Moving right along..
Life seems to be moving pretty quickly at the moment. I’ve tried to sit down and write an update, but could just never get started. What usually happens when I make it this far (starting a post) is that I decide to summarise everything with short paragraphs, then end up rambling on for ages about something else entirely. So, here goes:
Sebastian!
Sebastian continues to grow! This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s pretty amazing though to look back on some older photos of him and see just how much he’s grown. Here are a couple of photos I took the day before Mother’s Day:
Getting those shots was hard work. The previous day Lou had taken over 300 photos at home, with almost every one of them having a blurry Sebastian jumping around in it. I tried to take some myself, using the makeshift studio she’d set up in a corner of the room. However, despite lights, lamps, a tripod and my best efforts, I just couldn’t get a clear shot without some part of him being blurry.
Eventually, frustrated, I gave him a ball and took him out on to the front lawn. (Well, what’s left of it anyway - but that’s another story). Outside I found I had plenty of light, but still had the problem of him running around too much for me to get a good shot. Eventually I managed to take the middle photo shown above, after I tried running circles around him until he cracked up laughing.
Encouraged by this success we headed down to the picnic area at the end of the Lauderdale canal, and I managed to get the other two shots. The one of him standing on the sand in black & white is the one we chose to have enlarged, and gave framed copies to both sets of parents for Mother’s Day.
Oliver!
Oliver is doing well! Well, he’s doing what unborn babies do - growing, and making his mum uncomfortable. We’re at 27 weeks as of Wednesday, which means things are moving along at a frightening pace!
Going over to the pastel side..
I have given in to powerful forces, and switched allegiances. Still, I wouldn’t exactly call it the dark side:
I’ve lusted after Mac hardware for some time, and had resolved that if I finally took the plunge and bought a notebook of my own, it’d be a Mac. This was avoided, however, because I managed to get one for work. I’ve been travelling much more in this position, and after a couple of trips having to borrow spare notebooks and get them into a usuable state before travelling, I guess it made sense for me to have my own.
Of course, this means that my primary desktop is no longer a Linux box! All the keyboard shortcuts feel wrong, and are taking some time to get used to. There are things I like and things I dislike about OS X, but all in all I’m quite happy with it. Certainly it’s very pretty to look at. Once I’d installed a few key apps such as Firefox, Quicksilver (thanks to Tim and Jay for putting me onto this) and Adium, it was business as usual.
Talking about Sudoku..
I’ve been accepted as a speaker at SAGE-AU’2006, the national conference of the System Adminitrator’s Guild I’ve been heavily involved with over the years. I’m speaking on the second and final day of the technical program, giving a presentation entitled Solving Sudoku with Python and Linux Clusters which is every bit as geeky as it sounds. It’s an expanded and revised version of a presentation I gave at the Tasmanian Summer IT Conference earlier this year.
The reviewer who looked at my paper was pretty positive, and I’m looking forward to the conference. It’ll be the first time I’ve visited Canberra!
Enough for now..
Ok, that’ll do. It took me three days to get this far.