dale's thoughts

Does this really count ...

... as a blog? To make things easier for myself I'm going for a quick summary of recent events. I reserve the right to expand on these points in the future.

Grant and Jenna's Wedding

Rocked!

My speech turned out to be a poem that I was happy with and managed to read as I wanted to. Everyone looked good and the photos are great. I didn't spill anything on anyone!

Garth and Rebecca Engaged

Awesome!

Alz and Carla Engaged

Excellento!

Anniebelle

Teeth, pain, sick, no sleep, runny nose, cranky, no sleep, sick, pain, sad, runny nose, no sleep... ad infinitum. Poor little bug. Love the bug.

Vocabulary awesome, counting awesome, colours... well.. getting there.

Callum

Love the boy. Doing well but been sick with flu, headache, infected finger, sore knee, not sleeping the best but getting there. Super smart, great report card. Proudest Dad in the world.

Cassandra

Sick, no sleep, ad infinitum. Getting better. Holding the fort together. On top of everything. Love the Super Mum.

Golf

Back to the driving range. Not ready for the course.

Work

Still there (thankfully). Getting in early to get home early and focus my family time at the afternoon.

Kung Fu

Still there (barely). Not been able to train due to sick, barely managed to make it the last few times. Should be able to get back to normal next week. School hols break will help. Need to advertise and get more students http://www.southerncrane.org. Oh yeah, and update the web site.

Weight

Lost some, got sick, lost some more, tried to put some back on, may have gone too far but not keeping an eye on it whilst being sick. I know how to maintain and manage it so should not be a problem for me again. Unnecessary photo of fatty Dale removed from blog.

That's it for now. Will I expand on these points? Only time, will tell.

Love You Since Long Time

Wow over four months since I could be bothered to write anything. That's not a very good effort is it? I've been meaning to write a lot and have been thinking about what I would write but not actually had the time or motivation to get something out.

Since I had the whole month of January off (and didn't write anything) I guess I should see what I can remember. Holidays were good, we drove to Melbourne and stayed with Uncle Peter and Aunty Josie. Caught up with Grandma, Uncle David and Amanda. The drive was OK apart from the last 2 hours each direction at which time Annie was truly 'over it' and had had enough travelling. Managed to lose a few more kilos and was quite happy with my weight over the holidays. I was especially good at Christmas.

Back to work it seemed like everything was exactly where I had left it, not that I would have expected anything different but one can only hope. At least I didn't get called when I was on holidays, which meant I completely let work fall out of my mind.

I turned 31 in March and did manage to bring cakes in to work but didn't do a party, other than the communal dinner out for March birthdays. I got $100 Kmart vouchers of which I spend $60 on a swanky new pillow made out of foam. I also got and A&R voucher which I bought 'The Long Way Round' DVDs and have been watching over the last week. I might do a party for 2^5.

Annie goats started day-care in Jan and Callum started school in Feb. Annie seems to have settled in well and there are nowhere near as many tears from her as there were when Callum started there. I'm told she loves to dance and sing (as she does at home). I can already tell that she's going to be a lover of the arts. She is a clever little cookie too and is picking up her ABCs and 123s, though more from the tunes used to sing them than from the letters and numbers themselves.

Callum has also settled in well to school and has quickly shown himself to be among the best readers and counters in his class. Quite surprising considering he is also one of the youngest. It makes you realise how many millions of taxpayers dollars are wasted because parents couldn't be bothered spending time with their kids before they start school. There seems to be an attitude that it is the education system's responsibility to teach kids to read and write instead of the parent. Anyway we will continue to give Callum the best start he can and help him learn as much as he wants.

Recently my grown up boy had his 5th birthday. I'm so proud of the way he (mostly) handles life and it was nice to see him have a good time with all his friends. He is generous and loving but does have a short temper which he gets from his parents. It's hard not to have high expectations of him because most of the times he meets or exceeds them, but when he doesn't he has real trouble coping. 5 is a cool age because you can hold up all the fingers on one hand at once and proudly display your age. I wish I could do 5 over again.

Had seriously bad food escape on Sat so lost a fair bit of weight over the weekend. The past 3 days chocolate bender that I've been on (leftovers from Easter) should fix that :D

Baby brother's wedding next week. Better think about writing out a speech.

SSL Replication with Tivoli Directory Server

The error: "bind error: strong authentication not supported" when setting up SSL replication is misleading. If you have serverAuth set, consider this note:

Note Replication over SSL requires ServerClientAuth Secure mode.

Golf

Hit a bucket of balls with my Dad at the driving range yesterday. It's really the first time in a long time I can remember doing anything just with him alone. I had a good time and did a little better than I thought I would. Still far from golf course material though. I need to do things like that more often.

This morning Callum and I played mini-golf. We had a good time - he was very competitive and was proud of his hole in one at the end. Played with Annabelle at the play centre afterwards but didn't get much quality time. I think we need to do that at home. She had fun at least.

Back at training again for the first time this year. Lion Dance season fast approaching.

Mow mow mow the lawn, gently out the back

Gardening... check. Lawn... check. Still a ways to go but looking better.

Pretty quiet day on account of continuous brain ache. The boy got to see Madagascar 2 at the movies with his mum and Isaac. He came back and was proud to announce that "I like to move it, move it. I like to... move it!".

Zoned out watching the cricket while they were away as the girl had fallen asleep on me. Dissapointing batting day for Australia :(.

A Day at the Park

Today we went to the park in Wollongong. The kids got to play with Aunty Katy. Although it was cloudy and windy (therefore the beach was off) we had a good time. Pants with holes are perfectly acceptable.

Excellent food and Coffee at Turkish Delights Wollongong expanded the belly a bit but well worth it. Will be going back for sure. Love that Pide.

Soccer in the backyard was a little cold. No penalties were awarded no matter how hard he tried. The girl was happy all day, when allowed to roam free. Her speed walking definitely getting faster. Love the baby talk.

I could get used to not working quite easily. Looking forward to retirement in 35 years. Need to do some exercise tomorrow as holiday mode is starting to take hold. Lawn needs a mow and the garden need a tidy - that would do it.

Optus Sucks

After getting my line back, I got around to reporting another fault to Exetel. I thought that from the tests that I'd done and my mrtg latency graphs that my local exchange (Warilla) was underprovisioned in terms of Optus' (Exetel's DSLAM provider) backhaul bandwidth. The biggest affect this has on me is that BF2 is unplayable during "peak" hours (usually when I want to play) but fine after peak hours. This probably had something to do with me losing interest in it lately.

After spending countless hours (ok, I reckon at least 20 is realistic) over several weeks I was finally able to get them to get Optus to acknowledge that they were in fact underprovisioned. Small satisfaction to know I was right all along, but a month ago they told me Optus would not provision more bandwidth until at least February. Pretty lame, but nothing I (or Exetel) can do about it. Optus sucks.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm back, oh yeah!

So why did I abandon my blog? I don't know, I guess there were too many things going on in my life that took priority and the blog needed to sit on the back burner for a while. I just didn't feel like doing it. For a while I was tired and lost interest in a lot of things so it's probably a good thing I didn't put anything down on paper.

Since September, it's been business as usual with the major highlights mainly coming from watching Annabelle growing up and from being able to see how our relationship is forming. She turned one in December - I guess you had to be there - it was a good day for her: snooze for a bit, eat, snooze, get pampered, snooze etc. You get the idea. There is video of the cake time that I need to sit down and edit then put on a DVD. By her birthday she was beginning to walk and has now almost mastered it. She still falls down and resorts to speed crawling at times, mainly to catch up to me. She has her own gobbly-de-gook language that she reads books out loud with and sings happy randomness to herself. She has a very happy but fragile personality. I love making her laugh.

Callum has been growing up and we've been playing a lot of backyard soccer. He's pretty good at saving goals and his kick is becoming stronger. It helps him with fitness and coordination but really tires him out. His tiredness and other complaints led us to consult a doctor(s) and get blood tests done but they came back clear. Put it down to growing pains I hope, as my Dad mentioned I went through a similar thing as a child.

Somewhere in there Callum became really good at reading and can read whole books. Not bad since he hasn't started school yet. A few weeks ago we were going through some more complicated math stuff, like adding and subtracting in the order of tens and adding and subtracting other units like thousands and millions. He seemed to get the idea (I used an analogy of people giving him bananas). Note that if someone gives you a million bananas you don't have a million bananas but rather a belly ache! His writing has improved and he wrote all his own Christmas cards.

Work wise it's been a bit of a struggle to stay motivated with all the things happening at work and knowing that I have the whole of February off on leave. The last few days at work around Christmas/New Year were really quiet, which goes to show that if you just leave the stupid computers alone then they'll be fine and you don't need to do much.

Kung Fu was pretty busy with the Links to Learning program. I ended up teaching Lion Dance to three of the Links kids which they performed at their graduation. They only had two weeks to learn it so they put in a great effort after school and on weekends to learn it and pull it off with the help of the regular team of boys. As a side effect of losing a bit of weight, training has been a lot easier and much more fulfilling. Both go hand in hand but it's nice when an improvement in one area of my life leads to improvements in other areas. I still need to sit down and do the previous years reports for Fair Trading. If only we had an accountant in our ranks.

At about the same time I stopped updating my blog I backed right off of BF2 since it was consuming valuable time. The ladder seasons have finished and there aren't a lot of people playing. The TP website and teamspeak have been pretty vacant of late. I bought TF2 on steam and have been playing that for something a little different. It's OK but it doesn't have the same immersiveness that I get out of BF2.

Somehow we survived Christmas - it's a crazy time of year. It has made me realise that I need to concentrate on catching up with the people close to me a lot more and be pro-active at maintaining friendships. I hope to be better at this in the future and start putting people first rather than be lazy or insular. I wish life were less hectic and weekends were longer. I guess that's what holidays are for. Note to self, adhere to self imposed 11pm-ish curfew.

The future... hmm. Here is what I would like to do, in no particular order:

• Blog more frequently, perhaps daily.
• Get our home extension built. Actively call architects etc and get the show on the road.
• Read more. I don't mean Google Reader/Forums etc, I mean real-life honest-to-goodness paper books. Maybe even buy some textbooks that I am interested in.
• Play with the kids more. No more lazy TV time. Turn off the third parent.
• Fiddle with micro-controllers. Put what I did at uni to use for fun.
• Write more programs. Try and keep my brain fresh.
• Watch some cricket. Maybe even go to a match.
• Spend money. Stop being such a tighty-tight-tight-arse. Spend some money on computer hardware that would make my life easier.
• Garden. Tidy it up. Stop having the crap-est looking front yard in the street. Grow and eat some veggies.

Sigh, I'll get there one day...