Phillbo’s Blog Site

Well I think I’ve read millions of blogs where people try to make themselves accountable by writing something, and telling the world they’re going to stick to it.

I am probably guilty of such a crime myself. In fact I would probably have several admissions of guilt somewhere in my archives.

But today has been essence a challenge to my own conscience.

There are certain aspects in my life that need changing, and my perseverance is what is keeping me going forward. I am starting to see this change pay positive dividends too, however I wouldn’t say I am fully focused on achieving my goals, although my desire is to.

This is the challenge in itself. You cannot do everything! If you try to, you only find yourself more miserable, unless you can find an inventive way of ultra fast transport, and you obtain superhuman abilities to never sleep. Now being like that would be awesome. I’ve tested this idea in principle, but in practice, it is bound to fail. I hope that getting my unrestricted pilot’s license will reduce my over all travel times, as I tend to know a lot of people from all over the place. Being a mad aviator, I don’t need excuses not to fly.

I also hate it when I allow myself to be double booked for two glorious occasions. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened several previous occasions. On one side, its cool to catch up with some people, but on the other side, you feel as though you’ve let down your family and friends by not seeing them. You can try the alternative, and that it is to visit both parties/gatherings, etc… but that too has its drawbacks. What is worse however is that my own Mum and Dad don’t even tell me of my forthcoming family events such as my nephew’s birthday party. Who is to blame? Well it is easiest to blame me. I should know for sure when their birthdays are coming up. However often I feel I’ve got only precious moments to spare. This feeling does not make sense?

Well today socially was totally free. But after two weeks of absolute busy-ness, I had to do the essentials like two weeks of clothes washing and a little house cleaning. As my washing machine takes between 2 to 3 hours to wash clothes, I usually go to the cinema and watch a movie when washing clothes. Today i saw the Simpsons Movie, and I would give it the thumbs up, but it wasn’t astoundingly brilliant.

Last weekend (7 days ago) I worked at the Church all Saturday afternoon and well into the evening, I then turned up to a birthday celebration (but was quite late), and made it back hone by 2am. At 9.30am, I crawled out of bed, went down to St Kilda, and helped out with setting up an aviation project. I also had brunch with John, before heading out to Seddon in the afternoon, for Esther’s 30th Birthday celebration. It was a fantastic weekend, and I also had a great time, but I didn’t get to see my family.

Back in the evil Telstra days, I worked on rotating rosters, working days/evenings, and I worked more weekends than I got off. For four years, this crazy lifestyle carried on, until I went to a fixed evening shift, and then I chose to spend a year on the graveyard shift. As you can imagine, this killed your social life. But it also made me loose focus on the most important things in life.

I just have to remember that my circumstances are now different, and I have a greater choice in how I can make my decisions.

I know I need to spend more time with the people that I love. But I also wish that some of them would visit me too. Especially on those washing days.

Just over 12 months ago, I got my own place. Adapting to a one person house environment has really shown me more about myself. I think I could make quality hermit material if I put my mind to it, but I don’t think that should be my aim in life.

I do not see any easy solution to it all, but I am thankful that there are people that still love me, even though I haven’t seen them in a while.

But to ask a rhetoric question, have I changed too much, or is this world going crazy?

Well I’ve been up since 9am, it is now 2am the next day, and I find it way too difficult to sleep right now. I am a little restless, and probably overdosed on way too much coffee. I was at work for two whole shifts, although I did take a 2 and half hour break somewhere in the middle. I was happy with the progress I made today, I just have to make sure I keep my attitude positive, as I want to be confident that I am putting in 100%.

I know I desperately need a holiday, and I think I will have a flying week off very soon. I must try my best to rest for now - and hopefully tomorrow will be just as positive as it was today.

Today I felt a great sense of achievement, as I worked in various roles, and did them well too. But I know that tomorrow (I mean today) will be busy, so I sure hope sleep comes to me soon.

I now admit that I am addicted to using Flickr. Here is a random slideshow of a few photographs I took in Hong Kong. I’ve now put these up on Flickr too.

Now this place was a real eye opener, although I should add a few more photos to the collection. I was even surprised to see students at a school on a Saturday.

It has been over year since I’ve been on an actual holiday. I promised my readers over a year ago I’d publish some photos, but I never got around to it.

I went to Vanuatu back in May 2006. It was only a 10 day holiday, but I loved every bit of it.

Here is a random slideshow of my photographs which I’ve now put up on Flickr.

I will post some photos from my business trips in Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg and Portugal soon.

Michele from Blacknight blogged about the latest potential scammer in the world of domain names.

I’m almost fully convinced that it is a scam operation myself.

I’ve noticed that ever domain name appears to cost USD$69.95 to transfer. Interesting.

A .MD domain costs more than USD69.95 to renew, even for an accredited .MD registrar. I wonder if they will transfer these at the promised USD69.95? I think not.

Anyone want to gamble their hard earned cash?

The alleged scammer’s web site is:

http://www.domainrenewalonline.com/

Can they be trusted?

The WHOIS record says that they are based in Brussels, Belgium.

Registrar: domaininfo.com
Domain Name: domainrenewalonline.com

[Owner of domain name]
Domain Renewal SA
Avenue Louise 65
Brussels, 10050

BE[Administrative contact]
Domain Renewal SA
Suite 9 Ansuya Estate
Victoria, 000

SC
Email: domainrenewal@email.com
Phone: +32 280 80515
Fax: +32 280 80516

If they are a legitimate business, my only plausible explanation is that they have published an incomplete or demo web site.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if their web site changes over the next few days. Only time will tell I guess!

Over a year ago, I promised I would upload my Vanuatu photos. My dilemma is, I would run out of precious disk space on my server.

I’ve done what many other people are doing, and got myself a Flickr account. So far, I am still in the freebie stage, but I could almost bet my bottom dollar I will pay for the service. My new pictures are huge. I intend to publish Vanuatu, Luxembourg, Portugal, and a few pictures from London soon. I also need to put my aviation/aerial photos online too. I’ve been fortunate enough to score a few nice photos.

I’ve also got Ritz’s blog back online. She is a gliding connoisseur.. I just have to help her out with publishing some pictures, and it should look sweet

Now here is something that you will not normally see. Approaching Tullarmarine airport looking down the runway. It was awesome.

I know, its a huge picture. But you may want to zoom in on the detail. Only a few people ever get to see this. The landing fee is like $250. Dang! The experience was simply amazing.

Well tonight, I had the task of prepping new workstations on a network. Easy done you would assume.

I arrive, and no DVD-ROM drives in either workstation, so my Ghost Base DVD installs didn’t work. The Server has Ghost Images of the old workstations that were stolen. But alas, Ghost could not recognise these new fandangled network cards. Also noticing the new systems came with a new external hard disk, I tried the imporbable. I copied the images across to the portable hard disk, launch a Ghost floppy, and restored a system specific image to the workstation. Well what surprised me the most was that Windows booted up without the slighest hiccup. I had to uninstall some old hardware drivers, and install drivers for the new hardware, but it surprisingly worked. Hopefully the DVD drives will arrive by Friday, so I can do a cleaner install from the master Ghost images.

It was something that I was never expecting, but somehow it managed to work.  Perseverance looks like it won the golden hand tonight. The only sad thing is, I missed out on getting to my tennis club. You can’t win them all.

Well the title says it almost says it all. I am testing this upload picture feature.

Royal Victoria Aero Club - Moorabin Airport

After much procrastination, I’ve finally moved my blog to Wordpress.

bBlog was good, functional, and worked well, but I got hammered by spam on track backs. So comment spam wasn’t the problem, and installing “captcha” didn’t resolve the issue. The base code of bBlog hadn’t been updated in years, and hacked up scripts worked only sometimes. I had also hacked my blog code so much that even implementing other user’s code was a challenge in itself. I have modified my comment viewer to allow deletions of 5000 messages, and boy did it time out.

I’ve also decided I shall get a Flickr account, as there is no way I can publish gigabytes of photos on my server. Well I could, but it would take up valuable disk space. I still need to put up photos of my overseas travels, so I shall get working on that straight away. Well maybe after I check out the other features of Wordpress.