I received news that my former boss at UWA Arts, Mike Neville, passed away sometime last night.

There’s so much that could be said. I know he pretty seriously pissed off some people doing his job at UWA, but in the end he was a force for doing things right, and he was still there after they left. He was also a geek at heart, and we often chatted about the esoterics of computer and electronics hardware.

On a more personal level, I thought he was a great guy, both in and out of work. My heart goes out thinking of his wife, delightfully nutty daughter and son. He was also a great friend and mentor to so many of us, but I think none more so than my former co-worker Dan.

I’ll really miss the guy when I am next in Perth.

Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by? It’s starting to be dark when I wake up, and when I leave for work. But the colours are pretty.

Oh for a camera with the dynamic range of the human eye.

We had a fun roadtrip down to Seattle and Portland last weekend. About 1200kms round trip. No tickets, but we did have something fall off a truck and scratch our car. Will wait to see if Avis wants my kidneys for that.

US Customs were nice and quick. Seattle was great, but a short visit (but it’s a quick drive, so maybe we’ll head down another weekend). We arrived late, had breakfast at Pike Place markets. Lots of character. Went to the Museum of Flight and saw the first 727, 737, 747 and 757, as well as a Concorde. Very nice.

Portland was also great. Caught up with Perth-friend Jen S-B, and long time online friend Kristal. Had many yummy foods, before doing the drive back to Vancouver directly in one afternoon. All good.

Work has been fun. Really getting my teeth into it.

It seems I never posted about this.. we both have jobs now, and an awesome 17th floor apartment in Richmond BC. I’m working for a Big University, looking after operations for their VMWare environment (299 VMs and counting). Elizabeth is working for a small software company that does something like cpanel, but for IIS. We both passed our Canadian driving tests, so can legally drive here after the 24th of this month.

Which is coming up quite rapidly, much like the 28th of this month. Also an important date, for those following at home.

Sure, I could avoid 3 hours of commuting per day (and transfer that task to elizabeth..) but we wouldn’t have these spectacular views. What a country.

Working at a University, as I for some reason continue to do so, you are exposed to a large amount of political material from various student (and staff) groups. I also know some people who are pretty interested in Canadian politics.

I remember that at one point, I’d see this political speech and think “wow, the ruling party suck, how could they do these things!”. But as I’ve started thinking more critically, I’ve started to notice how sometimes these hot topics are mutually exclusive.

One example:
– BC Liberals have cut millions from student support loans etc!
– BC Liberals are predicting a deficit of over $400 million next year!
– BC Liberals introducing HST – tax increase!
– BC Liberals won’t raise minimum wage!

.. so which would you like guys? you can’t spend money you don’t have without going into deficit. You can’t have the money to spend without cutting programs or raising taxes. You can’t provide services without taxing, etc.

Another example, Federal Liberal blogger friend made a tweet about how the Conservative Party were spending into deficit. But the thing is, stimulating economies during depressions/recessions is best done by government spending.. so spending money in and of itself isn’t bad. At the same time, the Conservative Party (the ones in government) are running attack ads against the head of the federal Liberal party, talking about how terrible it is that he used to live in the US..

Which brings me to the conclusion that as a politician, EVERYTHING you do is going to piss SOMEONE off, and pissed off people ranting sells newspapers and gets viewers on TV. Which is another factor.. newspapers in particular are in a lot of financial trouble these days, and so are fanning the flames of discontent.

I think the trick in being a politician is to make sure you don’t do things that will piss off too many people at once.

Some of you may have noticed I like to make stuff. Or at least talk about making stuff. Regardless, the ideas are there.

Being a sharing person, let me show you the sites of some people I admire for their skills and abilities, and why I admire them:

• Mike Harrison – http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/
• Kenneth Maxon – http://www.users.uswest.net/~kmaxon/
• Tatja Van Vark – http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/index.html

Let’s start with Mike. Mike is the kind of guy who picks up a discarded high speed camera from the late 1980s and tries to get it working again. Having not received the control panel, he finds a picture of it and tries to guess how the control panel would talk to the main unit. He has some success, but is thwarted by the fact it records onto an esoteric data tape format, and the tape drive it came with is broken. Not to be put off easily, Mike builds his own controller and power supply, complete with direct driven LCD panel, and puts it all in the original box. He also has a bunch of other pages on his electronics projects..

Next up, Ken, or K’Max as he seems to call himself. His page is nominally about his robots. But if you look closer, there’s a huge series of writeups on all of his tools, including his home-built automated injection moulder, and some pages about things that he actually gets paid to do, which seems to be designing avionics systems. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages on tools, machining, electronics and more on his site.

Finally, Tatja Van Vark. She doesn’t actually maintain this site, but it’s pretty amazing. She’s built an improved clone of the Enigma Machine, reconstructed the navigation system from a cold-war era bomber and lots of other cool stuff. Some of the things she’s built, like the Harmonium and Antikythera Mechanism, are so complex I don’t even know what they do, let alone how they work.

So there you go.

We went to Ontario about 9 days ago for a week. It was great to see everyone again. The day we flew was pretty busy, as we both started it with interviews. Elizabeth got offered her job, accepted it, and will be starting on August 20th or so.

Mine went well too, and I’ve been back for another meeting with them. I also had a phone interview for a job in BC while I was in Toronto, and have another interview scheduled with them for the week after next, and on tuesday this week I have yet another interview. So it’s good that things are progressing in the hunt for a job.

And if you’re any of the employers I’ve been interviewing with, I still want the job :)

Before we left for Canada our plans were thrown into more than a bit of disarray by theiving gits who broke into my mum’s house and stole a bunch of our stuff, including laptops and most of my coin and banknote collection, which I had been collecting since I was 7.

I had good enough backups, and the laptops were replaced really quickly, thanks to insurance, but the coins and notes couldn’t be covered, so that’s a dead loss. On the one hand, it does save me worrying about storing and moving them. On the other hand, to the person or people responsible, may you die horribly, via drowning or fire or something like that.

For the benefits of the internet and google, this is a rundown of what was stolen. If you happen to come across these, please let me know, and I will pass details onto the Police. Or just call the Western Australian Police yourself. To save those of you at home some effort in calculating, all up it was about $15,000 worth of stuff.

– MacBook (Aluminium) – WQ8410161AQ
– MacBook Pro – W88102ZPYJZ
– iBook G4 – UV42000NQJP
– iPod Touch – 9C738XT6W4T

As far as coins and banknotes go, these are the ones I had records of serial numbers for, but I did have a lot more than that. One or two of them may have been sold prior to the theft, but not the Coombs/Randall $20:

Australian Decimal Notes
– Black lighthouse album with no outer sleeve
– Vort-Roland inserts – front page signed by MPVR with 1994 date
– various in $1-$50 denomination – mostly $20
Including but not limited to:

– $1 BEC 000570
– $1 Knight/Wheel Centre – CAN 605124
– $2 Coombs/Wilson – FCP 032075
– $2 Knight/Wheeler – HSH 225868
– $2 Johnston/Fraser – LHZ 54652(?)
– $5 Coombs/Randall – NAD 571219 (aEF)
– $20 Johnston/Frasher Gothic aUNC
– 2 x Last $2 green presentation folders

$10
SAY 127350 – Coombs/Wilson
SDX 975038 – Coombs/Randall
UZV 644542 – Johnston/Fraser
MFR 269360 – Fraser/Cole
MRR 671604 – Fraser/Cole

$20
XAB 161163 – Coombs/Wilson
XBQ 274438 – Coombs/Randall
VXK 965879 – Johnston/Fraser
EXZ 544259 – Phillips/Fraser
RKE 800303 – Fraser/Cole
AAA 909199 – Fraser/Cole
AAA 001076 – Fraser/Evans

Australian Decimal Coins/sets
– Proof 1984 $1
– $1 coin + $1 note in brown vinyl wallet
– Proof 1979 set in Styrofoam
– Proof 2006-2009 sets
– Uncirculated 1987-2008 sets
– Red $1 variety folder
– Blue 50c variety display case with badly scratched back

Australian Non-Circulating Legal Tender
– TV Anniversary Set
– Pipeline anniversary
– Kookaburra with Albany Privy mark and low coin number (68?)
– 1991 Masterpieces in Silver set (25th anniv dec currency) with no
cardboard box
– 1988 Holey Dollar and Dump
– $100 gold coin (Maroon box)

Other
– Australian 5 shilling uniface vignette note in envelope
– Australian half-sovereign – vf (unknown date)
– 1967 New Zealand Mint Set
– RBA Teller training notes
– $2 and $20 Birds of Canada series notes (uncirculated)
– 10 x $20 Canadian notes – circulated
– 10 x 1000 Yen Japanese – circulated

So since I last posted some weeks ago, we’re on our way to getting drivers licences sorted out, and we have somewhere to live through end of July, and into August if we want, which we’ll probably take up.

Still searching for work, building Social Networks, etc. Went to Tsawwassen on the weekend for a pool party, which was good fun. Going out tonight to meet some people, tomorrow to meet some others.

Still alive, basically :)