30 September 2010

House update

The last couple of weeks have actually been kind of a big deal for the house, but I've been too busy to blog about them. In roughly chronological order, we've visited a different mortgage broker on a colleague's recommendation, chosen and applied for a home loan with him, done the pre-settlement inspection of the unit and got the certificate of occupancy!

The last one happened late yesterday, and it means that the registration of the units plan should now be underway. That process should (fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc) take about 2-3 weeks, at which time the 14 day settlement period should begin. Which means that we should be taking possession of the house in 4-5 weeks, like forreal.

The house itself is pretty much complete, sans appliances and hot water system, which go in pretty much the day before settlement (otherwise they get nicked). This is a little unfortunate, as we were hoping that they would be in when the bank did their valuation (also this week), but we didn't really think we should hold off any longer.

More on the valuation and the loan and what it all means at a later day. Right now, I've got a date with a glass of beer.

As a wise woman once wrote: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a public servant in possession of a pay cheque, must be in want of the pub".

29 September 2010

I am Iron Man

Good news and bad news (both unrelated to the house).

The bad first - my headphones went walkabout from work during a moving day last Friday. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth - they were a fairly nice pair, bought for around $80 from the Akihabara shop while in transit in Tokyo. They were getting on a bit, but still had good sound and I had some sentimental attachment to them.

Now the good news, I got to go out and buy some new Sennheiser canalphones (CX300 - II)! They sound great and have excellent sound isolation, which is a mandatory requirement for open plan office living. Some more good news - we got newer (second hand) computers as a result of the moving day, with new shiny (for me at least) Windows 7. And I netted a window seat again, with an excellent view of the plaza outside the front of my work.

I'm using the new headphones to listen to Black Sabbath. Here's a video of Metallica covering Black Sabbath's Iron Man, I think at Black Sabbath's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or something. Anyway, it's a good cover. Yeah.


There are other things to blog about, but I need some more time to think about them before I put them up. Which makes them sound more ominous than they are, it's more just that I don't have time at the moment!

17 September 2010

Friday video art

Another lunch time browsing find, this is a result of the "lets colour" project. And it's awesome.


Via Gizmodo.

Hopefully that's some colour to get you through your day. Quite frankly, I cannot wait for mine to be over, thank feck it's Friday.

PS: Pulled the trigger on a home loan application yesterday morning. I was pretty sure we weren't going to bother with a broker and just go to the bank, but we took a last attempt at a broker a colleague of Dana's recommended. Long story short, he was excellent, and I think we got a really good deal on the loan. I cant wait until the pre-settlement inspection on Monday!

13 September 2010

Eat them up, yum yum.

Found this video in a hazy, post luncheon haze today. Stop motion pacman on a large scale.



In other news, it turns out Sri Lankan food is really excellent. I'm so full, I just want to take a nap.

11 September 2010

cs_747

Watching Wesley Snipes muddle his way through 'Passenger 57' reminds me so much of playing counter strike, specifically the map cs_747, which was based around a hostage situation on a 747. Good times, I feel like a nervous teenager just watching videos of it on toutube. It reminds me of a golden age of gaming where my reflexes were massively fast, and I could focus ridiculously well on games for hours on end....

I might be pretty rusty these days, but around 5 years ago, I would totally have hit you with a BOOOM, HEADSHOT!

Ah, the memories...

PS: HA, FPS Doug - the epitome of BOOM HEADSHOT!


I have more in common with that dude than I like to admit.

I've noticed you around

Word to your mom's, I came to drop bombs, and all of that sort of business. Today's announcement comes to you care of me sitting up late waiting for iTunes downloads to finish. The bastards are dragging on and on, but at least they're going faster tonight - last night I was trying them on after work, and it seems the peak period between 7 and 11pm is the worst time for vodafone 3d - ironic, as this is probably the time most people need to use it.

However, this is the world of 3g broadband - unreliable, unstable and often unusable. Take this as a public service announcement to anyone weighing up the most cost effective options for internet access as I once did - 3g may be cheaper than a wired interweb connection, but the quality is simply not comparable.


The title of this post foreshadowed the inclusion of this clip - it's weird, because it's not even that great a song, but man does it get stuck in your head. I blame the schools.

Anyway. I'm currently watching/ignoring passenger 57. It's one of those movies that I totally enjoyed watching 10 years ago when it first came out, but on this viewing, really makes me wish there was not a TV in the bedroom. This is something I'm planning to rectify in the new house, but for the moment, late night movies are the thing.


Of course, youtube has the trailer for your edification (is there anything youtube can't do!??), and it turns out I'm eight years off - it came out in '92, which means I must have seen it at least 15 years ago. Sometimes I forget that a bunch of years have passed, and I'm not 19 anymore. In fact, I think there's a certain amount of willful ignorance on my behalf - I like to think that I don't think or act any different to when I was 19, but my salary and the responsibilities I have seem to indicate otherwise. Damn you, reality!

Wesley Snipes just whooped some dude's ass with his bare hands and feet - the dude has some faux martial arts skills! And he's just also delivered one of the key lines of the movie "always bet on black"


Anyway, enough of that crap (and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't crap), what I really wanted to post about was some new dates for the house! The most solid of which is the pre settlement inspection date! We're booked in to check out the residence and make sure it is what we signed on for on the afternoon of 20 September. I'm pretty excited by this, because it actually means that settlement is not far behind!

That's actually a pretty big thing - previously we had been told that there would be a massive lag between the unit being habitable and being able to settle on it, because the ACT govt was taking a long time to register the final plans. I'm talking up to three months between the units being finished, and final registration of the units plan, which had us in a bit of a flap. Thankfully, there's been a legislative change, and now it should be done in like two weeks. I can't tell you how much I want to be in there (and more than that, actually take ownership of the place), but I guess you'll have to just take my work that I'm pretty keen to get in there.

The upshot of the new time frame is that it might not be worth moving in under licence any more - under the revised schedule, we'd only be in an extra 2-4 weeks before settlement is completed - so we might just save our money until we actually own the place (OMFG, how exciting is owning the place!?!?!?11?!1?11!eleven). Having said that, if being in early means we are paying less rent, it might not be too bad, even if it is a shorter amount of time that initially intended - it all comes down to the proposed licence agreement, which we still haven't seen yet.

Anyway, despite the possible delay to moving in, I'm taking these arrangements as a positive - the settlement date has actually got closer, and a concrete date on the pre-settlement inspection is a very good thing.

Oh yeah, the other great thing about today, is that it's my birthday. It's been pretty sweet so far, I've taken delivery of an ipad, some rather excellent single malt whiskey, red dead redemption, the girl with the dragon tattoo on blu-ray  and a bunch of cupcakes. I'd also had a degustation dinner with wines.Life is friggin excellent - good times.

I'm going to check this out on the ipad:


Everybody stay cool.

PS: Holy poop, there's a streetfighter game - it's not ipad specific, but it's still on.

PPS: we're up to the point in the movie where Wesley Snipes has a gun, and is totally shooting dudes. This movie really makes me think Blade was the peak of his career. Mind you, last I heard Mr Snipes was in some sort of massive tax issues like Paul Hogan - hopefully he handled it with more aplomb.

01 September 2010

Bleep'n'skweep music

I've been listening to Ratat's LP3 and LP4 today while trying to get my head around a particularly convoluted piece of work, and it has helped me no end. The mixture of weird ambient sounds, bleeps and skweeps has been just the ticket. It helps that there are no lyrics to distract either. Here are two of their latest album, LP4:



Check out cartoon anti-drug video some joker posted with the second track - made me chuckle a little.

The music reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from Spaceballs


They don't make comedy as good as that any more...