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Emily is doing dancing lessons on Saturday mornings, she looks so very cute. Not that she doesn’t look cute anyway of course (Insert smiley here!)
Normally the kids go into the studio and do their practice while the parents wait in another room.

Yesterday, however, the parents were invited in to watch. This freaked Emily out a little bit.
Poor thing, it was so pityful! She stood there with her head down crying for a while before running to me and crying in my arms. Then after a while she would go back to join in, only to start crying again.
For a while there, I even had Jamie start. While Emily was crying on the dance floor, Jamie was crying because he wasn’t able to do dancing.

Eventually they both settled, he was content to push his car to me while and get me to push it back. Emily stopped stressing out about people being there and started to enjoy herself.

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This has been a pretty hectic week where I have been generally lacking in sleep, if you read my Catch up Post on Tuesday you would have an idea of how busy I was

I Did have one saving grace, the submission date for my assignment was put back a day, which was good because I was stumped on it for a while.
I was trying to find out some information on a program called htdigest used in Apache, but the information I was getting wasn’t really that clear in relation to what was required in the assignment.
I had read through mountains of technobabble from various forums, as well as the description on Apache dot org. But late on Wednesday evening I found a thread that changed my way of looking at this program. The htdigest file was not a stand alone file as I was previously thinking, but a subset of the htaccess file. Typing htdigest +htaccess into google gave me much desired results
It was getting close to midnight, so I decided to leave it till the morning

Unfortunately, my mind thought otherwise, giving me insomnia and preventing my sleep until well after 2am

With my new found information, I planned to get stuck straight into the assignment as soon as I got home. Its a pity I totally lacked motivation, so I ended up cleaning the house up a bit, finally getting stuck into the task around 11.

I used to use MS Word to do all my assignments, in fact it is still on this machine, but these days I tend to use the open sourced OpenOffice on all my machines.
This is a very good full office suite that is available to download for free, and I have never had any problems with it. However I may have crunched too hard when I was doing a spell check and it locked.
No I hadn’t saved any of my work done that day.
Yes I did lose over an hours work

I then had to go to Subiaco and take some photographs, annoying because, even though I deliberately took multiple shots in case of a focus problem, all photos of one particular piece of furniture came out blurred.
Every one!

There went my plans of getting some catch up sleep in the afternoon

Today’s plans for sleep went out the window when I had a call from Amanda asking if I could pick Jamie up early
Naturally thats a stupid question, I’m certainly not going to miss the chance to get extra time with my babies. Only trouble was, by 6pm I was pretty much a walking zombie.

Ahh hell, it was worth it!

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Despite the near narcoleptic state I was finding myself in, I had a Rally Aus meeting to go to this evening. This is the final briefing before the main event starting next Thursday so I had no choice but to go. Also seeing as I had deliberately not gone to any of the weekend training sessions (although I did go to the trial event), I knew I would really be pushing my luck if I cut this one.

My parents babysat and I tried to stay awake through the tedious speech.
Thankfully I got my second wind… Which is dwindling now, so I’m off to bed!
Just wanted to blog this while I was thinking it

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A broken link on my site returns this 404 error message.

My Photo Friday for this week is finally up.
In my defence though, it was more of a photo Saturday. After having a week off for “vacation”, the Photo Friday people revamped the website, delaying the posting of this weeks challenge by 22 hours. It was Saturday afternoon when I found out what the challenge was

Broken… My chronically sarcastic humour immediately thought that it should have been procrastination instead!

Hectic work schedules meant that I was unable to work on this challenge until today. I had a few ideas that can go into my “nearly” list.
They were -

• Evidence of a traffic accident that damaged a fence and knocked down a limestone pillar
• A photo of a cancerous growth on my mothers rabbit, taken Sunday afternoon in the last few hours of her life
• A roadside cross or flowers, set up in memoriam
• A Multinova speed camera (Broken speed limit)

I’m happy with what I came up with in the end. What it boils down to for me is… I know i’m not a great photographer, so instead I want to try something a little outside the square.
Whether or not it works effectively or not remains to be seen.

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It amazes me the difference in customer service between Australian businesses and one’s from the home of consumer whoredom, the USA.

A few months ago I ordered a book from Dymocks Online.
The website insisted that the book was in stock, however once I’d passed over my Visa number, I received an email telling me the item was out of stock and it would be sent to me as soon as was possible.
I got the book eventually, it took three weeks. It was pretty much as I expected.

Last weekend I ordered a tee shirt from Thinkgeek.

I had previously posted on Cheri’s site that I would like one that said “There are only 10 people in this world, those who understand binary, and those that don’t.”
I was rather pleased when perusing this site, I found this shirt was actually available.

Despite the fact that the size I wanted was unavailable, I decided to order the shirt.

On Friday, less than a week after placing the order, I received a confirmation email saying the order had been shipped, and it arrived this (Tuesday) morning.

Some Australian online businesses should take note of this.
I certainly didn’t mind paying extra to have the shirt shipped from the States, even though shipping was almost as much as the shirt itself.

I think I would like the <geek></geek> shirt next!
(You may have seen that joke flash up in my random header tag)

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I’ve been meaning to blog for a little while now. I’ve been insanely busy and really unable to spend some time on writing for my own benefit, but really, I’m starting to get sick of that McDonalds post.
Currently I have the following to do -

• TAFE Assignment – Due tomorrow
• Updates for three different websites
• Photogaphy for two of those sites
• Accounting (I’m a little behind)
• Photo Friday – They procrastinated and stuffed up my schedule
• Sleep (I’m aiming for Thursday!)

I have a couple of things I would like to write about, but I’m going to leave them for later, right now I’m running off to the shower, then I have to go to TAFE… Then I have to go to Subiaco… Then I have to work on this assignment… Then…

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This seemingly innocent sign is located just before the traffic lights at Central Avenue as you head up Alexander Drive out of the city.

It is followed a little further up the road by two other signs warning of the close proximity you are to some of the worlds shittiest food.

But the question is… Are you that close to MuckDonalds?
One minute up the road certainly doesn’t seem that far, until you realise that this store is actually 2.9 kilometres up the road and past three sets of traffic lights.

So what? you might ask.
Well, have you considered how fast you would have to be going to actually make it 2.9 kilometres to this store in a minute. Go on, its not that hard.
Yes. You’re right, you WOULD have to be doing 174 to get there on time

Alexander Drive is a 60 zone.
Even on a good day, you’re likely to get at least ONE red light.
Conclusion* – The advertising department at Maccas think we are all retards!
Did I mention that their food is shit?

*not a conclusion

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Pauline Hanson was gaoled earlier this week for electoral fraud
What I find amazing is that according to a pole by Channel 10 (Yeah OK so they are hardly a news service), over 85% of Australians believe that she shouldn’t have gone to gaol.

Bollocks

She was tried and convicted based on the evidence that was given to the court. Remember that innocence of the law is no excuse, so even if she was totally naive about what she was doing, its too bad.

I do feel that the three year sentence carried out was a little excessive, especially considering that there are violent criminals who get lighter sentences than that, and I also think she believes she was innocent.

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On a much lighter note, a cold snap has brought snow to Western Australia.
Not here of course, as we are too far north and too close to the coast, but down in a couple of towns around the Stirling ranges, a couple of centimetres of snow lay on the ground for just over half an hour.
See this story in The West Australian.

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You should always be cynical about anything that asks for your password on the internet.

I was messaged by a random on IRC today, I wasn’t actually chatting at the time, I was doing some work, but then the icon started flashing and so I thought I would see who had messaged me.
Before starting the conversation, I DNS resolved the IP address to an ISP in Pakistan and proceded to chat.
It was mostly the usual crap, up until he asked me if i wanted to join his chat program, posting me the URL

I’m always suspicious of web addresses posted by people that I don’t know as they can have malicious codeing built into it.
Curious non the less I opened up Amaya, a W3C browser designed for writing and varifying sites more than actually viewing them. Certain codes do not work in this browser so it is a safe way to look.

The first thing I found was that the page was actually hidden in a frame. That gave the website a different address in the address bar to what it actually was, when I moved to the correct address it opened up an MSN page asking me to enter my passport and password.
While it looked rather official it lacked the tight form design Microsoft enforces onto its sites via CSS.
I looked at the source code

First clue that this was not a legitimate site was the fact that it had been edited in coffeecup.
Coffeecup is a cute HTML editor that you can buy in modules as you need them, rather than going out and spending lots of money on software. (Of course if you actually BUY all the modules you need to make the software really functional, it probably costs about as much as Dreamweaver.)

The second hint was the image tags. All images were pointing to locations on the Microsoft server. Not nessesaraly a bad thing, I’m just not sure the Microsoft web coders actually go to the trouble of adding http://www.msn.com before the location of the image file.

Finally there was the formcoding itself. The form sent data to a “free” forms handling company.
Can’t see Microsoft using that

So had I entered my password, I would have lost my hotmail account. This is passive hacking.

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Candy -
My mothers oldest cat finally went to kitty heaven. She is 20 years old and has been getting sicker and sicker.
She lost the use of her back legs. That part of her body simply died. The vet came round and gave her a needle and she went to sleep peacefully in my mothers arms.

My mum is naturally quite upset.

Sunday -
Took the kids up to Darlington with my parents. They wanted to go to an antique and collectables fair up there and I thought it would be nice to go along too.
There was a nice little park next to the hall where the fair was being held, so I took Emily and Jamie over and they played for ages on the swings and slides.
I’ve missing them so much this week. I’ve been feeling a little depressed since Sunday evening

Sunday evening I was all mopey and just couldn’t be bothered doing anything. I was doing a bit of reading on the net, passed loosely off as doing homework.
About 9pm, I decided that I really should eat, and lacking any form of motivation to actually cook, I headed off to Red Rooster (link to follow).
I took the drive thru to Chicken and Chips, and headed home.

When I got there the cupboard was bare… Well, at least, the Chicken and Chips pack was. It was rather lacking in chips.
Fuming, I drove back to the store and asked them if they considered that to be a fair amount of chips. The manager explained, showing me a small chips container, that they have a scoop that gives enough chips to fill one of these

I looked at the small box, looked down at my meal, looked back at the box and said “right! You think that there are enough chips in here to fill that box?”
Throwing the chicken aside I picked up all the chips and dropped them into the chip box. It didn’t even fill half way up. The manager insisted that there would have been the right amount of chips in the box when I left, so I insisted on raising my voice and swearing.

Yes I got my chips!

I was looking on the Red Rooster website (mostly for a complaints or contact page) and I just thought I would share with you what you get when you have too much money (but not enough sense) to spend on a website. I don’t know why some web designers feel that it is ok to say “here is our platform, if you want to view our site you can either conform to what WE want, or you can get stuffed!”