JamesX

Three days away from work. Who would have thought that were possible! For the first time, Chris and Mel have ventured up to share the country air, sunshine and pleasant surrounds. The weather is great and we spent most of the morning roaming along the bank of the Ovens River taking photos and paddling in the cool water. The photo up top is one that Penelope managed to snap of a forklift that was parked alongside the Bright Brewery - which is where we stopped for a quick break before lunch at the Riverdeck Cafe.

Now we’re back home and Richie is cooking up a storm in the kitchen. We just finished mounting the screen for the data projector on the landing upstairs. Maybe a movie night is on order…

When I’m back in Melbourne, I’ll upload some of the photos for everyone to see. Ah it’s so good not having to actually DO anything.

I haven’t posted a whole lot lately, and that’s because there really hasn’t been a whole lot happening. Except work, and it pretty much takes up all my time at the moment.

But there is a few hours on the weekend that’s mine - even though servers go down and Dean tries to get hold of me to fix them! Lucky I didn’t have my phone with me that day. :) Last weekend (and the one before that for that matter) I reinstated the Sunday breakfast. It’s almost as ritualistic as the monthly dinner, just not as big. This week I caught up with Penelope, Al, Richie and Stu. It was good, even if it was quite hot outside. We even had time to get down to the beach for a little while in the afternoon.

Hoping to get to Bright in the next few weeks. I need a holiday already!! Can you believe we’re one week into February already? I guess as you get older, it just keeps going faster.

It was back to work today after a relatively short, but much needed, holiday. It was a pretty quiet day, with only a handful of people at work preparing for the onslaught on Monday when everyone is back. Andrew and I were the lucky ones from IT to go back early and we spent most of the morning patching network cabinets. By lunchtime it was getting quiet, and hot, so we stayed in the air conditioning. That is, until we discovered our latest gadgets! But I’ll blog about those later. :) I think it’s going to take a little while to get back into the full time routine.

Whether you were out on a yacht or just relaxing in the backyard with mates, I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Eve last night - I know I did (thanks for the party Stu). It’s scary to think that it’s 2007 already. The new milennium seems like a distant memory and 2006 just flew by. But we’re here now and there’s a lot of fun times ahead (I hope!). This coming year I will finally finish off my uni degree, turn 23, and who knows what else.

I’m back at work on the 5th so the holidays are rapidly coming to an end for me. It’s consequently the same night Marc’s having his 22nd so it looks like it’ll be a long day indeed. I’m off to watch some TV - today is going to be so counter-productive…

Oooo “What’s this?” I hear you saying… Well I found myself with a couple of free days between Christmas and New Year to tinker with my blog. It’s almost a yearly event now and every year I learn so much more it’s hard to pack it all into such a small space. Of course the latest technology I’ve been mucking around with is Ajax and the site is certainly making use of it now (try out the search or drool over the archives page) which makes for a much cleaner experience. So what else has changed?

Here’s a few of the big changes:

• The site is super fast - most of the images have been replaced with text and Ajax dynamically loads up a lot of the content without reloading the whole page.
• Tags and Asides - you’ve probably seen these before. Tags are basically like broad categories by which to search for posts (check out the tag cloud on the archives page) and Asides are small posts or quips that appear alongside the major posts.
• The forums are gone - they were only around for user management anyway and they were under constant spam attack so I’ve now migrated to WordPress for managing users. (Unfortunately you’ll have to sign up again because I can’t export your passwords from the old database - luckily signup only requires your name and email address!)
• The gallery is much more cleanly integrated.
• You get a nice random picture from the gallery on the homepage.

Everything else is pretty much how it was before. I’ve gone for a much more cut down page with the banner image up the top to provide all the flair - they seem to be all the rage on blogs nowadays. Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback you have about the design and also any bugs if you happen to come across any. I’ve tested it in Firefox and Safari, not having IE readily available I can only hope it plays nicely. Fingers crossed. :P

Update: I’ve taken a look in IE and it seems pretty good. The only thing it has trouble with is the transparent tabs at the top and the PNGs. But naturally, what do you expect when you use Internet Explorer?