Settlement was meant to be on Friday afternoon at 2:15pm. At 2:30 I got a call saying that it had been cancelled because the vendor hadn't got his paperwork back, and his settlement agent hadn't felt the need to mention it to anyone earlier. What a fucker. With everything planned for a move on the weekend, it looked like life could get a bit difficult. Initially the vendor wouldn't let us move our stuff in, but after a bit of prodding from the settlement agent and the real estate agent he relented. Just as well.

Settlement actually happened today. It was a bit of a non-event really since the move is already done.

Moving

I hired a 3 tonne truck on Saturday to help with the move. It was $132 + $20 to reduce the insurance excess from $2750 to $550. If you ended up having to pay their full exorbitant excess for some reason, you would probably be better off buying them a new truck and keeping the old one for yourself. But I digress. The truck was money well spent because it meant that pretty much everything fitted in one load. The bulk of it was done in three hours.

Squeezing the truck down my old driveway was a challenge. Imagine a driveway on a steep hill with a 90 degree turn half way down, and brick walls on either side. That's my old driveway. But we made it in the end. Just.

Frustration

Sometimes I get frustrated at my lack of skill in pretty much everything around the house. Coding is not a very useful skill in most situations. It doesn't help with getting letterboxes concreted into the ground, or with replacing window locks for which we don't have keys, or for fixing leaky taps, or for drilling holes in walls. I suspect I should have picked up these skills at some point along the way, but I missed out.

Internet

I should be able to get ADSL now. I will probably apply for the super hyper fast 1.5M account with TPG. For raw speed it's better value than anything else around. The $129 setup fee is a bit of a bastard, but I should be able to recoup some of it by selling the "free" USB ADSL modem on ebay.

Work

I've been working on a half-arsed unit testing framework. It's coming along nicely and is almost finished. It lacks most features of modern unit testing (eg automation and reuseability) but is a lot better than the current approach (writing tests in Microsoft Word and doing everything manually).

Also, I am now an ACCU member.

In my last diary I mentioned that they were looking for volunteers to go on a week long ship trial with our software. Amazingly, six people have volunteered for two positions so my fears of being volunteered against my will were unfounded.