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.

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...

Managed to get on site last night - things are getting really close to completion, or at least it feels like it. since we were last on site, they've got all the internal driveways in, the garage roller door is on (and seems to be on most places), the clothes line is up, and all of the power and phone points are in! They've even put the controller for the central heating in, which is quite exciting. The inside of the place has been cleaned up and the mirrors installed in the bathrooms as well, things are getting closer.

In fact, it's probably easier just to look at what hasn't been done yet - I can pretty much count them on one hand! The most obvious is probably the carpets, although I'd expect them to be last. Then there's the appliances (oven and dishwasher), the fencing and the landscaping in communal areas. The final elements missing at the holes in the roof under the skylights in the en suite and laundry. 

Quite exciting! Still no word on when we can move in, which is a bit of a piss off, but it's still great to see progress.

I didn't manage to get any more photo's, and in fact, we were pretty lucky to get in the house at all, as most of the lockable doors were locked. I do, however, have a picture of the buffet unit we bought with the couch, and the curtain fabric samples against the carpet sample.

Unfortunately it's not that great a picture - I actually got kicked out of the store for taking it. Apparently they're worried about people getting knock offs made from the picture or something, which I think it a little silly. Plus, it's not really a nice way to treat someone who's recently spent almost $8k at your store! Rude buggers. Anyway, it's all solid timber, and the doors in the front slide to the sides in front of the drawers. It's actually going to be the TV unit, so we're going to have to get a drill and make some holes in the back for the cabling. It's bigger than it looks in the picture as well. Anyway, I'll get a better shot when we actually get it delivered. 

In the meantime, here's a the carpet sample with the curtain samples from Duckcloth against it.

As you can see, my favourite one looks the best, and I think we're going to go with it. 

Anyway, I'd better get to bed. Until next time friends!

With Lasers, wormhole generators, and sonic thrusters

I've read a couple of places on the intertubes recently that at the 2012 Olympics in London, the Modern Pentathlon will be switching to laser pistols for the shooting events. 

It makes me happy that all my teenage years spent plying Virtua Cop 2 in the Arcade was not wasted....

I'm sure that somewhere along the way, someone, somewhere is going to up upset that a laser pistol might require less skill, no compensating for the wind or whatever.

To those people, I say: welcome to the future. Robots will be along shortly with mind bending future drinks to take your mind off it.

We've seen a drop in all three measures of workforce engagement

Hello! Fancy seeing you here - it's been a while, and I bet you thought I'd forgotten all about you.

This is simply not the case - I've just been swamped at work and have been going through a massive reading phase recently. I've been averaging around 3 books a week since about mid-August. I blame this on the staycation and also Dana ordering a lot of books off the internets. I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of books at home though, will need seek out other pursuits. Or buy more books...

The work side of it is a little bit interesting. By rights, working in a policy area that both sides of Parliament are swearing blue that they won't be active in, it should be really quiet and cruisey in the caretaker period. But unfortunately, this has not been the case, due to a couple of things. The first is that the time frames for the issue that I'm working on are really tight, and there's not that much room to stop and do nothing. In addition, the time frame is being set by Fair Work Australia, the federal industrial tribunal, which doesn't take that much notice of elections.

The second is that we had a re-structure, and my direct supervisor took a voluntary redundancy. As she wasn't replaced, I've had to take a few extra duties.

None of this is really that exciting to you, I'm sure. Suffice to say, I had a whole heap of work to do and now, I'm in post election limbo, with much less to do. It's actually pretty demoralising not knowing who I'm going to be working for, and not being able to get working on it. Don't get me wrong, we've done a lot of prep for either way, but there's not much more that I can do without actually having a Government.

The funny thing is, everyone else where I work reached this point weeks ago. A friend summarised it with a lol public servants:

Hopefully it will all be over soon, but to be honest, for the sake of the next three years, I think I'd rather just have them go back to the polls and someone get a full majority. You think this whole independents horse holding the power thing is bad now, wait until there's some essential bill that Parliament can't pass because Bob Katter's a nut bar in a cowboy hat. It'll be double dissolution before you can say "how's ya father" and we'll be right back where we are now.

Another six weeks of annoyance vs. three years (and probably less) of stagnation in the Parliament? Shit choices either way really. Although I guess if you go in for politics generally and it means the other side (which ever that is to you) doesn't get their way for another three years, there might be some consolation there.

Bleugh.

In other news, I'm going to Foreshore in November with Dana and kindred spirits Karla and Esa. It costs a mint, but I'm looking forward to a few bevvies in the sun in a nice location and some tuuuuunes. I'm also looking forward to laughing at Tiesto.

"OHAI2U RAVERS, I ARE NUMBER 1 DJ LOL!!!1!1"

To balance out the Tiesto, here's some Noisia and Phace. I've been listening to Phace and Misanthrop's 'From Deep Space' this afternoon, and it's keeping me positive.

The sample 20 seconds in to this till about a minute always makes me smile. Also making me smile in that particular clip are all the ravers caught making made nightclub faces. Somebody make some noise (or some such) for the DJ!

To round it all out, here's an absolutely awesome clip that was on Giz a little while back of some stop motion animation. I also dig the soundtrack. Hey Daver, this one's for you (no play dough though).

I love lamp

I've been pretty busy recently with both work and play recently, which has led me to neglect this blog. Thankfully I've got some time off at the moment, which gives me a chance to get a post out! There's been plenty of house related goings on (although we haven't actually visited the house in a while). The most exciting of which is that we have some more detail on the licence agreement and an estimated move in date! I'm choosing to ignore the fact that all dates provided by the builder so far have been hopelessly inaccurate, and have instead opted to hope this one will be better.

Anyway, the most recent time frame puts us actually moving in (!!) in 4-6 weeks. There are two things that give me a bit of hope that this will be adhered to - first that the properties are starting to look more finished and I can actually see it happening. The second is that we're starting to get some detail about the licence agreement! The most salient information we have so far is an estimated fee in place of rent - $350 / week. It's a good $125/week less than the rent where we are at the moment, so it's pretty good odds that we'll take the licence agreement when it is finally properly offered. 

The only fly in the ointment at the moment is that the timing is less than ideal for me at work - I'll be very busy around that point in time! I had hoped to take a week or two off to move in and get the place sorted out properly, but that's probably not going to happen now. It's a minor annoyance though - I'll just be so damn happy to get the keys to the place!

More news on that as it arises.

We've also managed to get our hands on a carpet sample for the new place, which is actually a bit darker than I remembered. The swatches of curtain fabric that Dana ordered from duckcloth.com.au arrived as well, and the lighter one goes quite well with the carpet. I love it when a plan comes together.


We've also had a good friend pick up the lamp we ordered a while back, which is now assembled and in our living room - I'm sitting under it right now! Here's a picture of Dana sitting under it:

Wheeeee! 


Until next time ladies and gents, keep your laces loose.

A successful day

A quick note to say that we had a successful day shopping yesterday - we bought the couch and a buffet (which we're going to re-purpose as a TV unit). Contrary to the advice we'd had previously, the store said it will be ready in three weeks, but they're going to store it for us until we're ready to move in. Exciting! I was going to take a picture of the buffet, but I completely forgot when we were at the shop - I'll try and remember to take one again some time.

In addition, we checked out a few curtain places, and had some productive discussions around curtains. We found a couple of places that would be happy to make curtains with the fabric Dana found on duckcloth.com.au (blogged about previously), which was promising. We actually found a few swatches of cloth in the shops that were quite good as well, and would probably be a fair bit cheaper.

Dana's been looking for alternatives to side tables, because we won't really be able to fit any in around the couch. She's come up with the idea to use small stools that can be moved around, or used for additional seating as needed instead. A leading choice at the moment is the replica Xavier Pauchard Tolix stool pictured in several colours below.

These have the advantage of being stackable and well sealed against the weather, so they could be used outside without too much worry. However, they are quite expensive.

I'm feeling really upbeat about the whole thing at the moment, good times. Now time to finish watching season one of Mad Men and argue with Dana about what sort of home theater setup to go with - she prefers the more streamlined home theater in a box type setups, where as I prefer a more chunky (and slightly higher end) dedicated receiver and speakers. I have a suspicion that her point of view will probably win out in the end - it usually seems to. 

 

Edit: I should clarify the reference to the home theater setup above - Dana would prefer that they were invisible, or in fact, were not purchased at all, where as I would prefer some sort of ridiculously expensive and ugly home theater room instead. The discussion at the moment is about where we compromise between them all, based on budget at the available options. And also that we don't have a home theater room.