Life is so good, it gets better every day

Bad Hair Days

I’ve been getting a few recently, and most of the days I’ve gone down to get my hair cut have been pretty bad – I’ve had some shockers in my time, everything down to the mullet. Went down to ‘bojangles’ on 131 Armagh Street – it’s a little bit more expensive than your average $10 bar, but at $20 it’s far from expensive. Great service, real friendly dude, and a walk in, no appointments ‘this is a modern mans shop’ deal. I like it, and I recommend you checking it out if you’re near Christchurch. You even get a hot towel at the end.

New Music

I haven’t bought any new music for a long, long time, so having felt a little off form on Friday afternoon, I wandered in and met Jayne for a frappucino, and then a browse around the CD store. Picked up ‘This is not the target market’ by Steriogram (excellent so far), ‘Broken Boy Soldier’ by Raconteurs (again excellent), ‘Move by yourself’ by Donavon Frankenreiter (few few tracks being a little too Jamiroquai’y), and ‘Half the perfect world’ by Madeleine Peyroux (Careless Love seems better right now).

Climbing at Cattlestop

Heidi and myself got out for a sneaky trip to Cattlestop crag during the week. We were joined by Flo, Greg and his flatmate’s dog, Lizzy. The evenings are getting a little longer here, and you can pretty much climb until about 8 before the sun starts to drop and it gets cold again. Climbing at Britten crag (Cattlestop is just an extension of that crag up towards summit road) is always a little tricky when you first start off the season. It takes a while to find the various crimpers in that volcanic rock, and with occasional long run outs, it was a pretty cautious start. Started off on a bunch of easy 16’s, through harder 17’s and a real sweet 19 at the end. Planning on making it a regular session up there, and looking forward to pulling on steeper climbs.

Crocs

For everyone that hasn’t joined the crocs craze, you’re probably missing out. They’re ultra comfortable, ultra light, and ultra airy for those warm summer days. I’ve got a lime green pair of these babies and I’m loving them.

Not sure it’s the weather, but I’m getting freaking zapped like a lightning conductor with all the static. Anyone else experiencing this? Might have to add some static discharge strips to these buddies…

Broadband Cowboys

Telecom unsurprisingly get this award this week for providing me with bandwidth allowing me to download at a staggering 15KB/s this afternoon, which is barely workable for me while I work remote. Outside their definition of ‘peak hours’, I’m sure they’ll flick the switch and suddenly I’ll back back up to 180KB/s, as I was last night. Fitting that they currently choosing to associate themselves with MSN – maybe their speculated move to another partner may clean up their act, but I’m unconvinced. Once again I’m spectacularly disappointed with Telcom’s service. What a joke.

Keeping My Head Down

It’s been a busy couple of weeks work wise. While most of stuff inside has been relatively plain sailing, I’m still stuck in the middle of paper review for linux.conf.au. There has been some stunning proposals for the conference, and looking forward to it already. The less exciting thing is the 300+ proposals that I’m having to review as part of a wider review team. Heading over to Sydney for a short weekend to meet up with the guys and girls to come up with a kick ass schedule – I imagine there will be beer involved. Start making your LCA plans now!

Small Foster

Hooray! Tim’s now a father, Bob’s a mother, and consequently I am now an uncle. Congratulations to them, and very happy that everyone is doing well over there. Difficult to be a hundred billion miles away, but looking forward to seeing the pictures and skype webcams over the next couple of weeks. Have booked flights to Dublin for Duncan’s wedding in December – good times.

DTrace

Man, twice in a single day that I’ve been totally impressed with DTrace, and two posts from Brendan –

• A proposal for a DTrace Network Provider, net, so you can do funky things like –

  # dtrace -n 'tcp:::receive /args[2]->tcp_dport == 80/ {
          @pkts[args[1]->ip_daddr] = count();
  }'
  dtrace: description 'tcp:::receive' matched 1 probe
  ^C
  
    192.168.1.8                                                       9
    fe80::214:4fff:fe3b:76c8                                         12
    192.168.1.51                                                     32
    10.1.70.16                                                       83
    192.168.7.3                                                     121
    192.168.101.101                                                 192
  

• DTrace meets Javascript, building on top of the Spider Monkey JavaScript Engine.

All hail Brendan, new overlord of DTrace! Rad!

Wakey Wakey

Dear Planet GNOME [stop]
Please pay special attention today to Jeff’s blog [stop]
We have jack all submissions from the GNOME project [stop]
It’s making me cry because I’m on the paper review committee and can’t understand any of the other presentations I have to review and I already have an inferiority complex [stop]
P.S. Same message applies to Planet OpenSolaris and PlanetSun

Update: Of course, any good submissions to the main programme may entitle you to some travel sponsorship..

Boarding Nearly Over

So the winter season is drawing to a close, and there have been really fun times, with fun people [Patrick, Dave, Heidi, Nick, Graham, Myra, Michelle, and Jayne], and some of their blogs give a much better account of how the season went. In short, my boarding has improved a lot, having previously had a half a dozen visits 2 years previously. I’m digging it, pushing myself a little more, and feeling like I’m slowly getting enough ability to be able to start playing around on some jumps a little more. Last weekend we had a whiteout at Cragieburn, but some super slushy snow fun, and then a monster day at Porter Heights with some beautiful blue skies, and ball grabbing moments on Big Moma, a rather steep double black diamond run (WTF was I thinking?). Thanks guys, it’s been awesome!

The following image [thanks to Myra for all of them], says it all really –