theducks.org

We went to a place called Moose’s Downunder for lunch on Sunday, who bill themselves as providing a little bit of home and a unique Australian experience in Vancouver. Well it’s certainly as described on box. It seems to be staffed entirely by Australians, many of whom are from Perth like the owner. I had [...]

Aviation Geekfest 2010 022 Originally uploaded by FutureofFlight This is us standing in front of the mighty GE-90 of Boeing 777 Line Number 903 for Turkish Airlines. I’m just behind the right-most person of the front row

Aussiecon 2 Originally uploaded by theducks We’re down in Portland right now, catching up with Perth friends Jen and Chas. Has been fun.

Today was the 2010 Boeing Aviation Geek Fest. Let me begin by saying, going on the Boeing tour at the best of times is pretty geeky. This on the other hand, is a once a year tour they don’t promote heavily, but the aviation geeks find out about one way or another.. It’s slightly more [...]

As an expatriated person, I find myself thinking of home sometimes. Video conferencing with people from the old country is fun, so I thought I’d have a look at the details on Cisco’s new Umi video conferencing unit. Let me say, I have no idea what they’re thinking here. It’s for home use. It costs [...]

So what’s the difference between the Greens and the Australian Sex Party? (hereafter ASP). A question was asked by a friend. Without a doubt, the Greens have a much more broad spectrum platform. ASP is basically libertarian on social issues, without significant comment on other areas. So to make this easy, I’m going to talk [...]

Please forgive me in advance for the nerding.. Went to the Abbotsford International Airshow yesterday while Liz was at Anime Evolution (I bought a ticket to that too, but haven’t been making as good use as her :) The drive there was incredibly slow in parts, despite being on the Trans-Canada highway, and I think [...]

Sunset has been pretty awesome lately, but it is really getting earlier. Setting at almost 9:30 at night, instead of 10:30. In somewhat sad news, it seems there is some dust inside my 100-400 lens. I have no idea where though, it’s not on the front or back elements. Apparently the trombone design sucks air+dust [...]

I wrote a Perl script to merge /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files from two hosts In the words of Elizabeth “Now you have two problems?” See below. Sadly wordpress doesn’t do.. well.. any job of indenting. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve munged the passwd hash in the file :P #!/usr/bin/perl open PASSWD, “</etc/passwd” or die [...]

Dear Prime Minister Gillard, To begin, I congratulate you on your commencement as new Prime Minister of Australia. My wife and I are Australian Citizens currently living overseas in Canada and working as IT consultants and watched the change unfold with great interest. I write to you in agreement with the Australian Government’s continued efforts [...]