Was reading a report earlier. Road Safety Fact Sheet: Children Jan. 2008; WA Govt. Is interesting in a morbid way.

Were you, dear reader, aware that according to West Australian Government figures, about 17 children are killed every year, over a 10 year average via motor vehicles? That's just in West Australia by the way, not all of Australia. Most killed - slightly greater than 10 per year - as  passengers in vehicles.

It seems like it was just a year or two ago. Not Twelve!!!
Fortunately I don't have any of our wedding photo's scanned. Darn good excuse for not putting any of those pics online!

By golly we look young in them. Good party that night too! The reception was in the refurbished Customs House in Brisbane. Very nice! And I KNOW Dee did say "Obey" in our vows despite her protestations otherwise. Sigh. Woe is me.

It's probably going to get a little soppy: Even after 14 years together, 12 married, it seems amazing to me that every day I rediscover that I love this incredible woman just that little bit more

So here's to the next 12 Beautiful! and the 12 after that. And so on and so on.

I first met Brian in the early 90's. I had very recently started working for Defence Security Branch (DSB). He was in charge of the IT Centre at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) here in Canberra.

He and his team had designed and built one of the earliest proxying firewalls that would be used by the Department of Defence to protect their networks. Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) had also built something similar, but that was in South Australia.

My then boss, Col Hale, and myself did a site visit over the hill at Russell to check it all out and so on.
I can still picture Brian's office as it then was, 15+ years later. Every possible horizontal surface had a stack of paper about 20-30 cm high. A filling method I've managed to emulate despite my best efforts otherwise. Saved only by not needing to print out as much.

A good friend (Hi Tony) sent me this absolute gem of a thread started by one of his co-workers this morning.

Understanding the code (and I freely admit I didn't) is not necessary to appreciate the dry wit in the various replies.

But it was this particular reply that just about brought tears of laughter to my eyes.

For those that don't understand diff output or C code, the gist is that Rusty came up with this rather clever (ie horribly obscure. Read Linus' initial reply...) way of causing the code to fail loudly when used inappropriately. When tasked with the lack of obviousness, Rusty added a rather terse comment to his initial patch to clarify just what his patch does. Sorta.

Said comment being the text:

GCC is awesome.

Where GCC is the GNU C Compiler. The irony being that this comment is perfectly accurate and also totally useless in fixing the "lack of obviousness" problem.

I'm sniggering just re-reading all this.

It's a bit more like "olds" than "news", but on the 19th of Jan 2007, I officially petitioned Pamela Jones to be released my from indentured servitude as one of the volunteer Groklaw Technical Team members.

Many reasons, but one of the principles being sheer time. Or lack thereof. I barely get enough time to handle my personal projects, let alone all the needs of Groklaw.

It's been an amazing ride being on the inside for so long. It may surprise folk to know that for most of the past three years it was just Peter/Mathfox and myself. And the Ibiblio crew naturally!

In the vain hope that this saves some other poor bugger a broken back or simply a lot of sweat and pain, I offer up this small piece of advice for digging in hard clay:

Buy a cheap and not-so-nasty Rotary Hammer Drill. Also purchase an angled wide chisel for same. Gloves, Eye Protection and Earmuffs are also mandatory.

Use that to shatter apart the clay and break it up.

This solution was suggested to me over coffee by my then contract account manager (ie Pimp, in Contractor's Parlance) about a year or two ago.

When swinging a mattock bounces off the ground, this is the only way to go. And then some.

Being a brief rundown on myself as the author and maintainer of this website. Ego tripping even.

As you may have guessed from the Photo Gallery, married to Dee (two weeks shy of 11 years as I write this!!!) and with one small boy named Corbin. Who seems to have grown 10 cm by every evening. Dee reckons she has two small boys, just one happens to be taller and slightly older than her. I have *no idea* what she means by that.

Career wise I've followed a truely eclectic path.