So it's been a few days since I swapped in the Zonbu I bought, as my ATA over Ethernet "head".

It hasn't been all ponies and roses, but it hasn't been a total loss either.

The main problem I was having was a lot of

usb 5-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

type of errors during moderate I/O to the RAID10, which was connected to the four USB ports on the back of the unit (similar errors for all four USB devices). Initial Googling suggested that it was a USB mass-storage thing, and that lowering the maximum number of sectors read (and/or written?) a once in /sys/block/sd[a-d]/device/max_sectors would fix the problem. Well that didn't really seem to make a difference.

Then I did some rummaging in the Zonbu forums, and it became apparent that there were some problems with the four USB ports on the back of the unit and USB 2.0 mass-storage devices.

One of the forum threads pointed me at this bug, which had been subsequently fixed in a newer release of the Zonbu OS. I apprehensively emailed the Zonbu support folks lateish on Friday evening, not expecting to hear anything back until Monday, and half expecting to be unsupported because I was running Debian on it, when I got a reply fairly promptly telling me this kernel patch would fix the problem. It turns out that the VIA CX700 is a wee bit buggy, or the BIOS support for it is or something.

Anyway, I spent the better part of two days compiling a new Debian 2.6.22 kernel with this patch applied (took me two goes, the first time the patch wasn't applied), but the Zonbu is now running a 2.6.22 kernel with this patch.

Notably you get this message during bootup now:

PCI: VIA CX700 PCI parking/caching fixup on 0000:00:11.7

It's a bit early to tell how it's going to work out. I don't have a scheduled recording until tonight, but I've just scheduled something random to see how it works out. Playing back a recording made before I swapped the Zonbu in seemed to go fine.

That is all.

After the debacle last time I tried to grow the size of my existing RAID1 when I put new disks in daedalus, I thought this time I'd do my homework.

I did some research, I found out the way I should have done it. I did a practice run on a USB key. I fully planned how I was going to do it:

mdadm /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sdb3
<delete /dev/sdb3, recreate at new full size>
reboot
mdadm /dev/md2 --add /dev/sdb3
<wait for sync>
mdadm /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sda3
<delete /dev/sda3, recreate at new full size>
reboot
mdadm /dev/md2 --add /dev/sda3
<wait for sync>
mdadm --grow /dev/md2
<wait for sync>
pvresize /dev/md2

Everything went as planned, until I went to grow the RAID1 volume. It still thought the underlying device was the same size. There was nothing to grow.

So at this point, I decided to do something similar to what I did last time to get around the failing disk, and should have done last time anyway. I broke the mirror, created a new degraded RAID1 using the full size of the new partition on the half I pulled out of the mirror, and did a pvmove from the old non-full-sized degraded mirror to the new full-sized degraded mirror.

All of that went swimmingly until the pvmove was around 50% complete, when the kernel decided to oops spectacularly. I had to power cycle daedalus to get it back under control, and even in single-user mode, without me doing anything, the kernel started oopsing again. Dammit.

I had to boot into emergency-mode (insert standard gripe about Debian's single-user mode being far too non-singular here), then I could resume the pvmove without any further oopsing. After that completed, I was able to ditch the old non-full-sized degraded RAID1 device and resync the new one onto the old partition. There was still some minor filesystem corruption, more likely because I had everything mounted at the time of the crash. Yes, I still haven't learned not to do this kind of thing in multi-user mode. It seems every time I try to minimise the size and duration of an outage, it bites me in the arse. Even though I should have been able to move open logical volumes between physical volumes, the kernel oops seemed to be in the dm_mirror code. daedalus is running a fairly old kernel. The annoying thing is that getting some additional disk space on board was the dependency for doing a general upgrade of all of the software on it. Argh.

Anyway, it's done. I hope not to have to go through this again. I just have to sit through a potentially nail-biting remote upgrade of Debian now, and I should be good for a couple more years hopefully.

I've been quietly coveting the Zonbu for a number of months now. I finally caved in and ordered one when we got back from Australia, with the intention of using it to replace minotaur, the computer that exports my RAID10 via ATA over Ethernet to my MythTV box.

minotaur is the old daedalus, which I bought back around 2000. It's a VA Linux Pentium III. It's old, noisy, and has no idea what power management is. The Zonbu has more grunt than it (in terms of BogoMIPS), and it's a fraction of the size. Our linen cupboard is now significantly quieter (and hopefully cooler). Heck, hopefully the power bill will be lower as well.

Anyway, I put the order in when we returned from Australia, with the expectation that it'd turn up some time while Sarah was in hospital, or shortly afterwards, and I could use the rest of the month that I was off work to play with it. Well, I got an email on the 31st of December, telling me they were out of stock, and unless I wanted to pay $29 more for one with built-in WiFi, I'd have to wait until mid-January.

As I just couldn't see the point of having WiFi (or spending more money) and not needing the thing in a hurry anyway, because I had more important things to worry about in the meantime, I opted to wait. This morning, I emailed them to enquire about whether or not more stock had arrived, and they emailed back to say that they were still waiting, but they'd found one they could sell to me anyway. The company happens to be close by in Menlo Park, so I picked it up today in our travels.

Let me just say that it is a very cool little computer, just if you use it for its intended purpose. It's running a customised Gentoo Linux, with a 2.6.22 kernel. I'm a bit surprised about their choice of Gentoo. I think they'd be better off partnering with Canonical, given that Mark Shuttleworth is trying to make a Linux distribution easy enough for his grandmother to use. That'd take the work of engineering the operating system out of the equation, then they could just focus on the hardware and a bit of integration with Amazon's S3.

The thing I have to give them mad props for is documenting how to hack the tripe out of the box. They tell you how to enable root. They tell you how to enable PXE booting. So once I figured out that the front USB port seems to get treated slightly differently for a USB keyboard than the back ones, it was very easy to PXE boot it and install Debian.

I initially started with trying to install Etch, but I kept getting missed interrupts on the CompactFlash device, which resulted in the filesystems panicking. So I gave up and went with Lenny, and presumably because it also uses 2.6.22, everything seemed to go fine. The box comes with a 4Gb CompactFlash card, which is ample for my needs. It's running the 686-optimised kernel, which is probably not ideal, but works. We'll see how things go.

Interestingly, I blew another hard drive power supply, exactly like last time. I've no idea if it's the act of plugging everything back in again that's causing the problem, or they're generally flaky, and they don't fail until they're powered off and back on again. Maybe that IEC Y-cable wasn't such a good idea after all. I've now run out of spare power supplies, so I'm going to have to get some more for when these two inevitably fry themselves.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this purchase, but it's a bit early to see how it's going to perform. I can't imagine it's going to perform worse than the computer it's replacing, but it was probably never intended for what I'm using it for either...

Oh, and I discovered vblade-persist, which seems to be a very nice framework for managing ATA over Ethernet exports.

Now I just need to get my hands on a big tub of Lego to build a nice chassis for the whole thing.

Erich Schubert's two posts about embedding spamtraps in web pages got me wondering about trying to track the web crawlers that harvest such addresses.

If the pages that had the embedded spamtraps could be dynamically generated, it'd be interesting to generate email addresses that encoded the time of the crawl (well the page load I guess) and the IP address of the remote host.

I expect that most of the harvesting is done by botnets, so it possibly wouldn't tell you a lot, but it'd be kind of cool to maintain a central blacklist of known harvesting IP addresses, that sites like mailing list archives could use to try and block the harvesters with.

I've been a bit behind with the ISC DHCP v3 package of late. I've had a package of 3.1.0 for a few months, but I'm becoming more and more reluctant to make uploads of this package without giving it some rudimentary testing. Real life has been demanding of late, so I haven't had a chance to do that testing. Nothing's gone wrong with the package to date, I just feel negligent not giving it some basic testing before throwing it out there.

So I chucked a spare QFE card in my workstation brutus, put unstable on the second hard drive, installed Debian unstable on the spare 10G partition of Sarah's old PowerBook, and lashed the two together with a bit of CAT-5, and voila, instant DHCP client/server testbed.

So now that I'd verified that version 3.1.0 wasn't blatantly broken, I could have a fiddle with the new support for option 119 (domain-search) that has people at work very excited. I spent a bit of time off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to configure the DHCP server for this new option before I realised it was as simple as option domain-search "foo bar baz"; and then made the necessary tweaks to dhclient-script.

I'm figuring that since one of the blokes who wrote the RFC works at Apple, and since Leopard supports option 119, the way they're doing it in Leopard must be approximately correct, so I've altered the behaviour of the DHCP client accordingly.

All of this assumes you're not using resolvconf.

Prior to 3.1.0, if you had the domain-name option set, the /etc/resolv.conf created by dhclient-script would set the search directive to the domain name. With 3.1.0, I've decided to make this set the domain option instead. The resolver behaviour remains the same, as best as I can determine.

With 3.1.0, if the domain-search option is set, then the search directive is set to this. If the domain-name option is set, this is prepended to the list of domains in the domain-search option. This is consistent with what MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) does. I'm not sure what Windows does (nor what version started honouring the domain-search DHCP option)), and since it doesn't have an /etc/resolv.conf equivalent, it's a bit hard to test. I'm going to hazard a guess and hope that since the other bloke who wrote the RFC works for Microsoft, that maybe, just maybe, Windows and MacOS X at least behave the same way.

Currently, if resolvconf is in use, you get the old behaviour whereby the search directive is populated with the contents of the domain-name option, and the domain-search option is ignored completely. I've filed #460609 with a patch to fix this. Interestingly, resolvconf itself internally collapses the domain and search directives into the search directive of the /etc/resolv.conf it generates, so I can't quite get the same /etc/resolv.conf generated as would be generated without resolvconf being used. No big deal, the behaviour should be the same. The domain directive is largely unnecessary as I understand it.

I have unearthed what I consider to be a bug with the domain-search option handling code in the client. It seems to be largely benign, apart from causing the client to emit some errors when it's obtaining a lease that contains the domain-search option, and possibly not splitting the domains in the domain-search option correctly. There's also another (I think unrelated) warning that gets emitted as well. I'm waiting to hear back from upstream about both.

I'm not going to package the recently released 4.0 DHCP until I've figured out a transition plan to go from the old DHCP v2 packages to the v3 ones.

Sarah and I went to see I am legend with Shona today.

How many more post-apocalyptic, zombies-created-by-a-virus movies can Hollywood possibly churn out? That said, it was a good watch. Will Smith did a really excellent job, and there were plenty of edge-of-the-seat suspense moments.

One of the things I noticed when I was fiddling around with daedalus the other week, was that when I had everything stopped, linux.org.au seemed to stop resolving (and therefore semi-important things like ftp.au.debian.org, which is a CNAME to mirror.linux.org.au

This made me very sad, because I'm always harping on about BCP 16 when I see other sites go down because all of their name servers are on the same subnet.

Now that wasn't the reason for this particular "outage", though. It seems that because one of the name servers is russell.linux.org.au, and there's no glue record for this host on any of the .org.au name servers, I don't think russell is seeing any DNS traffic at all (perhaps only from resolvers that somehow already happened to have a cached entry for it obtained through other means than an NS query for linux.org.au)

So before I go doing any further disruptive maintenance on daedalus I guess I'll be needing to get a glue record for russell.linux.org.au. I'm surprised that searching Enetica's knowledge-base for "glue" didn't raise a mention of it. I would have almost thought that they could detect the need for a glue record when you're adjusting a domain's delegation, so I wonder if it's a failure of their domain management system, or a complete oversight. Maybe people just don't go sticking their name servers in the domain they're hosting any more.

Discharged!

Sarah was discharged almost bang on 11am, the advertised discharge time, which is less than 6 full days after she got out of surgery. Pretty amazing stuff, and not a moment too soon, if you ask Sarah. She had a final chest x-ray this morning, and that was about it.

We took a non-highway route home, and stopped via the supermarket to get a few things and get her prescriptions filled, so we got home at about 12:20pm.

The rest of her recovery can be followed on her blog.

We both feel forever indebted to the wonderful doctors and nursing staff at Stanford Hospital. Being in a hospital is certainly a lot better when you're not grieving, and the outcome is positive.

Not a whole lot to report.

Sarah's still yet to have a decent night's sleep.

The cardiac rehab lady came by to go through the do's and don't's and answer any questions we had.

They did an echocardiogram. I tagged along to watch. The Dacron looks a bit whiter on the ultrasound than the aortic tissue, other than that, there's not a lot to see.

It's looking like she'll be discharged tomorrow.

Sarah slept better overnight, but still not great. She was certainly more lively this morning when I got in, than yesterday. She's resigned to the fact that you don't come to a hospital to get rest, which is kind of ironic. She did need to get put back on the oxygen overnight because her O₂ saturation dropped. She was off it again by the time I got in.

Today's big achievement was getting the external pacing wires removed. They were put in during the procedure as a precaution, I think because if her heart played up, they didn't want to have to use defibrillator paddles, and because they'd cracked her chest open, manual CPR wasn't an option. The wires could be attached to an external pacemaker if necessary (but it never was).

I watched the removal quite closely, as I was pretty curious. Basically the physician's assistant just came in and yanked them out. Judging from the look on Sarah's face, it was an interesting sensation. We were both amazed at how long the wires were. There was probably 30 centimetres of wire under the skin. The last bit was loosely spiralled. I was just really surprised, because the PA's hand started off at Sarah's chest, and ended up at the PA's shoulder. It was just a lot longer than we both expected. All the extra length was because the wires wrap around the heart. The wires came out at about 2:30pm.

Sarah had another chest x-ray and a CT scan today. The CT scan looked good. The x-ray showed some fluid in her lungs, and her lung capacity is still sub-par. It seems when she's fully horizontal, her breathing isn't so crash hot, but it's fine when she's sitting up or walking around.

All Sarah's got left is one peripheral line now. There was some talk of her possibly going home on Wednesday. She has an echocardiogram tomorrow, and I guess it'll all hinge on how her lungs are going.

MythTV's commercial skipping really spoils us, and we practically never watch anything live (we don't watch a lot of TV at all, really, more DVDs, thanks to Netflix), so we're totally insulated from all the commercials except when we're staying in a hotel, or, as is the case right now, having a stay in hospital.

It seems all of the commercials during the news programs are pharma-related. The majority are prescription drugs to "ask your doctor about", with the rest being health-related.

Today's exciting product I learned about was Might Putty (you can watch the ad on their site). I just wish I had something to use it for.

The other thing that piqued my curiosity was the Takara Patch. It sounds like a bit of a gimmick, but I've always liked gimmicks that look like they're doing something. The Biore Pore Strips for example. I'll have to do some more research.

Slow day today.

I slept at home, and got in at around 9:40am. Sarah didn't sleep well again overnight, her O₂ saturation levels kept dropping below 90% because she wasn't breathing deeply enough in her sleep, and that causes an alarm to go off. So she was pretty flat when I first got in, but she picked up as the day went along, and was fairly chirpy by around 11am.

The doctor came by and explained the photos that we've been given, so I'll have to try and regurgitate all of it and update the captions. Her lungs are still looking a bit suboptimal. The third lobe on the right lung isn't inflating well apparently. They said something about there being some fluid as well, although the nurse said she can't hear anything.

All that said, she spent a lot of time in a chair today, and her O₂ saturation levels have been the best they've been since she was in the ICU. So good, that they're trialing having her off oxygen while she attempts to take a nap as I write.

Her blood sugar levels are settling down. I think they're still slightly elevated, but not to the point that insulin is required. She only needed insulin with lunch yesterday, so it definitely looks like it's improving.

She's already been on her three walks today, by 4pm. An occupational therapist came by, and went through the sternal precautions again, and showed us how to get in and out of bed without putting undue pressure on the sternum, and Sarah's been getting out of bed unassisted from horizontal since. Her pain has been quite manageable.

So while today started out looking like it was going to be a small backward step, I think it's still a good move forward. Sarah's continuing her breathing exercises, so I'm sure her lungs will sort themselves out in the next day or two. I guess they'll take another chest x-ray this afternoon, although it's getting a bit late in the day.

Sarah's starting to get a bit of cabin fever, but I think today's been pretty slow, in part because we deferred having visitors on account of her being not up to it in the morning.

"Day Two Downers" be damned, Sarah's powering along like a freight train.

Neither of us had a terribly fantastic night's sleep. Her chest drain is attached to this big box thing that has some sort of water seal in it, and with the suction going through it, it bubbles and makes noise like a massive aquarium. But she did get some sleep, and said she felt better this morning for it.

The doctor came by at 8am, and took the incision dressing off, and we got our first good look at it. It's big (i.e. long). It runs from about the top of her breastbone to the bottom of her sternum. 20cm at my estimation. She said that she thought the chest tube could come out today, and sure enough it came out at about 12:30pm. They also took her urinary catheter out at that time, so now all she's hooked up to is oxygen. Her blood sugar levels were acceptable at breakfast time.

Oh, the reason the incision ran so high was because they elected to do the bypass attachment to an artery in her neck, rather than further around the aorta, because the tissue was fragile and they didn't want to risk a dissection. Not doing the bypass in the aorta also left them the option of removing some of the transcending arch if they determined it still ended up being necessary.

Sarah got up and had breakfast in a chair again, and was generally feeling pretty mobile. She moved between the chair and a wheelchair (and back) when they came to get her for another x-ray, without requiring any assistance.

She took her first walk around the ward at 11am. I'd popped home for a shower and to check on the cats, and so I missed it.

Doctor Miller dropped in at around 12:30pm to see how she was doing, and that was good as Sarah got a chance to talk directly to him about how the procedure had gone. He was very positive and said she could put this whole thing behind her now.

At 2pm, she went for another walk, this time sans two thirds of the tubes from her first walk, and got in and out of bed unassisted.

She took her last walk of the day at 4pm.

Apparently her blood sugar is still on the high side, but within the range that they don't feel the need to give her insulin. Her chest is apparently looking better on the x-ray they took this morning. They took a second one after they removed the chest drain, but we haven't heard anything about how that looks yet.

She's continuing to do extremely well, most of this less than 48 hours out of surgery.

I just called the ICU for an update before I head in for the day. She's apparently doing well, and can probably transfer out of the ICU later today, although apparently beds are tight in the ward.

Update 1

I've managed to find somewhere with EVDO access, so I can update this in between ICU visits.

She's looking really good this morning. She asked for some 7up, because her throat's really dry and sore from being intubated. She had something to eat at 6am. She hasn't had much sleep though, because the ICU has been too busy. She's getting turned every two hours, which isn't terribly enjoyable, but her pain is manageable. She's such a trooper.

Update 2

Sarah's continuing to do well. The nurse sat her up on the side of her bed for lunch, and had half a roast beef sandwich and some fruit. Her throat's still pretty sore, and she's really preferring the liquids. Apparently her blood sugar is a bit high (something that can happen post-operatively) so they gave her some insulin before lunch.

Getting her back down again looked a bit painful, as did shuffling her up the bed.

Apparently there's a bed with her name on it in the intermediate ICU, so as soon as the doctor's order comes through to move her, she'll be moved. They'll also take out the central line and one of the peripheral lines at that time.

Update 3

Last update today. Sarah was moved out of the ICU and into intermediate intensive care (where she'll remain until she's discharged) at 2:25pm. She got a private room again, which is very fortunate. It's nice and quiet, so she should get a good night's sleep. I can stay the night as well.

One of the doctors from the team looking after her came by at about 5:50pm. She said the chest drain can come out in the next day or two. They took another x-ray this afternoon to check on some pleural effusion that they were worried about. When we asked the doctor about it this evening, she described it more as trapped air than trapped fluid, and that it should work itself out in the next few days. The x-ray showed that it was "stable", in that it hadn't really changed from the x-ray in the morning. They'll take another x-ray tomorrow morning to see how it's going.

Other than that, she's continuing to do really well. The pain seems manageable. She got up into a chair for dinner (with help). They didn't give her any more insulin beforehand, so I presume her blood sugar is settling down again.

I'm exhausted, but very relieved.

The important news: the operation was a success, the surgeon, Dr D. Craig Miller, bless his cowboy boots, managed to spare the aortic valve (he'd given us a 99% probability of being able to do so beforehand), so we don't have to be concerned about pig/cow valves for now, and mechanical valves later. He was reluctant to say that her own valve will last her the rest of her life, but it should last a "long time, long enough to have a family".

When I left the hospital, Sarah was in intensive care, extubated, conscious, and talking to me, but very very tired. She's got a daunting array of things coming out of her at the moment (a lot of which I couldn't see because she had blankets over her). It's been a long day, so I decided to head home, rather than potentially keeping her awake for the next two ICU visiting times tonight.

Here's the time line that I recorded:

05:15 - Arrive at the hospital to go through the admissions process

06:35 - I leave Sarah shortly before they're going to wheel her off to the operating room (I'll get into my fun at the end).

09:30 - I ask for an update, and they tell me she's going on bypass

10:30 - It looks like they can save the aortic valve

12:25 - Still doing the valve stuff, making a new sinus of Valsalva

14:15 - I ask for another update, everything is going okay, someone will come out to talk to me

14:55 - Still going, at least another hour until they start to close up

15:15 - Closing up, surgeon will be out to talk to me

16:10 - Surgeon comes out to talk to me about how the operation went

16:50 - I got to see Sarah briefly in the ICU, she was still intubated, but conscious and seemed to respond to my voice

~18:15 - Extubated. Spoke with her briefly. She was very tired, and I decided to let her rest for the remaining visiting times and go home and get some rest myself

So what the surgeon had to say for himself was very interesting indeed. He didn't end up doing exactly what he'd said previously, based on how things looked once he actually got in there.

He said that the sinuses of Valsalva were paper thin. So thin, you could see the blood flowing through them. They were about 0.5mm thick, rather than the normal 1.5mm thick. Sounds a bit like a disaster waiting to happen. Apparently it's not possible to detect this with imaging, you have to get in there and see it for yourself. He didn't end up removing as much of the aorta as previously planned (specifically the part around the transcending arch) as whilst the diameter was a bit bigger, the tissue apparently looked healthy. He said the part of the aorta he did remove (preceding where the braciocephalic, left common carotid and left subclavian arteries branch off) was "cheesy" in consistency, so it's not like she just happened to have an enlarged aorta, no aneurysm, and way too thin sinuses of Valsalva. There was definitely some unhealthiness to the aortic tissue, just not as bad as thought from the imaging.

So it's all good. I think she'll spend a day or two more in the ICU before getting moved to a normal ward, but it's too soon to say what's going on with all of that. There's some elevated risk of stroke due to blood clots for the next 24-48 hours, but she's on blood thinners, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The day was pretty crazy for me. I'm not sure if it was stress, or the stomach bug that's been doing the rounds of Central Park Apartments, but I went to bed last night at 11pm, was up again at 1am, with shall we say, a gastrointestinal upset, and up again at 3am, throwing up. We got up at 4:15am to get to the hospital.

I felt really nauseous all morning, and was an absolute wreck while I was in with Sarah when they were putting a peripheral line in her before they wheeled her off to the OR, so I bailed about 5 minutes early and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again. I haven't eaten all day, just tried to keep the fluids up. I'm debating having some plain boiled rice for dinner, or waiting until tomorrow to have something easy on the stomach. I definitely felt a lot better as the day progressed, but my stomach is still pretty tender. Sarah and I ate pretty much the same stuff yesterday, so I don't think it can be food poisoning. She tends to have a very sensitive stomach at the best of times, so I'd expect her to be showing problems before me if it was food poisoning.

But enough about me, I'll live. I hope it's not a stomach bug, as I don't want Sarah to come down with it as well, now that she's on the road to recovery from this surgery.

Many thanks to Shona, Briana, Laura, and Christina for spending time with me throughout the day to keep me occupied.

ICU visiting hours are every even hour between 10am and 10pm, for thirty minutes at a time, so I plan on spending all day at the hospital tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good spot to get some EVDO coverage, so I can update things as the day goes along, rather than at the end of the day when I get home, like I had to today.

Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight than I did last night.

We went in to Stanford Hospital this morning for a few hours of pre-op stuff.

They took blood, did an ECG, a chest x-ray, and we had a chat with someone from anesthesiology. A physicians assistant and a nurse practitioner talked to us (separately) about what to expect. We also watched a short video about what to expect.

We now have to report back at 5:15 tomorrow morning (there's a 5:15 in the morning, how about that?) for a 7:30am procedure. They're saying it'll take 6-8 hours and that Sarah will be on a ventilator for the first 4 hours or so that she's in intensive care, post-op. She'll probably be in the ICU for a couple of days. It's sounding like I can only spend 10 minutes in there every few hours, but we'll see how that pans out tomorrow I guess.

It's sounding like I won't get to see her until around 4pm tomorrow I think someone was saying. I guess we'll see how that pans out as well.

I've just doped myself up with some NyQuil so I hopefully get a better night's sleep than last night. I'm going to need it, it's going to be a long day.

We really haven't stopped since we lost Joshua. It's helped us kill time until Sarah's surgery, which is now in two days time.

It's hard to believe it's rolled around so quickly, really. We've got about four hours of pre-op stuff tomorrow, from 9am, which sounds like it entails blood tests and a chest x-ray, as well as general Q&A.

The surgery is scheduled at 7:30am the next day. It's good that it's early in the day.

We found a good page that describes what they're going to be doing (a modified David's Reimplantation Procedure)).

I'll be able to write something more competent about proceedings tomorrow after the pre-op stuff I expect.

Well, this is actually our fourth day home, I just haven't had the time or inclination to write anything until now.

We had an uneventful trip home on the 29th. I think I'm getting more used to these long-haul flights, the time went pretty quickly. There is much to be said for Qantas' in-flight entertainment system. And Melatonin tablets.

We had a good, jam-packed three weeks in Australia.

We landed on a Sunday morning, at around 8am. Sarah's Aunty Glenda picked us up from the airport, and we stayed with her for the week. We caught up with two sets of friends on the Sunday, and managed to last until the evening without crashing.

I spent the week working from the Sydney office. Jetlag is a wonderful thing for making me into a temporary morning person. I was at my desk by 8am every day. I'd forgotten how early the sun got up in Australia in the summer time.

Monday in Sydney is Sunday in California, so Mondays are blissfully quiet and great for getting things done. The beauty of getting in by 8am meant I still caught Mountain View from about about 1pm onwards for the rest of the week, so that was good. I got a lot done while I was in the Sydney office.

On Tuesday morning we went to the US Consulate to sort out Sarah's visa renewal. It was a no-brainer, and our passports were back at my parent's place within 48 hours.

Thursday night was the Sydney office Christmas party. The Friday night we flew out of San Francisco was the Mountain View office one, so it was good to be able to catch a party somewhere. Got to love working for an international company. Photos here.

Sarah spent the week in Sydney pottering around and catching up with relatives. Every night was booked out with dinner with friends. Photos from the week in Sydney are here.

Next stop was Canberra for four days. We stayed with different friends each night. We'd really come to appreciate how bug-free California is. Apparently Canberra was having a particularly bad fly season this summer. They were just about carrying us away.

We stayed a night with Rusty and Alli on their farm out at Majors Creek, which is always a nice getaway. It was great to see how the place is coming along. We won't recognise it next time we're there.

At Canberra airport on the way to Brisbane, totally by chance, we bumped into our old upstairs neighbour Melissa, from when we lived in Turner. Her and her husband and kids moved to Brisbane around the time we moved from Turner to Ainslie, and we hadn't done a very good job of keeping in contact. To cap it off, she ended up sitting in the seat across the aisle from us on the plane, so we had a good old chinwag for an hour and half. Photos from Canberra are here.

Then we got to Brisbane and did the family thing. It was good to see my family again, and show them all of the photos of Joshua and just spend time with them. Brisbane traffic has degenerated significantly in the last 12 months. The Gateway Arterial Motorway near the airport is a complete mess. There's a lot of construction going on for the new cross-city tunnel they're putting in.

Probably the highlight of the trip was the mass outing to Australia Zoo. It's been a couple of years since we've been there, and boy, does that place just keep getting better.

My hot tip is to save yourself a fortune, and a precious couple of hours, and avoid purchasing food from the catering area. It's sheer bedlam, and very expensive. The zoo is getting so big, that you really need all of 9am to 4:30pm to see it all properly, so you can save a lot of time by bringing your own lunch, or getting a pass-out and getting lunch from somewhere nearby. Photos from the zoo trip here

The weather in all parts of Australia that we saw was pretty grey and wet for the most part. I'm not complaining, we need all the water we can get. It was sounding like most of the rain was falling outside the catchment areas though. It was nice to see Canberra not looking all brown and dry though.

Photos from the time in Brisbane here.

In a brief fit of spontaneity we decided to sign up for Qantas Club memberships. I'm really kicking myself for not getting lifetime membership back in 1999 when I sold my share of our business. I've done so much travelling since then, and it'd have really come in handy. As it happened, we got good use out of it this trip. The flight from Brisbane to Sydney was at 8:15am, so we left my parents' place at about 6:15am, sans breakfast or showers, and breakfasted at the Brisbane airport, and showered in the Sydney airport, as we had about 5 hours to kill until our flight to San Francisco departed.