House

We bought a house! We put in an offer on Friday, it took the agent until Monday to catch up with the vendor, they made a counter-offer of $2000 higher, and we accepted. It's a four bedroom two bathroom home with formal lounge, big open living area, security alarm, ducted air-conditioning, on a 668sqm block. It's in Redcliffe which is about 8km from the city centre between Belmont and Perth Airport.

Today I had to quickly find a settlement agent. It's a strange business, it seems everyone charges the same percentage, which they then discount depending on how they feel on the day. The first place that was recommended to me offered a 20% discount, the second offered 30% based only on being recommended by a former client.

This evening I talked to our mortgage broker and we went through everything on the phone. He reaffirmed that we should have no trouble getting the loan, and we've decided on which loan we'll get. The documentation we require seems far less onerous than I had been led to believe. We should have everything submitted by Thursday.

Hooray for Perth and semi-affordable real estate!

Wine tasting

On Sunday my fiancée organised a wine tasting tour of the Swan Valley, primarily for her work colleagues. The DIY approach was hugely successful. She organised a bus for 20 people, tastings at four wineries (Talijanich, Baskerville, Sittella, Oakover), and a small lucky-dip gift for $25 each.

Talijanich was a bit disappointing. They are more renowned for their dessert wines than anything else, so we probably should have left our visit until later in the day. The grenache wasn't too bad, but I didn't think much of the chenin or the verdelho. The port was quite nice and excellent value at $17.50 for 1.5 litres. I wasn't really tempted though.

We went to the Feral Brewery for lunch. Like my last visit, I had the tasting rack of six beers for $10. The food was good, and the beer was nice without being anything special.

Baskerville Estate was the first stop of the afternoon. They have a new looking restaurant there, but it didn't seem very popular. I liked their wines better than Talijanich. My fiancée bought a cleanskin chenin for $10, but I preferred the sauvignon blanc and bought a bottle for $15.

The third winery of the day, Sittella, was the best but I think the tastings cost significantly more. The wines are clearly better than the previous places we had been, and I bought two that I particularly liked, an unwooded chardonnay and a shiraz.

The final stop was Oakover Estate. My memory of this part of the day is getting a bit fuzzy, but I believe their wines were quite nice. Not as good as Sittella though. I bought a 2003 cabernet merlot.

Football grand final

As is our tradition, we went over to a mate's place to watch the AFL grand final on his enormous projector. It was a pretty good game for the first three quarters, with a bit of biffo to make it more interesting. Port Adelaide ran away with the game in the final quarter, eventually winning by 40 points. The pictures from Adelaide Oval made their supporters look quite feral.

The news tonight is that retiring Brisbane forward Alistair Lynch will be visiting the tribunal to face six charges. He was going a bit psycho early in the game, so this is quite reasonable. But since he's retiring it makes no difference to him - he'll be suspended for a long time but I don't think they can impose a fine for the charges he's facing. Seems a bit stupid really.

Work

• The IT support people installed some new software on our server which replaced the symlink libstdc++.so. I spent four hours trying to work out what was going on.
• We have a new general manager. He started by making a speech and giving everyone a free lunch. I think he's doing quite well so far. Our old manager left a few days after a WARNING TO ALL STAFF email went around about inappropriate internet usage. Coincidence?
• Why does the customer not realise we have a code deadline in three days? Leaving design problems unresolved until they get a chance to go examine it is not good for the schedule.
• My tech lead went over to the US a while back. He brought back a video of the Quiznos Subs ad. Since then, the Quiznos song has taken the office by storm.
• Being a tech lead would suck. You get paid the same, your official title remains "software engineer", you end up using Microsoft Office all day, you do far less coding, and your only reward is a meets expectations on your performance review. In our office, we have a quota of how many people can exceed expectations. We don't want to encourage too many quality employees - they would upset the balance of the office environment.
• We had a very long Professional Development presentation yesterday in preparation for our compulsory Professional Development discussions. In the discussions we write down all the training we want, and then someone in management comes up with an excuse about why we can't have it. Anyway, they're bringing in a new career structure. In the presentation they proved they have absolutely no idea about our business unit, having spent six months developing the new structure without ever realising that we have an existing structure in place.

Hard drives shouldn't go click

My harddrive made the click of death a few times on the weekend. I quickly burnt a backup of everything important, and it's been ok since then.