Last night was Chris' birthday party at @Newtown. Had a thoroughly fantastic night. There was a great turnout of people, and I even knew a few of them :) Actually I even managed to drag along a few people that barely even know Chris. :)

He was utterly blown away by the present a bunch of us got him. His first reaction was "I can't accept this - I know how much it's worth". He couldn't quite grasp that so many people care so much for him. I didn't know how to say that, so all I said was "we all love you chris", which I probably wouldn't have even said if I'd thought about it.. it kind of just popped out :)

Had to crash out on the couch for a couple of hours before coming home. I only have five drinks the whole night, but you don't want to risk these things when driving.

So another weekend gone, with absolutely nothing achieved. Oh well :)

Aside from my cousin's wedding (actually their second wedding, this time in a Greek Orthodox church as opposed to a celebrant wedding) and a games night at James and George's which was a lot of fun, all I've done this weekend is read other peoples' blogs (eg Rick Macherat and Dave) and links off them (eg Despair). Although I did pull apart most of my Harry Potter lego.. I don't want it getting sun-damaged. I'll put it all together again when (if) I get the remaining sets I'm missing. I left out the Hogwarts Castle, Dumbledore's Office and the Hogwarts Express, as these are the best sets in the series.

I'm feeling incredibly unmotivated at the moment. Possibly because it's taken so long to tidy up the study that I'm getting demoralised with it. Possibly because of the heat, although today has been somewhat more comfortable that previous weeks.

I really should go shopping. I've run out of toilet paper and have been using tissues. It's just such a pain to have to go out.. would much rather leave it til I'm out anyway, like on the way home from work. Maybe I can borrow a roll from the neighbours. Or just keep using tissues. hrmm

Had another nothing day today. Just too hot. I actually spent a good deal of time trying to sort out the filing on my computer. It seems I have more than 4gb of *stuff* on one drive, and the backup job is failing because you can't put more than 4gb into one file on a fat32 partition. So I thought I'd try and clear out some junk, and burn other stuff to cd as necessary etc. In the end I ended up putting *more* stuff onto the disk as I'd brought home a pile of files from my work computer to sort out.

So anyway, I decided that I'd go for a swim. I haven't been for a swim all summer, and decided that if I waited any longer for someone to swim with, well I wouldn't get a swim at all. I'd of course have to go after dark, as I hate swimming alone. So 8:30 comes around (after watching the 60 minutes 25 year anniversary - weird because they filmed the end of it on the big sound stage they have next to the car park, and had setup a marquee in the car park and I'm, like, "been there!" hehe.. but I digress) and mother calls. The funniest part of the whole conversation is that she tells me that Dad has shaved off his beard!! He hasn't shaved in 27 years!! This I've *got* to see :) So I'm in a kinda good mood, when I go downstairs. Only to find that they still haven't fixed the frigging filter and the pool is closed until further notice. They decided it was broken on *Wednesday* and were going to get someone to come out the next day. I realise now that the pool was actually quiet all weekend. *sigh* So now I'm *still* hot and sweaty. Think I'll just wash my hair and go to bed.

Guy very kindly lent me his Olympus C750 UZ camera on the weekend for me to have a play with, as this was the camera I was interested in buying as my next digital camera. I've had an Olympus C-900 Zoom (D-400 Zoom in USA) for five years and it's been the most amazing camera. But by todays standards the pictures aren't as sharp as they could be, and the resolution could be bigger also. After reading review sites, I thought I might look at the Olympus C750 Ultra Zoom.

The biggest selling point on this camera is its fantastic 10X optical zoom lens. It also takes AA batteries, which George highly recommended to me after going through some very expensive batteries in her camera. And, being Olympus, it has a beautiful file naming convention that I really would not like to give up - it keeps the month and date in the actual photo name, so you can always tell when you took the photo from the name of the file. When you take as many photos as I do, this is a big plus, because you never have to rename files, and only need to separate them on year.

Initial results proved very disappointing. Not helped by the fact I probably had it on the wrong picture mode setting. That fixed up I was able to get some more successful photos. However, being at night, with only a single 100W incandescent light bulb for illumination, the camera still had problems getting a focus lock, resulting in blurry photos. There was also a lot of noise in the photos, especially at the higher resolutions. I had read a lot of reviews on this camera at www.dpreview.com and this weakness was commented on by many users. However, I would have thought that this camera, being five years newer than my current one, would still be better at focussing, and that perhaps these other users had a higher basis for comparison. Apparently not, and it seems that my five year old camera can still do a better job of getting the focussing right.

The macro setting also had issues. Again it had trouble getting a focus lock, often focussing at all sorts of odd depths, if at all. But the biggest gripe for me is that when using a flash, the end of the lens casts a shadow, resulting in photos with a semi-circle of shadow at the bottom. This would piss me off no end.

A smaller gripe is the electronic viewfinder. It's very difficult to see whether photos are in focus or not through it. Mind you, I had no idea at all with my old camera because there was no link between the lens and the viewfinder.

Having said all of that though, when it gets it right, it does so spectacularly. Outdoors with good light, this camera is superb. The 10x optical zoom is like a telescope, bringing up detail not even visible to the naked eye. The picture sharpness is great, as are the colours.

The other big success I had with it was with photos of my fish. My old camera has always had trouble focussing through the glass and water, but the C750 seemed to be able to get it right more often. I now have some of the best photos of my fish I've ever taken.

So. I've just looked at all the photos again, and I have to say I'm very disappointed with this camera. More so because I was expecting so much from it. If primarily taking outdoor shots with good light, then go for it. But if you take a lot of indoor shots, or macros with flash, then forget it. The focussing and noise problems really put me off this camera. Now I'm back to square one, trying to decide what camera to get.

Just watched the last two episodes of Nip Tuck, and was practically rolling around in laughter over a couple of scenes in the final episode. I haven't laughed that much over a tv show in ages. I know it's a trashy soap opera, but it's somehow compelling, and I found myself rather enjoying it.

I've also started collecting lego for making mosaics. Guy told me of a K-Mart that has the blue lego tubs, so I'm going to trek out tomorrow and see if there's any left. But I want more 1x1 bricks, and bricks of different colours, like brown, grey, tan, orange, purple and more green, so I've started buying lots of it off ebay.

Martial Air (the outsource company I couldn't think of the name of the other day) came out this afternoon after I'd left. Apparently it was not a compressor as first thought, but in fact a capacitor. So our air conditioner was out of action for a full week, we spent hundreds of dollars on portables, not to mention the cost of having the building air conditioning running all weekend, by something relatively simple. Needless to say my boss was not impressed and will be voicing his concerns with Mitsubishi.

It's hard to believe I started our active directory upgrade just a day and a half ago. It feels like about a week ago.

The upgrade went ok, although it could have been better. We had some wierd issues with dns that I didn't get in my test domain, so ended up having to put dns on the server we were upgrading rather than leaving it on the member server, and then move it across later. And DHCP stopped working when we upgraded the member server it was on, because it turns out you need to authorise dhcp servers in the domain. I didn't have dhcp setup in the test domain, because that would have just confused matters at the time. But at least that was an easy fix. We only had to go back to earlier ghosts once in the day, and managed to work our way around the other problems.

After work, went over to Chris' where a BBQ for his ex flat-mate's girlfriend was in full swing. Had some wine and relaxed for a few hours before getting home very late.

This morning in church, I burst into tears when someone killed a huntsman spider that was wandering around during the break. Sad I know to get that upset over a spider. I don't even *like* spiders.

This afternoon I wasted time drooling over lego and reading Eric Harshbarger's site some more. Didn't get any of the cleaning done that I needed to. Then George picked me up and we took the kids to the fair and went on plenty of rides. Well, they did, George and I mostly just watched. Although I did get lots of goes on the big slippery dip taking Rachel down, and got to drive a dodgem car. Haven't done that in years.

Then Sunday night dinner got moved to Luc and Lizzi's. Was feeling grumpy though, and I'm not sure why. I always seem to get grumpy when I go to their place for dinner.

Finally, almost time for bed. Just need to wash my hair and my lunch plate. blah.

btw, the Superman logo above is my first ever lego mosaic. I built it from sight off the logo on the DVD, so it's not exactly to scale. But I think it turned out fairly well. It's whet (sp?) my appetite for making more mosaics .. but need a *lot* of bricks if I'm going to do it properly!

If I had one word to describe today (and yesterday for that matter), it would be "sticky".

Hot + Humid = Sticky

The pic is of the star at the top of the 3-storey Christmas Tree inside the Queen Victoria Building. Isn't it purty? Snapped it coming back from dinner - Kin Hoong was in town for the weekend and invited a bunch of old friends out for dinner. Tonight's outing had him, me, Nicola and Paul, and we went to The Little Snail in Darling Harbour, which was lovely, but definitely on the pricey side. $50/head for dinner is a little silly in my opinion.

I also got a new fish today - another betta. He's gorgeous, and I'll take some photos tomorrow. I inherited a big bowl when I got the last tank, and needed to put *something* in it :) I'm a bit worried about it getting cold in winter though. How do people heat their betta tanks in winter? I wonder.

Or so the slogan for Pringles goes. Being a rather small person, I have no trouble sticking my hand all the way down to the bottom of a Pringles container to get pringles at the bottom. So it was with Darrah on Survivor VII - winning her third immunity in a row by being able to stick her hand furthest down a tube to reach a key. I thought that was absolutely a classic - cause there's not a whole lot of advantage in being small (like me), except in the odd situation like this and then it's like, you go girl :):)

Other than that, all I managed to achieve today was to mostly clean up my flat, which was pretty much all I wanted to achieve this weekend, so it's all good.

Decided not to stay up and finish "Enchanters' End Game". Decided to be a good girl and go to bed. It's still late though! doh!

Blew up my test AD domain today, and starting setting up the test servers as our new print and dhcp servers. Only two days behind schedule. Still think I should be able to get everything done by the weekend, especially if Sami does the dhcp stuff. Was even toying with the idea of taking Thursday off, but think that may be a little dangerous at this point. If all goes well I might be able to take next Tuesday off instead.

Anyways, really going to bed now!

Successfully moved global catalog servers from AD DC to another on my test domain today. This was after stuffing around with dns last week doing some trials, and leaving it pointed at the wrong place, so the domain controllers wouldn't talk to each other. "frigging dns" is all I have to say about that.

Also successfully connected an OS X mac and an OS 7.6.1 mac to the servers, doing file and print sharing.

Now that those problems have been overcome I can go back to the original plan of having new print and dhcp servers setup by the weekend for a big changeover. *scary*

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ps, in case you were wondering what on earth I'm talking about.. I'm planning our work deployment of active directory. We're upgrading our windows NT 4 domain to 2003. You know those ads on at the moment that say "we're merging all these domains and making it all easier blah blah blah" to which the boss just looks at him, and so he says "we'll save $2 million a year" ... well we're nothing like that really, given that we only have one domain and two servers, but that's what we're doing. I've been thinking about it for a couple of months, but really working frantically on it for the past couple of weeks when we all suddenly realised that next year was only 6 weeks away, and we plan to go live with it mid January. fun fun fun!