I flew over to Sydney on Tuesday, and am now in the middle of working Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday nights and then flying home on Friday. I wouldn't say it's fun, but it's a lot better than the sea trials experience from my last Sydney trip. And I get a couple of bonus days off as compensation. :)

Unfortunately I'm not staying in the usual place this time (Holiday Inn Potts Point) but at an apartment in Vaucluse. Apparently it costs the company $1500 per week. It's a nice place but a bit inconvenient. There's nowhere to eat within walking distance and I need to get a taxi every time I go to work.

But the main problem is the whole place smells like an ash tray. I have an excellent photo I'll share at some point of some baked beans that had been left in a saucepan in the sink and evolved into some new super-bean. Quite spectacular. And why is there no toilet paper? And why weren't the toilets flushed when I arrived. I know there's the whole if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down philosophy but I never knew anyone actually did that.

Yesterday arvo I went for a walk down to South Head which was nice. This afternoon I'm going to walk the other way down New South Head Road and see where I end up.

Firewall

Last week I was working on making the computer at home wife-friendly. Not too difficult on the desktop machine (which runs Linux) but the firewall was a bit of a bugger because it likes to be shutdown nicely. My solution was to put the firewall on a bootable CD and disconnect the harddrive completely. Took a while to get it right, but now it's sweet.

Just hit the power button to turn it on, power button to turn it off. At least that would be what you would do if I hadn't fried the power button trying to connect it to the jumpers on an unlabled motherboard. So now you press the reset button.

I bought my first ever CD-RW for this project. I only had it a week and managed to scratch it so that it doesn't work anymore. Stupid fragile crap.

There's still a bit of customisation to do like making it boot faster, and stopping it from changing the root password every time it boots up. That's quite annoying. I based the whole thing on a Gentoo LiveCD and I don't know how it does it.

Flying

I got stuck near a screaming child again on the flight over. I think it would be great if an airline dedicated a bit of the cabin to a child-free zone where everyone can relax in civilised comfort. The only downside would be there wouldn't be as many families to fill the crappy middle seats (all the good seats are taken by frequent flyers).