I am. However, I've been a wee bit busy and stuff has been piling up that was of way higher importance than doing blog posts...
So, on to a quick recap.
My trusty Fart Falcon is slowly dying. Now it has decided to spring a leak somewhere in the cooling system, in addition to all the other things that tend to fail slowly. Very annoying. Recently my RACQ membership came up for renewal; after considering all the options I decided that it's time to go for one of the advanced assistance plans: the rationale being that on the first breakdown I'll have the extra cost back...hmm, that's a sure sign to look out for a replacement.
In the meantime, the teaching semester has ended and my research semester has started. I've finally found some time to produce some long-planned documentation and do some work on a few research papers, as well as get back into my PhD research work.
On the personal interrelational front...well, there is no front. There's nothing happening, which is Not Too Good. I'm busy mucking around with all kinds of things, so at times being alone doesn't bother me at all. Then again, there's evenings where it bothers me a lot. I should take up less volunteer jobs. But then I'd be more alone, and would fret more.
Apropos volunteering: Yours Truly is now responsible for exmh in Debian. The original maintainer hasn't done a thing in years, so I wheedled him into letting me co-maintain. Net result was that I've spent a good two days cleaning up the mess of 5+ years of neglect (there are still some bugs open that were entered over 7 years ago!) Positive thing to find out, though, was that most of my gpg + q-agent patches made it into mainstream exmh somewhere around 2.6. And Tcl, while being weird, is a lot of fun to work with.
Apropos apropos volunteering: as mentioned in another post in the flying section, we spent a few weekends at Killarney, not flying much but wielding chainsaw, rake and whippersnipper so that the comp in October becomes a success. Of Course I had to do the website for that, too - but despite me not being a person gifted with lots of design talent people have taken to that one. The logo is mine, too: the halfway pleasing results of mucking around with Gimp for...can't remember, but it was too much time.
Tuesday I got the cds from NZ that I had ordered a few weeks ago. Ah, great stuff! There's so few Kiwis, but so much good music. My favourite tracks from that bunch of discs right now are Tall Dwarfs / The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Fetus Productions / State To Be In, Lucid 3 / Shiver and Stellar* / Violent.
smokecds actually has mp3 samples of much of their stuff online (which is pretty cool), see this, this and this page.
And as I'm talking about acquisitions of worldly goods, there's another development: my kitchen revamp is finally beyond V_1.
On Tuesday evening I nudged the fartmobile to Springwood where the local Ikea is (FSVO local; it's a good 60km from here). $2300 later I had all my kitchen (except for the tiles and appliances which I'll buy elsewhere, the benchtops which will be cut locally and one board that wasn't in stock). The stock situation has improved drastically, their move of the warehouse to a different location and expanding it at that time was very very positive. One of the salesdroids mentioned to me that in the past most of the stuff was stocked in Sydney and ferried up at need but that that never worked too well.
When I came home (huffing and puffing after carrying the goods to my house) I tallied the weight of the pile:
325kg. No wonder the car sat on the road like a hyena with bad hind legs. A big "Sorry" to all the motorists I blinded on the way home; I didn't mean to. In fact, the fartmobile has adjustable rear shocks but I couldn't inflate them as the petrol station I visited only had on of those newfangled automatic air thingies which refused to cooperate.
Sifting through the pile I found that some of the cabinet parts were "Made in Austria"...oh such irony.
