I wish I had a puppy

How time flies.  Since my last post stuff has happened.  In the space of a year it is expected, I guess.  I moved into my house.  My dad visited for a week.  I almost got killed in a car accident.  There.  My year to date.

I also planned many times to make copious and dubious posts here.  I had planned to get work started on my backyard workshed.  I had planned to dig up a space for a vegetable garden. I even planned to take over the world, but then I realised I could do that tomorrow.

Enough personal pronouns for now.  See below for my latest happy snap.  Hopefully soon I’ll spend some time writing something of less than questionable value.  Like why white (-ish) carpet is a bad idea and perhaps about the things I think about lying in bed unable to sleep.

On the advice of numerous well-informed parties I arranged a pre-settlement inspection of my newly-purchased property.  You know, to check everything is still there and not broken and what-not.  Tomorrow at 11am is when my people see the vendor’s people and exchange secret handshakes and cavort under a fountain of my hard-earned pennies.  I had been wanting to look forward to this day – especially tonight – to enjoy the anticipation of possibly the most important thing I’ve yet done with my life, if not the most expensive.

At 3pm I met the real estate agent and had a look inside.  I was, um, disappointed.  Sure, there were boxes cluttered around the place, but so too was all the furniture, wall coverings, bric-a-brac and other detritus situated mostly in the places they have inhabited for the last 27 years.  Then I looked out at the backyard.  All the, erm, “stuff” that was there 9 weeks ago is still there, and there, and over there underneath that other stuff in the corner.

At first I wasn’t too bothered.  The real estate agent reminded the vendor that under the terms of sale the property was to be transferred to me by vacant possession at 11am tomorrow, and it would be wise to “take care of things”.  I believe someone is to be on the scene to clean up the yard in the morning, but I’m not that bothered by a bit of junk.

When I returned to work, I soon came to suffer the symptoms of RAGE (raaaaaaage).  Several years of indecision and doubt about being able to buy a home of my own, then a few months of attending auctions and scouring real estate and subsequent disappointment (and more doubt), then finally making the purchase to waiting for settlement – which in all earnestness has been an eternity.

The day then comes, and I don’t think the place will be empty and truly “mine” – to say nothing of clean and tidy – at the appointed hour.  Naturally, I griped to everyone in earshot.  I was hoping for this to be an important and triumphal occasion.  Instead I have to decide whether to bite my lip and hope everything is out by the time I finish work tomorrow, or to postpone the settlement with a “no go, no money” caveat, or to get the Sheriff in at 11am, or to charge rent, or just to go bat-shit insane and flip out completely.  Whichever is the case, it doesn’t actually make anything better for me.  The craving for Valium (mmm) will still be there, and my new home will still be full of crap which isn’t mine.

Perhaps this is everything will work out.  So far it has – all the monetary, legal and other bureaucratic business has been smooth.  But to walk inside and wander around the premises and to see everything as it was, with the exception of some boxes of odds’n'ends packed and waiting in the lounge room, I must admit my hopes are not high for a stress-free day tomorrow.  We will see.

On the plus side, tonight I had a wonderful and throughly outrageously expensive dinner at what is a very innocuous-looking Japanese restaurant just a little bit down the road.  Raw fish, raw cow, raw egg and some other non-raw delectables, with a nice (but too young) bottle of Cabernet and good company.  Given the ol’ bank account has taken a beating this week I felt another body blow wouldn’t do it any more harm.  So off I will go to bed tonight, belly full of exotic treats, to awaken in the morning and see what the day brings.  At the very least it is going to be interesting.

I was going to write some stuff about something, like how I’m being reamed by The Man in fees and charges and other fiscal whining, or how it’s only 3 more days until I get a set of keys which will become obsolete about half an hour later when I change the locks.

However, I’m tired.   Even the recent pastime of sitting on half-a-couch listening to loud music isn’t as alurring as cocooning myself in blankets and wishing I had a better pillow.  Another benefit of an early night will be not wishing I was dead around 11am while pretending to work.  Trying to route circuit boards is very hard when you just CBF.

I’d actually like to spend some time writing something of actual, if perhaps dubious, value.  I enjoy writing.  However it seems to be so very hard to do.  I usually compose my next masterpiece mentally lying in bed, with just the right turns of phrase and the BEST words.  When I come to transcribe this piece of loquacious beauty, it becomes tarnished by the effort of transferring mental concepts to paper and the inadequacy of this lump of man-flesh in producing the glpyhs quickly enough to keep up with what the brain wants to say.

Nonetheless, writing is fun, if nothing more than an exercise in the abuse of language.  One day I’ll even have a go at it.  Words are fun.  Grammar, and the uncalculable permutations thereof,  is fun too.

Writing the above has taken 15 minutes and I’m no closer to my bed.  Grumble.

P.S.  “Web Standards”.  Haha, my arse.  So, like, being the hotshit programmer I get paid to pretend to be, I’ve been fooling around with Ajax to improve some of our zomg-proprietary-leetness we pass off as products.  There are *still* fourteen different and mutually-exclusive ways to do the same thing and still none of them work properly in IE without COLOSSAL HAX.  I really want to find a nerd and kick him in the balls, but I’m not much into self-injury.

Edit:  Half an hour after starting this I’m still sitting on the couch.  Cue emo music and “I hate my life /cut”.  Or something of that nature.  Grumble.

For the first time in my life I am now officially in debt.   I’ve never experienced it before. Not just in debt, but in serious debt. Many years ago I was frightened of being in serious debt.  Odd how things change; the repayments are just money, no different to the rent I’ve paid for the last 15 years.  And I end up with a 50 year old concrete house of my own in 30 years time.

After losing many battles in the preceding months, I have won the war against the lawnmower.   Every weekend I have ventured to the garage and engaged the accursed grass-muncher and come away muttering naughty words.  Mostly “stupid piece of crap”.

Not today.  I decided after least week’s defeat (new spark plug) I would actually attempt to gap the spark plug.  Just in case.  After the application of two precision instruments (the garage door and a cheap screwdriver) and the re-installation of the plug, it worked.  One pull on the starter and the damned thing worked.  Even after having the carburettor dismantled and washed in the the kitchen sink, the loss of a couple of vital bolts and inexpert alignment of the magneto.  Stupid piece of crap.

I do vow that the next lawnmower I buy will not have a Briggs and Stratton engine.  A Honda would be nice.

In my tradition of offering half-arsed advice, I have typed up a document showing how to make your new ath9k-based 802.11n wireless card to work as an access point under Linux (in my case Debian, but it shouldn’t be an issue).  After spending a lot of time looking for simple instructions on how to do something which seemed so uncomplicated, and being stumped by immature drivers and stupid Windows networking tools, I felt it would be only fair to provide a simple walkthrough.  Not just in the hope I can make like easier for others, but as a thank you for all the tidbits of useful information I did manage to find amongst numerous blogs, fora and mailing list posts.

Click through to my ath9k and hostapd howto if you are even in the slightest bit interested.

Hi everyone.  It has been 6 years since I last felt a need to pollute the internet.  Several things are to blame – no-one actually looked at my website, it was crap,  and my life got wtfowned by Everquest.  But I got better.

So I’m sitting here in my lounge, Family Guy episodes playing in the background, after surreptitiously creating this WordPress weblog thing on my Dad’s domain.  I may even tell him I did it.  I may even let you know that I’m probably not the Robert Heyward you are looking for.  He’s older than me and has less hair.  And he’s over here.

As it is 3.30am and my brain is mushy, I haven’t anything valuable to add to human knowledge right now.  It must be said that WordPress is nifty.  Writing my own weblog software would have been fun and more my style, but the result would end up being unfinished and really half-arsed.  Hopefully it will give me a way of meaningfully communicating with other people via the internet – I never seemed to get far with email  or instant messaging.

So.  The oven is clean.  Well, cleanish.  Sodium Hydroxide is wonderful stuff, and just as toxic as the can says.   The Other Toilet has taken the full force of 4 different cleaners and continues to scoff at my pitiful attempts to make it fit for any purpose.  The thought has occurred that this kind of cleaning needs to be done more than once every 6 years.  But bugger it; it’s only to keep my soon-to-be ex-landlord happy.  For what it is worth, the oven is now cleaner than it was when we first moved in.

The lawnmower still refuses to work.  New spark plug and everything.  Stupid heap of crap.