amphigoric macoronical pointlessness

finally friday

except i'll be at work tomorrow, yuck.

some of the girls sitting behind me were talking about a wedding one of them went to on the weekend. i am amazed not only at the amount of detail they remember about it, but the detail they are interested in anyway. from what the bride was wearing (which i suppose is a normal question) to what she wore there as a guest. and the speeches and blah blah

maybe because mine was so traumatic i've tried to block it from my memory. i don't want to go through that again. i'll be happy if i can find a girlie who just wants to live in sin (that's just a saying i don't follow any religious stuff)

the wind is howling and the grots want to go to the beach this arvo. that should be amusing, we're gonna freeze. hope there's some waves though. i could really do with a surf to unwind.

back to work (although i'm not blogging from work of course hehehe)

updated

well so much for the plan. ended up working instead with that security patch. one of our servers didn't restart (and i was working from home) so i was a bit nervous about what was going to happen when i upgraded our crappy mail server. fortunately the server that didn't restart was because someone left a diskette in the drive. only gotta get thru friday then i'm safe....

another kooky thursday

but today has so far been ok.

i asked this girl i'm interested in, if she would like to have lunch, and despite bringing her own lunch she changed her mind and went to lunch with me. woohoo!!

all seems to have gone well, i don't think i made an idiot of myself or bored her with my stupid stories. time will tell.

and now i've managed to wipe out my thursday nights for the rest of the autumn and winter by joining one of the "old cretins" soccer teams (over 35's). hopefully this will be good fitness training for me so i can compete with the much younger kids in my regular team. or else it will reduce me to a complete wreck. we shall see...

in any case it will make up for all the saturdays i can't play because of my weekend work. i wonder if i can still fit a surf in this arvo before going to the soccer :-)

now to do some more patching because of, yet another frikken microsoft patch for yet another frikken microsoft security issue. sheesh! we should be running apache for chrissake!

nothing to see here, move along

a particularly uneventful day. which can be a good thing. i didn't stuff anything up and as far as i can tell i haven't made a fool of myself for at least a week now.

no soccer training tonight as everyone will be still stuffed from two games over the long weekend. instead i'm going to the dive club meeting. to see what mischief everyone else got up to over the weekend. a mate of mine is driving, which is good, but i have to drive home from his house. so no drinkies for me at the club. doh!

trolling through the blogosphere quite a few people are quiet as well. maybe they're like me and still a bit stunned after a long weekend and a lot of late nights. one of our lads turned up tuesday morning straight from a party that went all night. strangely he was a bit ill that day and had to go home early hehehe

as a blogger user i've been given a chance to play with the new (not an april fools day joke after all) gmail. before they offered it to me, i was wondering how i could scam it. now i've got it, i wonder what's the point of yet another free online email account. sure it's 1000mb, (is a gigabyte 1000mb, or 1024mb?) but i'm not gonna trust it with stuff i don't want to lose just yet. yahoo has been fairly reliable so why give up now?

hmmh, free email accounts; yahoo.com, hotmail.com (online like everyone else on the planet no doubt), bsdmail.org, hotbox.ru, netscape.com (probably expired), icq.com (same) and now google.com. must be a computer geek thing.

oh well, tomorrow is another day. thursday. i never could get the hang of thursdays.

a weekend as a deckhand/galley slave

24/4/2004
we were camped at hyam's beach last night, first thing this morning, after the boss and i went to the boat ramp to meet the Don and get the exposed film and drop off some food, we motor out through the heads and dive crocodile head. the same location where the other, cooler deckie, and boss F found a porthole.

next we decide to motor up to the drum. everyone gets two dives, the cook and i manage a dive as well. con the conga is nowhere to be seen. but a good dive nonetheless. then we bounce our way back down the coast to hyams beach. it's not as rough as anticipated, although still a little bumpy when we get in the bay with the strong westerly that's blowing. only two for the night dive while we all have a few drinkies.
some slide shows, including presentations from the last 2 years of shootouts. very amusing. perhaps tomorrow we'll stay here and get a dive at hyams beach.

25/4/2004
not a huge hangover, managed to get myself into bed at around 11:30. this morning the last of the processed slide film is back, we pick it up at Hyams Beach boatramp. the competitors have until 10:30 to mount the slides they want to enter for each category. in the meantime, the cook and i go diving.

you can dive this site as a shore dive, but we're doing it as a boat dive. and a cool dive it is too. the viz isn't too good, around 5 metres. but i take heaps of pictures of old wives (it's a type of fish) and manage to find a turtle and the frantic picture as it swims off, actually works. then i find an eagle ray! too cool. i've never seen one of these before (and everyone else gives me a hard time because they see them all the time. nuts to them) i take a few photos, then it gets restless (just wakes up?) arches it's spiny tail and then shoots off. i called this one princess diana, because as soon as it saw me it went "fucken paparazzi"! and swam off straight into the nearest rock, then it fought off the kelp and nearly ran into a huge blue groper that had to duck out of the way.

i need new gloves, a little maori wrasse bit me while i was taking pictures of the old wives. (gettout of it you little fuck!) a couple of little stingrays on the sand on the way back to the boat. all in all, a lot of fun :-)

25/4/2004 12:00am

what a totally awesome weekend. we had the shootout presentation tonight, and everyone got a prize. unfortunately so did i. the hero award for diving overboard to rescue a lady's lost fin. drat. yet again i have made myself famous by doing something stupid, like diving overboard to rescue a sinking fin, and then they took my photo at the presentation, and one of the presenters pulled down my tracksuit pants, fortunately i had shorts on underneath.

the guy who won, we talked into entering the competition a month or so ago. it's his first compettion. among other things, he's won a trip to the solomon islands. too cool. i think he's glad now we talked him into competitng so he could learn some new things.

26/4/2004

after such an idyllic day yesterday, a beautiful red sunset with the cresent moon and venus, today is a little less perfect. the swell is up and the wind is blowing. but the water seems lovely and blue and the divers all went for a stress free dive without the pressures of the photo competition. today is the last day, and one of the divers has already got off. we left him at Murray's Beach boatramp waiting for his lift home.

all the competitors should be happy i think. they produced some lovely pictures and no-one went home empty handed. i've had about enough for one weekend. a 4 day charter is a little taxing. it'll be nice to sleep in my own bed. even if i do have to go to my "pay-the-bills" job tomorrow morning.

more shit but different day

my latest interest has me spinning my wheels as usual. the initial attraction, a bit of banter and conversation. but i've burned my fingers so much over the last few years, i think i'm actually afraid to get further involved. and yes, for the psychologist i know who reads this, i never stopped loving my ex wife, but i accept the reality and am ok with the situation. the door is closed, and neither of us want to find the key.

so i'm going to do my normal shit and just wait and play a lot. go slow, don't over-reach your limitations. crap, that is so much shit. i'm interested but i don't know how interested, and i'm afraid of exposing myself to that again. but i totally love the bit where it works, where you can totally bare your emotions and be honest with someone, and you are stronger for it because you share so much ect...

i've been cooped up on a boat for the last 4 days, and unable to access the net as i would like (mobile phone internet access is not only expensive, but it really sucks) so here is some crap i wrote on the weekend, edited a bit to protect me from making an even bigger dick of myself.

this girl i'm interested in is pretty, but that is not what captures me. her lovely inquisitive blue eyes hold me spellbound. and her gorgeous smile stops me in my tracks. sometimes she touches me. and i am amazed that the touch of a relatively unfamiliar lady, is so comfortable and desirable. finally found what i look for in a woman!

in short, i think she is interested, and i think i am interested too. if i can keep from acting like an idiot for another few months and spend some quality time with her, that would be a good thing.

morons anonymous

after work i decide i'll have a little surf. last chance until monday arvo as i'm on the boat for 4 days. i get back and pack to go and find a couple of god-botherers have left pathetic comments. threatening me if i don't stop blaspheming and whinging.

i have a closer stickybeak, turns out all 3 are really one person, a dialup tpg account from the looks, and get this, he found my site searching for "bindy hilton". snigger

i love it, someone comes to my site, dedicated to me ranting, whinging, blaspheming if i feel like it, and generally writing idiotic things about my life. and they are looking for bindy hilton.

i can't stop laughing. frikken pathetic loser....snigger
i just wish i had better snark skills to really point out what a loser he is :-)

hmm, maybe he needs better snark skills as well. he can't point out what a loser i am with his shitty skillz.

sure i'm a loser too. it's a shitty site, and i whinge a lot. but read the bit on the top right. "don't bother reading it or coming here to find anything interesting". consider this the disclaimer and if you don't like it, i don't fucken give a shit.

page 23

vlado has told me to

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

and to avoid another "hump day" title i thought i'd play too. the first stupid book had a chapter title on page 23, so the freebsd handbook will do. all the other books behind my desk are even worse.

"Some software distributions have attacked this problem by providing configuration scripts".

how boring, the next bit is more interesting

"Some of these are very clever, but they have an unfortunate tendency to triumphantly announce that your system is something you have never heard of and then ask you lots of questions that sound like a final exam in system-level Unix programming ("Does your system's gethitlist function return a const pointer to a fromboz or a pointer to a const fromboz? Do you have Foonix style unacceptable exception handling? And if not, why not?")"

but still boring.

today is the day that wouldn't go away. i just want it to end. if i have another coke i think i'm gonna go hypo. i can't even troll thru tssh because they are getting a "bandwidth limit exceeded" message. bleah!

oh hold the press, they are back. back to your regular scheduled broadcast hehe

update

glassy, warm and not too small, not too big. i figured this could be my last chance for a surf until next week. but now i've decided to try to get out thursday arvo before getting on the boat for 4 days.

one young couple was there with their little baby. i thought, that's nice of the dad to be helping the mum carry the baby etc... out to the beach, then she came back for the surfboard. turns out she was going for a surf and he was baby minding hehehe

she got a couple of good waves, as did everyone as far as i could see. i caught some waves. i have really, interesting, wave choice. after a while i will go "damn sets are never coming" and will catch the first big wave that comes thru, it closes out, then i paddle out thru cool lefts and rights going doh doh! frikken DOH!

got a couple though, nearly ran over a guy paddling out. i was so engrossed in what i was doing, riding this fast little right, i looked up and saw him and fell off. woops, sorry. next wave was a cool fast little left, i'm trying to beat the white water and get back to the face, look up, another dude paddling out, fall off and nearly run him over too, woops, sorry dude.

i love these fast little waves. i'm going to have to start bringing my glasses in the car though. i'm wiping out trying to beat the last close-out section and i think i'm gonna lose my contacts for sure. i used to be able to just give myself some room and launch myself off the last bit. my timing needs work. one guy out there has some kind of wrap around surfing glasses, strapped on and tied to his wetsuit for when he loses them when he gets wiped out. i think i'll stick to contacts.

a sure fire way to wipe any thought of a crap day at work out of your head. the sun is going down earlier and earlier though. gonna have to start taking flexi's and sickies to get my winter surfing rush :-)

rant

our organisation is changing isp's, fun and frikken games. the old one went bust, and it was slow and unreliable anyway. the boss has decided that i should take care of it because 1) in case he goes under a bus so someone else knows what's going on, and 2) his hair has already fallen out, now he thinks it should be my turn.

i thought everything was just going like normal (ie: badly) until someone rang up with a complaint yesterday to say one of our links wasn't working. and it's to one of our domains anyway, and it's name server records aren't being hosted at the frikken ausregistry. we've got about 20 goddamn domains, registered with 4 different registrar's. don't ask me why, i'm just a frikken indian. been changing them all to have the same primary and secondary dns, and moving them to the new ip addresses. what a nightmare. anyway, one of them has shit itself.

first i check to make sure it's not my fuckup, and fix it if it is. but it looks like they did a deletion in jan 2003, it just never took effect until dipshit (me) goes to change the dns settings. and it won't let me unstuff it.

so i ring up the first contact to see what is going on. i can't get who i want so they put me thru to someone else, and the little fuck has decided he's going to run interference. i control my temper and tell him what's going on, in a way that the dumb shit will understand, i'm not getting through. he reckons the domain was deleted in 1995. you just aren't listening are you dumbfuck?! it was working last week. the crap on your site mentions a deletion last january, but not of the whole goddamn domain, and redelegations before and after. i'm not giving up, print off the records from the admin page on the web and fax them to him. who the hell is this prick, his administration tools are such that he can't view a damn thing anyway, and he wants me to FAX it to him? christ, you work in IT you numbnut!

screen capture, paste, change page, capture, paste, whinge whinge moan moan. (the others are getting sick of my shit, they are laughing at me and shooting rubber bands at me). fax it off and ring up to make sure it's arrived etc... (in case he is unable to use a fax machine) and i get to talk to the first person i wanted to talk to anyway. he says he'll sort it out.

about a minute later he rings back and says i'd be better off talking to the next person up the food chain as his department doesn't have the necessary tools to undo deletions or change anything. he'd be just doing phone tag. ok, at least i'm getting somewhere. i ring the number and talk to the woman in charge. she says she'll hopefully be able to fix it today, but i need to send am email to them for confirmation from the admin contact. no problems, i send it off from the admin contact (then tell him about it hehe) and within 30 minutes she sends an email back to say it is fixed. you could knock me down with a feather. now i'm grinning like an idiot (except now i have to stop moaning and whinging)

Ma'am, i am never losing your number or your email address. that is the price you will pay for being competent. unfortunately we have to change the ip addresses of our primary dns in a couple of weeks....

actually the word competent really sums it up. able to listen and assimilate. fix shit. cut through the shit. did i say fix shit? i hope one day the moron who first ran interference comes up against a really snarky opponent. i just ran over the prick, i want someone really snarky who will really make his live miserable. you stupid, ignorant, dumb, miserable, brain dead, goat fucking mutant. gah! i work in IT, i hate it when we look like dicks, this guy makes us look like fucken limpet mines. dunno what your agenda is, you crack smoking, son of a blind guano harvester. but i'm glad i drove over it. get a life and while you're at it, get a brain.

update

i had a late lunch, so late that i didn't go back to work (ok, so that meant i left a whole 15 minutes early), anyway, i picked up my son, and his mate, and we went for a surf. a bit of a nor-easter blowing, so we headed up to the favourite spot.

the weather is starting to cool, but the water is still warm. and an advantage of cooler weather, is that the nor-easter isn't so strong. after 20 mins it was nearly gone, and the waves were really glassy, got a cool little right hander, it just got faster and faster (jammo wherever you are, i'm getting you to make my next board, this one is great).

a couple more waves and my son's mate is nowhere to be seen, drat!!! paranoid parent gland kicks in. catch next wave in, paddle lots, send the grot looking one way while i run back to the car. paddle out, check the lineup, surf in, thank the gods, there he is looking for us. breathe, breathe. my mistake, never relax too much surfing with the kids, sure he's in year 12, (not my son, his mate) but i am too paranoid not to know where they are all the time.

ok, while i'm on that. we need some new terms. like a half brother shares a parent, but if you have de-factos with their own kids, it's way too hard to say, for example, we went surfing with my ex's son, and my ex's de-facto's son. my ex's kids expect me to call them my own. i'm their dad as far as they are concerned, even though they know their own, i'm their dad too. and the ex's defacto's son, he's not a half brother or step brother. an "instant sibling" perhaps?

gah!

5:00am, the alarm goes off. what the fuck? where am i? who am i?

drat. i went to sydney to visit a mate of mine and watch valentino rossi get up and win on a yamaha!! woohoo!biaggi can not be happy with that. it was a pretty good race too. and seeing as my mate has pay tv (40 channels and nothing to watch) we got to watch the 125cc and 250cc races as well. we planned to watch the superbikes afterwards but about half way through the first race i'd had enough and went to bed.

yesterday it seemed like such a good idea to go up in my sister and brother-in-law's mgb. and it was a fun trip. apart from bumper to bumper crap through kiama downs and albion park. the first shift of holiday makers going home, and the second shift coming down for the next week of school holidays. some poor fool's jaguar broken down (or just parked, i dunno) by the side of the road. this morning, it was burned out. what a waste. reminds me of when i used to drive out to hootersville (crookwell). one day there would be a broken down car on the side of the road, next morning, same car, no doors, bonnet, boot, windows, wheels. and if it was still there the day after, no engine, diff or seats. anyway it seemed like a fun idea, but this morning i could have done with a v6, heater and cd player.

i was worried i'd be a bit of a mobile chicane going up the freeway, but as it turns out this little engine loves to sing. overtaking everyone and having heaps of fun. until i worked out that 80mph is more than i thought it was and i slowed down. don't need to lose any more points on my license.

breakfast of champions, two cold hash browns from mcdonalds (stupid pricks, how hard is it to make food hot) and two redbulls. and i'm on my way. i missed the heater out of the crapmobile though. i'll never criticize it again (for at least a week anyway). had to put my shoes on for the drive home. i hate driving with shoes, and my double clutching doesn't work too good with shoes on either.

and back to work after a week off. crap. i want a sleep in! at least being away from home last night means i don't have to troll through everyone's blogs and see what drunken comments i left last night :-)

beer is the answer. what was the question?

ok, survived soccer, with only a few bruises and sore bits. drat, i feel old. gotta really work hard this year to be faster and stronger. went for a 50/50 ball, and now my right foot is a sore, screwed unit. i remember being taught, never back off, you'll just hurt yourself and the other player, a lot. and he was right, but in our case the ball spat out like a bit of slimy soap and we clashed foot to ankle, doh! oh well, at least the other guy felt worse than me. i don't play to cause pain or be a shit, i just play hard and fair. he was good natured about it, and i said sorry.

it's like in cricket. if you stuff up (like i do, a lot) and throw a bean ball. you apologise. play hard but fair. and seeing as i'm a clumsy shit, i say doh! shit/fuck/doh! a lot and then say sorry if i have run over someone. we are unfortunately having fines for swearing this year. my coach is trying to stop us swearing in front of the spectators and kids (as he should). it's gonna be an expensive year!

and for those who are wondering about all the links on the side, they're for me. i open up my page, see if anyone has made a comment, then run down the list of links on the right. except for john howard's blog. i only click that when i get an email saying it's been updated. kinda like bookmarks. right-click, open-in-new-tab. and for all you poor internet explorer users, thats like open-in-new-window, except you don't get 50 icons on the taskbar. and don't even start me on xp's "group similar icons" cause thats just painful.

firefox (mozilla), the intelligent choice hehehehe

i did a tech course a few years ago, writing stuff for the web (ok it was called something else, but that's what it really was). not too exciting, more of a pointcha in the right direction. one of the things the teacher said was, never have links open in new windows. if the reader wants to do it, they'll do it. (also, never have music, it's just painful. if you must have it, let the user find the button to turn it ON, not off). and a few other things that i can't remember. eg: how the goddamn hell do i have links without underlines? i wrote it down somewhere, and buried it in the mire that is my computer room. ok, blogspot isn't the most exciting, and it does mostly what i want, but i don't got a lot of choices.

ok, enough boring shite for one day. down the pub for our therapeutic, after game, bbq and a few beers.

freitag

goddamn! i'm having fun. i'm going to surf all winter this year, for the first time in about 10 years. i'm on a rush, a high, dunno how to describe it. and i don't want it to end. sure there's little self doubts, moments of self pity (ok hours and hours, fuck it) but today has lifted that shit all away.

ok, got up late. kids got up even later. finally got ourselves to the beach at 11:00. and the nor-easter is up, but it's side-shore, so we're paddling into it all the time so we don't get blown down the beach. grot L doesn't want to play today, so grot D and me are out there. it's small, only just big enough to actually catch, especially as i've only gotta smallboard. next board could well be a mini-mal. but i don't want to admit to growing old!

got a little left, and the grot drops in on me, ok, that's ok, as long as he doesn't do it to anyone else. got a cool little left, then a few rights. ok, time to go in, and me and the grot catch the last wave in together. (paddle paddle you little shit!) how cool is that?! it doesn't get much better than that. catching a wave in with one of the kids. i've got a warm fuzzy feeling (as my dad would say) from that.

soccer training tonight, i survived (got there late because the ex turned up late to get the kids. i don't care, i have to take it easy for friday soccer training otherwise i'll be stuffed for saturday games) . our first game tomorrow is going to be another matter. fortunately afterwards we have a therapeutic, relaxing, barbeque down the pub hehehehe

never could get the hang of thursdays

well a sleep in is always good. only that meant by the time we got to the beach the nor-easter was in full force, not that there was any swell to speak of anyway. we went to a different beach for a bit of variety as well, poor choice as it turned out. oh well

not a very productive day really. but then we are on holidays. so i don't mind. i like my holidays to be a mixture of fun and boring. if you have too much fun they go too fast. but if you have a few boring bits in there, they can drag and drag forever.

the kids are in the loungeroom negotiating with my sister for what telly they are going to watch tonight :-) but i guess they can't be having such a terrible time. they want to stay tomorrow night, even though they will be bored out of their nuts waiting for me at soccer training.

tooling around in the mg again was fun though. we gave it a wash yesterday so we can actually see out of the windscreen instead of having to look over it when driving into the sun. i'm not looking forward to my sister and her husband coming home and taking it back off me. i'm quite enjoying myself playing with it.

oh well, back to your regular scheduled broadcast...

just another shitty day in paradise

sleeping in, going to the beach, tooling round in my sister and brother-in-law's mgb with the kids. i should work less and holiday more!

trolling through the padi job market i see heaps of job opportunities for divemasters and instructors who speak german or russian. maybe i should go back to school and see if i can get the fuck out of dodge city for a year, and work overseas teaching german and russian tourists how to dive. that could be fun.

one of my best mates, has yet again, organised another blind date for me. i shouldn't go along with it. we have such different tastes in people and our outlooks to life. he wants me to move up to sydney and make big bucks selling real estate with him. i just can't be bothered. i like my lifestyle at the moment. but i'll admit i'm a pathetic enough loser to take any opportunity to get back into the kind of relationship i once had. bleah. how depressing is that.

and to be perfectly honest. i am completely unready to be in another relationship. i love the stability and comfort of being in a relationship. ok, i'll admit it, the sex as well. but i really don't have my shit together at the moment. sure i've also got the ready excuse that i'm constantly working and don't have the time between work and kids to fit another person in. but for the right person i'd find a way. but i am so disjointed at the moment i'd probably accept someone just because they were available, rather than because they were the right person. shit, i hope i remember all this crap when i'm sober. and have the balls to remember it when i meet someone who is interested.

in a complete turn around for me i actually was approached by a woman this year. she was attractive and successful and stuff. we had a date, but i really did have it together then. we weren't compatible, and i managed to tell her, hopefully in the right way. maybe i did tell her in the right way, i didn't get any hate mail or anything like that. i think the older i get the more my standards go up, which is a pity really. because if i find someone who meets my standards, i don't have a hope in hell of meeting hers. but if i meet someone who doesn't meet my standards in a really big way, i'll probably go along with it anyway, and make a complete disaster out of the situation.

life is messy. except around me, then it's clumsy and messy. drat!

gah! enough whinging. it's boring

holidays!

woohoo, woke up this morning, and didn't have to do anything. only my stupid personal clock has totally clued into 7:00am starts and i was so trashed i went to bed early last night. there goes any chance of a luxurious sleep in.

oh well, drag myself out of bed and take my time to get with the program. pick the grots up at 9:30 (wow, they're not ready, how surprising hehehehe) but the weather isn't so great, so we go and do some shopping. birthday presents etc...

a few hours later, the weather has turned lovely. so we grab the grot's surfboards and head for a sheltered location. unfortunately not sheltered enough, grot L doesn't want to get in the water because she has soccer training tonight (must be girl logic) and grot D tries for an hour to paddle out, without success. takes me about 15 minutes to paddle out, after half an hour i catch one wave and check that he's ok, about another 30 minute round trip to get out, and catch another wave back in. when i'm this stuffed my takeoff's don't work, so i'm thrown over the falls a few times trying to stand up. yes, i suck at surfing.

soccer training for grot L, then dinner and they watch the remainder of my sister's soapie (a reminder for me why i don't watch telly) then grot D's movie pick for tonight. agent cody banks. well done dude. now i'm gonna watch "the transporter" and have a little sleep in.

tomorrow is gonna be a big day :-) a big day of bludging and grooving. late start. surf. more bludging, soccer training for me (ok that's gonna hurt) and dancing for grot L. i should be a home dad. i love this :-)

wow, a day in my life on holidays. how boring.

ishtar weekend

my first 4 day weekend on the boat. and i'm stuffed. it was fun, but i'm glad to be able to sleep in my own bed tonight.

despite being a little unlucky with the weather, we managed to get out of the bay and up to the drum and drumsticks to drive on the wreck of the wandra. too cool.it's more of a wreck site than a wreck dive. bits and pieces of a wreck, rather than an actual wreck. in 1915 a wooden steamer sank, and we dive on the remains, wood doesn't last long and metal soon attracts growth.

the most distinguishable parts are the 2 steam engines, with propeller shafts, propellers (steel which is why they are still there) and a huge boiler with resident conga eel. my boss has been diving this site for 20 years, and "con" the conga eel has been here the whole time.

of course, the staff don't get to dive when the customers are diving (usually) so when they get their siesta, before afternoon dive, i am dropped off on the wreck. i signal the boss that all is fine, and he zoots off in the dinghy, then i descend to about 7 metres, to find a stream of bubbles emerging from my gauges, shit! ok, cure number one, give them a bit of a wiggle, and now i'm in a spa bath of bubbles. it isn't serious yet, but i'm getting the occasional loud sound from my gauges. drat. up we go.

and the boss, in the tender, is back at the boat. time for a long long surface swim. it's about 700 metres so i roll onto my back, and start slowly swimming. the boss, after about 15 minutes, sees me and, unable to work out where i am swimming to, ( don't get me started on this shit) chooses to ignore the situation. fortunately the other deckie, who is a very skilled coxswain, decides that i need to be picked up. only by now i am within easy reach of the boat. oh well. i'll accept a lift anyway.

the second attempt, i am dropped off over the wreck, woops, they missed, fortunately navigation is very easy here and i find it easily enough. the other deckie, (smart divemaster/coxswain/cool at finding shit) has previously found the ship's steering wheel; so i want to find it too.but despite knowing pretty well exactly where to dig; limiting bottom time, plus me being a fraidy cat being left by myself, and a frikken wobbegong shark with an attitude problem, make me decide to ignore it. (ok, i'm at 27 metres, on my own, and a stupid wobbygong has freaked me out. drat!) but in any case it was a fun dive (as long as i gave him a wide berth) and then i set off to the west, at about 15 metres, to see if i can find the boat. a little while later i'm thinking, what if they aren't over here. sure they told me to swim west, but they change their minds very often. fortunately when i surfaced i was only about 150 metres off and in the right direction.

sunday finds us heading south, back into the bay. it's about a 2 hour trip. and ishtar sunday finds us on the north side of the bay, sheltered from the north easterlies, and the divers have some interesting diving, while the customers take their afternoon siesta, the staff (who needs sleep anyway!) dive a little reef and we have a great time.

monday and half our complement want to leave early to drive home. i can't blame them. it's about 5 hour drive home. so we work out a transfer method for them and get on with another 2 dives for the remainder. back to our mooring for lunch, then drop them off at the wharf from the tender. i am one screwed unit. sleep will be soooo good.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


woohoo! that's not bad seeing as i guessed some of them :-)

stolen from Vlado i thought it might be broken, so i went back and got a couple wrong on purpose and it told me i was a "complete and utter BASTARDIZATION of the English tongue!" hehehe some of the other results are quite funny, but i'm keeping my grammer god status :-D

hump day

another kooky day. glad it's over. a bit of a surf after work to blow the cobwebs from my head. then soccer training to make me work a bit. good for the body to punish yourself a little, and i love to run, flat out.

part of our training is sprint training, only they are short sharp sprints, and i suck at that. we get to the end of the sprint and i haven't hit top gear yet. oh well, more training to pick up my sprint starts. and ball skills.... HAH! christ i suck at this game. i rely on the element of surprise, if i don't know where the damn ball is going, i'm fairly sure my opponent also doesn't know. when in doubt, be unpredictable. chaos is good :-)

thursday is gonna be a big day. one more day to make a real dent in this project i'm working on, before i take a week off. so on the boat thursday arvo for 4 days, the following week off to spend with the kids. i am so looking forward to some time away from work!

hehehe nearly forgot. hamish and andy, on again tonight, even better than last week. i have actually found a telly show that i'll watch. wow. amazing. well apart from motor racing, but that's only if i'm near the telly and not working.

i'm just waiting to see if anyone tears shreds off it over on tssh. there's no reality shows on at the same time, poised to have their inherent stupidity exposed, but with the 20,000 other reality shows currently showing on australian television, their workload is pretty high. so they mightn't get around to it for some time. i'll have to watch and wait, and hope that hamish is stupider than andy when they do tear us apart hehehe (it's not important if you're stupid, as long as someone else is stupider so you can point at them and laugh hehehehe)

another day, another dinero

more of the same shit. i'm over my rant from the weekend. i'm just gonna have fun with it. and monday's rant as well.

our programmers seem to be suitably subdued after our over-the-weekend-fuckup. so i'm gonna stop piling shit on them (ok, i'll just do a little bit) and work through fixing the remaing 300 odd pc's with my, less ranting, teammates. my immediate boss had a little screwup as well, but as far as i'm concerned, that's par for the course, gotta un-fuck a situation on a weekend, and you make a syntax error, welcome to the world of computing. even if he'd got it all right, the rollout would have crashed on the runway. too many other fuckups. untested fuckups. i still giggle about it though. i wonder who set the due date for the rollout and how much of the subsequent, annoyed, seagull management from the bigger boss is due to arse covering. but that is probably my interpretation.

he's been pretty good so far, usually when he screws up, he does like i do, and holds up his and and says:" shit, i fucked up, thought this (gotta have a stupid excuse :-) ) and did this, and this happened. woops. i'm just curious who set the deadline we "had" to meet, and who was afraid to say "shit, it's still not right, let's squat on it a bit more, in case we lay a golden (brown) egg". sure blame is irrelevant after the fact (hmmm, maybe i should rename yesterday's title: "woops, i laid a golden egg"), but upgrades will happen. i don't feel like this shit again. and my favourite rant: frikken microsoft!!!!

after work, grot D says he'd rather surf than play squash, and SO.THE.FUCK.DO.I (dot fucken com dot au) got a coupla waves, the grot has really picked up after a week away at port stephens, and i'm feeling really comfortable sitting out the back with him picking off the right waves. ok, that sounded good, reality is, yes i'm comfortable, but i'm picking off any wave that i can get, which usually close out or i stuff up, and paddling out going: "shit, i shoulda waited for that wave" "what a perfect left" ect.... the grot is surviving getting pounded by a few waves (cause he can't duckdive for shit, yet) but he seems calm and happy. i was watching him catch a cool little wave and trying to egg him on with encouragement and shit, while not getting pounded by the same wave cause i was caught inside, paddling out. paddle paddle paddle! woohoo!! he had a grin on his dial from ear to ear.

surfing, cures all woes. easily the hardest sport i've ever tried, but the rewards are "totally excellent". (gotta stop quoting bill and ted!)

monday, i'm over it.

i was grinning for a while, but mostly at the ludicrous-ness (if there is such a word) of it all. on friday our programmers were testing some new software that they want to install. it didn't work properly, so they bodged it up and rolled it out to a few hundred computers over the weekend.

along comes monday, surprise, surprise, surprise, it didn't work. the boss comes out and asks if i know anything about it. i tell him that i know nothing about it except it wasn't working when they tested it on friday, they didn't test it enough, and it stuffed up today. he told me that was the wrong answer. i had to think about that. does he mean that i'm incorrect? or that he doesn't like the answer i gave so i should rephrase it so that everything is rosy and gleaming? (rosy from being fertilised with pig shit and glowing from being polished with the same)

frikken programmers don't know how to fix it, they send us out to fix the damn things on everyone's computers. manually. only they don't tell us how or anything like that. we have to make it up as we go. story of my frikken life.

i went to the physio for my back, that was fun. a cute girly physio climbing all over me. rubbing my back, pushing my knees together and apart and all the rest of the black-fizzeo-magic that they get up to. i think i'll have to go back next week just in case i'm not cured yet :-)

another weekend over

much as i love working on the boat. i was happy for this weekend to be over. time to rack up a few more frequent flyer points with my physio cause my back is not good.

apart from that: saturday: took my first group of divers for a dive as a divemaster. the experience would have been a whole lot better if i'd actually found my way back to the boat and didn't have to subject my charges to a surface swim. i mean, one of the reasons you want a divemaster is so they can show you all the cool stuff, have a fun dive, and find the damn boat. drat!!!

second dive, same two girls. to be fair to myself they had a great dive, right up to the bit when we _again_ didn't find the frikken anchor. ok, the boat did swing, but good navigation and less worrying about looking around all the time for the divers would have made life a lot more easy.

but the second dive was a cool dive, they saw heaps of weedy sea dragons, a blue devil fish, an angel shark (and i'm giving the signal, don't tough this frikken thing!) our cook seems to relate to these dumb sharks in a special way. whenever we go for a dive, if there is an angel shark within about 500 miles, she will find it and manage to annoy it. another cool little gurnard (i really should find a photo) and heaps of other little critters.

unfortunately when we got back to the surface one of the divers had a panic attack. this is common when your gear is too tight. at the surface you fill your buoyancy vest with air so you won't sink, but if it's too tight, you constrict your stomach and lungs, making it hard to breathe.

so saturday was a learning experience. which basically means i screwed up and need to learn from my mistakes. DRAT!

sunday was rainy and overcast, but the divers all had fun. the water was clearer and they found some interesting critters. after that we basically make like busy bees. running round like crazy pricks, stripping beds, geting everyone and their gear on the tender to take them back to the wharf, and generally going mad.

i had an annoying bit though. (yeah, moan moan moan). sometimes we take the divers away from the big boat in the smaller boat. they step down with their scuba gear on, then get dropped off at some other location and try to make their way back to the boat. it appears that we like to wait until the "last" second to tell people what is going on. the water is a little bumpy, so the small boat pitches up and down. i don't know about you, but i wait until the target step is easy to reach then i step down, next you step from the side of the boat, into the middle. things should be fine then, you either move back a bit and sit on the edge of the boat, or turn around to your right (if you turn left you smack everyone around you with your scuba cylinder)

ok, no worries. in my experience it's not that hard, except, when you step into the boat, boss number 2 grabs you. i don't know about you, but when my balance is difficult, any new influences cause me to stop and prop myself against them. and then he says either "step back" or "turn clockwise" and gives you a push. so i'm standing there, scuba unit on, and unbalanced, someone tells me to move and pushes me at the same time. my balance system locks me in place and i push against so i won't fall over. and turn clockwise? look up, turn clockwise, then look down and turn clockwise, hmmm, opposite directions. and look straight ahead and turn clockwise, it's nonsensical. i mean how hard is it to say turn right? every single frikken weekend. it's exactly the fucken same. they don't get clockwise.

so i'm trying to prime the divers before they get there. this is what's going to happen, you will do this or do that. and i've scored a fucken lecture off boss number one, because she thinks boss number two has lost control by my talking to them. i do see her point, because we had a few situations where boss no. 2 would mumble something (and the diver is wearing a hood so they hear nothing) and i thought he said for them to go, etc... etc... so they've got 2 people talking at once. i think he's said go, but he's really said "mumble bumble furgle wurble". fair enough. but i think that it's way too late to wait until everything is happening at once, and then expect someone who's getting sensory overload to get what you're saying all at once.

gibber gibber. don't get me wrong. usually it's all a sea of roses. lots of easy, fun dives.but i think we could make it a little easier. i'll have to think about it a bit and work out how to approach them. it's their diveboat and their operation. i don't want to tread on their toes. but i do want everyone to enjoy themselves and want to come back. i don't do weekend work for money, i do it for fun. if stupid things happen that make things hard, i don't like it. i'd rather everyone had a fun time, and came back to have another fun time. because if they are having fun, so am i. (ok that's a little selfish). if you wait for the last second and then start yelling commands, people, being people, will wait until they understand. we get a lot of repeat business. they have less and less problems until they understand it all.

give people information overload, then stress them out a bit with loud music and shouted, hard to understand commands, and surprise, surprise, things won't run smoothly. but what do i know. i'm only a deckie.

ok, now i've had my moan. i must say that usually it is all fun and games. there are just a few things that niggle at me and annoy me. they are so easy to correct, and when they all happen at once, then it's not fun.

and this weekend was fun, nice diving, staying up late drinking and socialising, and then more fun diving on sunday. now i'm a wreck hehehehe

friday arvo

i'm sposed to be working on my project, but i'm mostly trolling the blogosphere to see if anyone has anything interesting to say last thing friday before i disappear for the weekend. then i leave idiotic remarks in people's comments that i find funny but no-one else understands (and they're not funny anyway)

at work they are having a farewell. everyone is gonna knock off early and have a few drinkies and listen to speeches and stuff like that. usually i take this opportunity (if i'm not working all weekend) join them and then party on at the local pub afterwards and install a monster hangover requiring a big sleep in, panadol and berocca. but after making a dick of myself at the christmas party i'm still in the sin bin. only a month to go!

and i just went and raided the canteen. i highly recommend working for a company with a canteen. ours is staffed by sympathetic cooks who will feed me the leftovers from lunch when i'm hungry.

bleah! back to trolling! (i mean working studiously hehehe)

drat, i thought i was on top of all this april fool shit. survived the toxic custard april fools challenge only to be seduced by Gianna's engagement announcement

in the words of my workmate (who rearranged the keys on my keyboard so the middle row revealed said words) "your a dick" dammit, i hate it when he does that hehehehe

in any case, the highlight of my day was caz's on the spin starts here betchers never thought of that. :-)

(crap, i just broke my frikken headphones)

whenever you're tired of life and feel like some snark, check out tssh, or perhaps the line of contempt. i won't be so bold as to suggest she gives tssh a run for their money, but it's pretty snarky none-the-less

is gettin old when it's only thursday (i never could get the hang of thursdays) and your day has been total crap, instead of blogging about what cool crap you've been upto, it's the cool blogs you've read, and, yet again, you're pissed as a nit?

my goal; to drink only fridays, saturdays and sundays.

reality; i'm managing about 1 alcohol free night a week. doh! oh well, homer (simpson) is my hero. (well actually, al bundy is my hero hehehehe it's gotta take years of practice to be that bad)