Down in Melbourne for the weekend (again)...

Back down in Melbourne for the weekend again to watch the Melbourne Victory play Wellington Phoenix. It was a bit upsetting that the captain - Kevin Muscat got sent off on red after about half an hour. But like the past few matches, it appears the Victory needed to loose a player to start playing properly. They scored first with a fantastic assist from Archie Thompson to Danny Allsopp, but it didn't end there - like I would have hoped. Wellington answered in the second half with their own goal, which meant the game ended with a 1-1 draw.

I don't know what the Victory need to do to get off the lower half of the ladder - with the obvious exception of starting to win games. They're not playing like they were last year. I think in a way, this was an indication of how much Fred was to their midfield. I know there are people out there who will say Fred didn't do anything for the first half of the season, and I would agree with that, but once Fred got into his rhythm, he was feeding the other players as well as creating gaps in defense.

Once again, my wife and I went out for dinner afterwards. This time it was to another French restaurant called Paris Go. Food was great, and the prices were more reasonable than the other French restaurant I went to a fortnight ago. I would definitely go back, as well as to the other. Awesome steak tartare!

1st month in Canberra gone... time to go to work.

I've been in Canberra for one month now, and it's been OK so far. Not as good as Melbourne, but then again, Melbourne is home.

I think it is time I get down to work. I am working at the moment, but I am not working on my side Open Source projects. Now that I've settled into the place I am staying, I need to start coding up a car ordering system for a car dealer. I've seen what systems are being used at the moment, and I think I can make one that's easier to use for the car dealers.

My idea will be that it is written in PHP, and talk via Apache to a MySQL database. I'm running Gentoo Linux on my PC, so it's going to be developed on a LAMP platform, but hopefully it will be portable enough to run on WAMP if necessary.

I'll update people through this blog on the progress. Wish me luck!

A gentle sunday walk...

Yesterday I decided to take a walk to Parliament House from where I'm staying in Canberra city. Along the way I decided to take photos of what I saw. I got side-tracked a little when I saw the British High Commission (which would be equivalent to the top-level embassy or consulate office), and that led me onto the Chinese Embassy. If anyone ever visit Canberra, please make sure you take a walk / drive past the foreign Embassy section which should be approximately west of Parliament House. The Chinese Embassy is done with a Chinese theme, complete with a Chinese tiled roof and Chinese ornamental garden. The New Zealand High Commission has some metal cow sculptures out the front of it, and the Papua New Guinean High Commission is what I would consider is in the shape of one of their tradition abodes.

Just a word of warning - don't spend too much time around the US of A Embassy. I was approached by the Australian Federal Police and asked to move along. They were not rude, and were very professional and polite. It was just somewhat unnerving to be asked to be hurried along. There was absolutely no one else there (being a Sunday morning), and I was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts - hopefully I wasn't posing a threat. If you ever met me, you wouldn't think I was threatening in any way.

Any pictures I do upload to this blog will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Down in Melbourne for the weekend...

Drove down to Melbourne on the weekend to catch up with my wife and my daughter. Both are doing well, and my wife mentioned that my daughter was extra well behaved while I was down there. She usually growls (ok... keep in mind she's a Vizsla).

Was a little disappointed with the Melbourne Victory vs Sydney FC game which ended in a 0-0 draw, but that is football sometimes.

My wife and I had dinner at the brasserie by Philippe Mouchel at Crown. I love French cuisine, and it was awesome having steak tartare.

Fortunately I've also found a Canberra restaurant that also serves tartare. It seems like food is motivating me at the moment. I'll get around to trying it and informing writing down what I think of it.

2 weeks down, and missing the ones I love...

I've just started my 3rd week of what could be a 6 to 12 months stint in Canberra. My housemate just came back from Melbourne after spending the long weekend down there (Melbourne Cup). In the 2 weeks that I've been in Canberra, I've managed to see:

• The War Memorial
• The National Museum
• Bits and pieces all over the place

I'm missing Melbourne greatly, as my wife and our four-legged daughter is down there. It feels weird as tonight is also the Wednesday night meeting for LUV (it's usually on a Tuesday night - except for November due to the Melbourne Cup weekend). Last month I attended the CLUG meeting and was lucky enough to hear Tridge speak, but it wasn't the same as LUV. In a very geeky act, I introduced myself to him and thanked him for his contributions to Open Source.

I really miss Melbourne...

The start of something...

As some of you may know, I'm from Melbourne and was happy there. Recently I've taken a leap of faith and am working in Canberra in an infrastructure role with IBM technologies. It's mainly around their UNIX and application server technology.

So why did I start this? Wanted to get some bits down of what I was thinking as well as document some of the things I have been doing or playing with. So let's hope this becomes something big, and not just another neglected blog.

In case you're wondering more about me, here's my current homepage.