I only got through part of my todo list for this weekend :(
Just too busy :( And didn't recover my lost sleep either. Argh it's a disaster.

Didn't get to reinstall windoze, didn't get to do a dvd database for my friends, didn't get Esther read, didn't get the washing up done.

Did manage to get some new fish, go to cousin's engagement party, a bit of programming, and dinner at a friend's place

* buy some fishies - a few angels and a betta
* get a card/wrapping for present for my cousin's engagement present
* nuke my windoze installation and reinstall - I'm thoroughly sick of IE crashing all the time and taking all the other windows with it
* cousin's engagement party Saturday night
* SLEEEEEP!!!!

Had another good day today. Church in the morning, did a water change in my fish tank, as well as rearranging some of the plants. Apart from that just watched some tv and that was about it. Totally relaxing day :) (oh, and a load of washing up which wasn't too much fun, but I needed to do it so as not to feed the cockroach population)

Channel 7 have started up a new show called "Your Life on the Lawn". They empty the contents out of a family house (at least the bedrooms anyway) and the owners go through it all, sorting out the junk from the stuff they want to keep. The stuff they don't want to keep they sell at either garage sale or auction, or they throw out. And while they're at it, they give the rooms a face lift. The end result of course is quite spectacular.

If I had to do that, almost nothing would get thrown out or sold - pretty much everything I have has some sort of sentimental or "potential" value. As much as I'd love to get rid of the clutter in my life I just couldn't bear to part with anything. I just have to get more creative with my storage solutions :)

Well today was how weekends *should* be. Morning relaxing, reading up on tropical fish, answering support mail, reading mail. Trek out and about window shopping at a couple of different aquarium stores, pick up a dvd player on the way home. Clean up the unit. Have friends over for dinner, enjoy some wine and company. Go to bed feeling pleasantly relaxed.

I'm going to need a Dr Video device for my dvd player, as my tv is so ancient it only has an aerial input. And I can't play it through a vcr thanks to macrovision. Jaycar make a little device that strips out the macrovision (although probably with some loss of quality - but with my video/audio setup it probably won't be noticable) which should let me view dvds properly.

*yawn* I'm off to bed.. night! :)

1. What is your most prized material possession?
Probably my computer and digital camera (can't have one without the other really :) )

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?
Yikes I've had *stacks* of stuff since I was a kid. Although one of my earliest memories is getting my bed, which I still sleep in

3. Are you a packrat?
Majorly!

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?
I like a clean house, and I like to be free of clutter. But I'm also a hoarder, so I have to think up creative storage solutions :)

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?
No themes. I was thinking the other day it'd be cool to have a space lego room, but this unit is just far to small for that sort of thing. Mind you, my lounge room is basically just a widened hallway. All I have in it is a little couch and a small table. So technically I would have the room

It's kind of ironic that this friday five is about material possessions - I've been reading Ecclesiastes. Strange little book of the Bible that's for sure, I still don't understand it. "Meaningless, a chasing after the wind!"

I'm going to go on an aquarium crawl tomorrow, to look for a shipwreck to decorate my tank, and maybe some fish.. *maybe*. While I'm out I might also have a look around for a DVD player. It's getting about time that I get one (my Dad is looking at getting one also, and it'd be a bit tragic if he got one before me :) )

Looking forward to a full two day weekend this weekend. One day weekends (as per last weekend) totally suck. I reckon we should have three day weekends every week.. just a thought :)

I felt totally *blah* today, but had trouble explaining why. Perhaps it was because I only had a half day weekend (had to work all Saturday, church sunday, then just too hot to relax), or just the combination of annoying little things between sleep and lunch.

I was thinking at one stage I should keep a mood diary where I could put the stuff that affects me positively and negatively, and see if I could find any patterns. Except I'd probably only keep it up for a few weeks before I lost interest.

My car has plumbing problems (again) :( This time a 1mm hole in a radiator hose squirting a little green stream of water into the engine bay. Fortunately not a big enough leak to be a big problem yet, I'm just topping up the radiator before going anywhere, but I'm going to have to get it fixed tomorrow. A nice walk up High St in the morning for me.

I couldn't wait any longer, I had to get fish this weekend :)

I dropped into our local aquarium today and was served by a *kid* ! He picked out 8 Long-Finned Zebra Danios for me. I also picked up a couple of plants and some flakes for the fish before wandering back up the hill home.

I let the bag sit in the top of the tank for a little while (while planting the plants and rearranging the others a bit), and then added a little tank water to the bag and removed some of the bag water. I did that a couple of times over a bit over half and hour before letting the fish swim out into the tank.

They went totally nuts, swimming around, exploring their new surroundings and chasing each other. They also refused to sit still long enough for me to take a decent photo of them. The pic up the top is the only decent one I got! I also gave them a tiny pinch of food, which they devoured within a minute. I'll give them more next time after they've settled in a bit.

Now the fun part begins - the joys of the ammonia/nitrogen cycles.

And this was in the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks later:

By Jenny Sinclair
August 6 2002
Next

Australia's new domain naming system brought in a lot of firsts - the first truly personal domain name, the first of the new com.au names and the first "reserved" or offensive word allowed to be used in an Australian URL.

The first Australian personal domain name bought under the new system was not Smith or Jones, but the wonderfully Australian "Kazza". Sydney woman Karen Johnson, 28, bought kazza.id.au, in preference to karen.id.au, because Kazza is what her friends call her.

"I just though Kazza would be a good name to have," she says.

Johnson, who works in IT at the University of New South Wales, says she was talking to a friend at an ISP and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy a domain name. She didn't imagine it would be the first of its type to be issued.

Technically, id.au names have been available before, but they were only sold under sub-domains such as "wattle.id.au".

There isn't much at her site yet; Johnson, a confessed Internet addict, is considering moving her personal site there soon.

She also bought the name johnson.id.au. "I got that for my family," she says. "I can set my e-mail address for whoever I want, so I can have colin@johnson.id.au (for her uncle)."

The first page she's hosted under the johnson.id.au URL is a memorial site for her grandmother, Win Johnson, who died last month.

In Adelaide, Danen Lush, 28, was the proud owner of the first com.au name under the new system.

For her, the new system was little more than a delay; she'd applied for bodyjewels.com.au just as the naming system was suspended over the weekend before the changeover, and it was registered on July 1 when the system reopened.

Now, a month later, she's busily building inventory for her start-up business, an online shop. Lush is selling jewellery, both the conventional type and for attachment to body piercings - hence the name.

She plans to keep the business virtual, operating from home.

Western Australian domain-name speculator Brad Norrish, 23, began domain-name trading several years ago.

He is participating in auctions for some contested generic domain names that are being sold by auDA through online auction house stuff.com.au.

Last month he picked up what Internet industry watchers would consider to be a couple of bargains when he registered f--.com.au and music.com.au for less than $100 each, at retail prices.

Neither were put to auction.

He says this is a good result when the generic auction has seen some hefty premiums paid for some names.

I never realised just how much chlorine they put in Sydney water until last night. On the weekend I got a fish tank (a nice AR-620T from Strictly Aquariums) and I've been running water through the filters to get the bacteria thing happening. I noticed that the tank wasn't evaporating very much (the water level hadn't dropped at all since I filled it), so I opened the hood and poked my nose in to have a look. I was nearly overwhelmed with the chlorine fumes trapped between the water and the hood of the tank! It smelt like a heated indoor swimming pool. This is why fresh water fish tank owners need to "age" their water by letting it sit for a day or two in the air to let the chlorine dissipate out before adding it to the tank.