Back again

Sorry, life's been hectic.

Apart from Elijah not wanting to sleep, I also started a new job on 16 November. It's been hard to find time to do anything but exist at the moment. Hopefully things will ease up again soon.

In the meantime, gratuitous footage of Elijah being cute at bathtime (for anyone who hasn't seen it on Little Elijah...)



I know, life's got so desperate I'm pinching content from my own blogs...

Shake shake shake

Shake shake shake

Shake your booty, oh yeah, shake your booty!

Since I've declared I'm never going to put video of my victory dance online, this narrative representation is just going to have to do.

I got my marks back on my final assignment, and they were good enough to tip me over the edge for the clean sweep - 4 from 4 High Distinctions!

Awwwww. Yeah.

Oh, shake shake shake...

Meh. Still sick.

Still whingeing too.

I've been poked, prodded, given erythromycin (a broad spectrum antibiotic) and blood tested. Hopefully I'll soon know why I'm coughing all the time and have a sore throat. The latest guess is bacterial bronchitis with a remote possibility of whooping cough, which the blood test is meant to rule out (and is mainly just a precaution as whooping cough and babies don't play nice together).

After taking today off work, I do feel much better albeit still a little tired and still with a sore throat. Now that it's night time, the cough is starting to return and the tiredness is creeping back.

Off to work again tomorrow. I have exactly one week left in this job before I start my new one. The next 6 work days are going to be a blur of tidying up loose ends and writing up some handover. Woo.

And then there was none...

It is done.

The final assignment has been submitted electronically.

I've had headaches, a continually sore throat, constantly dripping sinuses, hacked up my lungs on a number of occasions and slept on the lounge the entire week so I don't keep my wife awake with my coughing, but I did it.  I don't think the marks will be good enough to make it a clean sweep of High Distinctions for my Grad Certificate (there were some intricacies of Open Office Base that I couldn't quite work out and to be honest, I'm not sure if it's me or the software), but quite frankly right now I could not physically care any less.  It is done and it will just have to do.  I only need 12 or 13 out of 25 to claim a Distinction and I'm almost certain to get at least that many marks.

So, it's off to the doctor again tomorrow because apparently I should be much better by now, and then after some more sleep, life will return to a semblance of normality.

yay.

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Boo-yah!

I'm still sick (turns out I had laryngitis) and struggling through my days, but one small piece of news caused me to do the most joyful victory dance I have done in a long time.

I got the marks back tonight for the final assignment of one of my subjects (Introduction to Data Networks), and the mark (14.1/15) was high enough to push me over into the High Distinction category with 87.7%.

Awwwwwwww yeaaaaa-uh.

Of course, this is pending final weighting of marks but I'm feeling pretty confident that I'm going to just scrape in there. This makes 3 from 3 HDs for my first year of part-time study/full-time work/full-time dad/slightly neglectful full-time husband. I had convinced myself that I wouldn't get the marks required to push me over 85% into HD territory, and this made the victory dance that little bit sweeter.

Just one assignment to go. I really don't think I'm getting the required marks to make it 4 from 4, but it is within the realm of possibility. It's just not all that likely.

*victory dance including obligatory butt wiggle*

(no, I will not tape it and put it up on YouTube)

I hate being sick...

It's weird. I get sick maybe once a year (twice at most). I generally complain about this because it means I don't get time off work. Problem is, when I do get sick, I complain about endlessly. In fact, I'm so pathetic and needy and whiny when I get sick that my wife usually can't take more than a day of it (two at most) before telling me I must be feeling better and shouldn't I be going back to work now?

Right now, I'm sick. Sore throat, dripping sinuses, aching back and neck and pretty cranky (actually, that last one is true on just about any given day). I've got an assignment due in just over a week, but that can wait until tomorrow.

I hate being sick. Bleh.

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Taking better pics

There's some great tips here for how to take a better photograph. Some of my favourites:

• tilt the camera
• get up close, don't use the zoom
• stop looking through the viewfinder (you'll have more fun this way)
• turn off the flash (the difference can be amazing).

I know that for the photos of our trip to Tasmania, the ones I liked the best were ones where I went for different perspectives or just snapped off a quick shot without thinking too much.

I'll post my favourite Tassie photos later, but they're all in our Tasmania Gallery.

New Shoes

Last Friday I bought new shoes.

This may not seem like a monumental and earth shattering activity for normal people but as a quick perusal of this blog would demonstrate, normality is not my "thing". My recently departed shoes (actually they're sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to remember to remove the shoe laces and then dump them in the industrial bin) had a small hole over the left big toe (I have no idea how it got there but the leather just got thin I guess) and the sole of the right shoe had begun separating from the upper, leaving a gaping chasm where, if it ever rained here, water could seep in when splashing in puddles. My shoes have been in this condition for about 3 months, which is a conservative estimate.

I last bought new dress shoes for wearing to work in the months leading up to my wedding (which was in July '03). I had had those shoes since 1999. They replaced shoes that I had for seven years. I had got those shoes at the beginning of Grade 11 and only replaced them after I slipped over in the kitchen of the restaurant where I managed the bar and fractured my elbow. They had already been re-soled once and I didn't see the value in doing it again as the soles wouldn't be non-slip (nor were the new shoes for that matter - curse you lying sales assistant at Colorado, Myer Centre!)

I don't replace shoes very often, although football boots is another matter (if they last two seasons, I've done well).

I don't have much of a point here except to say I like my new shoes. Comfy. Shiny. Leathery.

I wonder if I can break double figures with these ones...

US bans vegemite

Edit 29/10: As has been pointed out, this is in fact not true: http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/vegemite.asp

Heresy!

The US government has banned vegemite! Apparently it's because vegemite has folate added, and in the US you can only add folate to bread and cereals. Bah! Weak excuse if I ever heard one.

This should be considered a declaration of war, in my opinion. Vegemite on toast is one of the finest delicacies known to man (to this man anyway) and now thousands of expat Aussies will be denied this simple pleasure unless they can smuggle it in from Canada or Mexico.

Is this any way to treat an ally, Uncle Sam?

A new job

Most people who read this would be aware that I'm merely a small administrative cog in a large, federal, administrative wheel.  On 16 November, I'll officially enter the lowest rungs of management as I become the least powerful executive level administrative functionary.

It's actually pretty cool to me and is the culmination of my 5 year plan when I moved to Canberra back at the start of 2002 (which means it just scrapes in to my 5 year plan, but it still made it).  One of the positive personal benefits is that it provides just enough security of income that my wife can continue to be a stay at home mother for the forseeable future.  This, more than anything else, is what I love about this promotion.

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4 down, 2 to go

I did the exam tonight and got 37 out of 40 (I did it online through WebCT which means it got marked straight away), which translates into 14 out of 15 (there's some beneficial rounding going on there, I'll concede but that's the way the system does it). That leaves me sitting on nearly 84% for this subject, but there's still 45% of the marks to go (one assignment submitted but not yet graded and one due 27 October).

I now have just 2 assignments to go and then I'm free for the year and Helen can have her husband back and Elijah can have his Daddy back (although I always try and make room for Elijah, but I have been woefully neglectful to my wife - I am well aware that some things must change).

Yay. The end of the year is in sight! Woo!

3 down, 3 to go

Assignments and exams still suck, but at least there is a whole let less of them now...

Creative void

How do people manage to be creative and still live the 9 to 5 life?

When I get home after work, I can barely find the energy to feed myself, yet alone spend precious mental energy doing anything creative, whether it be writing, composing, playing my guitar or even free form day dreaming.

Admittedly, I'm probably burning my mental and physical reserves pretty low right now, between work and study and a lad who has decided that, at nearly 6 months of age, sleeping through the night is for little babies and since he's a big baby now, he'll wake up and scream when he wants to, but still...

Two things of interest:

1. Creating Minds.org - tools, techniques, methods on all matters creative. It fits well with my renewed interest in lifehacks and when I've got some time to breathe again, I'll see if I can combine this with some of the things I'm learning off 43folders.
2. You too can be creative; it just takes hard work - great, more hard work. Woo.
   

Maybe I'm just stretched too thin to create right now. I can feel the creative burn, but the flame is so faint and struggling for oxygen that sometimes I'm scared it won't come back. Ever.

Perhaps what I really need to do is to just go to bed.

Good night.

Fat, scrawny, infertile and impotent

Judging by the email I'm getting lately, this must be what I am. Why else would I be getting all these emails selling "v1@gr@" and cialis (what? no levitra? are they too good for me or something?), weightloss pills, steroids and medications to increase the number of "swimmers" I can produce (but clearly only after I've taken the viagra), which is apparently what really impresses the ladies. Oh, and I'm not as big as I could be either, apparently. Yeah, and steroids will help that problem...

The weird thing is pharma-spam is the only spam I get. Do I have a file somewhere marked "erectile dysfunction only. Has no money so no emails from Nigeria. Try Euro lottery in 6 months if viagra works"? I remember the good old days when spam tried to help me work from home, send on mail, help me to update my bank account details and inform me that Paypal needed me to log in straight away.

Spam just isn't what it used to be when I was a lad.

Assignments suck

'nuff said.

Between doing assignments and the boy's currently unsettled sleeping patterns, I haven't had more than about 6 hours sleep (and often much less) in almost three weeks.

Thank god for caffeine.

Crunched

Four assignments and 1 exam due between now and 6 November.

Temporary promotion leading to longer work hours on top of my standard full-time working week (and then there is the hour each-way commute on the bus).

A sad, weed infested lawn and garden with not enough hours of daylight (yet) after work to do much with it, which just leaves me with spare hours here and there on the weekend (I sowed some lawn seed yesterday, covered it with some granulated wetting agent and watered it in - a small patch of lawn still took two hours to do!).

A nearly six month-old son who insists (quite rightly) that he is the most important thing in the whole wide world (and the cutest, too) and that everything else should come second to him.

Somewhere in there is cooking, cleaning, ironing, sleeping and (gasp) spending some quality time with my wife.

*sigh*

If you don't hear much from me over the next six weeks, I'm bound up in all of that. Somewhere.

Getting things done

I'm an incredibly disorganised person. You can usually tell where I have been in residence as there is always stuff everywhere, generally accompanied by teetering piles of paper which in turn are occasionally balanced or weighed down with a collection of stuff that is separate from, but related to, the other stuff that is, as I have already mentioned, generally everywhere. This habitual habitation ritual can be witnessed at work, in my car, my desk at home, my coffee table at home, my dining room table at home, my side of the bedroom floor and in large piles of bank statements, paid bills and other receipts in the study, which are often weighed down by obsolete pieces of computer hardware that no longer fit on my desk.

I'm a big procrastinator, which goes a long way towards explaining the preceding paragraph. I am also very easily distracted and I am sure that this is strongly linked to my procrastination. It is amazing what mundane item of trivia will catch your attention and leave you engrossed for hours when you are supposed to be sorting through old telephone bills from 2002 which for some reason you have kept but you cannot for the life of you work out why.

Being like this actually offends my geek sensibilities and my almost obsessive desire to categorise and order just about everything in existence.

(this last point will confuse my wife no end who would probably argue quite convincingly that she has never seen me exercise a desire to organise and categorise in the 8 years she has known me. In my defence, I'm easily distracted and just because you don't act on the desire, doesn't mean it isn't strong, obsessive and tears you apart inside when you never quite get around to doing it)

The thing is, I should know better. Late last year and early this year, work paid for me and five other people to undergo a Personal Efficiency Program, or PEP. PEP is full of incredibly useful, but also painfully obvious ways of improving your own productivity and helping you keep on top of things. Possibly the biggest driving force behind the PEP philosophy is "Do it now" which translates to "If it can be done in under ten minutes, do it straight away and then it's out of your way. Don't let it sit there, nagging at you, festering, sneering at your ability to keep control of your own life and circumstances, mocking and deriding your organisational skills". Something like that anyway. PEP was useful, but it is all too easy to stray once more.

"Do it now" seems to have a lot in common with the "Getting things done" movement, based on the book by David Allen titled, strangely enough, "Getting Things Done". I haven't read the book myself, but I have found something that seems just as inspired (and indeed has been inspired by David Allen) - 43 folders.

43folders falls under the category of "lifehacks". Little things you can do to try and be a little bit more productive. There's more than the website - there's a 43folders wiki, a 43folders Google Group and it's a blog and community as well. So much stuff to look at. So little time to look at it all (largely because I'm not as productive as I could be).

This time, I'll try harder. With Web 2.0 on my side, how can I fail?


As something of a post script, Merlin Mann, founder of 43folders is an interesting guy. He's a regular on MacBreak Weekly (an Apple based weekly podcast on the TWiT Netcast Network) and will also be featuring in an upcoming Inside the Net podcast (also on TNN).

White & Nerdy

Edit 6/11/06: For some reason, the video shows up as currently not available on Google Video. Maybe Weird Al thought there'd been enough viral marketing and took it back down again. Link left for posterity.

Yes. Yes I am. It's probably not a surprise to anyone who knows me that I understand everything in this song (even identify with some of it). I've always had a soft spot for Weird Al and it's comforting to know that as I get older, some things will never change. It's also comforting to know that once again I'm a little late to a bandwagon. Some other things don't change either...

Marmaduke Explained

When I was a kid, we had this giant book of Marmaduke cartoons. I used to love reading them while eating my breakfast in the mornings. However, a large book of Marmaduke cartoons quickly brings the reader to two conclusions:

1. they don't really make a lot of sense
2. they're not actually all that funny.

These two conclusions held true for many years, but now all that is about to change.

Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke.

Gold. Pure gold.

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A few more days away

I'll be off-line until Monday evening as we're having the boy christened this weekend. Yay.