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Ok, so I must be suffering from some stress symptoms or something. I went to work around 3pm today and just got back 1/2 hour ago. It’s a freaking Saturday. A lot of stuff wasn’t working again, and it’s really pi$$ing me off. Or maybe my liver really is stuffed. No! My liver has to be stronger than that. It can’t be that wussy. I rang about 20 piano stores within a 15 mile radius of home looking for my Kawai ES3 digital piano. You know what? None of the buggers stock it. The only place that does is ‘certified’ to and they charge US $1600 for it (pre tax). Blood sucking bastards. Considering I can get it for just over AUD $1800 back in Australia… well that’s just dodgy. I’m going to walk in there on Monday with a printout showing the Aussie price and let the guy know that I know he owns the only place that sells such pianos in South Florida (as far as I know know know know). He has two choices - either sell me the piano at the equivalent Australian price or lose a sale. I’ll bring in cold hard caaaaaaash too to put a bit more pressure on him. And you know what else? I didn’t talk to one nice person out of all of those people I spoke to today. At least in Oz people would sound nicer over the phone. Bastards. The Yanks aren’t getting tipped so they can justify treating you like crap over the phone. Wankerchops. ...

I couldn’t believe how bad today was. It was just absolutely, undoubtedly, the worst work day I’ve had over here in Florida. I swear to God I was nearly in tears when people were going through pointing out mistakes I had made in resolving merge conflicts, and why the program could not be built. Err, merge conflicts. Basically you have many people working on fixes/improvements to a program. Each person has their own separate work environment and eventually all the work done has to be brought together. That’s where I stuffed up. We were hoping to release the version that had everyone’s changes today, and I stuffed up. Yeah, good work K. My tech lead trusted that I could do the work in his absence, I thought I could do the work, but it was shown that I couldn’t. I guess I’m being pretty hard on myself since I’ve never done this before - and it’s not straightforward text source code files that I was merging either. For those who know, I was trying to resolve conflicts in Rational Rose Realtime code models. A nightmare. Incredibly complex, but hell, I thought I could do better. Oh the humanity! ...

I’ve just arrived back from work. Let’s see… nearly a 14 hour day. Not bad, not bad. It’d be a lot better though if I actually felt like I’d achieved something today. I wish I could just laugh at things when they get like this but I just don’t have the energy to at the moment. I swear I was going flat out the whole day and then spent most of the night fixing problems arising from the day’s work. I discovered a lot of the problems weren’t mine - which is sort of a relief, but then it’s also a pain in the ass because I’m the one who worked the overtime. Ahh well. At least I’m back in time to watch the Daily Show. ...

- Put the icecream in the fridge. - Put the margarine in the freezer. - Failed to declare $VOB_ROOT in my rational rose realtime environment, thus causing me an amazing amount of pain over the last 2 days. It never told me it wasn’t declared!!! - I had one beer. C’mon, it was only one and it was happy hour! Wanna know what I ate? No? Well don’t read on. I ate the same damn thing I eat every damn time I go to Wednesday night happy hour at the Davie ale house. Zinger Caesar Salad, medium hotness. ...

A change is in the wind. You know, I actually used to believe my mum when she said “Don’t pull a face like that or the wind will change and you’ll stay that way forever.” Ahh the pure innocence. From that to being told by a doctor to stop drinking 20 years later. Nice. The reason for this post is to alert you to a new sidebar I’ve created. This sidebar will be updated with the latest pictures that have been posted to my Flickr account. Yes, I’m about to ditch my Webshots account in favour of Flickr. Thats what you get, Webshots, when you’re shit. Sure, the professional photographs are nice but hell. I’ve already found Flickr to be an order of magnitude better. Thanks though for the suggestions that people have as to what other options there are out there. Flickr won hands down for me though. So what I’ve uploaded are some pics from my visit to the Kennedy Space Centre. They aren’t edited yet as I’ve just put them up there for the moment for a bit of testing. Album is here. ...

When I first went into the doctor about a month ago my resting heart rate was 80. That was the bloody highest resting heart rate I’ve ever had I reckon. I weighed 179 pounds (approx 81 kg) which for being a tiny bit over 6 feet this placed me within the medically safe region. My blood pressure was in the normal region. I considered this bad because I normally have a low blood pressure. ...

It was a bit weird to hear that Traffic, the premier place for Drum and Bass in Adelaide, had closed its doors recently. The big memory I have from there is when I saw DJ Marky and Stamina MC play and that was simply *awesome*. However, that and maybe a couple of other performances aside, one thing I had against the place was that there was way, way too much cigarette smoke inside. I was constantly in search of some nice clean air or some decent ventilation. It sort of sucked like that. ...

If you classify not doing anything as being great, then yes, this weekend was great. I read some books, surfed the net, read some books, slept, listened to music, slept, read, slept, played some music, slept, read. Ok, I sort of lie. Today I did venture outside because my face was looking relatively normal again. It just looked like I had a lipstick malfunction (I’d believe this too if I did actually wear lipstick. Not in this lifetime.) I played a game of Tennis today because it was too much of a nice day not to. I think Javi, who I played against, may have felt sorry for me as he let me win by a 6-0 6-1 6-1 margin :-p Thanks Javi! ...

I have to say that for the past couple of weeks I have been living like a rock star would… well, sortof. There hasn’t really been a night out where I’ve gotten home before 7am. Awesome. I had more of the same planned for this weekend until I woke up Thursday morning and noticed… a cold sore. I was left thinking “where the f$8k did that come from?” I can’t remember the last time I had one. If anything it would have been in primary school I’m guessing. That’s even if I actually have had one. I had to leave work early Thursday because I had a heck of a fever. Had my lifestyle finally caught up with me? Were the gods trying to strike me down? At any rate, there is no way I’m going out in public. Not at all. I’m not going to leave my apartment. I have enough supplies to last me until Monday at least. I’ve got a few books in storage to read so that will see me through ok. ...

It’s nearly midnight and I’m still at work. No! Hold on, back up. I’m *back* at work. I’ve already been out for a couple of drinks tonight and I had to come back and get some stuff done before tomorrow morning. The problem is, I’m finding nearly everything and anything is distracting me at the moment. Plus, I’m still listening to Rammstein from Valentine’s day. It’s pretty difficult to head-bang and code at the same time, ya know? ...