Neither Justine or I had ever been to Werribee Open Range Zoo and have some time off, we went today.

We arrived at the zoo just in time to catch the 12:30 bus tour; however, the bus decided that it wasn’t going to let the speakers work today, so our 12:30 tour departed at 12:50 when another bus arrived. Better late than never, I suppose. Curiously, almost everyone (including us) took the same seating positions in the new bus as the old.

Unfortunately, the giraffes had better things to do today than pose for us (well, I suppose they did, they just weren’t visible to us); we did manage to see most of the other animals on show (except for some cat-things which were hidden too).

The problem with Werribee Zoo is that since the animals are in a relatively open environment, and can roam where they please, they can roam somewhere where I am unable to see them. At least at the Melbourne Zoo they are caged in a manner which forces them to be visible to me… mostly.

Unlike yesterday, most of the photos I took are — to me — mostly pretty “meh” so I won’t bother displaying them there. The end.

Since Justine and I both have this week off, and had nothing to do today, we decided a trip up into — and around — the Dandenong ranges might be a nice thing to do. We’ve been there before many times, but always with an aim; not this time…

We made our way up to the Mt Dandenong observatory, and attempted to find the track leading to the site of a 1938 plane crash. However, since none of the walking tracks are actually marked, it made things rather difficult. We left after we got bored of guessing our way there and decided to grab lunch at the Pie in the Sky pie shop at Olinda.

Before I knew it, I’d shelled out thirty bucks for two pies and two drinks… right. Mine was accompanied with chips and salad and Justine’s came with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy — sans the peas and gravy. As any sane person would do, we asked for the peas and gravy, only to be hit with another three dollar fee because the girl “forgot to ring it up”… right.

Not yet ready to go home, but with no particular plans, we decided to go to Emerald Lake (conveniently located at Emerald) since Justine seems to have fond memories of the place. After taking a wrong turn and heading down a dirt road for around five kilometres, we ended up at the lake. For anyone who’s been to the Caribbean Gardens before, imagine something as old as that, but no longer used.

We walked a couple of kilometres to a “wishing well”, which was a well, but with no water. We then proceeded to a museum of some kind, but couldn’t find it — again due to lack of signage. For some reason, Justine wanted to view the model railway there; hey, why not? After shelling out ten bucks to see a toy, we observed the 2km of track, 100+ trains and many little people in their make-believe lives. You know, I think that in an alternate life, I would have really enjoyed model trains.

Here are some pictures I took during today’s outing:

Given that I’m not a Christian, I still have no problem celebrating both Christmas and Easter.

In that vein, yesterday was Easter Sunday. Justine’s Dad’s family came over at around lunch time and we picnicked in our back yard (that’s the most attention our back yard’s seen in 12 months) for lunch.

A bit later, my Dad came over with his shiny new Canon EOS 300d camera, which is pretty fancy indeed. Nice unit, and I’d personally love to have one myself.

Not really much else to speak of, so that’s all I’m going to write.

Tonight, as mentioned previously, Justine and I were going to see Bill Bailey. After the incredibly long drive into the city (we managed to catch footy traffic down Punt Rd, great) and difficulty finding a vacant parking lot, we managed to arrive around 10 minutes late.

Nevermind, everything’s fine, right? Well, except for a mix up with our seats, where two ushers argued quietly over who had our seats (us or another couple), and then both left with the other couple and not telling us what was going on, it was. We just sat down after a few seconds, by the way.

I know Bill Bailey is an accomplished musician, but what I didn’t know beforehand is that the show we attended tonight features music; in fact, a lot of music (nothing regarding music was communicated on the advertising posters). The show was composed of small stand up skits, music, repeat. Not for long though, since the $45 per seat show went for 75 minutes. Jeez, talk about feeling ripped off.

Not only that, most of the jokes were aimed at people 15-20 years older than us.

There were some minor highlights, like Bill playing a trip-hop version of “Zippity Doo Dah” on his Korg keyboard (along with a Theremin [which I'd never heard of until now] — which is totally nerdy and cool at the same time) and a Kraftwerk-parody of “Hokey Pokey”. Also enjoyable was him playing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Stairway to Heaven” on his guitar, but using a synth to make it sound like a banjo.

Overall, I was disappointed with the whole experience. The musos in the crowd might enjoy it, though. I think he’s playing another show tomorrow, since the others sold out. It would appear that Bill Bailey is better in front of the camera, than on stage (perhaps if he did stand up it may have been more enjoyable).

Today was Glenn’s (my now ex-boss) last day. Lesly and I went to Geelong to ’see him off’, so to speak. Glenn’s been at Deakin for fifteen years, and worked there for ten (and at Buildings and Grounds Property Services for five). He was a good boss, and I enjoyed his enthusiasm and… interesting sense of humour. It’s a shame to see him go, but to be honest I feel he was underpaid for the job he was doing/hours he worked.

As a parting gift, we bought Glenn a very nice flash drive (I wouldn’t mind one of these myself, they are rather swish) and also got it engraved (I went to two places — a shopping centre type engraver and a trophy engraver, and neither of them would do it; a place in Geelong had no qualms about doing it though… strange). Of course, since I’m awesome (and modest!), it was all my idea. Glenn seemed to like the gift, so I’m hoping he’ll enjoy it.

So, like I’ve done before, I’m the boss again… for now. To be doubly honest, I’m not sure if I’d want to do it permanently — the amount of pay compared to the hours (I’ve seen Glenn work a lot), stress (I’ve also seen him extremely stressed) and responsibility doesn’t really seem like enough to me. Obviously, it would be good for my ‘career’ (since when has that ever bothered me?), but I’m not too sure at this point if I really want it to move in that direction (where else would it go?). This time around, I’ll try to guage whether I’m interested in doing it permanently, but at this point I think not.

Glenn, I wish you the best of luck at Matchworks, it sounds like you’ll be doing some great stuff there!

P.S. The first thing you should do is get the web developers to make sure the web page works properly in Firefox (since I know how much you love anything non-Microsoft ;).

I was just speaking with my best pals, Indy (he only lets his closest buddies call him Indy; it’s Indiana to you) and Yoda and they have agreed to provide an unbiased, honest appraisal of my website.

So, here it goes:

There you have it. Best site in the universe, as told by Yoda!

Well, I’ve already mentioned what we were attempting to do this weekend, and it’s sort of been done.

The aim was to convert an NT4 domain to an 2000/2003 AD domain — though in mixed-mode (emulating an NT4 domain) — and part of it’s been done. The PDC is now an 2000 AD machine, and we have a fileserver now running 2003 as opposed to NT4 (it also has more than 1000% the disk space than it had previously, huzzah!).

Unfortunately, the server here in Melbourne has behaved very strangely, so I have backed out of my NT4 to 2003 upgrades and am about to leave, feeling a bit disappointed that we weren’t able to complete things. When a server is unable to join a domain, but a desktop is, you know it might be time to rebuild the server, since it’s not yet in production. We will attempt this in two or three weeks.

So, as the title says, the last two weekends for me, have become half a weekend. By the time Easter rolls around, I’ll have worked 17 out of the previous 18 days… fun.