As any programmer will tell you, when you hit “the zone” it can be hard to track exactly what it is that you’re achieving. It’s not uncommon to sit down for a six hour session and at the end of it have a poor memory of what you were doing at the beginning.

This is a real problem if you make a living off charging for your time, as the natural result (for honest people) is to under charge by under accounting for your time.

Using source control can be a good initial reminder, so long as your commits are meaningful and descriptive. I use the following command to give me a basic idea about what I’ve done today (since midnight):

It results in output similar to this:

e6de125 Added progress controller and basic views
bce08e1 Added stylesheets including 960 grid layout
b034acc Implemented initial 960 grid layout
2576762 Added AASM gem dependency

Girls’ Generation/SNSD - Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)

We use a DrayTek Vigor 2008 wireless ADSL 2 router at both The Frontier Group office and Berwick Manor. I was surprised and disappointed to see that at home my wireless network was performing especially poorly, with up to 40% packet loss and significant drop outs.

I investigated a few avenues, but because the MacBook Pro is so damn new there’s nothing I could find online to help me out. Coupled with the fact that things work fine at the office and you had one confused little gangster.

The first stop was to check out my old MacBook Pro, which is now Magdalena’s new MacBook Pro. Her wireless worked just fine and dandy, but at least that meant I could point the finger to my unibody badboy with confidence.

I upgraded the DrayTek’s firmware because the version I was using was from mid-2006. There have been numerous patches since then which claim to help with wireless connectivity. Magdalena’s laptop is almost 3 years old, so it was about the same age as the firmware - it made sense that it might play nicer, whilst mine was expecting something else.

The new firmware flashed fine but it did nothing to help my Mac. I fiddled around with the various wireless security options but even having no security didn’t change anything, and I was still dropping more packets than I could afford.

I did have success by locking the DrayTek to 802.11B only, instead of the B/G combo. I know, I know… the standard allows for a much slower throughput, but that’s not super important to me. I want nice, fast pings on my wireless network at home. When I transfer large files I jack into the wired network anyway, so it’s not going to be a limitation I can’t live with.

I went from this:

<snip>
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=17 ttl=255 time=42.394 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=18 ttl=255 time=44.301 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=19 ttl=255 time=9.830 ms
^C
--- 192.168.10.254 ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 30% packet loss

… to this:

<snip>
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=454 ttl=255 time=4.426 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=455 ttl=255 time=4.422 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.254: icmp_seq=456 ttl=255 time=3.667 ms
^C
--- 192.168.10.254 ping statistics ---
457 packets transmitted, 457 packets received, 0% packet loss

Boston Legal is a fantastic television show.

“Denny Crane.”

Today I chopped and stacked a tonne of wood for our fire. It was delivered this afternoon from a guy mum and dad have used in the hills for a while. $250 delivered with a smile and a wicked chopping block.

The pretty red-head at Bunnings is getting to know me now - she asks about the previous things I bought. She bent the rules and let me take cash out over two separate transactions so I didn’t have to hit an ATM.

It was good to get outside and get a bit of different exercise, even if I am still picking splinters out of my hands.

I’ll leave you with this one thought: if a man uses firelighters to start a fire, he’s not actually a man,