last Tuesday after battling for two nights with Apple, and blogging, it got to 21:30 and I still needed to wash my hair.  Le sigh.

The lake was a little fuller after the hail storm.

Thursday was a bit of a crazy day.  There was a bushfire near the airport, so people were distracted monitoring that (it originally started in trees that I'd noticed on the way to the club just last weekend were dead because of the drought).  And then it took out some good chunks of our network because an Optus location lost power and they didn't have generator backup there.  And there was a water bomber plane crash.  Sadly it was the same C-130 we saw taking off out of HMAS Albatross last year.  Sad times.  And then they closed the airport (well most flights were cancelled), stranding people in (and out) of Canberra for the evening.  I really couldn't concentrate very well on work that afternoon.  In the evening I was going to watch Coco by myself (finally caught up on all the Pixar movies I started watching a year ago, with just Toy Story 4 to go now - which is coming soon!) but the boys were ok for me to watch it on the main tv and they watched it too.  Was pretty good.  Well except for the whole I issue I had that photos have only existed for the past hundred or so years, so what did people do before that?  Paintings?  hrmm

Friday I went over to Chrissie's and we had some champagne for her birthday and had Chinese takeaway and just chatted which was really nice.  Her car was damaged in the hail.

Saturday I did a bunch of research into how I was going to morph Ryan's donut photos.  One person said use "face movie" from Picasa.  My version of Picasa was pretty old and didn't seem to have it, so I downloaded the latest off the Wayback Machine.  And it was magic.  Saved me hours and hours and hours of effort.  Well, I still need to get some final photos from Luc to finish it off but I suddenly found myself free for the weekend.  

In the evening was a party for Aquila's 60th.  Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising but he came and stayed anyway which was nice.  And we didn't have a late night.  There was a lot of food.  Food spam to follow ;)  After the jigsaws!! OMFG!!

Sunday.  OMFG I hate Apple.  Ever since I got my XS, it's never synced my Google calendar with the phone.  I've tried all sorts of suggestions but nothing ever worked.  So I gave up and downloaded the Google Calendar app which works just fine.  But it's also stopped syncing my contacts.  Which is more annoying because I often update my phone, but I want Google to be the master.  So I went hunting to see if I could try again to fix Google sycning.  Someone talked about using iCloud.  So I logged into iCloud to find my contacts aren't synced there at all!!!  Even though it's set to backup contacts.  What a retarded piece of crap.  I complained on Twitter, as you do, and they actually responded.  Not with anything useful of course.  I haven't tried the last thing they suggested, because I was completely over it.  I'm going to go back to my old 1999 perl/mysql database as my "master", making sure I have a full backup of everything, then try some more to hack away at it.  

We were originally going to go to the club Sunday afternoon but Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising, so we just stayed home.  Which suited me just fine as I was having fun geotagging my USA 2000 photos, and listening to the Classic 100 Music in the Movies, Rescreened, which I listened to the entire weekend which was awesome.  Did a bit of jigsaw as well.  We watched Quantum of Solace in the evening.  Man, that movie made me dizzy just looking at it.  Such a frenetic pace in the action sequences - editing of shots less than a second each.  Madness.

Monday I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep (well I did for about half an hour at 6:30).  Hurrah.  Spent the day geotagging photos.  It was fun reliving my trip to New York from 2000, with more fresh memories to reinforce it all from a year ago.  I was sad geotagging the World Trade Centre photos though - I found it somewhat strange/disturbing that I could still geotag those photos with complete precision.  I was even able to geotag just about all the photos fairly accurately in Disneyland.  It's amazing how much has stayed the same over the past twenty years.  Managed to manually geotag the entire set of photos in one weekend.  Ok so there were only 727 of them, and about 70 I'd done the other week.  

On Monday afternoon a bushfire started near Orroral, where Stu, Kit and I did the Granite Tors walk a few years ago.  We could see the smoke from our place.

We watched the first episode of Picard in the evening.  

Got a much better night's sleep on Monday night.   Tuesday the Orroral fire got much much worse.  We could see the pyrocumulus clouds from work.  I got some pretty insane timelapses of it.

Tuesday night I backed up my phone.  It only took 32 minutes and about 8-10 reconnects of the phone to get the photos and the half dozen regular videos, not counting getting two timelapses I got via Google Drive earlier in the day.  Then another 15 minutes to process them (every single video had its timestamp changed), minus the few minutes I ran outside to see the sky on fire..

Today I worked from home.  Last Friday David had gotten sick enough of our slow internet upload speeds that he called Internode to see if they could fix it.  Today an NBN dude turned up and went off to fix it.  Turns out there was a broken connector, resulting in exactly half the speed we should have had.  So he fixed that and our download speeds are now back up to 20mbit down, 4 up.  Not quite as fast as it was before, but still twice as good as recent times.  Hurrah!  So at least that was a win.  Smoke from the Orroral fire blew north and the sky got a really eerie green/brown/yellow colour for much of the day.  

Tonight was just going back into the photo labels I'd done for the USA 2000 trip, and giving them a bit more detail and tidying it up.  I also redid all the panoramas.  Back in the day I used a program (Panavue?) that you had to manually set linkage points for it to line them up.  It worked pretty well for fairly horizontal panoramas, but not so well if the camera was angled.  So I redid them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor.  Sometimes Microsoft comes up with amazing software, and this is one example.  Works like magic.  

Case in point:

In all the crazyness of the world right now I can't help but be inspired by these flowers growing in our front garden.  They've basically had no water all summer, except during the storm last week.  Yet here they are, in full bloom, smiling at the world.

Stay safe everyone!

Urgh.  I hate Apple.  But more on that later.

Monday I finished blogging our Hong Kong and Singapore photos and got them online which was good.  Finally I achieved something.  Hurrah.  Logged onto our Disney+ account and had a look around.  There's a bunch of the new live action movies I want to see (although not Lion King), and Toy Story 4 is coming in February.  But there's a bunch of things I want to watch before we take a break from it.

Tuesday.  Blerf.  Stoopid insomnia.  Couldn't get to sleep *and* woke up for ages feeling uncomfortable.  Spent the day deleting All The Things.  Had EPIC steaks for dinner (I didn't eat all this! Not even one of them! ;) ).

Wednesday I extracted all the geodata out of Google Earth (myplaces.kml) from the geotagging I did of our flights across America in 2000.  Used exiftool to take that geodata to geotag the files, and then fix them up slightly (because annoyingly the data has tilt and range, it doesn't have altitude in the geodata, although I did calculate it trigonometrically).  

And it rained!  A bit anyway.

And people that spit chewing gum onto the ground have to be up there with the most disgusting ferals on the planet.  Right up there with those who leave their dog turds on other people's front lawns.

Then Echofon lost its auth, and Internode started blocking me from sending mail via its smtp server.

So a bit of fun, but also a lot of pain.

Thursday we had a bbq at work to finally finish off all the sausages from the Christmas Party.  Stu wanted to have drinks after work so I went to get him, but first we had dinner of pizzas at Grease Monkey.

The lake was very low last week...

Friday might have shared some wine with Neil at Grill'd.  Made tacos for dinner.  Watched the first episode of Who is America, which was extremelly cringey (especially the gun fanatics).  

Saturday morning (after waking up at 3:50 #grunt) I spent much of the morning filing and organising my old photos (mainly the ones taken on my Olympus camera between 1999 and 2004, as well as a bunch taken on the Sony in 2004).  Making sure everything had the date in the file name (so I can find them for the This Day in History project) and just general neatness.  Also with a view to sorting out all the kids' photos for Ryan's 21st.. hrmm.. 

Then we headed out to the club.  Had a swim then a bit of an antisocial with a bunch of people that were out there.  The new carpet and kitchen bench are amazing.

Sunday morning I spent ages going through the "tool shed" in our van, taking of stock of what's there and sorting things out.  Then came home and spent the rest of the day doing photo filing and sorting.

Monday had a super intense hail storm.  Luckily our car was under cover, and it all missed our house.  But the carnage in Canberra was crazy.  Hundreds if not thousands of cars, awnings and gardens damaged or destroyed.  I'll put up some pics in another post.

Did some food shopping in the afternoon and marvelled at the blue sky, which we really haven't seen in nearly two months.

Came home and then went into battle with Apple.  As per usual, downloading even regular videos caused the device is not attached to the system error.  Had to reboot the phone because it refused to show me the file system at all afterwards.  Twice.  Had to do *multiple* reconnects of the cable to even show the file system.  Then when I got (most of) the files, most files' timestamps were changed by Apple on the phone and had to be manually fixed.  Took literally all evening to get all most of my files.  Transferred some with Google Drive, but even one of the regular videos (not a timelapse) won't play. F#%$ I hate Apple.

Tonight I got home and did a water change in Chrissie's tank and cooked and ate dinner and then it was like 20:00.  #grunt  And then I spent the next hour or so continuing to fight with Apple.  I should paste the table of crazy inconsistent behaviour.  In the end David used his Macbook to recode the couple of videos that I couldn't get to play.

You're lucky you got this blog entry at all.  Two nights battling with Apple is killing my will to live, or in fact do anything.  And I have a billion things that need doing, and none of them are getting done.  I'm dying from the stress of it all.

I don't think I saw any movies this week.  Sad times.