Good Lordy, I just realised I’ve been with ISA for 5 years today! That’s right, it’s 5 years since Mr T phoned up and had the phone answered by Chips from Rafferty’s Woodyard! 😉
<DG> Rafferty’s Woodyard, Chips Speaking!
<ST> Umm, hi, I’m looking for Damien Gardner?
<DG> That’d be me..
<ST> *chuckle* I kinda thought so.. Damien, my Name is Steven Thomas, I’m one of the managing directors of Internet Solutions, and I’d like to offer you a job…
Gee, don’t you think I felt embarrased? Not that that stopped me from my funny phone answerings 😉

Holy smokes batman, you should have seen the fires on the weekend! Took out a whole crapload of houses around Canberry (think the total was 508 in the end??)..
The power in Deakin West went out about 2pm, came back up about 5pm, but the entire suburb dropped out again when I tried bringing our server room back online *grin*, so we gave up and sat around for a few hours to see if it would come back up. No such luck, so after cruising over to Randal’s place for some hearty aussie tucker (chicken and pea pies with hot chips), we headed back to mission control and started pulling hard disks out of servers.
Now I’m curious as to where the APS were during all the goings on.. Going on the number of times they’ve called in the bomb squad because I’ve parked my car too close to the building, we were surprised not to get hassled when we backed Spoon’s LandCruiser in through the front doors of the building and started loading files and equipment into the back!
Power came back on sometime Monday morning, and we set things back up again.. Wow those fires are taking off down south though 🙁

Packed all the camping gear on the back of the bike and rode up to Palm Beach on Wednesday. Spent a few days camping at the basin with Vin and Sherree, then cruised back down into Sydney to have dinner with the Suspects crew. Was a good ride, and the bike held up nicely 🙂

Heh, yay for people grabbing one piece of a conversation and running with it…
We were evacuated out of the building this morning due to a bomb scare upstairs (The Embassy of Afghanistan moved in about 9 months ago..). After much phoning around within the AFP and getting ‘you dont need to know’ answers, I finally thought to phone Barry Corrigan (Team Leader, Protective Services), who I know looks after our building, and finally got a straight answer from a fellow called Tom.
Apparently the Body Corporate got broken into AGAIN (they’re the only office in the building without an alarm system, and I swear their door jams are made of balsa wood!), and the lockbox they keep the spare keys for the offices in the building in was torn off the wall. Apparently the Bomb Squad was on standby (as is standard procedure when an embassy’s building is broken into), but were never actually called in. They found the lockbox in the end, but they don’t know if any keys were taken, so they’ll be changing all their locks (now you know why I insist on us having completely separate bilock system, alarm, video surveillance, etc).
But yeah, I think it’s pretty funny that someone at the body corporate heard ‘bomb squad on standby’ and ran with it, evacuating the building.. 🙂

Isn’t it nice when you finally manage to meet some of your resolutions?
Three weeks ago I made two resolutions – one to stop doing something that annoys me, one to get properly into shape by christmas.. Ok, so I’m not in too bad shape – I ride my pushbike the 20km each way into work and back occasionally, and love spending a day out in stromlo forest mountain biking – but that doesn’t mean I’m actually in shape..
Three weeks later, and I’m now able to do 50 pushups and 30 situps in one go, and my heart rate isn’t rising while doing the pushups! I know that’s not much, but stop laughing (*grin*) – That’s a pretty good acheivement in three weeks I think, for someone to whom exercise was walking the 2km to the shops and back to get an icecream after dinner 🙂
I’ve also managed to burn about 90% of the fat in my arms!