Now that we’ve got a bit of distance between Christmas Day and now, I figure I’ve unlaxed enough to be able to blog.It’s been interesting having all of J’s family staying with us – I haven’t had to cook for more than 6 people in many years. Last night’s Chicken in Soy was a case in point, and the lesson I learnt was “always cook more vegies!”We’ve had a very quiet few days and apart from codercat deciding that I really should be getting up with the birds too (0400!!) it’s been quite relaxing. We enjoyed mango daiquiris yesterday, courtesy of J’s sister who used to work in a bar; young T has been doing laps of the loungeroom, living room and just outside, and we made sure to jump in the pool on Tueday.Yesterday morning J, Spoonboy, S and I wandered in to GoMA at South Bank to see what the Andy Warhol exhibition had on offer. Parking was easy (well, it was Boxing Day) and cheap, entry was AUD20pp and we saw a massive amount of Warhol’s work covering (as far as I could see) his entire professional life.As somebody with an interest in photography, I was particularly interested in his use and extension of photography in his work. I’m not quite sure how I might describe it just yet (still have to read the exhibition catalogue book), but I found it very powerful while at the same time subtly disconcerting.Today after taking S+C off to Lennon’s for an overnight stay (a present from myself and J), J, C and I took young T for a walk to the park up the street, then for a roundabout meander along our street. Managed to get some semi-decent photos of our nephew on a swing, then when we got home I snapped him some more around home. The killer photos though are the ones from dinner (I made spag bol), where he was so keen to be at one with his dinner that he decided to wear the spaghetti (nose) and bits of broccoli (eyelid)! Just you wait for your 21st, kiddo, then all will be revealed .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_razz.gif

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S+C and C+A will be heading home with a cd each of photos, should be a nice memento of our first Christmas here.It’s been a good time over the last few days. I just wish I could get a bit more sleep.

Overnight I received this email:

Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:35:01 -0800
Message-Id: [200712152235.lBFMZ1tV020872@crawler002.qts.spock.com]
From: Spock Team [donotreply@spock.com]
To: [me]
Subject: Stephen has requested your trust on Spock
Hi James C. McPherson,
Stephen has added you as a trusted contact on Spock.com.  By accepting
trust, you will be able to search each others' network, share contact
information, and get news.
Get started here:  [url]
-
Unsubscribe:  http://www.spock.com/do/public/request_unsubscribe

I’ve got a few questions here. Firstly – why Stephen? I know perhaps 6 or 7. Secondly, wtf is spock.com? Thirdly, why is it that if I go to www.spock.com, I get see this image? .. image:: http://images.spock.com/fail.jpg

Today I got a servicedude out from Steel-line doors to service our garage roller door and remote operation stuff. He managed to tell me that the unit I had the primary door connected to had a faulty logic board, so he swapped the two units around.He didn’t remember to swap the radio receiver with it though. This meant that my remote control didn’t actually work with the powered-on door opener/closer unit. Damn! When Chip came over for coffee this arvo, we spent 5 minutes looking at both units, and very quickly realised that the radio receiver needed to move in order to enable the opening and closing remote control functions. One very quick swap later, and joy had returned, along with a working carkey-sized transmitter unit which actually did tell the open/close unit what to do. J will be pleased

The caption comes from this El Reg article:

Forget test-tubes and blackboards, this is *proper* science.

That’s for damned sure!

I assume that the photo is Copyright 2007 The Register

We finally have a pool fence installed, courtesy of a big weekend of effort and assistance from J’s parents. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank C and A for coming down for the weekend and helping us, we would not have been able to get the project completed in one weekend without their help.It’s a great relief that our friends and family can now visit us without having to worry about their younguns clambering into the pool unsupervised. We’ve got a few more pavers to re-lay and sand to brush around, but it should all be sufficiently prettified by next weekend. .. image:: http://www.jmcpdotcom.com/roller/jmcp/resource/20071204_130533__MG_7708.JPG-640x480.jpg

… it’s going to be interesting – very interesting – to see what are now marginal seats. I think North Sydney, Bennelongand Ryan might be three such seats.With any luck that will make those MPs pay more attention to their electorates and not take them for granted.

On Saturday 24th November 2007, Australia made history. The Liberal/National coalition government under John Howard was solidly defeated by the Australian Labor Party lead by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.Yes, the Australian economy is going gangbusters. Yes, we’ve had about a decade of sustained growth.

Today, in Australia, we finally get the chance to exercise our democratic right and vote for our federal representatives. I’ve eagerly been awaiting today – the campaign has been tortuous and I’m more than past it. We’re going to vote at our local state primary school, where hopefully they’ll put on a better bbq and cake stall than North Sydney Boys’ High did for the last NSW state election.Both J and I made up our minds a long time ago about who we would vote for, and who we would vote against; now we can put that into action. In recent days, however, it’s been very disturbing to hear people calling in to commercial radio saying that they don’t know who they’ll vote for just yet and that their opinions and plans change with every ad they see/hear, or every leaflet they get in the letterbox.Please, if you are somebody who is in that group, please think about the direction that you want the country to go in for the next 5, 10 or even 20 years. Look to the future, use your noggin and think for yourself.Most importantly Get Out There And Vote! ----------------------- You can find your local polling places by using the AEC’s Polling Place Locator.And this evening, if you are at all interested in how the rest of your fellow citizens made their choice, tune in to the coverage on The ABC, Channel Nine or Channel Seven. Channel Ten, on the other hand, is showing this instead. Oh, sorry, I meant Star Wars.

What a complete freakin’ pain these last few days have been!I’d no sooner gotten snv_75a installed on the ultra20 in preparation for xVM-ification, than snv_77 ISOs were released, so I pulled those down and tried the live-upgrade path.Part of the rationale for building up on the ultra20 (rather than my u20m2) is that the u20m2 was so crufty that I really couldn’t do an LU without serious pain.Unfortunately I came across a number of problems with the LU process from snv_75a to snv_77:6628378 snv_77 upgrade installation fails to update grub menu.lst file, still refers to previous version`6628268 snv_75a with non-global zones refuses to allow LU `_\ `6627736 snv_75a sys-unconfig and zone bringup gives “#” for choice of Language and Locale`_6628272 biosdev is still broken, even with nv_sata-attached disks in Sun hardwareNone of which appear to have made it through the firewall into Openness .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_sad.gif

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Suffice to say that I wasted many hours trying to figure out wtf was going on with the LU before I twigged to having to remove my non-global zones, and then once I did get everything fixed up again, I’d managed to leave my punchin certificates on the other environment.Sigh.At least I’ve had the chance to get 77 installed. Once I’ve got a few spare cycles (probably later in the week) I reckon it’ll be fun to play with the in-kernel CIFS service and perhaps xVM.

A short while ago my upstream provider from Watersprite got bought out. In the changeover process for all the downstream customers it seems that my static IP didn’t get migrated to the new system.Fortunately that’s all now been resolved, so www.jmcp.homeunix.com is now back on the air.Happy now .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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:-)

Thankyou to Conrad for chasing this up for me.