Well we got the house we wanted (renting). It’s in bardon and it has a pine tree, but more about that later. The main thing is I’ll be transferring my internet over to the new number during the next week and all of zion, including my blog, will go offline in the meantime. So if you hit this page and start getting 404’s, or your feed reader starts bitching at you cos it can’t find my site, don’t give up. Bear with me, it’ll all be back to normal soon, maybe even with a bit of a speed improvement.
Have been moving stuff all afternoon and I’m jiggered. All the heavy stuff to do tomorrow….sigh. But it’ll be wort it. These units we’re in now weren’t built to be units. I’m all for parties, but when the bloke upstairs has a party it sounds like it’s in our lounge room (through no fault of his own, although the fact that he has a subbie the size of a small planet doesn’t help). Still it’s better than the psychotic domestics and 7am sing-alongs of the previous tenants. Soooo glad we’re moving! Don’t think I’ll ever live in units again.
It was Amie and I’s 2 year anniversary on Tuesday.
We booked ourselves some hang gliding flights down in Byron Bay. Drove down in the morning and spent the first few hours in Bangalo, a funky little town about 30 mins inland from the bay. Saw some beautiful afgani and probably persian rugs for several thousand dollars each. At first it seemed like a ridiculus waste of money fit only for people who have too much and just aren’t sure what else to do with it. But after further thought I wondered if giving more money to poor suckers who sweat their asses off in hot, dry, dusty places doing the only thing they know how to make a living was perhaps not such a bad cause. Or maybe I just want one of them sweet rugs.
Went into the second hand book store to have another look for Victor Kelleher’s The Red King, but they still didn’t have it. Spewin. In my dispair I bought 3 of his other books – Em’s Story, Taronga, and Forbidden Paths of Thaul to add to my collection.
After that we were booked in for some hang gliding flights at Lennox Head. It’s one of those “extreme” things we’ve always said we’d do at least once, like sky-diving or snow boarding. Funnily though once you’re up there it seems anything but extreme. It just feels completely safe – more like you’re suspended by some invisible wire than flying through the air. We hit some decent air speeds, but you could only tell by the sound of the wind getting louder in your ears.
More pictures here.
Later on we saw Jimoen with his kids at the beach and a giant TV. Random.
It’s a great day for programming (and such). Little bit of sun, little bit of cloud cover, a cool breeze blowing in over my shoulder (in a cruel twist of fate, good programming weather is almost identical to good beach weather).
So I finaly got motivated to work on something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. That is, create an address online where we can gather all our thoughts and plans regarding our home church. We’ve sometimes talked about stuff (eg: that list) and thought it would be good to have somewhere online where we could record what we came up with. Also we’ve agreed it would be nice to be able to let everyone in on what someone is planning on talking about ahead of time so we can all come a bit more prepared to contribute to the various discussions.
Being a programmer I immediately thought “wiki” (ala Wikipedia). Being an avid live-journaler, elPoncho suggested something of a similar nature to livejournal.com (ie: some kind of blog that we can all contribute to). Both have two of the most important ingredients I can think of – user contributed content plus RSS/email notification of updates – though with slightly different focuses. A wiki is more about creating structured content, with the *ability* for use as a communication medium (via user “talk” pages). A blog on the other hand is more about communicating ideas in real time, with the *ability* to create kind-of structured content in the form of “pages”. I do think though that blogs tend to do the structured content thing a bit better than wikis can do communication.
Given the choice I think that, for our purposes, timely communication would be more important than the ability to create structured content – at least initialy, if not ultimately. So I think we’ll probably prefer the communal church journal with the odd page of content at first, and maybe “grow into” the wiki if we start doing more with content. In any case I’ve set them both up so we can see how it goes, experiment with both for a while maybe.
The wiki is powered by MediaWiki, and can be found here. Feel free to sign up and poke around and have a go adding content or whatever. The blog is powered by Wordpress 2.0, and can be found here. Again, join up, add entries, go nuts!
Note that both have RSS feeds (the MediaWiki one is in the “Recent Changes” section).
With any luck, this just might inspire the return of something a bit like the much missed “freedom project” with a wider community. Vee shall see.
Listening to: Air, Moon Safari
Had a really good Christmas and new years this year. It all started with good presents in the morning courtesy of lovely wife:
- 2 CDs – System of a Down (Hypnotize) and Dirty Three (Cinder)
- 2 DVDs – Red Dwarf VII and Little Britain Series 2
- Voucher for McGills bookshop
- Funky shirt with the nuber 78 on it, such that it looks like 8F in the mirror, which is hexadecimal for 143 (the things nerds notice).
We did the usual family things during the day which was good.
Christmas night I went to a bash at Kev’s. I hadn’t seen those guys in a few months so it was good just to see them. They’re obviously quite experienced at throwing good parties on their back deck. By far my favourite moment was the “Bathurst”, where someone makes a spontaneous decision to imitate the winners of Bathurst on the podium by shaking and spraying their beer over everyone in sight. This of course would inspire every other person holding a beer to join in, with the obvious end result being a deck full of beer-soaked people, crying “ahh, my stinging eyes!” while still dancing their little asses off. Priceless.
New years eve was the karaoke/engagement party for elPoncho and Viviennea, also a top night. Highlights were generaly having a good time with lots of different people (esp Steve who I haven’t seen in a while), getting to know elPoncho’s friends a bit better, and Jeff’s fire twirling. Lowlight would have to have been singing Wham! – Wake me up Before you Go-Go. Oh the shame.
Christmas eve saw the birth of our newest little friend Ezra! Born 3.2 kg at 8:30 am, as his parent’s car was being stolen from the hospital parking lot.
