I'm joining the crowd who is giving up on ICQ. I'm receiving too much spam and too many strange authorization requests. I will continue to be available via Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo (thanks to GAIM for making it easy).

When I donated blood at the Red Cross blood drive at work, they also took an extra vial to test donor suitability for apheresis (platelet donation). Sure enough, I was a suitable candidate, and got a letter in the mail a while ago inviting me to donate.

Back when I used to donate in Brisbane, I'd seen the plasma donors in the other room, all hooked up with blood coming out one arm, getting the plasma spun out, and the red cells going back in the other arm, and it totally grossed me out. The concept of having that for 2 hours wasn't all that appealing either.

The letter said my donation would be helping out cancer patients, and as I recently lost an uncle to cancer, I thought I'd give it a go, just once, to see what it was really like.

Man, I'd hate to have renal failure and need dialysis, that's all I can say, because having to have this done to you every week would be a real drag. Better than dying I guess... I had the "out" hose hooked up to my right arm, and the "in" hose on my left. They had a bit of trouble getting a good flow out that way, so if I ever do it again, I'll probably try it the other way around.

The recliner you lie on is heated, as apparently the "in" hose is a bit cool, but I didn't notice (the nurse did say my left hand got pretty cold at the start though). They also heap the blankets on you. You get a selection of movies to watch, so I watched War of the worlds, which was a good length. It finished just as they were unplugging me from everything. I did feel a bit tingly towards the end, and felt a bit woozy when I got up, but that could have been as much from lying down for 2 hours as anything else.

So would I do it again? Not in a hurry. It's pretty time consuming. We got up early and drove to Oakland, both because that was the only place with a slot available today, and we haven't been to the eastern side of the Bay yet. So we hit the road just after 8am, and weren't out of the blood bank until midday, so it's not the sort of thing I'd be wanting to do regularly.

So that's my good deed for the day.

Oh, and having hairy arms really sucks.

I'm surprised at how often I've had this response from Americans when I've had a conversation with them, and explained how I've moved from Australia, and describe Canberra. They seem to be very down on their own country.

It's not that bad. I moved here because I wanted to see a bit more of the world, experience the American culture for myself, and to just live in another country. It's not every day you get that sort of opportunity, and seeing a place for a holiday (even an extended one) just isn't the same.

I already know Australia is the greatest country in the world, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded every now and then.

I love reading about the new packages in Debian Weekly News. It's one of the regular bits of it I always look forward to.

This week, I was very pleased to read about rpmstrap being packaged. Finally, I can create a RedHat chroot to muck around in to test RPM building, without having to resort to running an entire RedHat box (or messing around with virtualising one).

So if getting confused about the seasons wasn't enough, it seems this country doesn't do Easter either. Good Friday and Easter Monday are not public holidays.

So I guess that explains all the fuss about Thanksgiving. It's the Easter equivalent.

So it seems that at least in North America, the seasons don't map directly to the inverse of Australia. Case in point, spring started today, on March 20, when if you were to invert autumn, should have started on the first of the month.

In fact, my research seems to suggest that the seasons change around the 20th to the 22nd of the month, but it's all based on on Equinoxes and Solstices, so it wouldn't surprise me if it moves around slightly year to year, like Easter does.

That said, the source of all knowledge is trying to tell me that summer in the southern hemisphere begins on November 6, which is news to me.

In fact, further research tends to suggest that the northern hemisphere hasn't got a fucking clue when the seasons start, and are all over the place like a dog's breakfast.

I'm feeling very seasonally confused.

Well we've just had two more Aussies arrive off the boat. Welcome to Daniel and Tanya. Daniel's starting at the usual place of employment next Monday, and we brought them along to the Thursday night outing to the regular watering hole.

It's always good to hear more Aussie accents.

Simon Rumble wants store-and-forward SMS sending technology, for times he's got no coverage. I just want an SMS inbox that is a a ring buffer. If I don't save a message into a more permanent folder, it should be fair game for overwriting by newer messages. Screw this "inbox full" crap.

I had no idea what scrapbooking actually was until our friend Sarah showed us some of her handiwork when we were in Phoenix. It's just themed photo albums really. She'd done some nice work.

Sarah's made friends with Louise, Sean's wife (they recently relocated here from Canberra, but we didn't know them in Canberra), and she's into scrapbooking too. Heck, it seems like everyone's into it.

Today I went with Sarah to Scrapbook Dreams at Sunnyvale to get some bits and pieces for some cards that Sarah wants to make, and I got to see just how big a business scrapbooking is. This place had so much stuff. Card and paper stock, stickers, cutouts, tools, you name it.

I can see how this could get very addictive, and it didn't seem all that expensive either. At the back of the store, they had some tables and heaps of stencils and other equipment so you could do some of your assembly work on the spot. I thought that was a great idea, because you've got all of the store's resources at your fingertips. They also do classes there apparently.

I think what we might do for family Christmas presents this year is send home a scrapbook each of photos from the year in the US. Should be fun to make, and it's something that we can make progressively throughout the year.

Thanks no doubt to Joey's work, changelogs.debian.net works again as well.

Stewart: it's because Costco sell them by the pallet for not a lot of money.

Today I went to see the doctor for the first time in the US.

I went for a few different reasons, there was a mole on my back that Sarah was worried about having changed, my wrist still hurts from that bike crash a few months ago, and I thought I'd see if I could get a 'flu shot.

The first thing that's different is when you make the appointment, the receptionist asks why. I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable explaining what ails me to a receptionist from the comfort of my office cubicle shared with three other people within earshot. Besides, it's between me and my doctor. I was a bit taken aback by this level of questioning, just to make an appointment, and hid behind a "general checkup".

The second thing is each doctor seems to have their own personal nurse to do the pre-consultation blood-pressure taking and examination room setup.

The third thing is the prescription seems to go straight from the doctor to the dispensing pharmacy of your choice. Pretty cool.

So today I had my "general checkup". Hoo boy. Let's just say an hour later, I was feeling very poked, prodded, and squeezed, and emerged with a tetanus booster, a blood test, and an order for an x-ray. I certainly felt like I got my ten dollars' worth.

Holy Blackberry product placement, Batman!

Tonight Sarah and I went and saw Syriana.

It was an interesting movie. It told a story, which is what I like in a movie. In fact it told four, and that was the problem. It had four plots that vaguely intertwined, each with their own sets of characters, and it became damn hard to follow who was who, and what was what. This is definitely one to watch a few more times on DVD, with the director's commentary, just to work out exactly what the heck was going on...

From the "Things the make you go 'hmmm' department"...

In the mail today I received a flyer for the upcoming Australian System Administrator's Conference (aka SAGE-AU'2006). Along with said flyer was another flyer, one for a new offering somehow associated with Charles Sturt University, with the above degree.

Whilst it looks moderately interesting on the outset, it reeks of vendor-specificity when you dig a bit deeper. I'd hope that it teaches a lot of general skills that could be applied anywhere. Certainly, the above Masters degree, whilst sponsored by Novell, only has one subject that sounds excessively Novell-specific, namely "Novell Administration". Hopefully the "Linux Fundamentals", "Linux Administration", "Managing Linux Enterprise Servers" and "Linux Enterprise Security" subjects are sufficiently distribution-agnostic so as not to produce graduates that are hopeless entrenched in one vendor's way of thinking.

Of the the other programs they are offering, they mostly sound excessively Microsoft or Cisco specific, except for the Master of Information Systems Security, which looks like it gives a pretty broad coverage of multiple vendors.

It would certainly be interesting to see how a graduate of the Master of Networking and Systems Administration stacked up in a Google Sysops interview...

There is something really cool about being able to just ask my manager quick questions on IM...

So it isn't just me, who has noticed that MSN's crawler seems to be going a bit nuts on the downloading front. Chris Siebenmann from the University of Toronto has also got problems.

Given that the mirror in question is intended to be benefiting Linux Australia members and Australian Linux users in general, and not some half-baked wannabe search engine that doesn't know when to stop downloading, I might need to take the step of banning MSNBot as well.

I was having a quick glance over the most recent weekly HTTP download report for mirror.linux.org.au, and to my surprise the top downloader in terms of bytes was msnbot.msn.com, at 5.2G. Five gigabytes in a week!?

GoogleBots are the highest and third-highest downloaders in terms of requests, but only the highest one ranks in the top 10 downloaders by volume, in at number four with a paltry 613M. Seems like they know about the HEAD request. They might even know how to do an If-Modified-Since request. Whatever next?

Fortune magazine's written an interesting article on the birth of the Prius.

There were some interesting quotes in the article, like this one from Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan:

"Some of our competitors say they are doing things for the benefit of humanity," he says. "Well, we are in business, and we have a mission of creating value."

That just smacks of capitalist greed if ever I heard it. I mean, what this guy's effectively saying is "Fuck the planet at all costs, shareholder value reigns supreme". I wonder how the shareholders might feel about that when the next hurricane Katrina wipes them off the map?

Anyway, why did we by a Prius?

Well, originally, a Prius in the US looked cheaper than one in Australia, however after we were forced to buy one with the more higher-priced options (with a lot of options we didn't particularly want) just to get the options we wanted, and on-road costs, I think it works out much of a muchness, price-wise, when you take into account the exchange rate.

So cost (compared to Australia) wasn't a big part of the decision in the end. The main reasons (for me) were:

• an environmentally conscious purchase in a country that likes to guzzle gas like it's going out of fashion
• a US Federal Government tax credit
• the ability to drive in commuter lanes with only the driver in the car (normally you're required to have 2 or more in the car)
• a bonus from Google (to help defray the premium of buying a hybrid over a conventional gas guzzler)

In California at least, these things are selling like hotcakes for the above reasons. The Prius is the iPod of cars at the moment.

The fact that we get reduced fuel consumption/better fuel efficiency is a really just a bonus. Petrol prices in the US are already a lot cheaper than in Australia. We filled up the (11 gallon/41 litre) tank today at $2.439/gallon (or about AUD $0.85/litre), and we're getting around 45 miles per gallon at the moment. Petrol in Australia is up around the AUD $1.20/litre at the moment, I'm told.

The other thing that makes the Prius cool is that it really is a geek's car. It has an engine management system that doesn't try to hide itself. It's got a very obvious computer in the middle of the dash with a touch screen. It screams hack me!. Third-party mods already exist (if only I could get the temperature to display in Celsius).

Sarah was initially fairly apprehensive about getting the car because of the initial cost, given the timing of it with all the other expenses of moving. It was pretty tight, but she really loves the car too, and we managed to scrape by. She was concerned about its fuel efficiency for highway driving, because reports had said that it was more efficient in start/stop city driving than on the highway, but as we discovered from our trip to Phoenix, the car did really well. I think we spent about $60 in fuel for the entire trip.

The fact that the cost saving in fuel doesn't necessarily recoup the extra premium paid for getting a hybrid is a total non-issue (to me). The fact that a hybrid isn't insanely more expensive than a conventional car makes it a justifiable expense on the grounds of environmental sensitivity. These cars are only going to get more affordable and more mainstream if people buy them.

I've noticed a bit of whinging about Howard in the blogosphere of late.

I'm not a strongly political person, but I have to say, so if not Howard, who? Not Beazley. Not any other serious contender that has led the Australia Labor Party since Keating. I'm not even that convinced that Costello makes a fantastic successor to Howard.

I was fairly okay with Howard until the Iraq war, then I got seriously pissed off with him. Aside from that, and refusing to sign on the Kyoto agreement, and his general tendency to follow Bush around like a sheep, I think he (and his Government) have done a reasonably good job of running the country in the last 10 years. Look at the economy.

Robert Collins: Actually no, we don't pay enough at the movies so that we don't have to be inundated with advertising. In fact, it's getting harder and harder for movie cinemas to make a buck, that's why the candy bar has such outrageous prices. It's the advertising that is their bread and butter, not the ticket sales.