I don't want to see my jQuery photo previewer fall off the front page despite my lack of photography lately. Especially seeing that the minified javascript library is included regardless at the top of every page. So here's a few random photos from the last half a dozen weeks.

Muttaburrasaurus, Queensland's Dinosaur. Was quite possibly a bogan.

Attempt at something artistic, lookout over Wollongong, NSW

Yeah!! What's up, Steve McCurry?

Want to know what could have made this a good photo? A subject.

Getting Fancy

Note to self: still need to improve skill at finding subjects.

This will be image id 1000. I hope this doesn't break anything.

My second square crop in as many days!

Here I am practising both finding a subject for the foreground, as well as the general field of 'Wedding Photography' in case I ever want to charge lots of money to lose my Saturdays. I think I achieved both a foreground subject and a nice, storytelling exposure. I must have been pleased with it because it was the only good photo I took for the whole day.

My little brother went to live in the UK for a while. Last weekend we saw each other again for the first time since January. He gave me an unopened Lego Minifig package as a gift, which I opened and assembled on the dance floor. It was a happy Mexican playing maracas.

Unfortunately for my little brother and me, I already had a Mexican with maracas.

Luckily the new Mexican was also pretty handy at shredding on a guitar. The End.

Vanessa has gone away with her girls for the long weekend. What that means, is, this is probably not the last Lego phocumentary you'll be seeing this weekend.

Last Thursday night we went to check out Vivid Sydney. I think my tripod talked me into it because it needed to visit its hometown for a census. While making the plans in my head to go there, I was determined that I would try and take photos that showed something different or original compared to the (literally) thousands of people who were plonking their tripods on the boardwalk and pointing them at whatever buildings had lights being shone on them. I succeeded in doing this, mainly because I only brought my gorillapod and I had to basically lay on my stomach to use that thing and still be able to look through the viewfinder.
The packaging on the gorillapod is very misleading, there is not conveniently placed, shoulder height horizontal poles to wrap your gorillapod around everywhere you go!

I am basically posting these photos here so that every time I revisit this entry in the future I will be re-enthused to go back into the city and take photos of buildings at night that aren't shit.

Customs House.

Circular Quay.

Different angle of Customs House.

The Opera House. Still an attention whore!

Red.

On Saturday morning I went to inspect a few unit/townhouses in Sutherland. I am considering working in the city some time soon and if we moved there it would double the amount of trains available as well as cut ten minutes off the journey each way. Unfortunately it seems like half a million other people have had the same idea and the demand for nice accomodation in Sutherland has followed traditional economic principles in regards to pricing.

After a quick look a Google Maps I noticed that the suburb of Woronora Heights, which is adjacent to Sutherland but sheltered by bushland, rivers and cemetaries, might also be an alternative living location. It would be at least a one kilometre walk to the Sutherland station however its isolation might mean that rental prices were cheaper.

To investigate this I could have done many things: looked up rental prices in Woronora Heights on the internet, driven there, poked around on Google Earth. Instead of doing any of those things I decided to walk to Sutherland from Engadine via Woronora Heights, and in doing so became one of the many victims of "Google Maps does not show you are about to walk up a gigantic fucking hill."

Now that I reflect on what the suburb is called I guess I should have know what was coming. Fortunately for you, dear reader, I brought my camera.

Part of the walk along the ridge of the gorge to Woronora Heights, from Engadine. Steeper than it looks.

A bulldozer along the way. It was like: "Brad, take some photos of me here and if you like me maybe we can do some more photos on the Sunshine Coast!"

After a couple of kilometres I reached Woronora Heights. Seriously, I can't believe this suburb is actually closer to the CBD than Engadine.

An example of a backstreet in Woronora Heights. This explains where all those four wheel drives, utes and boats that drive past my house every day are coming from.

I took this photo because my brain was excited to see something colourful that wasn't green or overcast.

Canoes. This was about 1km from Sutherland station, and when I noticed that the trip to the train station was up yet another hill and through thick bushland. I realised we probably wouldn't be living here. The End.

Woronora Heights was very pretty though. A leafy, tranquil suburb - even more than Engadine.
These were not the greatest photos. Luckily my witty captions were here. I think I might need to do some more Daily Shoot assignments to tighten up my skills.

I spent this chilly Sunday evening catching up with Cowan and his lass for dinner at Bondi. Because that's how things go in Sydney.

After the meal we went to a semi-classy pub for a couple of pints schooners and we were ID'd at the front door. This wasn't a super dressy pub, and the bouncer hadn't baulked when I walked through the doors with a DSLR around my neck and an attached gorillapod dangling beneath it. However, after checking Cowan's South Australian drivers license without batting an eyelid he looked at mine and spat "Engadine!" And then ushered me through the door without a further word.

We found out on Friday that the landlord wants to move back into this house when the lease expires next month. I am very much looking forward to moving north of Sutherland Shire.

I had an important event today which required me to be clean shaven. I'm not going to talk about that, though. I'm going to talk about my new shaver.

My old one has been around for nine years. It was my 18th birthday present from my Dad. We've had some good times. Lately though it hasn't really been cutting it. After looking through many shops at local shopping centres it became very obvious that shavers were stupendously overpriced in Australia and - with the USD exchange rate being so epic at the time - I could own a prestigious, $400 shaver for only $100 USD. And thus began my first, positive experience with Price USA.

After waiting only a few weeks, I walked out the door this morning to find my new shaver at my doorstep. To this event I swore loudly, mainly because I had been half-heartedly maintaining my stubble since I placed my order while waiting for my new shaver to arrive, and I had literally only just given in and spent twenty minutes shaving with my old shaver for what I now know was the last time.

So at that point, with nothing left that I was game enough to shave, I instead took photos of my new shaver.

The box, which lists the shaver's many powerful features, not limited to: being usable in the shower, having a better battery than my Samsung Galaxy S, Sonic Vibration cleaning mode and an LCD display!

It also comes with a handy guard for the foil, and a genuine leather carry case.

The Panasonic ES8249S features FOUR blades in an arc that contains nano-technology! By the time you finish shaving you will literally be living further into the future. It also has a fast linear motor drive. What this means is that it vacuums hair off your face like a tiny jet engine.

Although all that shaving power is pretty much wasted on me as I will basically use the trimmer accessory to just tidy my stubble 80% of the time.

After you finish shaving you dock it with the automatic self-cleaning charging base where an LCD Screen will tell you how charged and clean it is, along with shaving stats like how many seconds your last shave took and how long they take on average. When it's finished charging the shaver will play a happy tune, and while plugged into the charging base it can display shaving tips and connect to FaceBook to share shaving data with other ES8249S users. It pretty much is the best shaver ever, and the fact that I imported it for such a ridiculous discount makes it all the sweeter.

Shit..

Work has been full of changes lately. None of which have involved reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork I have to do. I raised a Change Request just today for a customer who pays thousands of dollars a year for server support for no reason, apparently, as they know how to do everything themselves.

The customer wanted to schedule a system reboot for this evening to improve the performance of their Java applications and I agreed to supervise it. I created the record and added the client's justification to the 'justification' field and the work plan 'restart windows, confirm services are running' to the work plan.
In the 'Backout Plan' field I wrote 'server reboot, impossible to backout'.

Normally this would be duly accepted by the posse of change approvers, but there is a new Change Manager in town today and they told me that my backout plan was not acceptable and they would not approve until I fixed it. I mentioned that nothing was being moved, deleted or changed and there was nothing we could therefore undo in the event of problems. I was then asked what happens if the server suffers a hardware failure after the restart. I tried to explain that it would be the same thing as if there was a major hardware failure right now or any other time outside the change window.

This still wasn't good enough; in order to finally gain approval I changed the backout duration from 0 minutes to 30 minutes and changed the record as such:

Restart Windows Server
Time: 7pm 29/6/2011
Work Plan: Reboot Windows. Confirm services are running after boot.
Backout Plan: In event of errors, un-reboot server.

Fortunately for me everything went smoothly.