.:M@tyBoy:.

The last two months have been very busy. My wife and I have bought a house and will be moving in a few weeks. I have had to stop myself from posting any news about the house as my original plan was to spring it on family and friends after we have moved, maybe even invite a few people over for dinner and then when they turned up to the empty house take them across to the new place. After realising how much we actually have to organise before moving we thought it best we come clean and tell everyone.

Here are a couple photo’s of the new place:

Its a semi-detached house

The furniture doesn't come with it

I purchased a LG DVD player for divx/xvid capabilities as my current player is very outdated. One of the features of the new DVD player is HD-Upscaling and the sales person at Harvey Norman asked if I required a HDMI cable. I was shocked to see HDMI cables from $80 - $300, as my DVD player only cost $120.

Later I did some online research and found that Australian consumers are being ripped off. I recently purchased from Play-Asia a 1.5m HDMI cable for less then $10 delivered. The cable works great and the cheapest I could find it in Australia was $20-$30 from eBay or $50 from Dick Smiths.

I am pretty sure that Australian retailers like Harvey Norman, JB and Dick Smiths are relying on Australian consumers thinking “I just spent $3000 on the LCD screen, its only another $100 for the cable” or they are trying to deceive consumers with statements like “24 carat gold-plated connectors ensure the best signal quality”.

Signal quality is more likely to be impacted by the length of the cable. The average consumer probably requires 3m or less of cable and I sincerely doubt they will see any significant improvement in “signal quality” between an entry level cable and the more expensive “gold-plated” cables.

Hopefully the price of HDMI cables fall once more people adopt the technology. In the mean time I suggest you do your research before purchasing a HDMI cable inside Australia.

That’s right I have a new baby… Mazda 2. My wife has got herself full-time work and selfishly wants to drive her car to work. After some discussion about what we can/should do we decided to purchase a new car. We have been lucky to only require one vehicle for so long, but we were eventually going to need a second vehicle as our careers progressed. If Melbourne’s public transport wasn’t so shit maybe we could have avoided it longer.

With some help of my brother we eventually purchased a vehicle from Ballarat City Mazda and we were well looked after. We did do some price matching in Melbourne, but found the staff member at Penfold’s Mazda arrogant and pushy to the point they wanted us to pay them more then we were offered by Ballarat. I know WTF!?! Pay more? So we took our business to Ballarat and got the price we were quoted and it was ready by the following weekend.

I have to say although we didn’t want to spend the money and we could have come up with other solutions, the new car is pretty nice. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, I have always said new cars are a waste of money and I stand by it, they are, but there is something about driving a car nobody else has owned. The other thing I like is it is a manual, I have been driving an auto for the last few years and didn’t realise how much I missed driving a manual, even in traffic.

Here are some pictures from the internets. I can’t be bothered taking photo’s when somebody else already has

I have commenced my new position as Analyst Programmer this week and although it is early stages I am very keen to begin actual work. Most of my time at the moment is spent reading over the web developers wiki and reading through functional specifications. So far the most challenging part has been the drive to work, surprisingly I don’t really have to wake up much earlier as its only about a 30 minute drive.

Just after 11:00am a tuck truck arrives and luckily I am still able to support my Farmers Union Iced Coffee addiction, although I am trying to cut back. Shortly after the first tuck truck, another less healthy tuck truck arrives, I have yet to investigate the contents of this less healthy tuck truck but I am told that it has all the pies, sausage rolls and other greasy goodness.

All of the staff are very friendly and I have already made some “assumptions” about certain staff members personalties, but I won’t get into details here. The staff arrangement is very similar to that of Swinburne, with BA’s, Developers and Database/Unix administrators all in the same section. The building is quite large and I have yet to be shown around to all the other departments.

Overall the change has been pretty smooth, despite having to sacrifice some of the more pleasurable aspects of working at Swinburne.

“A resignation is a grave act; never performed by a right minded man without forethought or with reserve.”

This quote sums it up nicely, I have decided to spread my wings and move from the university sector into the private sector. There isn’t much to tell at this stage the new position title is Analyst Programmer, it is amusing that I loose the “Senior” of my current role but significantly improve my take home pay.

I will miss many of the people at Swinburne, but mostly I will miss fitting in 18 holes of golf during lunch breaks. I look forward to the beginning of my new job and I hope it is as exciting as I am excited.

It is 1:00pm and I have just dragged myself from bed onto my chair at home. I have to admit I did not think I was that tired but given the opportunity I have managed to waste almost the whole day in bed. My wife unfortunately had to work today, as she works for Melbourne University. Melbourne University refuses to observe Labour Day because the workers who were building it went on strike. Just one of many protests in its history. So the students and teachers still have to attend on a public holiday, although I expect most of the students probably don’t go anyway.

This is something of an oddity to me, how can they choose not to recognise a public holiday. Labour day was primarily a fight for improved working conditions and an eight hour day (eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest). By not recognising this holiday Melbourne University is basically saying, we prefer to overwork our staff and underpay their efforts. Talk about holding a grudge, I think it is time they got over the fact that a few building stones didn’t get laid that day and start to think about the long term benefit that strike had on a nation.

The Identity Management project that I have been one of the technical leads for has finally started to wind down. We deployed the final product over a fortnight ago and have only had to put out some relatively minor spot fires. Although the project did not run as smoothly as I had hoped we did deliver some benefit to the university and the majority of users seem happy with the solution.

I had hoped to have a little bit more time to work on my poor little RV90, but the forecast is not looking good. University has already commenced and this semester I am undergoing the software team project. This project combined with my full-time work commitments is going to make the next few months very challenging.

After some speedy work today I have released version 1.1.1 of Tagline History Plugin. I have done away with the ugly “prepend/append” fields and replaced them with a nice customizable template file. This template file should allow you to achieve the desired look you want for your tagline history page.

The new template file approach looks much nicer when rendered onto the Tagline History page, well at least I think it looks better. After some user feedback I have fixed the template file, it is now XHTML valid ;).

When we were younger we used to scoot around on my Dad’s old RV90. And like all young boys, my brothers and I eventually rode that motorcycle into the ground. Sure we managed to resurrect it a few times over the last 20 years but eventually it just sat in the shed and would not run any longer.

I decided that my boredom recently is purely caused by the fact that I do not have an activity or project to keep me occupied. After spending a weekend out on the farm trying to get another motorbike running I thought wouldn’t it by nice to breathe some life back into the old girl. So last week I purchased the RV90 service manual off eBay and this weekend I began work on restoring this old relic. Already I have managed to strip the bike down, perform some general cleaning, pull apart the carburetor and I have identified several damaged parts which I will now begin to source.

Obviously the photo’s below do not represent the very very poor state my little RV90 is in, however I hope after this project I will at least have a working RV90… The beautification process will have to be done after I test my mechanical whit.

2007 has ended and at a first glance I seem to be stuck in this endless loop of study and work. This time of year is rough for many people, as it causes you to reflect on what you have done and where you wanted to be. Looking back over this year I can’t say that I have achieved everything that I wanted but I have certainly made some significant decisions, the most important of which was to get married.

The beautiful part of being married is that every step that I take in the future is taken together. I’m not stuck in a loop, I am merely stuck in one of life’s ruts. My wife and I are always able to put things back into perspective for each other and I am glad she is there to pull me out when I need her. There are so many more decisions to make and even more challenges to come. I won’t be making any ridiculous new years resolutions, I will just keep moving forward, only this time I have help.