Moving "house"

I have relocated this blog to: http://uptomyneckinit.wordpress.com



A few months ago, I decided to take a bit of a break from I ended up taking a bit of a break from writing in my blogs. I've had a chance to stop and smell the blogging roses as it were, and recently I decided to move all of my blogging efforts over to Wordpress, primarily because I prefer the features and tools, and more importantly the user interface which seems to have a better workflow. I suppose I'll need to update a whole bunch of links out there on the net to avoid them going dead. In the meantime, I'll leave this blog up for a while, just in case the occasional lost surfer finds their way here.

You'll find all of these old articles at the new blog thanks to a nice import feature that I took advantage of.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy my blog at its new location.


http://uptomyneckinit.wordpress.com

I've left my job, and the future seems bright

Yes, it's official. As of 2:30pm AEST, I walked out of the door for the last time of the company where I have worked for the last 9¹/₂ years. It felt almost surreal as I started to drive away that I have spent nearly 25% of my life as an employee with the same company.  In some ways, it's been a scary thing leaving a place so familiar and where I have invested so much of myself in terms of my work. In other ways, I feel elated, excited, and like the future couldn't be brighter.  All of this, and I don't even have another job to go to.

Setting goals, and learning to get over the past.

It's not very often these days that I can look back on a day and say that one of my boys has made me feel incredibly proud. You see, my boys are of an age where they are either in their tweens, or teens, and that means lot's of moping about, feeling bored, and generally behaving as if every moment in life represents the end of the world as they know it. Yes, welcome to the early stages of puberty. Like most siblings, they fight a lot, and complain a lot more, and they whine more than my two dogs do when they are begging to go for a walk - and more often than not the dogs are whining to walk, while the boys are whining because they are being told to walk the dogs!! Yes, it's a vicious circle. I can't really complain though, because for the most part, I've got two really great kids, and they give me a lot less grief in many ways than other parents get, but still there are those days when I find myself in the role of the bad guy sucking all of the fun out of my boys lives. It is then with the greatest relief that I find myself today feeling immense pride for my younger son, who showed me that he has not only learned from his father's advice, but that he has embraced it and used it to assert himself.

The "Slashdot effect" and "Going Viral" on the small scale.

Anyone who has been on the Interwebz for a while has probably come across the Slashdot Effect at some point. For those who haven't, it's basically when a whole bunch of people suddenly find out about something really cool or interesting online, and all of a sudden nearly everyone in the world seems to visit a particular website on the same day. So much so that it has been known to close down systems that can't handle the overload of people trying to all get onto the same web server. While certainly not on the scale of such global anarchy as I have just described, I've noticed my own little micro-"viral effect" occurring whenever I post a really well received answer to a question on one of my favorite Q/A sites.

My wife appears to be Novak Djokovic's girlfriend!!!

I'm sitting in front of the TV a couple of nights ago, and I'm watching the Australian Open tennis.  OK, so I've never really been into the tennis.  I'm not the sort of person to become a "fan" of a particular team or player, and I don't really watch a lot of sports. It's my wife's fault really that I've been watching so much tennis, and I've found myself getting a little hooked.  There, I've admitted to it. It started with the 2011 Australian Open, and while I haven't watched any tennis in the whole year since, when the 2012 Australian Open started, I found myself drawn to the TV, and then glued as I've watched the likes of Djokovic, Murray, Nadal, and Federer dazzling us with great displays of strength, stamina, agility, and finesse. As I type this in, I'm watching the Semi-final between Djokovic and Murray,  It's been a grueling 3 hours, and the 3rd set is locked at 5-5 with Djokovic serving.

The tennis has been very entertaining.  I'm looking forward to seeing Nadal in the final, because his energy is infectious, and I keep finding myself in awe of his ability to get to the ball no matter where he and the ball are on the court.  Yet with all of the really great tennis that's being played, I find myself waiting for the camera to do it's pans of the crowd, and in particular when the camera switches to the player's guest seating to show the reactions of the coaches, and girlfriends, and other hangers on.  For me though, I've been having the most fun when Djokivic's girlfriend (Jelena Ristic) appears.

Bad Parenting and Selfish People

I went for a walk a couple of evenings ago with my wife. As couples often do we were strolling along slowly, enjoying the hot summer evening air and chatting about the little things.  It was about 7:30pm and while the traffic was reasonably light, there can be times when we get a lot of cars moving through our neighborhood so we usually try and walk through the quieter streets, being nosy and looking into peoples gardens for interesting plants and ideas. Naturally to get to these quieter streets we usually need to follow a path that takes us through some of the heavier traffic areas, and at that time of night, you have a lot of people out and about in their cars, visiting friends, returning with their groceries, or just going about other business.  So it was with some surprise that my wife noticed a very small child in a driveway across the road and (due to the heat) completely naked.

I have a Gripe...

I read in the news recently about an Indonesian man who was convicted on a People Smuggling charge and given a mandatory sentence of 5 years.  The news article went into detail about how not only the Judge imposing the sentence thinks it is unjust, but also how the courts have no discretion in order to be able to take into account an individual's personal circumstances when sentencing people. This is of course not the first time that Australian law has included mandatory sentencing.