Quiet

Things have been quiet for the last few days. Since I'm only back for a week or two, I've been recovering from working for a living, doing school stuff with the kids, going up and down to China quite a bit, dealing with a disk crash or two, and ogling at laptops.

The work in Brisbane wasn't the crippling death-march that Melbourne was, mainly because the pubs close earlier in Brisbane and you can't work your fingers to the bone without a pint or two afterwards. Even if you can only drink through a straw...

Both of the little troubles are now in Kindergarten, so there's been a certain amount of being Dad to be done, as well as getting the older one back into the homework routine. I'm running short on my ability to help with the Chinese homework, so I really need to practise some more.

We've been up and down to Shenzen a few times in the last week. KCR first class to Sheung Shui, then hop out and travel with the peasants for the last stop. It's quite pleasant in 1st as long as you choose the quiet end of the car. Why can't they mute the announcements in the first class car?

This last time, I went up to get some suits made. I have a regular tailor up there — a Shanghainese lady — who does a very good job. Very reasonable rates too. Unit 5091 Luo Hu Commercial City. She makes good suits, trousers, shirts and dresses. You'll need to speak Mandarin, although she speaks a little Cantonese and English.

One of my disks failed last night. Honest, it's never happened to me before, er, *ahem*. Sorry, yes, one of gizmo's disks failed last night and I was up until 4AM trying to salvage something from it. Luckily (I suppose) it wasn't anything essential on it; just /usr/src. Considering that fully half of the mission critical software on this server is compiled from source, that may present me with some problems later on. Right now I'll probably put some 250GB disks in there and mirror everything a few times. I know I should have copies on a machine served by a different ISP and power company, in a different country and on a different tectonic plate, but a second disk in the same machine is what I can do at the moment.

After a colleague's laptop made the supposedly fast desktops look like doorstops, (1.6 Ghz Pentium-M 30% faster than 3.0Ghz Pentium-4) the prospect of a decent laptop is quite exciting. Perhaps I can go from a laptop where Zork is the most advanced entertainment possble to one where graphically accelerated games rear their ugly (but well rendered) heads.