My kindle has arrived.

I am most pleased,though I haven't done an awful lot with it yet. The cover is blue.

And my first typing of kindle was knidle - perhaps the K should be silect.

coming up for air

I have been silent for a while as the thought of being even half way coherent on my blog was beyond me. This was mainly due to setting up for a 2 week intensive subject I ran, followed by a 4 day conference. I've now had a week back "in the office" and my brain has settled down again. The course went well. I had lots of complements. The conference went well. I think I've finally figured out how to get something useful out of going to a conference. I'm now dealing with trying to get reday for semester which is only a week away and 3 days of that will be spent in another courshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife that I'm a student in.

In other news,
Somewhere in there I had another birthday & we've been eating birthday turkey for 8 days so far.
My computer is getting weird again. I'm downloading the latest video card driver to see if that imporves things. I have doubts about my power supply though since my DVD drive is "vanishing" on occasion. In an unrelated matter, my headphones died too - I had a new pair and plans to change over, but I wasn't expecting to do it just then. Or maybe it was the computer port playing up too. The new headphones plug in differently.
I finally bought a kindle - it hasn't arrived yet. I did the easy thing and bought from Amazon with a case with a light - so many colour choices. I chose blue. Pink would show the dirt, I don't like orange, green seemed a bit off & I seem to by everything in red, so this was a novel colour for me...As soon as it turns up I'm buying Andreas novels - all of them - in a great glut. Speaking of which Thanks for the tea, I'm off to have some momentarilly.
Ok. Off to install a video driver. This could be a long night. The tea will help.

Long weekend?

I don't have time for a long weekend. I had plans that involved me coming in on Saturday at least. And plans for working Monday. Hmm maybe I'll come in anyway. At least no-one will interrupt me.

Oh...really..that was unexpected

Yesterday I went to see an ophthalmologist about an itchy eye that hadn't really gone away for a year. I was concerned that I had something in my eyelid scratching my eye. I can also see a strip across my eye when looking down a microscope. The doctor couldn't see anything and thought it best to refer me on to someone with better equipment. The expert told me I have an allergy response, that might not be to anything specific & I can take drops. He then had a look for the strip and didn't find it, so its probably floaters or something like that.

Oh, and by the way, while looking he also found the tear in my retina, a precursor to my retina detaching. so 1/2 an hour later I was sitting in front of a laser having laser eye surgery to fix it!

The phrase "dodged a bullet" was mentioned.

everyone is sick

It seems that I'm surrounded by the unwell...and not just the usual colds. Nooo; suspected pneumonia, fighting 3 separate influenza strains at once, whole families going down together. I feel threatened by it all - I can't afford to get sick right now.

Its been ages since I've done one of these

I'm a yellow magic drafter!

Take the quiz at Brent Weeks.com

Weirdly, this was my favourite colour when I read the book

And since it soesn't show up, heres what they said about it;

Yellow luxin is most often a liquid that releases its energy back into light quickly, allowing its use as a torch or a trigger to ignite flammable materials or explosives. Yellow nourishes other luxins, extending the durability of luxin structures or tools. Like water turning to ice, when yellow is drafted perfectly, it loses its liquidity and becomes the hardest luxin of all. Yellows tend to be clear thinkers, intellect and emotion in perfect balance.

The results from your color matching test have also shown that you are one of the elite, a superchromat. The magic you do will almost never fail. Satrapies will compete to recruit you, and you will have a wide latitude in what work you choose to do once you finish your studies. You can expect your patron to lavish praise and honors on you. As a monochrome, you will master your color, and only have to defer to bichromes and polychromes and, of course, the nobility and the satraps who support us all.

I laughed and I laughed

I walked past mum as she rolled an icecream cone in what looked like crushed nuts. mmm. Then as I walked away I heard her tell dad "its the biscuit crumbs left over from the tart". Then she made her own icecream cone, shortly followed by a cry of disgust. The biscuit crumbs were garlic granules. Bwah ha ha ha.
What makes it even funnier is that this is the second time something like this has happened. Some months ago she gave dad some eye drops that turned out to be the ant rid in the dropper bottle next to the eyedrops in the fridge. Suffice to say, they aren't stored in the same place anymore. FYI - ant rid stings, but doesn't appear to do any damage if washed out quickly.

Oh, and dad was happily eating the garlic icecream, having not noticed.

new toys

I bought myself a HTC wildfire phone. I was wanting another one in the HTC family, but it was only available on a network I didn't want to use and the next closest one was very expensive. I got it on sale, set the internet to wifi access only and am now happily doing prepaid. If needed I'll switch my prepaid to the version that has a couple of meg of download in case I need to use maps somewhere, but in the short term its a cheap way to have a smart phone with lovely, lovely apps. The wifi isn't as great here as it is in the UK. My brother has the same phone and showed me how to set it up this way. Almost everywhere he goes in the UK has free wifi access.

My next toy, should it ever come back into stock anywhere, will be the Sony PRS650 ereader. After extensive reading, I decided it was the one that did the most of what I most wanted....then its not available.

well that was inefficient

I had to get up before dawn yesterday & didn't find out till later that that was the best day to see the 4 planets align in the predawn eastern sky. (Mercurey, Venus Jupiter and Mars). Not that they were is a straight line, but they are clustered. They'll still be there till May 30 (when you can draw a line between them, but they are further spread out). So tomorrow, I'll be getting up before dawn...again.

Check here for the video

sad to see you go

My brother is leaving today. He's been visiting from Britain & we've been doing lots of socialising. I've been crab potting at Giru, to Ayr for high tea, to multiple coffee shops and having lots of barbeques on the strand. More in two(ish) weeks than we normally do in a year. Now I need to work very long days and catch up on the huge workload at work - lots of deadlines.

mmm holidays

Of course,
My dvd drive is dead and needs a trip into the repair man. The earthquake may have just jostled the plug from the motherboard, but there's too much metal in the way for me to see & I'd rather let someone else pull it to pieces to check that. It doesn't help that the water cooler keeps the open side attached so its not as easy to manipulate. Perhaps it should be attached to the back instead. I can't play sims right now because it needs a disk to be in the drive, or install bejewelled for mindles hours of fun. I can play LOTRO though, at least till my brother turns up. He should be here now, but the plane was late so he missed his connection. Instead of a 2 hour flight here (or less) from Brisbane, he now has a flight that goes to Canberra, then another that goes to Cairns and a third that comes back to us. Six hours - Madness!

Earthquake!

Although perhaps tremor would be more appropriate. I was just lying down for a nap this afternoon when there were about three "trembles" as though someone heavy was running up the stairs, but without the noise. Then there was a stronger, longer one that rattled the pictures (and the bed). It was like a helicopter flying low, or someone using heavy machinery on the house - all without the expected noise level. I thought it might be dad, who was downstairs, but he hadn't done anything (or felt anything). Then my brother range from the other side of town - he'd felt it too. I think we felt it because we were a story up in a wooden house - more movement. Lots of people felt nothing if they were in solid buildings like shopping centres. It turned out to be south east of us & measured 5.4 on the richter scale. I haven't heard of any damage anywhere yet.

blah

Head hurts, tired, haven't been able to access my files all day and the IT people haven't got back to me since I called at 2pm. I'm also about 3 days behind in the amount of work I have to get done by tomorrow afternoon. The 2 most important ones require me being able to access my files.

SIMS Medieval - more addictive than chocolate

I bought it on Saturday. I played it for 5 hours on Sunday. So far only one of the fatal flaws has actually been annoying. Gambling. My knight constantly loses. Actually, she tends to fail at everything. Though I did make her last. Perhaps its because I made her last and was rather fatigued. Screen shots will follow now I've thought of it. Now off to play again. I only works 10.5 hours straight today - plenty of energy :)

Rain, flash floods, car accidents, traffic jams, thunder

I'm still at work. It was pouring & I got a txt saying our road was flooded, but my car has high clearance, so I wasn't too concerned. I did try to leave when it started thundering but as I drove out one of our school exits, I saw that the road was blocked with cars going out...all the way back to the main Uni ring and beyond. So I turned back the other way, hoping the other exit was free, but I could see cars backed up to the point at which you could turn right rather than left. I think the whole university is grid locked. I turned back in the other school entrance to come back to work & after I parked I get a txt saying there was a crash on the Nathan Street Bridge. That would explain it. Now theres so much water I just got a txt telling my the budies in the aviary have an indoor swimming pool - the aviary is usually 10cm above ground level - ick!

Edit: finally got home & had to use some odd back streets. There was lots of traffic doing the same and some really fast flowing water over roads. I only saw one car in the water with hazard lights, abandoned. I decided to get into my street at the other end as the end I usually use is very potholed and would be flooded. I should have gone the usual way. The bottom end is a bit lower and it was DEEP. I considered driving up someone elses driveway to get out of the water but by the time I thought of that solution, I was onto the shallower part of the road (ie still too deep for a little sedan but ok for me - just. My fan belts were screaming as I came up the drive. Now I just hope it will all drip dry. Dad's belts were screaming too. He was at a shopping centre when it all hit & it was up to his doors trying to get out of the car park. The water was still rising when he left.

answers to the wet question et. al.

Yasi was the cyclone that struck much of Queensland earlier in the year. Anything that was damaged/destroyed as a result has been "Yasi'ed"

A slasher slashes or cuts long grass (whipper-snipper on steroids).

Making money off my blog...a strange and disturbing concept that would require I read all the fine print in the way its done. must...read...contract...all...the...way...through.
Though it might be worth it to see if the advertising was for XKCD ;) Alternately they would be weather related. By the way, its wet here again. We got 40mm last night.

tempted

I was downloading something from EA gamesand I found a new version of sims - Sims medieval. Its just come out. I could buy it and get totally sucked in. (Sims3 was tempting me to start with). If I had more free time...sigh

matryoshka limit

This sucked me in enough that I had to google the title of my blog. The front search page didn't actually use the terms in the same way as in the comic. But they should have! If it doesn't exist it should.

nothing ever goes away

I just had someone comment on a 2007 post. I blame google searches. I've also just found that this program doesn't like me typing google in lower case - it wants Google. Go figure.

And now back to reading through a paper someone here is submitting. So far I've only found a couple of typos. No, my name isn't on the author list :(

wet

It's been raining all day (after raining on and off for weeks). I almost gave myself heat exhaustion getting through mowing the front lawn last week and it needs doing again. I think the back needs a slasher now. Of course its too wet to do anything.

In other news, I'm getting used to my new progressive lenses. The frames are a bit more of a problem - I've been getting them adjusted every day. They still aren't right.