My photoquest entry is now online in the image gallery. You can look at it by following this link

So Lia arrived on Tuesday night and my plans for the day included cleaning, siesta and more cleaning.. However you know the best laid plans of Mice and Men..

I was cleaning the aquarium around 2.20 when Amanda called me asking me if I was busy. I told her I was but asked her what she wanted. Because she was flu ridden she wanted me to go and pick Emily up from school and then pick James up from her house.

Naturally I jumped at the opportunity but I knew that my chance for a rest had just gone out of the window.

I did manage to get some cleaning done, but I was also now behind the eight ball and it certainly didn’t help when James decided to throw chicken around the dining room making me have to re-mop the floor.

Having gotten up at 4am to go to work and with the light not landing until 11pm, it made for a very long day. It was around 1am when I finally went to sleep.

As the time has gotten closer to Lia’s arrival in Perth I have been busying myself on all sorts of cleaning projects. I’m a horder, and a bad one at that. I collect junk that has little or no use other that the fact that “I may need it someday”.

I never do and so every so often I get a spurt of motivational energy and trash the junk. I have been harsher than normal and am pleased with the amount of crap that I have actually gotten rid of.

One of the things that I have also managed to get done is a clean up of my office area. That’s not to say that I haven’t had it tidy before this, but I was never 100% happy with it because I have gone from a smallish bedroom sized area to a moderately sized living room.

I had enough furniture to fill the room but it kinda left the central floor area open and empty. Mostly I just didn’t know what to do with it.

It’s funny, but most of my ideas come to me while driving and my plans for my office were no exception so a couple of weekends ago I started to move the book cases around and compact my work area. I now (still) have a large bare area, but my intention is to get a table and some chairs so I can meet with clients, rather than having them sitting around my desk.

I would like to have a large presentation monitor and a media PC, but that’s not a short term plan.

Anyway.. I promised photos when the office was done so.. Here we go!

My office. Jamie’s computer on the left, my computer on the right. Emily uses the notebook (currently closed) and the computer my housemate sometimes uses.

Looking in from the “meeting area”

Files. The orange files are a new addition. I printed proper labels for them and I intend to replace all the files to match and paint the archive boxes as well.

Blue Glow. When I upgraded my computer Jamie got the old box. I got myself a new iCute case which included all the fluro.. Cool huh!

Oh, and that pink has to go!!!

I should know better. In fact, I even said to my mother that I was busy and didn’t want to spend the whole day out so when they said they might be going out with the Watsons I originally said I would give it a miss. And yet, I went anyway.

Mostly though, because the research I had been doing for one of my latest clients had been fruitful so I figured that I could afford to spend some time relaxing.

So we went out to the Swan Valley, which is conveniently close to my home for what turned into lunch at three different restaurants.

It was one of those glorious winter days in Perth, sunny and in the low 20’s and the valley was very very busy. The Swan Valley is one of Australia’s premium wine growing regions and is covered with restaurants, vineyards and micro-breweries and it was at one of these breweries that we started our meal.

Our entree at the first place was tappas, served with Danish feta, octopus, olives, beetroot dip and some spicy sausage which I washed down with a Pale Ale.

Our second stop was a German styled restaurant and brewery where we had the house speciality of bratwerst and pork chops (smoked and marinated) and served with fried potato and sauerkraut. I chose the wheat beer.

Next we went to yet another restaurant come brewery, however I really didn’t want any more alcohol so I decided to have coffee instead. For dessert I had a Broulee which was a little bland but not unacceptable, followed by another coffee.

Five hours it took!

I should have known better.. But I’m glad I went

You would think that living in a major city (the fourth biggest in the Australia) in a first world country that the power companies could manage to have a reliable supply.

So why is it that i find myself blogging, yet again, about the undependable source.

There is a jolly good reason I run a Uninterruptable Power Supply on my main computer and my router and that is because the power in this house can just cut out for anywhere between half a second and 15 seconds.

This morning it was much longer so I guess that qualifies as a power cut rather than just an interruption.

I got woken at 6.15 by the beep beep beep of the UPS and tried hard to go back to sleep, but I just wasn’t tired any more so I layed in bed instead.

It would have been nice to get up and do some cleaning or something while there were no distractions but it’s just past the winter solstice and with no lighting and no power for the electronic ignition on my gas heater, staying warm in bed seemed like a better option.

I did end up falling back to sleep an hour later and now I have that muzzy dull feeling that I often get when I drift back off to sleep after I really should have got up

The power came back on just after 9am

I have a client. In fact, my first client, and he’s somewhat tardy about paying his account.

The current account in question is for his site hosting and it was getting more and more overdue.. Six weeks in fact!

I have taken to calling him but every time I do I get responses like “F*^$ me, I totally forgot” followed by promises to put the cheque in the mail that day.

I finally decided that enough was enough and on Thursday, one week after I had made the last phone call to him, I suspended his account taking his website off line and more importantly his email service.

I was half expecting a phone call from him asking what had happened to his email but it never arrived.

Friday morning the cheque was in my PO box!

I was still feeling elated about that 20 minutes later when my phone rang and it was the office wanting to ask me a question about a misplaced bag.

I pick up some internal mail bags at the airport for a couple of different companies and take them out to our depot and sort them out. Unfortunately when I was picking up the bags for one company, I ended up with just one from the other and it got delivered to the wrong place.

100% my fault and I accepted that and apologised for it.

“Oh Ok, no problem but you do need to be more careful when sorting out the mail” was the reply

Sure, I accept that and I really don’t make big mistakes at work, but I am not perfect and sometimes these things happen. I mentioned that I was careful and it was just one of those things and they were happy with that..

Then they kindly let me know that they wouldn’t charge me for the mistake.

…

How generous!

I guess it’s kind of like waving a red flag at a bull because I pounced on it. I politely reminded them that I don’t get paid for either of the customers that were concerned. You could almost hear him choke on his words!

“What do you mean you don’t get paid” he asked, giving me the perfect opportunity to make a point.

It was one of those things that was piggybacked onto a different run on the basis that I “go there anyway” so it would not be any problem.

I took that chance to make further criticisms about the situation with unpaid work which thoroughly brightened my morning.

One of the things that I want to get running again is the Haloscan commens that I have used in the past .

It appears to be something in the Joomla CMS that is upsetting the applecart and stopping comments from working.

For some reason it is adding the URL into the href, even though it is not called in the code, thus disabling the comments.

For example, my archived posts used this piece of html and php to call up the comments link -

Comments on <a xhref=”javascript:HaloScan(‘<? echo”$blog_title” ?>’);”>

where the php variable was the name of the post for automating the comments and the javascript call is included at the top of the page.

Under the old site this still works fine, but in joomla instead of returning html to the browser that might say Comments on <a xhref=”javascript:HaloScan(‘post name’);”> I end up with Comments on <a xhref=”http://juslooken.com/javascript:HaloScan(‘post name’);”>

Enter the 404!

This is not a foggy morning. This is smoke haze caused by CALM controlled burn offs. It’s very unusual at this time of year to have smoke haze as normally it is something we get in summer, usually caused by a temperature inversion.

Annoyingly, yesterday I did 3 loads of washing and left it on the line overnight because it was not yet dry so now I have to wash it all again to get the smoky fragrance out of my clothing.

Basic Skills
Reading – Can read well but he must read more loudly
Number – On the whole steady progress, but he is too old to still be writing his figures the wrong way.
Handwriting – He does not always work to the best of his ability.

Creative Ability
Original writing – At times quite good ideas spoilt by careless writing.
Art and Handwork – He enjoys this subject.
Mime and Drama – The required effort is not always made.
Singing – Could be good if he did not, at times, drift off into his world of fantasy.

Social Attitudes
Obedience – On the whole, satisfactory
Kindness to others – He likes to help with classroom duties.
Order and neatness – He must try to be neater with his written work
Application to work – At times, strict supervision required to keep his mind on his work, otherwise he would drift off to “dreamland”
Attendance and punctuality – Excellent

While cleaning up some stuff in my room today I came across my old school reports. I thought I would share this one with you. It was from a teacher called Miss Barker and she was my first grade teacher. I was 5 years old when I first went into her class.

From the old school of teaching, she would criticise, use sarcasm and she was very scary.

I had to chuckle over this report, especially the drifting off to dreamland, something that I still do to this day. I know it used to annoy the heck out of Amanda.

I remember once asking her where the pencils were, only to be informed that they were on the roof. I guess I would have looked quizzically at her because her next sentence was “Well, ask a silly question..”

Barker was an appropriate name..