When I was a youngin' I remember saving my pocket money for several weeks to buy a mechanical pencil. I was about 8 or 9 years old and loved drawing; at this particular time I enjoyed drawing on grid paper for some reason. I saw a stainless steel mechanical pencil in an art supply store and fell in love with the simple but elegant design. I had to have one.

And so I saved and bought it, and drew my little hand off.

I remember having it in Tech. Drawing at high school, and the cool "art" kids thought it was mint. I never saw them for sale after that one time when I bought mine.

Growing up I gave away the doodling, and the technical drawing for that matter. Now don't use a writing stick except for making notes in my notepads, which I try to do frequently.

Today at lunch I had an urge to dump my brain down onto paper, so I went a few shops down from the cafe that Adam and I were eating at to get a pen and a notepad. Low and behold, there's one silver, shiny new mechanical pencil sitting on the shelf. I knew at once I must have it.

So far I've made lists for work tasks, things I need to do outside of work, things I want to buy and most importantly, a list of the things I like and dislike about my job. I think this last list is worthy of a journal entry of its own. Stay tuned...

(sorry about the tiny picture; I've spent 30 minutes looking for a bigger one but they don't exist online! :)

I bet this guy makes Steve jealous.

You can read about him here. I bet he's divorced.

On Saturday Adam and myself took the Zeds out to MC Motorsport, near the Perth International Airport. We went with Hoops and his new, very impressive RX-7, and met Radford and Jack there.

There were morning and afternoon sessions split with lunch. We had lunch and partook in the afternoon group. A driver's briefing taught us a few basic tricks, and then we hit the skid pan. There were road cones placed to make courses, and we took the instructors out for a few laps. They gave pointers as we drove. It was interesting, becuase most adults I know would be saying "slow down, slow down" but the instructors were saying "more pace, brake harder" and things like that.

After three runs they let us go on our own, and then it was time for squealies. Everyone had fun and it was good learning in a safe environment. Traction control is handy in the real world, but it was great being able to turn it off on the track :)

I'm hoping Radford gets his photos online soon, though there is a video of Danny taking my car out for a lap. It's a fairly big MOV file but you get the idea.

In other car-related news, check out the Top Gear review of the Ariel Atom. These guys are importing them for track use in Australia, if you're looking for a new toy.

Seriously, check out the video.

When I was younger, say around 17, I used to think my life followed a sine wave (or cosine wave if you will). That is, I used to go through high and low periods, at fairly regular intervals. When life was good, it was great, and when it was on the down hill slope it sucked, until you hit the bottom and started coming back up again.

A lot of these highs and lows were related to either money, or relationships. An extra shift at Coles or a fight with mum and dad (which I did, regularly - that'll teach them for raising an independent young man :) meant a huge difference at that age.

Now that I'm older those highs and lows are not as noticable. I think it's a combination of me being more "on track", and my life needing "bigger" changes to cause the swings. An extra $50 is literally nothing to my lifestyle, when back then it was a quarter more.

... but right now I feel like I'm on the way to another peak. Stacks of things are going well, and it's all falling into place.

This started really last night, when Adam and I moved prime from QV1 out to Osborne Park. The colocation facility is moving, and this is our old server that we started with. It was one of two that Jono had left at QV1 and now it's in his racks at the new office. I say new, but he's been there for over two years now!

The move went flawlessly. And I do mean without flaw. Prime went down fine. Prime came back fine. All systems go.

When we were out there, Jono showed us a bunch of cool projects they're working on in 2006, and I'm hoping that we can forge closer relationships in this coming year. We're all mates, but there's more opportunities for each other there that we should be exploring. Listen to me, I sound like a homo :) I'm talking about making money, not making out!

One cool toy he showed us is his Iron Port. It's a real-time spam and virus checker, and we'll be using it shortly to filter all our mail. No more spam, ever. I really like that idea.

It uses a real-time black list that's based on server reputation, and all the Iron Ports in the world talk back to each other through a central service. We're all ganging up on the spammers, which makes me happy.

Next up, I applied for a credit increase. This is primarily for the holiday, but it'll also be nice to have afterwards. That hadn't come through last night, but it has this morning. I'm stoked to the max.

Life is working out pretty well, and summer's on the way :)

I got an email from the State Manager of Sun Microsystems inviting Adam and myself to a breakfast briefing. Here's what the email said:

This breakfast session is about how to apply the principles of SOA to high priority projects like application consolidation, integration of disparate silos of customer information into a single view, and multi product and multi channel customer engagement.

I mean seriously, do you people think that these buzzwords impress anyone?

It never used to bother me and I thought it was just "how IT was" but now it's driving me mad. You can't just invent shit and expect it to mean something. Another recent entry: "security posture". What the hell? It's meant to mean how well positioned you are with respect to security, but instead sounds like you're sitting on your ass.

The term "AJAX" came out of nowhere and it was good. I didn't like it because it sounds catchy, or because it was a fuynky new technology (it wasn't, Google and Microsoft have been doing it for years, well) but it meant that you could discuss what it meant with someone and you'd both know what you were talking about.

But who talks about god damned "silos"?