The 'Australian Vaccination Network' are a bizarre cult.

Last year I had a delightful case of pertussis, thanks to the continual erosion of herd immunity interacting with the natural reduction in immunity for this disease that occurs in most humans.

This can be directly attributable to the work of the Australian Vaccination Network, a bunch of paranoid cultist nutbags who believe that immunisation is a plot to corrupt and pollute precious bodily fluids.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, was not a mild disease for me. I had not only the paralysing cough, but also the full-blown whoop, or stridor. Imagine coughing until you have completely expelled all air, and then as you try to breathe in, being strangled by an invisible maniac. Also, I'm not exactly certain that I did not crack a rib.

The 3AM hospital visit was Not Fun.

Meryl Dorey and her minions are howling loons. Pay them no mind.

Ho ho ho tee hee

ksh 93!

ksh 93

Bloody hellfire.

If you don't fix things, they break

A decade is a longish time

Deary me. The X-Files have not aged well.

Jolly good!

Stephen Fry likes Linux, and tells you why. Good on him. I recommend the Fedora Project myself.

You'd think this wheel would've been invented again by now

It is unfeasibly difficult to get a modern version of RPM for Solaris 10, either built from scratch or as a package of some sort. This Should Not Be. I refuse to use native Solaris packaging as it's awful beyond comprehension, and besides, I want to use my leet RPM skillz0rs. Also - why, yes, it has been over a year since I last posted here. Wheee! Job good!

Great Googly Moogle

Signed a shiny new contract for a shiny new job yesterday. Go me.

Went out for a few drinks and a meal with some BookCrossing people last night, now my other toe is sore. Damn you, genetics. Damn you, purines. Too much beer/meat I guess, but uigar cuisine is very me-ish indeed. I regret nothing.

Start next Thursday. Really looking forward to it.

The Weekly Me

In this week's headlines

• I discovered what Gout is like. Not recommended.
• Moved my domains over to Google Apps for Domains. If you'd love the CIA to read your mail, send me some.
• Pulling beers as a volunteer for the National Folk Festival is to be my doom
• Had my fifth and hopefully last (in a good way) job interview for Prestigious Company Foo

Bookcrossing this week, and I've barely touch my new stack. Oh noes!

I'm skint, so click on a link. After a year or so, I'm up to US$Bugger-all.

Colliding geekery - Linux guitar project

I used to be a bit of a guitar geek, you could say - regular trips to the various guitar shops in Brisbane to see what was new, who was hanging out, and so forth. I'm kind of a Busy Professional sort-of-thing these days, and I got into choraldom as well, so haven't devoted much time to the old axe.

This project might get me playing around again. What a nice idea. Of course, it's only a short step from there to ax84.com, the co-operative guitar amp project.

How will I ever find the time to buy a C38 and build a model railway?

It's a shame all the really cheap hobbies suck. I guess there's always beer.

Feitlebaum

Don't know why I thought of this today. Feeling a little insomiaish, so a quick branedump might be theraputic.

So, I'm four interviews done, with another one possible. Then there's the background check, to ensure that I'm not actually a thieving liar. Seems like a good gig, so here's hoping.

Been playing with livejournal a bit - I like the community features, and certainly it seems everyone I've ever met, ever, seems to have some kind of presence there, but so far I'm still happy enough with Blogger, mainly because of it's Googleness (I can use it as an embedded blog for other domains, like, for example, BIV 2007).

Tried the BookCrossing thing (yay pub!), and only realised I'd actually met Trainman a couple of days later.

And now, Sleep, the Sleepening.

Pluggin'

Blatant plug for a mate time.

Need some plastic crafted? How about some nice new polyeurethane engine mounts? Why not try the skilled artisans at Plasticcraft (note, two Cs). Plasticcraft, for all your polyeurethane moulding needs.

In other news, I'm short-short-listed. Only the Final Probing remains. Crivens!

It's funnier without pants

So, I suppose it's that time again. Check it out.

The last Australian Intervarsity Choral Festival in Brisbane was in 2000, and I was on committee. Interesting Times. This one is looking pretty good, so please lend your support.

Iron helps us play!

Wow, so much under the bridge since the last post. "Stay tuned" indeed. Really need to do something about that.

Lesse. Went to Dublin for an interview with Company Foo. Despite the jetlag (which I always underestimate) I think I did as well as could be expected. We shall see.

Google Apps for Domains is fun to play with. Finally able to get some mal etc for my rambling collection of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time domains

Oh yeah, thanks Dave.

Sidderknee

Heere we are. Furniture is arriving. Stay tuned.

Zoom, away

So, I'm sitting in Mum's kitchen, eating scrambled eggs on toast, and I'm about to drive off to Sydney with Feebz and a box o'cat. We're staying overnight in Armidale with the Amazing Julez, then arriving on Saturday to fix up the lease. Pusscat is staying overnight in the house whilst we do the Hotel Thing, this needed because the furniture etc isn't arriving until Sunday.

Aieee, out of my comfort zone. Scary!

Drift racers ~= Furries

Drift racers are the Furries of motorsport.

That is all.

It's 2006, do you know what your perl modules are doing?

Plenty of things still seem to need File::Lock, despite it being ten years old and apparently predating Perl 5. The FreeBSD ports collection builds it OK, because they've had POLLUTE=1 in their configure-config for ages, but I had to build it for an app on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Here's how I did it using cpan2rpm, as I couldn't work out if cpanflute2 could pass an argument to MakeMaker or similar:

cpan2rpm File-Lock-0.9.tar.gz --make-maker POLLUTE=1 --author=robk --make-no-test

Drol is visiting, and seems to be enjoying himself gathering GPS data for it's own sake.

I'm a teapot!

It never rains, but it bloody pours.

You know, a lesser man would panic.

Edit: corrected the links

So, yeah, moving on

I suppose I should mention the new job.

I also suppose I should mention that I'm moving to Sydney in a couple of months.

aieeeeee!

I'm basically going to be The Red Hat Linux Guy, it seems. It'll be nice to ge back into some real sysadminish work again, and my new colleagues seem like stand-up fellows. Excitement abounds!

Vale, ex-RH-BNE hifi thingy

Our stereo died. All it does now is make feeble mumbly noises out of the right main speaker. The absurd flashing light display still works fine.

I bought this from RH BNE when they sold off some stuff prior to moving from Fortitude Valley to Milton, along with a leather office chair. The office chair's castors are falling off, and now this. Might be time to actually Buy Something Decent ...

Large-Male-Sibling needs cockpunching

I look forward to the iminent demise of Big Brother as a cultural phenomenon. Opiate for the masses, indeed. I hate RATM, but I fell like listening to them OUT OF PURE SPITE.

In other news, Kris-with-a-K plugged Canticum on Starslip Crisis today. Thanks Kris!