Not quite a wedding present — but definitely a present that was well appreciated! After several months of coveting Marko’s port barrel — not the least because he picked it up in a second-hand shop for around $5 — we’ve acquired our own…. Marko, the guru of the second-hand shop and flea-market, discovered it while poking around last weekend in a market in Bendigo.

I wonder how things are going at Monash this week— I’ve been away on a course, generally fun to be out of the office, but the five-day course feels like it could be compressed into four, or even three. We’ve been leaving at around 3.30 pm everyday so far! In another example of small-world syndrome, I’ve discovered that the instructor is the brother of one of the Smeg cyclists…

Judging by a phone call I received at lunch time, things are proceeding as normal. The call was to tell me that the work I was going to do this evening — the work that nobody had asked me to do, that some had just assumed that I would do and then told others that I would do — well, that work, had been cancelled because one of the other groups hadn’t got something working yet. Actually, it hadn’t been cancelled, it’s been postponed to Friday evening, and would I be available to come in then and do it… Unfortunately the answer is no. I’ve already got other bookings. We’ll continue to haemorrhage money by giving the students free printing, because the ability to generate paperwork is fundamental to the operation of a computer network, and letting thousands of people print in a total unmanaged way is more important than saving trees, printers and our time. Bah!