For those who don't know where House of Flying Pillows is, plug these coordinates into Google Maps. I hope this works.

-35.228469, 149.058436
-35° 13' 42.49", +149° 3' 30.37"
Link: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=-35.228469,149.058436&num=1&t=h&sll=-35.228435,149.058444&sspn=0.00206,0.004823&ie=UTF8&ll=-35.228384,149.05852&spn=0.00103,0.002411&z=19&iwloc=near

The physical address is 116/15 John Cleland Cr, Florey. It's the large block of townhouses on the corner of John Cleland and Coulter Dr. All the way up the back and to your left.

Parking will be an issue. As in, there will be none. I suggest carpooling, and it might just be worth parking at the Florey shops and walking across the paddock.

However, unless you arrive after dark, we'll probably be in the pool, which is easy to find.

I just uploaded about a hundred photos to my Flickr page.

I just came home from my son's end of year concert. Lindsay plays saxophone in the beginner band.

After they finished their second song I turned to my mum and said "I'm so sorry."

I remember when I was in the beginner band, and my mum and dad stoically went to my concerts.

The band sounded terrible, and I was so very proud of every one of them.

The rest of the show was also very impressive (Lindsay was only in one set out of about twenty). Calwell High School has a very good dance course, and they showed it off. I thought that at times, the dance routines got a bit... well, emo. But it was altogether most enjoyable. I'm glad I went.

You want my opinion?

I'd say that if we were stupid enough to send away half our staff on the second busiest day of the week, after a massive systems update that was known to be problematic, then we deserve to fail a few of our SLAs.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Happy birthday xole!

My Beast Day will be Friday 18 July 2036. This is the day that I will turn 66.6 years old.

I've entered it into my calendar.

Okay, so I've got this iPhone. The other day I realised that I had actually fallen into the trap, and I would be lost without it. Sad, really.

I check TweetDeck, Facebook, GMail and iReddit every day. Without them I think I may well go nuts on withdrawal. But that's not all - there are games! Lots and lots of loverly games. Most of them cost money, and for things like Bejewelled I don't really mind that. My current favourite game is called DoodleJump, and it's a very silly mindless piece of fluff that involves getting your animated character to bounce off various kinds of platforms and go as high as possible. It's fun. But that's not all.

It connects with both my mail and my calendar on Google. I can post to LiveJournal from it. I can use Maps to see where I'm going. I can check the news and weather. I can convert units from metric to imperial and check the current currency exchange rates. I can read eBooks from Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks. It holds my entire music collection and automatically keeps my podcasts up to date - it even remembers where I am in one podcast if I decide to stop it and listen to another. It has a complete web browser integral so that I can look up anything, any time, anywhere I have a 3G connection. I can reference the Yellow Pages, Wikipedia, the Holy Bible and the Australian Constitution, whenever I want and wherever I want. I even have a polyhedral dice roller! How cool is that!?

As a phone, it's okay. It's not the best mobile phone, but it works, and it's got one or two nice features - like pausing the podcast when there's an incoming call, and resuming it automatically when the call ends. Call quality is... well, it's okay. Good enough for most purposes. It has a voice recorder, and I wish I'd known that when I went to TAM, because it's much better quality than the dictaphone device I did all my podcast interviews on.

But one of the best things, one of the things that I appreciate the most, is that is shows me SMS messages in a conversation format. So I can see what I'm replying to, and what someone who has just sent me a message is replying to. It shows the full history of SMS messages with this particular contact, until I decide to clear it. Now, I'm not a huge txt msger, but I do use it occasionally, and one of the things that annoyed me about previous non-smart phones is that I'd sometimes get a msg from someone, and I couldn't remember what it was they were replying to. My iPhone shows me exactly what I want to see.

And yes, I know that there are other devices available that can do all of this. I chose an iPhone, mostly because I was already using iTunes. It's what I decided to invest in, and although I acknowledge that it's definitely not the perfect device, it is pretty good from my point of view. It works, and it works well for what I want it to do. It's one of the better investments I've made recently, and I'm very pleased with it.

Photos of the interclub fighting day on my Flickr stream.

Well, as some already know, I'm turning 40 this December. A good friend of mine, Sarah from the AAF, is also turning... er, 12 (well, that's what she says, anyway), close to the same date. We have decided that we will combine our parties and have a Pool Party at her place on Saturday the 5th of December.

Don't worry if you don't know where it is. We'll show you.

Please let me know if you can make it so that Sarah has some idea of how many people are likely to be descending on her flat.

...about my Flickr photostream - in particular, about the photos I took at the Mount Ainslie rally the other week, which I have publicised a little bit.

( Cut for photos )

Tonight, JOY 94.9am radio in Melbourne (Australia's only gay and lesbian radio station) will be replaying (with permission) my audio segment from the Mount Ainslie rally. It will be on the Hide and Seek program, airing from 11pm tonight.

I'll be contributing.

http://www.youngausskeptics.com/2009/10/action-required-response-to-the-rise-of-atheism-convention-ddos-attack/

I'm making the mistakes I never got to make as a teenager.

Something has ended that I valued. It's time to try and move on with my life, hopefully having learned from the mistakes I made.

Episode 12 is now available through the Nonsense Podcast website, or on iTunes, featuring the audio of the Mt Ainslie rally. Plus, of course, many other interesting items. :)

For those who didn't know, there was a rally/protest today atop Mount Ainslie. Here's the story.

Pastor Danny Nalliah, from Catch the Fire Ministries, decided that Canberra needed a spiritual cleansing. He decided that there were bloodstains on the plinth supporting the aviation beacon, and that these were from covens of witches doing blood sacrifices up there.

Anyway, the Australian Sex Party got wind of it and organised a protest. I went up there to cover the event for the Nonsense Podcast. I got about 10min worth of audio/interviews, which will be featured on the next episode, due out in a couple of days.

As is my wont, I also got a few photos. Behind the cut.

( Photos )

The audio will be on Episode 12 of the Nonsense Podcast, due to hit iTunes and your reader of choice within the next couple of days.

As I mentioned, I had blood taken last week. Today I got the results. The significant ones are:

Cholesterol: 6.0
Liver GGT: 167
Triglycerides: 2.66

These numbers are high. They're not high enough to be a serious concern - no need to put me on medication or anything, but they are higher than they should be. The good news is that I don't have diabetes (yay!) and the above numbers are likely to go down on their own - so long as I start treating my system better than I have been.

So that means more exercise and eating better. I'm already getting more exercise - we've had this treadmill for some time, but I haven't used it before because I figured that whatever calories I burned off I'll just drink back on. I'm doing a 20min walking cycle every second day at the moment, but I plan to start ramping that up as I get more used to it.

So to summarise: Health decent, but could be better. Could easily have been a lot worse.