Our final offer on the house we were after was rejected on Saturday. I don't feel too bad about it. To us, it wasn't worth any more than we were offering. So now we're looking again.

Sydney

I'm off to Sydney for a few days, leaving this afternoon. It was only decided yesterday. I'll be away until Friday attending a a software integration exercise. We tried integrating with this particular system back in June 2002, but we had some problems and it's taken until now until the other vendor is ready to try again. It's a bit silly that it's taken so long.

I'm looking forward to getting frequent flyer points again. It's been a while. And I'm staying somewhere different this time - our usual hotel (Holiday Inn Potts Point) is full, so I'll be in the comparative luxury of Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour. Work hours for the week are 2pm to 10pm, so I should get plenty of time to sleep in and do my own thing. It does make dinner a bit difficult though - contrary to popular belief, Sydney is not open 24 hours.

Today will be my 50th flight since 2002.

STL

I've been getting into the C++ STL a bit recently, both at work and in my current project at home. It's quite funky. Yesterday I wrote my first functor. I don't really understand what a functor is, but it got the job done (a custom sorting function for a priority queue). Hopefully my blossoming STL skillz will ultimately make me more employable.

I'm enjoying having a little project at home to practice on. I've written a search engine to find the cheapest way of earning Qantas Frequent Flyer status. It's still a bit basic, but it's coming along nicely. I'm now happy with the core functionality, now it's time for more features.

Football

On Saturday arvo I went over to a mate's place to watch the Eagles vs Sydney in the first round of the AFL finals. Like last year and the year before, the Eagles crashed out in the first week. They played well for the first fifteen minutes, and then it all fell apart. Not being able to pick up the ball was quite a problem for them.