Dad asked me this morning if I'd be his chainman for a job he had to do today. My Dad is a surveyor, and I haven't seen him in action since I was a kid.

Technology has certainly made the profession evolve. Previously, being a chainman involved being on the other end of a chain - in this case a long, thin length of metal with specific lengths marked on it (a throwback to the Imperial measurement system of links and chains and whatnot) measuring various distances from pegs and nails in kerbs to correctly mark out the boundaries of properties.

Today, it involved holding a small prism in various places, while Dad used his theodolite, complete with laser distance measuring equipment, and plotted various points and bearings and distances in his data recorder, where he'll later upload them to his computer and draft a plan.

I still have no real appreciation for what doing a survey entails, but it was interesting to see what he has to do from an adult's perspective, rather than a child's. The equipment sure is expensive. Each prism is $300 a throw.

create your own visited countries map

Not much, but I can't select Hong Kong or Macau to bop it up a bit...

Henning Makholm emailed me the other day after he'd been doing some hacking on vaiostat-source to get it to work on newer 2.4 kernels and 2.6 kernels. It stopped working a while ago, and the upstream author no longer had a VAIO, so he wasn't that motivated to do much about it.

I'd actually filed a removal bug on the package, but screwed up and filed it against the package itself instead of ftp.debian.org, so it hadn't been removed yet. As my VAIO recently died, I can't really test or play around with the software much myself at the moment, so I offered the package to Henning if he wanted to take it over. He's not yet a DD, so I made a sponsored upload of Henning's new revision of the package.

Sarah got a phone call from the real estate agent on Christmas Eve and they told her our application was successful. We get the place from the 14th. I'm not looking forward to the move.

It's the humidity, yeah I know. But dammit, Brisbane is so uncomfortable. This is what I like about summer in Canberra by comparison, the heat is significantly drier.

We drove to Sydney on Wednesday night after work, and stayed the night with Sarah's aunty, and spent 12 hours driving from Sydney to Brisbane on Thursday.

The drive was uneventful. We took the New England highway route (first time I've gone that way). The traffic was light, the police presence was visible. The trip meter says we've done 1307 kilometres since we reset it just outside of Canberra.

Personalities : [raid1]
md2 : active raid1 hdb2[1] hda2[0]
497920 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md1 : active raid1 hdb3[1] hda3[0]
116222144 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 hdb1[1] hda1[0]
497856 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>

I finally got around to putting a second disk in daedalus, so the degraded RAID1 arrays that I installed it on are no longer degraded. I converted the swap device to a RAID1 array as well. Haven't rebooted yet, just in case something bites me. Given it's nearly Christmas, I don't want the box in a shagged state for potentially a week because there's no one at the colo facility or something.

I just need to mess with GRUB and the BIOS booting so that in the event of /dev/hda going bye-bye the box will boot of /dev/hdb and hopefully life will go on. Then I'll feel vaguely more comfortable with going overseas for an extended period of time. Knowing my luck, the box will then blow its powersupply instead, or something. It's served me quite well. It must be approaching 5 years old.

This was the only part of the upgrade that actually worked. The box rejected the 512M PC133 SDRAM DIMM I bought (I was really hoping it would just clock down to 100Mhz) and the decent IDE cable I bought apparently had a dud connector on it.

Sarah and I are looking at moving from our current share-house arrangement with Kathy to somewhere by ourselves again. So far, we've found a three bedroom townhouse in Watson, which we inspected at lunchtime today, and have put an application in for.

It's a touch on the older side (the carpet is what really dates it), but having three bedrooms would be nice. A dedicated study, and a dedicated "spare room" for when we get visitors. The rooms are of a generous size as well.

It'll be the furtherest from the CBD I've ever lived in Canberra, but I haven't been out on the town in ages, so I don't think it'll be much of an issue. The commute to work would still be acceptable, and that's more important to me.

Today Sarah and I have been together for three years. Last night we had dinner at Windows On The Park in the casino to celebrate.

I was actually a bit disappointed with the restaurant. It's literally in the casino, and is quite small. The outlook is nice though, hence the name.

I've never really gambled much, so just for shits and giggles, after dinner, we had a quick play of rapid roulette, and I had a couple of games of blackjack. With minimum bets of $15 (for the blackjack), I can see how you could get into strife quite quickly.

I've had a hankering to build a MythTV box, since about when I first discovered MythTV. The hankering was increased when I went around to Rick's place a while ago and saw his DVB-T card in action.

On the weekend, I bought what (fortunately) turned out to be a rebadged DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus at the Computer Fair, which is of the same breed as what Rick was running.

Some clever person has managed to reverse-engineer a driver for the card, but frustratingly, it's a royal pain to build. After a weekend of dicking around, I managed to get it to build against 2.6.9, but I'm getting heaps of symbol errors when I try to insert the modules.

When I first got home with the card, I thought I'd have a quick play with it under Windows 2000 to see what the reception was like in the study with the cheap and nasty rabbit ears I bought. Given the card is designed for Windows, you'd expect it to Just Work, right? Wrong. This is Windows after all.

If I have the drivers enabled, Windows 2000 blue-screens on bootup. If I boot into Safe Mode, disable the drivers and reboot, Windows boots fine. I can then enable the drivers (without rebooting) and watch TV. Whacked. I tried every version of the driver I could get my hands on and the outcome was the same. I'll have to drop them an email. Granted, my machine isn't quite of the specs they say... It's a 1.4Ghz Pentium IV, with a GeForce2 card, and the specs say you're supposed to have a 2.6 Ghz Pentium IV or something if you don't have a select few nVidia or ATI cards. But it plays back fine. Chews about 50% CPU.

I'm absolutely fanging to get it working under Linux though...

Blah, 30 is getting too close :-)

Sarah gave me a snorkle, mask and fins. So when we go to Brisbane for Christmas we can do some snorkeling.

It's been storming most days for the last few, and showering in between, but the novelty value hasn't worn off yet. I have to keep going and looking out the window. It's good to see the dam levels going in the opposite direction for a change...