OK, not quite a million. Scrap that.

Here’s the question. If you had $100 to spend on whatever you wanted, what would you spend it on? If you have two $50 things that’s fine. List what you’d buy and what it costs. Then do the same with a purse of $1,000. Then do it for $10,000.

I’ll start it off.

$100

• Socks and jocks. I saw some wicked Lonsdale boxers in Leederville for about $30 a pair and I’m always short of socks.

$1,000

• A bluetooth headset – the Jabra BT250. I used Peter’s the other day and it was great. I like talking on the phone when I’m at a keyboard or in the car so this is a real necessity. Online for $147.
• The Art of Computer Programming. It’s a three-book set written by Donald Knuth, one of computer science’s biggest celebrities. I recently joined a mailing list that’s attempting to read the books in 12 months, and though I’ve missed the start by a month, I’d still like to read them. About $150 after postage, if I can’t get them cheaper locally.
• Some new work clothes. I like shirts with cufflinks and need some new pants. About $400.
• Ticket to Ruxcon. I’ve been asked to join a Capture the Flag team (the bottom of that WP article – God knows why, I’m no 1337 h4x0r ;) I need to get to Sydney for the weekend, but accomodation is taken care of – one of the other hackers has an appartment so we’d all be crashing there for that extra nerdy goodness. I think $300 would be about right.

$10,000

• A suit. How I’ve gone so long without one is amazing. I’d spend between $2,500 and $3,000.
• The NISMO body kit for the Zed. Imagine this, but in silver. $2,000 after it’s bought, painted and installed. The Zed is about two weeks away. Ideal would be to have it for the trip down to Capel, but I’m dreamin’
• Trip to Canada. $5,000, as a minimum. I don’t know the details yet other than that’s where I want to go with Maggie.

I left off the remote control model helicopter, because I don’t think that’s really going to happen. It’d be nice, but it’s very impractical.

This is the search I use when looking for 350Zs.

I thought I’d pimp some software that I’m really digging right now:

Beagle is one of a handful (F-Spot and Tomboy, which I’ll discuss later, are others) of Mono applications that were written to show off how cool Mono is.

I first saw a working copy of it when Robert Love (a very cool kernel hacker, if that’s possible ;) demoed it at LCA this year. It was part of the GNOME mini-conference that ran before LCA officially started. The system utilizes ionotify, which from my understanding causes an interrupt (or something similar) when disk access is made, indicating something might have changed. When I receive a new email, or have an instant message with someone it causes something somewhere to alert Beagle. This means I open Beagle, search for “yoyoma” and it returns the results. I then get an email from someone with “yoyoma” in it and it will rock up in my Beagle search results. Instantly. That is cool.

Next up we have monopod. I like this a lot, but I don’t like how it forces you to download all the available files for an RSS feed. What am I talking about? Well, an RSS feed will normally have between 10 and 30 seperate podcasts in a single RSS feed, and if it’s a feed you regularly listen to then you’ve probably heard the stream from August 2004 and don’t want to download it. The good news is that Edd plans on adding this feature in the near future, so I won’t be submitting feature request bugs.

Last up is Tomboy. This little treat lets you store sticky notes. “That’s not overly amazing” I hear you all thinking but it is. How often do you make a short list of things that you want to do? I know I do it all the time. This lets me organize my notes in a semi-logical fashion, and logic is good.

The downside (for all you Windows loooosers) is that you need to be running Linux for each of these apps, though I might be talking shite and they may well compile with the .Net framework. Which would make complete sense. I think I am talking shite. No, I think my good friend Jay-Dub is talking shite.

I half-watched an episode of Bread on Channel 10. It’s a show about small businesses, so it was not entirely unrelated to the work I was meant to be focussed on ;)

From what I could tell, it’s like that show on the weekend that promotes 3M products, except here they push Telstra (which makes sense, as the site’s on Sensis’ webservers) and the National Bank.

On the topic of Telstra… they had a segment with a dude in a taxi driving around whilst connected to the internet. As a demo of “how the internet works” he conencted to Google maps. Then he went to a map of San Diego. I thought in my head “hey, that looks familiar” and sure enough, he goes “and you might see Tom Cruise in this pic because it’s Top Gun”. I fell off my chair. Almost. I should have. I am so great – I can recognize a Google map :)

Following last night’s efforts, I ordered another pizza. I got the Egyptian pizza yesterday which has “pepperoni, onion, capsicum, spicy beef and a touch of chilli” and tonight I got a Mexican Volcano which has “ham, capsicum, onion, pepperoni, fresh tomato and chilli”.

I must say, I do prefer this Mexican Volcano, though there’s not much difference.

Give the All Night Pizza Cafe a call on 9470 9292 for delicious pizzaz0rs.