Of Thanksgiving Turkeys and Black Swans

A couple of months ago I finished reading The Black Swan (TBS) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I suspect I'll read it again sometime. In a nutshell, TBS is about (un)predictability, uncertainty and knowledge. Karen and the kids bought me the second edition of TBS for Fathers'

The Australian and the new Battle of Jericho

When the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into the land of Canaan, they came upon the city of Jericho. God spoke to the leader of the Israelites, Joshua, saying he and seven priests should walk around the city once a day with the Ark of the Covenant, until the seventh

No startup culture in Australia

Occasionally I go back and read some of Paul Graham's past essays. I find them to be a source of enlightenment, mostly on issues surrounding startups. Some gems are consigned to the footnotes: There are two very different types of startup: one kind that evolves naturally,

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High Tea at the City Garden’s Cafe

Posted on Tuesday, November 01, 2005 by ricky in Devonshire tea review | Leave a comment

On Sunday previous, we (Karen’s family and mine) celebrated Karen’s birthday at the City Gardens Cafe. Neither Karen nor I had ever partaken of a proper high tea before, so it was something we were both looking forward to.

Since I haven’t done a Devonshire Tea review in a while, I will do a short one for the high tea instead.
The food, of which there was an abundance, was served on a three tiered platter. The bottom platter had an assortment of pesto sandwiches. The middle tier had battered fish pieces, meat balls and scones with jam and cream. The top platter had a multitude of sweets such as cakes, slices and white chocolate. Everything was delicious. The scones were small, but perfectly baked. (Their small size was more than compensated for by all the other food anyway.) The jam and cream came in the requisite little pots, and the tea itself was better than acceptable, though there was not nearly enough of it. The setting couldn’t have been more perfect. The cafe is situated on top of a hill towards the rear of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. We all went for a walk after eating our fill.

I’d definitely go to the City Gardens Cafe for high tea again. 9/10.

What a week!

Posted on Friday, September 30, 2005 by ricky in Random observations | 1 Comment

Sometimes it seems as though months can go past without much happening, and then, all of a sudden, lots of things happen in the space of a few days. The past week has been jam packed with notable events.

It all began last Saturday, when Karen and I looked at nine houses in the Forest Lake area. The last house that we saw was the best of the lot. It was perfect for our needs, and we liked it very much. We visited another house on Sunday morning (which was not too bad, but a lot older and therefore in need of some patching up here and there) and then took our parents to see the one that we liked from the previous day. They liked it too. On Tuesday we made an offer and a price was agreed on Thursday. So, unless something disastrous happens in the next thirty days or so, Karen and I will be the proud owners of a three and a half years old house in Ellen Grove.

On Wednesday, I was offered a position as a research scientist at a new lab in the city. On Thursday I had a meeting with my current boss to inform him of the situation. I was due to travel to Newcastle, Rockhampton and Townsville in the space of three days next week to install our new product (deSide version 2) at various clients’ facilities, and then to Melbourne the following week to attend the Energy Users Association of Australia conference at the Grand Hyatt. Part of the reason for these travels was so I could meet our clients and vice-versa. Luckily there was enough time for Paul (my boss) to rethink who to send on these trips. The meeting I had with Paul was long, but he took the news as well as could be expected. I’ll be sorry to leave global-roam after such a short stay because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time there and learned a great deal about what it takes to develop software that people actually use on a daily basis, but happy to be stepping into a job that allows me to work on problems very similar to those I worked on during my Ph.D. candidature. I’m still to negotiate a finishing date with Paul, though I expect I’ll be staying on until sometime near the end of the year.

As if buying a house and having to tell my boss that I was leaving was not stressful enough, today was also the deadline for deSide development and testing. It’s all finished bar maybe ten percent of the installation file, which I’ll have to do tomorrow morning. Also, this week I’ve been setting up a Linux box to act as a gateway between global-roam’s LAN, Roam Consulting’s LAN (Roam Consulting is a sister company of global-roam whom we share office space with), a Cisco 877 ADSL router/modem, a Netgear ADSL router/modem and one other ADSL router/modem. I wrote a failover script so that the Linux box will switch between our primary Internet link (the Cisco modem) and our secondary link (the Netgear modem). For Roam Consulting, it’s the exact opposite. The script also had to take into account the fact that our SMTP server has to change depending upon which link is in use (we don’t have our own internal mail server). I set up a couple of dummy DNS zones and the failover script adjusts the zone files accordingly (i.e. changes the IP address associated with the hostname ‘smtp’ and increments the serial number for the zone). We’re putting each company (global-roam and Roam Consulting) onto its own subnet, separated by the Linux gateway. This means that we have also had to set up a Windows domain controller for our subnet.

So, that was my week. The weekend will be spent finishing the deSide setup file and then hunting for a reputable building and pest inspector. There are a couple I like the look of, and Karen also has some ideas of who to use, so it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange, assuming they’re not all booked out for the next few weeks. Tomorrow evening Karen’s parents are taking us out to dinner for a belated engagement celebration, which I’m really looking forward to. Also, I hope I find the thirty minutes I’ll need to touch up my responses to my thesis examiners’ reports. (Hmm, I suppose I could have been doing that now instead of writing this long blog entry). Finally, I’m looking forward to sleeping a bit. :-)

Our Wedding

Posted on Saturday, August 27, 2005 by ricky in Random observations | Leave a comment

Karen and I have organised the most pressing parts of our wedding. We’ve booked locations for our civil ceremony and high-tea reception (something a little bit different from the traditional sit-down meal or cocktail reception), and we’ve booked a photographer. Karen’s also ordered her dress. Our wedding will be held at Mount Tamborine in mid-April next year. I won’t post any more details here just yet.

The process was a bit frustrating at times, mainly to do with synchronizing the different bits, but it wasn’t as difficult as I’d been led to believe. My wife-to-be has been amazing at getting things organised.

Engaged

Posted on Saturday, July 30, 2005 by ricky in Random observations | Leave a comment

It is with much elation that I announce that Karen and I are engaged, and due to be married next year, probably in mid-April. We’ve been engaged since our Queen’s Birthday weekend holiday in Noosa, but I delayed announcing it here so we could tell all our friends and family first. Needless to say, we’re both looking forward to April next year!

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