I’m about to make some major database changes. Afterwards, you’ll see a few useful new features and one ambitious blog post.

I’ve been a little delinquent in sharing my life stories, so hopefully this weekend will make up for the past few months. I decided it was time to go camping again, so on Friday night I met Remko and Daisy and drove north towards Colo: the middle of nowhere, yet only 45 minutes from the outskirts of Sydney. I set up my tent and started cooking dinner: curry! That’s right, I was not exactly roughing it. Soon after dinner, I curled up in my new two-person tent and quickly fell asleep.

Most weekends closely mimic each other: drinking a lot of wine, playing on the computers, eating lots of food. However, this past weekend was pleasantly eventful. On Saturday night, I met some friends in Windsor, a small suburb on the way to the Blue Mountains. After a stunning dinner of fish curry with numerous sides, I drove into Richmond to watch a local theatre guild’s production, A Dark Winter Night. Having been spoiled by theatre since childhood, I still enjoyed the performance. It was humble but entertaining. They even served free coffee and biscuits at intermission!

The laptop had 1 GB of memory and ran Windows Vista. I heard a memorable quote today: “I think Vista plus Office equals Monster.” That was followed by: “I just clicked the exsomething.exe with the somethingelse.exe and hit end task. Now my desktop went black.”

I had a mere 12 minutes until my laptop, running Ubuntu 7.10, finished upgrading to the newest release, so it seemed like the perfect time to share a few updates from my life. The last few weeks have been chaotic, to say the least. I found my own place at last! I am now in Pendle Hills. The commute to work isn’t much different, and taking the bus may even be a little faster. Living in a house again, rather than an apartment, is nice. I am quickly warming to the idea and generally enjoying the house.

This is a fairly inconsequential entry, but I found the incident amusing. I assembled my external drive enclosure this morning and noticed a bug crawling around inside it; I hadn’t used the enclosure in a while. I decided not to interrupt what I was doing to remove it, so I closed the enclosure and hoped for the best. About an hour later, while moving files from my laptop onto the drive, I heard a dreadful “blugrrrrrrrrrrrr.” I looked over and said, “Oh no!” For a few seconds, I thought the hard drive was failing. Then I realised the bug had tried to crawl out through the little fan.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to go on a boat ride with my co-workers as a team-building activity. Although we didn’t do the usual team-building exercises, I think everyone had a great time. Clinton and I brought a case of beer, Alanna brought the wine and food, and James was the designated boat driver.

Yesterday we went to Coogee Beach for a BBQ, and I must say, a BBQ in December is pretty nice. Wan, our flatmate, and I visited the store in the early afternoon and bought a case of beer and $50 worth of meat. One of the nice things about the beach is that there are free BBQs to use: just push the button and away you go. After a few hours of eating, we took a short walk to the beach. I was nominated as the designated driver, so I took Wan and one of his friends back to his house to change. Shortly afterward, we were back at the beach and then on our way home.

First, don’t worry: it wasn’t me. The day began as usual: checking email, calling the United States, and taking care of business. I baked some muffins and scones. To get out of the house, I decided to visit one of the markets on Oxford Street in the city. I love markets. At about 2:00, I left the house and headed down Parramatta Road. An hour later, I had parked on a side street and was walking towards the market. It had more variety than the markets I knew in Taiwan, which often sold many of the same things, and I enjoyed looking around. One food vendor wanted to sell a few remaining kebab sandwiches and lowered the price from $8.50 to $5, so I picked up two.

As you can read, I’ve been traveling around quite a bit lately. This means I haven’t been checking the comments on my blog, which means quite a bit of spam has been entered. I am blocking the spam via akismet, however, it is still recorded in the database. Being somebody who hates cluttered desktops, you can imagine how I feel about having a lot (447) of spam. Well, since akismet flips the is_public switch True for good comments and False for bad comments, that makes a really easy query in mysql.