Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girrrlll

Welcome to the world my Beautiful daughter. Born this day at 2:55pm. Weighing 3.805kg, measuring in at 51cm (1cm taller than her brother).
Here is the new little Miss Storey:

Oh yeah she has her own domain, registered today (as is the tradition), the only one in the family with a non .com
www.annestorey.net
Peace out all, especially my Beautiful girls, Fiona and Anne.

The trials of Man and Machine.

The site and other sites hosted here as you may have noticed, has been down for an extended period.
Christmas was great, Geoffrey had lots of fun playing with his cousin Jack, Isabelle and Holly, running around as best he could. He has started to vocalise himself, but not in any way that we can yet understand. He seems very annoyed and repeats himself often. He has even started to shrug in his own cute little way.
There was a problem with the powersupply on my server which temporarily took two of the discs in my raid 5 array offline, taking down the array, rather than recover the minimal backups to it, in hope of recovering some of the data from the array I had to build a new hard drive storage case for r2d2, thus the time gap.
All back and good though. Lessons learnt and server better than it was before.
I recently attended the open day of the Linux Australia conference and helped out on the Ubuntu-AU stand. It was lots of fun, got to play around with some immersive computer technology, and got to play with the One Laptop per Child laptop... very cool.
Got to meet some people I have only heard about. Like Theodore Ts'o;one of the main designers of the ext3 file system, used fairly heavily in linux and I met Jono Bacon; One of the incredibly funny stars of LugRadio possibly the funniest audio shows I have heard since the GoonShow. He is also an avid free-software advocate, author and employed member of Canonical: Ubuntu's parent company. It was a great day and has pushed me to get some more stuff done here and in the community. A lot of my projects I had on hold have been started up this week, Stu and MrTeeny are being built, and I intend to try and run an Ubuntu stand at a local computer fair to get the word out.
So all in all it has been a busy while since I last posted. Peace out all.

Now new and Improved

Geoffrey is walking.
Yes thats right, he started ages ago pulling himself up on to things and walking along holding it. Then the other night I decided to hold his hand and walk with him, he walked very well, it seemed to build his confidence, and he took his first steps towards his Mummy.
He has since been walking a lot between Fiona and I, and even on his own accord. The best yet was when Fiona and I came home, after I had picked her up from work and he walked out into the entrance to meet us.
He is so cute and so tall.
Hmm other stuff, well I did post a blog entry before I left on our cruise but a few days into the cruise there was an accident with the server and the post was lost, and blogger seemingly don't have it anymore. Then I tried to post a blog entry while on the cruise but the cruises internet connection redirects port 143 imap and port 25 smtp to their own servers, unbeknownst to me, so when I clicked send on the email to my blog, and emails to my family, they went to their servers and no further and as I have my email set to imap it tried to store my sent item in my imap sent item folder but couldn't so the emails and data are lost. Very, very annoying. I mean what is the point of wireless if it is neutered.
So to recap a little from the cruise.
We had a good time sailing across the Pacific, I worried I would get sea-sick but didn't. Geoffrey was a flirt, having several girls and waitresses learning his name and playing with him. He enjoyed the attention.
The first stop we got to was, Noemea the capital of New Caledonia, a French territory. It was a fairly interesting city, with an obvious large unemployed percentage. But the French culture really shone through, with the supermarket selling wine, and the drivers all driving Peugot's Citroen's and other god-awful French cars. They also drive at break-neck speed and when crossing a zebra-crossing they will leave it to the last few meters to slam on their brakes. It was also very odd to see people smoking inside a shopping mall, and even inside some shops.
Then from their on to Port Villa in Vanuatu. A very beautiful place, with obviously a few Australians living there. We started out our day there going on a tour to a traditional tribal village, which was very good and very interesting. After that we went back to the ship had lunch then went shopping, which was very good.
Then we stopped and another island that was part of New Caledonia, where I got sunburnt.
I think I have decided I will put a more details Journal and pictures in my Jaunts section when I get around to it.
In other news shortly after we got back MrHankey, my laptop died, well the screen did. I intend to fix it but was looking at getting a new one anyway enter Gandalf, named as such cause it is white :)
It is also a beast, but very light.
Well since my last post I have been with Insight for 3 months, and things have really happened. Lots of fun playing with SQL and exchange replication, and Linux as well. There is also some good stuff on the horizon. Tis good.
Oh yeah here is a photo of all of us on the cruise.

Oh yeah and the reason for the heading New and Improved, well it came to me to describe Geoffrey's new abilities, but I also had to mention one of our clients has People Telecom as their internet service provider... People Telecom is terrible, I have waited for over an hour at a time to call and check on logged cases, and always they have these annoying little diatribes amongst their hold music and advertising. One of these diatribes goes like this; "Why is it new and improved, if it is new how can it be improved and if it is improved how can it be new", there were others but I think I will spare you all.
Peace out all even the idiot who thought these little diatribes would be funny after the 50th time you have heard them.

Yippie

So lots of exciting stuff happening, only quick cause I gotta go soon.
Got a new job, with a company called Insight Integration so far a very good
job, good company, and great people to work with. Like usual in IT very
busy, but that's good, and it is fun.
New job gave me time off too as I am off on a cruise today (Yippie), all
packed and ready to go. You can see how the boat is going on their webcam
here
My new webserver is up and running, Linux Ubuntu dapper, and Apache, so
much better, secure and stable which is good, also the whole os and data
is on Raid so no issues with failed discs, I was going to do the set-up
manually, but I got lazy and at the last minute used some scripts and
web-based administration. So the pages hasn't changed just the server
that is running it.
Funnily enough mere minutes after setting up some security on ssh I
checked the logs to find some twit from Korea had attempted to brute
force hack in, he has since been blocked and reported :P. If you wanna
have a go/look at his site, where he seems to be running some kind of
web-based disk access it is here
Peace out all, even stupid script kiddies in Korea.

Lots to do

Lots to do but gotta post this first it floored me when I heard about it on an irc channel dedicated to ubuntu, specifically Phlosten on #ubuntu-au. There is a bigger version if you click it.


If you don't know the bottom cute little penguins is a complete copy of the tux penguin the mascot for Linux, which is fine I think it is allowed to be used for whatever if my quick google was right, more publicity the better, see tux below and a link to some history on the cute little guy.

KHAAAAN

Am I a geek, I saw a number plate the other day KHAN, and straight away imagined myself kneeling on the ground shouting KHAAAN to the sky above, as has been seen in Star Trek the original series. That and I have been reading the funny quotes on bash.org, including the one about how klingons speak Unix, that one made me laugh, so I guess I am a geek.
Seeing as I married a geek, a geek proginey would be expected, of course Fiona and I joke that Geoffrey will probably hate computers and love sport when he is older, but he already loves playing with keyboards as the earlier blog post on the email he sent me will attest. More than that now he has started crawling, fairly quickly, and being his geeky leanings he usually, whenever the door is not closed crawls straight for the server rack to look at and play with the pretty lights on the UPS at the bottom, he is so cute.
Today thanks to Fiona letting him play I had a conversation with him via ICQ. He was trying to communicate I don't think I am at his level yet.
In other Geoffrey related news he has started to pull himself up and stand leaning on things. He hasn't even learnt to crawl properly yet. His newest trick is to climb up onto his little couch and try and climb up on to the sofa, that and trying to clear everything off of the coffee table.
Back on computers, a very scary little article has been written by Richard Stallman the father of the free software movement, and thus Linux, BSD and a lot of programs everyone uses everyday. See here.
I agree with the article, I think DRM could very well be the end to not only freedom of speech but innovation, and life as we know it.
I saw an interesting free movie about the incredible documentary on Martin Luther King and his famous speech "I have a dream" that footage is copyright, and this will probably never be seen again, due to crazy copyright laws. DRM is just going to give more power to these orwellian copyright laws.
It is hard to protest about it though, the big proponents are Microsoft (actually it is easy not to use them) but intel, amd I can't use via's cpu's they aren't really that good. I don't know what to do short of lay down in the street when it starts to happen and have a tantrum.
Peace out all, except those DRM people I think they can only see the dollar and nothing else.