Well, it's official. Maggie and I are getting our own place. We move in three days after our 2 year anniversary on Friday 13th of August - Black Friday :) We're meeting the real estate agent at 9:00AM to collect the keys, and give them the bond and first two weeks rent.

We looked at it last Saturday, dropped the application form and fee off on Monday, and heard back this morning. It's been a bit of a whirlwind decision, but not as much as Sandgate was.

It's a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment on the top floor of a three story building in Victoria Park. The bedrooms are huge, and it has reverse-cycle airconditioning and two undercover parking bays behind a security gate. The kitchen is pretty big, and the living area is really open. One of the bedrooms will be a study, and the other will be a server room/junk room. Some of you might argue that's one and the same :)

Location wise, it's amazing. There's dozens of restaurants along Albany highway, and pretty much one of every kind of shop or store you would want. There's a LiquorLand on the corner, about 100m from our front door! :)

The server room has a view to the city so a wireless link is likely to be setup with the Sandgate massive and myself, via the AAPT building. If Mark and Em have visibility, it would be wicked to get them on our network too. We can stream videos to each other Xboxes! But that's down the track... when we get some money together...

Today we bought one of IBM's brand new x206 Intel servers for a client. These beasts are new to the market, replacing the older x205 entry level machine. We're among a handful of Perth people to have them, and ours was shipped via air freight from the East.

It's a really well specced workhorse, especially considering the price. This box has a 2.8GHz HyperThreaded Pentium IV processor (which means that an SMP Linux kernel will think it is a dual-processor machine), 512 MB of RAM, dual 160GB SATA hard disks mirrored on an Adaptec RAID card. It also has dual network cards, with the onboard adapter having gigabit capabilities.

This machine cost all up about $2,500, but that's not the best part. All of the hardware is supported with the 2.6 kernel that ships with the new Debian Installer. The onboard RAID controller didn't seem to be supported, but I gave it about 5 minutes attention. There's probably a boot argument I could append to make it work, but seeing as the client has paid for a seperate RAID card, I figured we should probably give it to them ;)

We bought seperate Seagate disks (IBM wanted to charge twice as much for half the capacity) but have since found a problem. The design of the server incorporates a front-accessible cage where the drives are mounted with the SATA backplane. Silly me didn't buy/order any seperate disk caddys, and now the disks are sitting there precariously. And I won't even go into the heat issues... It's a good thing we have three cradles on back order from IBM's Spare Parts department (one extra, so we don't have this probme again when they get another disk).

This is the only problem, and it wasn't anyone's fault but my own (I guess the sales people could have checked if I needed them). Ohh well, live and learn.

The machine will run Sarge, with a full X11 install. Both Gnome and KDE get installed when you choose to install the "Desktop" components through tasksel. It's the first time I've used X on a server machine :)

At this price, it makes it a very affordable application server. This one will be running the internal office systems (the susual suspects; Samba, Cacti, iptables/NAT) including a Copper deployment we have modified.

Now I can't wait to compile a new kernel, and see what this HT processor can do!

It may come as no suprise (especially for Jimmy) that Telstra made a mistake with my new phone contract. I got the bill, which said I was on a 24 month contract, even though I clearly indicated I wanted to remain on a 12 month contract for the new handset.

Clownpockets.

A quick call to their Mobilenet helpdesk resolved the problem, and as compensation for my sadness, they've taken the final T610 handset payment off my bill, saving me just over $70!

He shoots, he scores!

On Sunday Adam, Steve, Laurie (Adam's dad) and myself went for a joyflight in Laurie's plane.

It's a turboprop, which means that a jet engine drives a propeller at the front of the aircraft. Inside, Laurie has two flight systems that are the same as those used in F-18 figher jets! They displayed a variety of information, and run on a DOS platform. It's funny watching them run ScanDisk everytime they load, and then launching into DOS4GW mode (you ol' skool gamers will know what I'm talking about).

We went down to Augusta, and back to Jandakot and the round-trip took only an hour! We were crusing at 10,000 ft and travelling about 260 knots on the way down south, and that was with a 30 knot tail wind. That's about 480km/h :) Also, the turbine was running at about 60% power, meaning that if we took it higher we would run more efficiently. Not surpisingly, the jets are from Slovakian fighter planes :)

With a resale value of just over $1.2M, this has to be the coolest toy any guy I know has.

It seems that every man and his 'blog is reviewing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 film. This means, that the next cool thing to hit the 'net will be to make a stand and go out of your way not review this film, with a claim that "you don't want to be like everyone else" or "there's already enough written about this." Consider this me starting the new trend.

Last night I saw the flick with Maggie at an advanced screening in Mt. Lawley's Astor cinema. It was ram-jammed to the tits in the foyer before we went in. People were complaining that they were going to faint. Clearly there was high interest in what Mickey had to say.

Whilst I knew that it was never going to be a subjective documentary, I went in attempting to see through some of sheer anti-Bush feeling, and find the truth. Maggie and I have a saying that when you have two sides to a story, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I was thinking I could employ this concept to the film and maybe I'd learn a thing along the way, while not being as completely blindsided by Michael Moore's extreme opinion.

That quickly becomes hard to do when you see Bush acting like a mega-dickhead. Seriously, the guy has no clue. Not one tiny clue. I won't ruin the movie and give examples, other than the final quote from the film.

The actual quote goes "Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me" indicating that if you don't learn your lesson the first time, you deserve to get burnt the second.

You'll walk away and talk about the issues he presents, which I think is the strongest feature of any of Michael Moore's films. The thoughts provoked after the film are the ones that might save the US in the near future.

I was pro the war on Iraq, but that was a pretty unfounded belief (I'll admit). Now, I really wonder if Iraq ever wanted to be liberated in the first place. American soldiers are either dumb as a doorknob, or they were asking "what are we doing here?"

In the mean time, check out this funny-assed Flash cartoon about Kerry and Bush. Look out for big Arnie. I really hope Kerry wins now. He has three purple hearts :)