Hi y’all, here’s a few pics from my flight the other day. I had a window seat on both flights, which was sweet, I love looking out the window.

Some of these have been digitally enhanced for your viewing pleasure.

The city shots are all of L.A. The final sunset shot is here in Austin the night I got in, from the hotel I almost didn’t stay in, complete with scenic Lexus dealership views!

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PPC64 is a dying dead architecture!

The simple things in life … can leave you with hot wax all over ya face, don’t try this at home kiddies!

I finally do some washing and look what happens …

If you don’t know what this is a picture of …

… then you missed the best party of the year!

As some of you might remember, the last time I went to North Head, I came home with a small cargo of ticks.

In the end I didn’t have Lyme disease, I might have had Tick Typhus, no one’s really sure. I was however laid up in bed for a month, and at the end of it all I was pretty pissed! Nearly as pissed as this little kitty.

Given that back drop, I was a little nervous heading back to the fateful head.

Well actually I wasn’t really, I don’t go in for that sort of thing. The weather was gorgeous, it was a long weekend, and I couldn’t wait to get down to those cool waters.

We headed down on Sunday morning, Saturday night was Ange’s 21st (photos soon!). Alli and I took my car, packed to the eaves with gear, and Jeremy and Clare cruised down in Kelly’s MX5.

Down there already were Ben, Jo, Sarah, Celine, Catherine and Hutcho.

The usual fun was had. Food, lots, some beer, swimming, Aerobee (which nearly sank about fifty freakin’ times), a camp fire, jaffles (!) and so on.

Jeremy catalysed some innovation in the fireside dessert space, introducing us Ossies to Smores. You can’t beat chocolate, biccies and toasted marshmallows!

Seeing we only stayed one night I couldn’t be bothered putting up my tent, so I slept outside on one of Clare’s banana lounges. It was remarkably comfortable, and although I woke up a few times it was a really nice night. It also meant I woke up pretty early, so I headed down to the rock pool for an early morning swim – Daniel style. Brrrrr.

On Saturday we bumped into some friends of Sarah’s from Tilley’s who had a stunt kite. They kindly let us play with it while they checked out the rock pool, how cool! It wasn’t very windy, so we struggled to keep the darn thing in the air, but it was good fun anyway. Next time we’ll have to get Ben’s out.

Both days we headed down to the rock pool for some snorkelling action. It’s no barrier reef, but there’s still heaps of lil’ fishies and stuff, it’s great fun floating around checking stuff out.

I didn’t take too many photos, you can only take so many shots of people sitting around drinking beer! I did take a few shots at night, some of which came out, and some of which are just “interesting”.

To honour the tradition I did a panorama of the rock pool, although it can’t compare with the original North Head panorama.

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Thanks to all of you who made it to the gig on Friday, it seems most of you thought it was “less s##t” than you’d expected. We aim to please.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, you lazy bastards! no hard feelings – hopefully there’ll be another time.

We took a few shots with my camera, but most of them aren’t much good (it was a bit dark) although there’s a few decent ones.

Thankfully Hugh was there to save the day, and spent most of the gig putting me off by poking his freakin’ huge lens in my face! But I guess that’s the price you pay for being a rock star.

It turns out it was worth it though, he took some awesome shots, which he’s put up here. I’ve collected a few here for the impatient.

As Robert Plant would say, see you next tiiiiiiiMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Photos which are in focus are © Hugh Blemings

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Martin mentions one way to avoid getting distracted while waiting for jobs to finish. Working in an office I can’t hear sounds unless I happen to have my headphones on, and even then it might get drowned out by the music.

Instead I have this little script …

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $PWD completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $PWD failed!" 2> /dev/null
fi

Which you use like so …

concordia ~/src/work/kexec$ mn make

And when it’s finished it pops up a dialog on your current virtual desktop, which is pretty hard to ignore. Back to work!