My Blog Posts

Things continue apace at Todd/Perry towers. Preparations for our imminent return to the mother country are slowly being completed. Bobo has managed to write some emails to her global human resources team advertising her availability for work (as long as it is in London of course) and I have started compiling a list of all of the people we need to notify that we have moved. Normally its quite easy in this country, you just get Australia Post to redirect your snail mail to your new address for a period of between three and twelve months. They will even do this to an overseas address, a very useful feature of the service. The snag comes when people want to send you things, in our case wine. Its going to be hard to cancel our winery subscriptions.

We went to see Al Murray, the pub landlord last night at the basement. Very, very funny. As usual, I laughed my socks off for two hours and can only remember one joke; “Wales, its a great name, innit, cos if you get rid of the w and the s you get - ale. Great name” Well, I guess you had to be there.

For no apparent reason I’d like to bring you a quote from the first episode of the sixth season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Spike, to Giles; “Did your whole life flash before your eyes? Cup of tea, cup of tea, Almost got shagged, cup of tea?”

In a break from our scheduled coverage, I would like to bring you this scary message; The Lone Gunmen are dead. Is anyone actually watching the X-Files any more? Here I’m looking in the general direction of the Palmers for confirmation that interest peaked very many seasons ago. I, for one, watched a couple of episodes in the first series and got very frustrated with the fact that they concentrated solely on being moody and forget plot or character development. But that is just my opinion.

Just to prove to Craig that people do watch Rugby in this country, here is a shot of the Waratahs vs Brumbies match at Aussie Stadium last night. There were approximately 41,500 people there, not bad for a Saturday night in Sydney. For those who are interested the Waratahs won, and its a good thing because it justified the pale blue hat that I wore all night (well, it was free). For those that are interested, there is a match report at the Sydney Morning Herald.

This link is for Ben and Emma. Ben, just bear in mind who is looking after your daughter this weekend, who knows what Unix tricks I can teach her in twenty four hours. I would link to their web sites, or blogs, but apparently they are too busy leading fulfilling lives to indulge in such frivolity.

Its not much, but I have just added a new page to the Photo Album. Say hello to the Easter Bunny Chronicles.

Just to bring a little light to all of this shade, Ally McBollocks has been cancelled. Cue unprecedented celebration across the globe as we are finally free of the worst television show ever produced.

I have a couple of thoughts today; “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” “Life is too short to put up with bad software or idiots” I will let you decide which, if any, of them applies to you…

Useability testing is a great thing. It is a great shame that I don’t do any. I was just idly navigating around this web site and noticed that if you press the “Archives” link to the left and select any month before January that the format is different to this page. Time to go hacking about in my templates again. A teaser for the next couple of days, the saga of the Easter Bunny is coming to this web site soon. Let the anticipation begin.

Oh bugger it, lets just follow Jonathons lead and call it meta-blogging. Anyway, after a few left turns and a couple of cul-de-sacs I’ve managed to solve the problems I mentioned in the previous post. This would all have been so much easier if I was using cascading style sheets properly. Never mind, the archive pages are all formatting properly now. Of course this whole discussion is completely irrelevant to everyone but me. This comes up often in the wonderful wacky world of IT. You strive and suffer to fix a problem that no-one has noticed and would probably never come across, secure in the notion that if you know about it and do nothing it will blow up into the seemingly the single biggest issue that your organisation has ever encountered. So you work and work and finally fix it before this happens, and no one notices.

It is my own fault really. When I agreed to fork out the cash equivalent of the GDP of a small country on an engagement ring I stupidly assumed that would be it. After all, didn’t my lovely fiance tell me that “the wedding rings will be much more reasonable”. Foolish, foolish, me. She went to the jeweller yesterday. This isn’t your Michael Hill or Ratners sort of jeweller. This is the kind where you need an appointment. The kind that can only be described as reassuringly expensive. It didn’t help that the rock in the engagement ring is very nice, apparently there is no way she can possibly have a wedding ring without some little friends for it.

Quote for the day [from Diary of a start-up], and bear in mind that I have a degree in Management; “Management has fallen into the same category as Psychiatrists and Lawyers; there are far too many of them, and not enough quality left in stock” I should point out that this gem is in the comments at the bottom of the piece, but you should read the story anyway.

Spotted on a job description; “High requirement for communicate with senior management” You can’t make these up.

Nothing to be seen here this week, sorry Mrs P. I won’t be saying much over the weekend as we are going away. Keen observers (Mr Reeve) will have already guessed our destination - we are going to the Hunter Valley again. Well, Bobo’s sister is in town and its rude to come all this way and not swing by Cessnock and pick up a few bottles of vino. Until I come up with some original content for this page, and for amusement, take a look at this post from Textism and see how many of the “worst ever” items you share with Dean.

Now I know I had nothing to say, so I’m going to say nothing. But I am going to point you to two “non-stories” that appeared at Yahoo! today; http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020412/80/cwhii.html http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020412/80/cwhgs.html Reuters, that is not journalism it is just a waste of time. If I was a merkin I’d consider sueing for the wear and tear on my eyeballs from reading such rubbish.

Last night rather than watch the Phantom Toss like virtually everyone else in Australia I tuned in to Sweet Revenge on the ABC. Which was not only a very good programme, but also made me feel slightly homesick for London. For those that missed it (or watched Law and Order or maybe even one of the other films on last night) it was a story of revenge but London was definitely one of the stars of the show.

I have been chastised. Mrs Palmer has upbraided me for my lack of blogging this week. What can I say? Well, I haven’t had much to say, so I haven’t written much here. This week I have just about managed to scrape through the following exciting tasks Tidy the house on Monday Go to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Play tennis on Wednesday evening fixed a bug in the dbBrowser sample for PythonCard

I almost forget, the absolute highlight of the week had to be receiving a new box of business cards. Because I was in severe danger of running low. I’ve only got about 950 left of the 1000 cards I’ve been issued over the past couple of years. I think you will agree that the situation was getting critical and this new box was just in time.

For the curious amongst you Lorna, Bobo’s sister, arrived safe and well (courtesy of Singapore Airlines) last night. In a cruel cultural initiation we made her watch the Footy Show. Surprisingly enough we didn’t do this on purpose, it just happened to be on the television. Honest.