6.4.14 - 15.4.14

Sunday night after the Turkey meeting I got super frustrated because I checked the seat allocations we had against the type of aircraft we were getting and found that we were right over the wings on all flights.  After I'd asked specifically for NOT over the wing, and then asked again was she really sure when I first got the seating allocations back and she said the seats were definitely not over the wing.

!@#$%^&@*!!

This is the same woman who gave me this seat on my Sydney to Hong Kong flight ..

And this seat on my Cairo to London flight ..

And yes, I'd specifically asked for a window seat NOT over the wing for those flights too.

I was absolutely furious.  So I mailed her *again* and said the seats were in fact over the wing and could they please be changed.  (I tried to do it online myself but couldn't, presumably because of the group booking).  She did adjust the allocation a little further back, but not nearly as far as I would have liked.  Might have to ask at the airport when I checkin if there's any option to move further back.

*sigh*

Monday I met up with Luc at the Baxter Inn, but I'll save that for another post.

Also on Monday I *finally* got a game of 2048 out.

Tuesday was lunch with @StuartCRyan at Super Bowl - Peking Duck!!

Wednesday was takoyaki day at Sushi and Grill.  I asked them if they make their own, but she said they didn't.. oh well.  Still, they're not too bad for pre-made.

I also had some potato croquettes that day, but they weren't as nice

After lunch was reading about Heartbleed and getting scared.  If you haven't changed your passwords yet for things like Yahoo and Flickr DO IT NOW!

Also on Wednesday there was a "signal failure" at Mortdale, so trains were "late and out of timetable order".  The announcement at Martin Place was "the next three trains will be terminating at Hurstville and the next Cronulla train will be at 17:22".  This was at 17:10.  So I did what any sane person would do - hopped on a train to Kings Cross and caught it from there.  Window seat :)  I was on the wrong side of the train to see how crowded it was on the platforms at Martin Place and Town Hall, but I think it was pretty insane.  It wasn't meant to stop at Como, so I was just going to walk from Jannali, but they said after Oatley it would be stopping at Como, so I got off along with quite a lot of other people.

Also got a nice view of the city coming back from Kings Cross.

Thursday was sad cause there was no 4:51.

Friday was social club drinks so stayed for a couple of beers.  I came home and wanted to watch To Kill a Mockingbird that mum taped for me last year, but mum wanted to sort through stuff in the study, so we did that, and by the time we were done, it was too late to start watching a movie.

This is a box full of clip art that dad had compiled and printed out.. he had an obsession with clip art..

On Saturday, mum and I went and visited dad's little spot in the cemetery, where he had been buried that week.  He's there next to his grandmother and parents.  We also went and found Chrissie's mum.

Saturday night I went Chrissie's and we went to Rhodes.  We had dinner at the Phoenix Chinese restaurant.  We had some duck noodles which were nice enough

.. but we also had these slow cooked pork ribs .. oh my they were delicious!  The meat was fall off the bone tender and the sauce was really yummy.  Loved this.

Then we went and saw The Lego Movie.. because Everything is Awesome .. even a second time :)

On Sunday I went to church with mum.  In the afternoon we tried to figure out dad's photo filing system.  He made so many fricken backups of things, there's up to ten copies of some files, on multiple disks, with copies made for "slide shows", some with labels, others without, some full sized originals, others resized.  Some files don't have full sized originals, he only has "enhanced" or labelled copies.  Which is a bit of a poo.  So I backed everything up onto one little portable disk and brought it all home, and if I ever get time (yeah right) I'll try and sort it so there's a minimal number of copies in one organised location.

On Monday Uncle Colin and Sandra and Uncle Ian and Aunty Janet came over for dinner.  At the beginning of the evening I was freaking out about how similar my uncles are in some ways to dad.. just their attitudes to a lot of things and even some of their mannerisms.  It was a good fun night (it was Ian's birthday).

On Tuesday night I came home and cuddled my sweetie for a long time.

6.4.14

Not a regular follower of news, I had no idea the Canberra Airport Open Day was on until I drove past the sign to it on Friday night when I was heading out to the club.

But it was dilemma, because I needed to be in Sydney by 2pm.  So I decided I'd make a flying visit (arf arf) and go for just an hour and try to get onto one plane.

Coming from the Queanbeyan side of the airport was an epic win.  I turned straight into the carpark and only had to wait a minute or so to get in.  Traffic from the north was backed up for who knows how long.

I parked and hurried up to the gate just after opening.  I headed straight down to the 717 as I'd never been in one of those before, and there didn't look to be much of a queue.  As it turns out, they were still securing the plane so noone was allowed near it yet.  I was there less than a minute when they opened it up and I was in the second group of people to go through it!  Win!

Got to set in the pilot's seat too :)  I asked the copilot whether it is "ok" to poke my head into the cockpit after flights as we're getting off, and he said generally it is, so might have to do that some time :)

Then I walked up and down the line of planes taking photos and generally marvelling at being up close to planes :)

The crowds!!  It was super super busy this year.  Definitely getting more and more popular.

So then I headed for Sydney.  The traffic around the airport was INSANE.  Every approach to the airport was completely choked.  Traffic on Majura Road was banked all the way back to Mount Majura - probably nearly ten kilometres north of the open day entrance.  Hopefully the airlines were a little lenient with late arriving people to the airport...

Working in a state office away from my team, and not following any news sites closely, I was out of the loop about Heartbleed until today.  Then I read about it.  And got scared.

xkcd summed it up - "Heartbleed must be the worst web security lapse ever.  .. Worst so far. Give us time."

Basically it's a vulnerability in SSL (used on https websites) which makes them essentially completely open to the web.  Any data you transmit to an affected site is NOT secure.  Anyone can read it.  And not only that, but if the affected server doesn't replace their SSL certificates/keys, they continue to be vulnerable, because the keys are out there.  And they never ever should be.  Yeah, really really messy.

Initial reports indicated that two thirds of SSL sites on the internet could be affected, but it seems to be smaller than that.  Big sites confirmed to be affected included Yahoo, Flickr, Imgur, ok cupid.  From what I've seen so far, local banking sites, ebay and paypal aren't currently affected, buy they may have been in the past, or even yesterday.  I haven't seen many .au sites come up, although I did see vic.gov.au come up.

General advice is: change all your passwords on affected sites that you've accessed recently (the vulnerability is two years old, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that it was in the wild until the past couple of days.. although having said that, it doesn't show up in logs so it's possible people have been collecting stuff very quietly).  And then change them again after the certificate has been fixed.  

There's a couple of test sites around - eg http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ and https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html

Fortunately none of our public facing websites at work are affected, so that's a relief!

Last Friday night we headed up to Sydney, staying at Mum's.

Saturday morning Mum and I went to have a look at my flat.  It'd been six and a half years since I had last seen it.  Sadly tenants just don't take care of things.  

Like the vanity - which had had so much water left on it over the years that it had gotten into the chipboard and swelled it all up and made it look disgusting, and the door was missing off it too.  

Or the light fitting in the second bedroom.  Who the hell loses light fittings?  And lots of stuff stuck to walls - I thought that was pretty much forbidden for tenants everywhere??

Or the vertical blinds, which I had in the two bedrooms and the lounge room.  But they're a crappy design and have a really thin bit of plastic holding them on, so if people let them swing about in the breeze from an open window or door, which tenants seem to do because they don't care, they break.  So now there's dodgy curtains in all three rooms.  *sigh*

Not to mention holes in doors, smashed tiles etc.  It was all a bit upsetting.

For the rest of the day Mum and I decluttered drawers and a shelf in the study - chucking out lots of stuff, reorganising things, and trying to sort out the hundreds of dvds Dad had made from shows he'd taped off tv.  Also David came over and we had another go a fixing the letterbox light, but something very weird is going on so he couldn't fully fix it.  At least now the light will come on when there's mail, but Mum has to go to the workshop to reset the light.

In the evening we headed to the other side of the world (ok the other side of Sydney) for George's 40th birthday party.  There was heaps of food and it was great to see lots of people I knew again, some of whom I hadn't seen since leaving Sydney (or even longer).

 

Rob and Alison had these super cool lenses for iPhones (although designed for iPhone 4s, so I had to hold them in place on my 5).  I liked the fish eye and macro lenses.  Might have to get me some :)

Then there was cake cutting

And Pippi Longstocking impersonations.

We stayed til near the end, which meant we got coopted into helping clean up.  A good fun night.

Then Sunday morning we came home.

So last weekend (well really the weekend before.. sorry, I've been a slacker) we went down to Bermagui for the weekend.  We had a slow start and left Saturday morning and didn't arrive till nearly 4pm.

Cheese!!  I wanted to stop here and try cheese .. maybe next time..

A crappy photo of the Wallaga Lake bridge, which was recently used as a film set for Angelina Jolie's upcoming movie "Unbroken".  The bridge is meant to be in Japan!

When we arrived at Bellbird Cottage B&B we got out of the car and it was all BELLBIRDS!  They were peeping all around the bush and it was a lovely welcome!

The B&B is delightful.  They only rent out one (very large) room and it's downstairs and has its own entrance, so it's very private and has a wonderful bush outlook.  

I was sitting on the toilet for this photo..  :)

On the first evening they bring down a cheese platter as a welcome, so it was lovely to sit and nibble cheese and look at the bush and listen to the bellbirds.

We chillaxed for a while before heading out.  Unfortunately we were a little too late for the seaside fair, so we had a wander around Sculpture on the Edge.

This was probably my favourite - it's made with the tops of milk bottles and old bicycle tyres and has solar powered strings of led lights mingled through.  I would love to have seen these at night.

Wandered down to the wharf to find some dinner.  The cafe was booked out, so we got some fish and chips from the outside servery.

It was about 7:45 at this point, and there were fireworks scheduled for 8:45.  It was threatening to storm on us, so we went and found somewhere that we could park with a view of the fireworks.  This is the spot we found.

The fireworks were actually really good for a small country town

Had a pretty good night's sleep.

In the morning they brought down a fabulous breakfast with a yummy variety of food.  In fact there was so much food we couldn't finish it all, and I packaged up the leftovers for our lunch!

Then it was off to meet up with some people at the beach.  It had been raining in the morning and it did look a little miserable to start with, but the weather cleared into quite a nice day.

Came back to Bellbird Cottage and chillaxed and listened to the birds and sipped some wine.  Lovely!

Then we met up with J&H and D at Il Passagio down at the wharf for dinner.

A very nice salt and pepper squid

Polenta chips - crispy and yummy

Quite a nice steak

Good panna cotta

The next morning was another amazing breakfast

Saying goodbye to Bellbird Cottage - we hope to be back one day!

Went via the foreshore to hack some portals

Stopped by some cliffs and took photos of birds

Scratching himself on the wing?

Stopped at the rather green Blue Pool.

And headed home via Cooma.

Stu fell in love with this place overlooking a beautiful valley and across to Brown Mountain.

Fred Piper Memorial Lookout.  On a clear day you can see the ocean.

Glider south of Canberra

Hume Solar Farm

And then we were home.  A bit tired from what seemed like two days of travelling, but it was lovely weekend nonetheless.

Last Sunday morning we headed home from Sydney with a car load of crap in tow.  Caught up on housework/washing etc in the afternoon.

On Monday I finished packing up and inventoring Jake's Lego.  

On Tuesday I suffered from major lack of sleep.  We went to the Dumpling Inn for dinner (mixed chow mein and shredded beef peking style) then did our food shopping.  Came home and dismantled most of the Star Destroyer (that had also been constructed at Christmas 2009) while watching TV.

On Tuesday night I still couldn't get to sleep, so Wednesday was more misery.  Watched some pretty cool rainstorms out the window at work.  When I got home however, there was a small stream of water going across the garage floor.  Which would have been fine, except it intersected with my old desk that I've had for thirty five or so years, and the chipboard at the bottom all swelled up :(:(:(  So that was pretty annoying.  My parents still have the matching beds, and I still use the matching set of drawers.  I was hoping to sell/give away the things as a set one day so that's a bit of a poo.  In the evening it poured with rain again, so I collected a whole heap of it and put it in the pool.

Wednesday night I finished dismantling the Star Destroyer, and started the remaining section of my Life jigsaw. 

Thursday night we got pizza and watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies in 2005.

On Friday a bunch of us got pork knuckles from Zierholz.  Omigosh they were *huge*.  I got through all the meat/crackling on mine (but only just) but didn't quite finish the sides.  Pretty much everyone said the experience of it was good, but noone would really be interested in having it again - simply too much food.  I reckon it'd go well shared between two people.  I didn't have any dinner that night.

Friday night was more jigsawing while watching Angels and Demons, which I hadn't seen.  

Saturday morning I cleaned the gutters and flushed the downpipes which were all completely clogged.  Then we headed out to the club, but I'll leave that for another post.

Today was catching up on housework as well as doing more jigsaw and tv show catching up.

Friday night last week while I was still in Sydney, Stu came up from Canberra, and David came over too.  Mum did a lamb roast - yum.  We did some final checks on the reflections slide show and took it up to the church to test it out and make sure it'd work ok.  We also put a good effort in to fix the letter box indicator light switch.  We got pretty close - thinking we just needed a new reed switch to be all done.

Saturday morning was Dad's funeral.  The church was *packed* - standing room only.  The service went well and people laughed at the right places in my slide show.  Sadness when the coffin was taken out.  Was good to see people like Steve Bull and Peter Neve and Barry Smith, as well as various aunties/uncles/cousins and Chris and Jim as well.  There was a light lunch in the hall afterwards which most people stayed for which was nice. 

After the funeral, the family type peoples were all invited back to Mum's for a continuation of the wake, and so they could all go through the workshop and garage to see if there was anything they wanted from Dad's hoard.  Some people took a few things which was good.  Then we toasted Dad, somewhat ironically since he was a teetotaller, and some of us proceeded to get quite merry.  We got some chinese for dinner, including Dad's favourite - lemon chicken.  David had another go at fixing the letter box, but while the reed switch worked, there was still another issue with the wiring he couldn't sort out.  Next time!

Mum got seven large bunches of flowers during the week, which made it look like she was opening a florists shop!

So goodbye Dad, will see you again in heaven!

Before Dad died I started collating a list of silly things my Dad used to say.  There turned out to be quite a lot.  And I'm sure I've missed heaps.

As mentioned yesterday, there were a few random song snippets, such as "they're coming to take me away hey hey" and "beep beep, beep beep, his horn went beep beep burp".  Somewhat relatedly he'd sing "Sunday driving, Sunday driving" when we were out and about on a Sunday.  If we saw a delapidated building in our travels, the parents had a running joke that it was a "prospective youth hostel".  

When someone did something wrong, he'd say "nooo that's not it, try it again", as per Yosemite Sam.  Actually my brother and I changed the default error beep to that wav file many years ago on the parents' computer, and we had months of laughs because they couldn't figure out how to change it :)

When anyone offered him tea or coffee he'd say "I don't drink, don't smoke, don't drink tea or coffee, don't go around with naughty women".  This was appended in later years with "because I don't know any".  Actually this is why he thought it was so unfair that he had a brain tumour, as he didn't use a mobile phone either.  Still, he'd also say to people "I'll have a vodka and orange. Hold the orange" and at other times "Hello officer, I'm not under the affluence of incahol" in a slurred voice.

Regarding physics, he'd say things like "It's only the lack of heat that makes it cold", "It's only the weight of it that makes it heavy" and "It's not the fall that kills you it's the sudden stop at the bottom".

He could be quite negative (actually that's another story entirely).  But with Mum there'd be such things as "I earn the money, she spends it", "Whatever you say dear", "Yes boss" and "I'm always wrong".

With us there was the whole "Seven eights!!" thing that haunted David around Western Australia in 1984.  David was in primary school and learning his times tables, so on the holiday Dad would call out random times tables for David to give the answer to.  Except he kept tripping up on seven eights.  So Dad did it over and over again getting quite angry with David about it.  Mum said Dad changed on that trip.  He had issues with his camera and basically became a lot more negative and grumpy about things from that point on.  Mum thought he had a mid life crisis at that point.  He'd get annoyed at us for "drop" or leaving things around the house, but actually he was probably the worst offender.  And if we ever happened to burp at the table he'd say "oink".  To which after 1995 I'd respond "la la laaaa" :)

He'd get very frustrated with "yellow lights!" even more so than red ones, and also "Sunday drivers".  If a someone was heard shouting or speaking loudly, he'd say something like "We heard you the first time" or "ahhhh shaddap".  And if someone was incompetant they "couldn't organise single track working on a single length of N gauge".

He loved cockatoos, and the family had one when he was growing up.  So there was always "Scratch cocky" and "Hello cocky" and "G'bye! G'bye!" in screechy voices.  The doves he used to feed were "girls" because they were birds, so it'd be "hello girls" when they came down.

He liked cats, and whenever he saw one he'd say "I tawt I taw a putty tat", or simply a realistic meow (actually he'd meow at pretty random times too).

He loved cheese.  Or "ratfink".  And if anyone ever said "say cheese" for a photo, he'd say "Coon", his favourite cheese.

Whenever he got home and wanted to get changed he'd say "I'm going to take me pants off".  I use that a lot myself now too.

Many every day objects got different names.
"Soviet" was a meat pie - soviet spy in rhyming slang
"Serve you right" was a serviette.  I use this all the time, which confuses people sometimes.
Police were sometimes pronounced "poh-lice", or just "the fuzz"
"Screaming ice" was ice cream
"Gobbies" was his word for potato scallops
"Jackie" was a kookaburra
"Franks" meant thanks
"Probabully" was probably
"Grey shirts" were the train ticket inspectors.  He had an irrational thing against authority and beaurocracy.
"Woofit" meant "what's for tea?"
"Crick" was creek
"Rake" was a lake
"Crouds" were clouds
"Riv-her" was river
"Hurro" was hello
"Martian bastard" was a Mars Bar
"Chew and spew" was McDonalds
"Chif and phips" was fish and chips

And there was plenty of other random $#!+ .. :)

"Pong!" - obviously a response to ping!
"We want a funny story from" - sometimes said at random at the dinner table
"Growl, grumble and gripe, da dum da dum da dum" - the da dum bit might have been appended by my brother, can't remember
"Around the corner and into the straight comes beetle bomb" - or BDL Bomb, after the number plate of their old car
"Screech crunch tinkle tinkle" was a car accident
"Sparkle-arkle-arkling" usually referred to fizzy drinks
"Arc arc arc" or "stone the crows" whenever crows were around
"Die quietly" if someone was coughing loudly
"No bull" for no kidding
"Me three" instead of me too (I use this too)
"Me think that 'mazing" if something was good
"Bless me" if he sneezed
"Oh girl. You can't say oh boy, that's sexist".  

When my friend Luc first met my parents he said to me later "I can understand you better having met your parents".  Maybe anyone that's just read through the above list of words and phrases will see what a crazy Dad I had and understand how I came to be so completely silly :)

So I have a few days where nothing much happens, then I have a day where five people want things from me at once.  Bah.  Can't people spread things out so there's a nice flow of work?

And I've not really even unpacked from my last trip and I'll be off again.  But with people staying here in the whole intervening time.  Really not sure how I'm going to get everything done :(

Three months ago today we came home from Hong Kong.

Thoroughly sucky afternoon.  The way things work mean that some things are super difficult which leads to much frustration.  Then people get upset, so other people get upset and the whole afternoon ends up being a write-off.  *sigh*

Came home completely depressed, although an episode of Sherlock made me feel a bit better.