Wow! What a busy weekend. We went skiing went down to Chris and Nic's place for Friday and Saturday, raced home and had Tracy at our place on Sunday and Monday. In amongst all that there were garage sales, new toys, water skiing and lots of laughs. All up it was a good weekend :-)

This morning (Wednesday 31st March, 2004) I lost all power to all my machines. This meant The Gray Matter and a few other sites were down for about 2 hours while I sorted out the mess that was caused by simultaneously pulling the plug on every machine in my network! Apologies to anyone who was bitterly disappointed not being able to access this site.

If anyone has a spare UPS they want to donate - I'd be forever grateful!

Alas, it served us all well. Complete with psychedelic fridge, the "Fun-Guy", soggy floor and imperfect trailer. BEHOLD! The joy that is Bull--it.

Went skiing this weekend with our good friends Chris and Nicole. A few other people showed up and a good day was had by all. There's photo's here and my reflections here.

My fault this time. I acquired an older-style SCSI drive but it doesn't want to play with my web server :( Consequently I spent most of today (Wednesday) trying to coax it to life. Alas the bloody thing will be a 36Gb paper-weight...until someone donates a Ultra-Wide SCSI controller ;) (HINT HINT!)

YAY! I have finally managed to build out some "new" equipment. The new webserver (not this site - the one that runs all the "other" sites) is now a P200MMX, upgraded from a P133. The database server is now sharing the same machine as the mail server which is a Celeron433, upgraded from the P133 again. Now all the P133 has to worry about is firewalling duties and some other sundry network stuff (like DHCP, NTP, NNTP, DNS etc). It's all technical "back-end" crap but you *might* notice pages generate faster due to the faster database server...maybe not too :-/ Here are some pictures of the new boxes

Telstra are up to their usual tricks again! They hosed not only my ISDN line but my home phone as well. We've been down since 12:30pm Thursday 29th Jan but (obviously) we're back up now.

Update: Tue 6th Jan, 2004 - I've now set up my webserver to compress the data it sends you :) This is A Good Thing(tm) especially if you use dial-up etc coz it means most stuff will be downloaded quicker (coz it's compressed!). You don't need to change anything at your end, it all happens "automagically" on my web server. Neat huh?

I've modified the site so those blocks on the right hand side will ONLY appear on this front page. This is mainly to provide the gallery with a bit more room to display pictures.

I also have updated the site logo :) The other one was a rush job and was way too big. The new one is neater, nicer, smaller and more styleish. Hope you like it too.

A few people have asked me what screen resolution this site was designed for. Well, it's designed to be used on at least a 1024x768 display with 16bit colour as a minimum. Any less than this and the colours look a bit weird and the scroll bars appear :-( If your setup can't handle this "design" please contact me via the About and Feedback page. If enough people say "hey my setup cant display your site properly" then I'll rewrite the relevant "bits" so it will work with 800x600 and 16 bit colour. This is a bit of work though as all the graphics will need to be scaled etc, so it will ONLY happen if enough people provide feedback :-)

Well we're back from holidays and have the photo's to prove it here.

Click the "read more" below to read the blow-by-blow story of our week away :)

People may have noticed that some of the topic icons (those little pictures on the right hand side) were all screwed up recently. That was my bad, sorry.

Seems in my zest to poke around with the back-end database that drives this site I messed up some crucial mappings that link those little pictures with their respective topics. Bummer. It's all fixed now though :)

Another thing, if anyone wants to submit a story, poem, link, interesting tid-bit, PLEASE either register and sign in first, or make a note on your submission of who it's from :) I arbitrarily REJECT ANYTHING from "anonymous". Once you sign in though, the submission system tells me who submitted it.