makumaro.net

Been Busy

Was at the Werribee Rose Gardens and while the strange heat wave in Melbourne wilted the flowers a little, there were still some roses that looked picturesque enough.

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Mom made an impromptu visit to Melbourne so the weekends and weekdays are jammed packed with activities. Heh, that and me having discovered Gundam 00 on my hard disk and I was glued the minute I started watching it. There are 50 episodes in total over 2 seasons, and I have 5 episodes left to watch. It’s typical Gundam in terms of storytelling and character edvelopment, but I feel that 00 has better overall production values compared to Destiny (SEED was great, and Destiny was a great letdown). There’s little fluff and padding so the progress of the storyline feels more focused. Not sure what to expect from the ending, eventhough I’ve taken glimpses here and there searching on the Internet.

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Also doing some spring cleaning on my hard drives. I have a lot of files and some of it is redundant. I need to keep a backup copy of my photos and music so I’ve started using Synctoy (from Microsoft) to synchronise the folders I have with the redundant backups. Heh, even with my 2TB of hard disk space, I’m quickly running low on space (due to having redundancy) so I might plonk down on another drive over the next few months. Trying to clear out one drive now for one of my other projects.

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Making decent coffee these days and I’ve had many variations on how I dose and tamp a shot. Find that I like South American beans, as they have a sweet note to them. Drinking Nicaraguan and Guatemalan beans at the moment. Would like to retry the PNG beans I had earlier. They didn’t taste as nice and I wonder if it was because of poor technique before.

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A few more months before the end of the year. Heh, the year just feels like a blur now, and I’m not feeling as philosophical as I normally do at this time of the year. Keeping busy distracts you from clarity at times. Heh, now that I notice it, I can take time off to reflect.

Alive!

Not a fantastic image by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that I have not seen red eggs for a very long time. The eggs are meant to signify fertility and the red is just for prosperity and good luck.

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It’s nearly 2am in the morning and I’m still wide awake. Today was the first time in a very long time I felt like I was doing something exciting at work. Needed to prepare some various reports for the whole financial year, and I needed to prepare formulas in Excel to get the reports to auto populate itself. I miss having to do this sort of problem solving and I’m starting to wonder if I could be contributing more in a different sense. I just feel like I’m winding the springs of a giant clock to keep it ticking, instead of designing the cog wheels that would make it run more smoothly.

The added sense of value carried on to when I got home, and I decided to tackle the convection oven where the knob had become loose and one could not tell what temperature the dial was facing. Being inquisitive as I was, i saw the screws that held the oven to the slot it was in. Took those off and saw a few more screws to reveal the panel where the knobs were attached to.

Apparently the electrical ‘box’ that held the knob switch had come loose so when you turn the knob, the box turned with it. You see, the box is supposed to be stationary so that when you turn the knob, it’s pointing at the correct function. I’m not sure if it was originally glued in place or whether someone had cut corners and didn’t install the screws to fasten the ‘box’ in place.

So I had found my problem, and needed to find a solution to it. At first I tried gaffer tape to stick the ‘box’ in place, but as you turned the knob, the force from the turn would loosen the tape and dislodge the box. Tried a few layers of tape to see if it would hold, but to no avail.

Then I had a better idea and got some of the cardboard packaging from my coffee machine that acted as padding. I got a thick enough fold of the cardboard, and slotted it below the ‘box’ to wedge it in place. Tied some gaffer tape to it and the ‘box’ is now quite securely stuck in place so you have a pretty accurate idea where the dial is pointing when you turn the knob. The cardboard wedge prevents the ‘box’ from turning with the knob when you twist it.

Cleaned up the panel a bit from all the grease left over from cooking and installed the oven unit back to the opening slot.

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Fast forward to midnight, decided to clear up the kitchen a bit. Heh, it seems to be in a perpetual mess but we do try to keep it as neat as possible. After dumping some garbage, decided to wash my car.

Loaded up a bucket with soap and water, took the car washing mitt to the basement garage and started wiping my car clean. As with the cardboard solution, it’s not the most thorough cleaning I could do on my car. Given that I’d like to save water and used only about 5 or so buckets of water to clean the exterior, it was clean enough. Driving on the highway to Beechworth left plenty of dead bugs on my car and I decided I couldn’t stand it no longer, hence the need to wash the car.

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I guess humans are very good self motivators if they are doing what they wanted to do. I wish work was as motivating and as much as I’d like to not complain about external factors, they dampen my spirit to perform to the best of my ability at my job.

Heh, a story for another day. The weekend has started, so time to turn in so I can get up earlier and make the most of it.

Simplicity

The picture sums up a lot of what’s going on now. The flowers represent the pollen I’m battling with as I have to take a pill a day of the stuff to keep the hayfever at bay. Hayfever is no fun, as your eyes turn itchy, you start to sneeze uncontrollably and you are just leaking fluids from all your pores. Heh, the red is how the weather’s been today, just red hot. It’s probably cooled down a bit now that the sun is setting or either that it’s due to the fact that I’ve turned off my main PC, which probably generates some heat (but I don’t know if it contributes that much to it).

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Organised a LAN party over the weekend.. Lugged my computer over to a friend’s place to play Left 4 Dead, basically a first person shooter where you co-op with 3 other players to survive a horde of zombies going from point A to point B. Heh, the first time I did this was while I was still in uni and we lugged 17″ CRT monitors to another friend’s apartment just to satisfy our gaming itch. A PC for gaming costs much less than it did back in 2003 so you could get a decent experience with modest hardware these days. Miss the good old days of just spending hours playing games and not having a care in the world.

It’s been a quiet weekend, not doing much other than cleaning up the apartment and eating. Some days I’d just prefer it that way.