Scribem

It’s kinda funny how time really flies when you’re having fun (or in my case, having a looming unmoveable deadline that’s quickly approaching).  I just realised that the last post that I put up was in November last year, even though I can distinctly remember writing it not too long ago… so a very belated Happy New Year shout to all you readers out there.

Anyway, thanks to an inadvertent over-consumption of caffeine during the evening, it’s now almost 2am and I’m still sitting here unable to sleep, so I’m sorting out some wedding stuff.  I’ve written some Perl/LaTeX bits and pieces to auto-generate the placecards, and the order-of-service contents.  All that’s left now is to actually get the content finalised and then it’s off to the printers.

Five weeks left and counting…

I didn’t go house hunting on Saturday… decided to go through my entire 17 GB backlog of photos in one huge sitting and do the whole cull/post-process thing.  After many hours of gimping, and several thousand photos later, I emerged relatively unscathed with the following galleries:

Grace and Chris’ Wedding

MKC 2008

Melbourne Trip

CCC Combined Houseparty 2008

Susie’s Graduation

City B&W Night Shoot

Joyce’s M Clin Psych Graduation

Peter and Winnie’s Wedding

Muso Retreat 2008

James and Bertie’s Wedding

RICE Regenerate 2008

RICE Rally 2008

Engage 2008

KT and Erica’s Wedding

Things have been pretty busy since the last post — wedding planning has stepped up a notch (i.e. we’re actually doing something now), and I’m still pretty much spending every Saturday popping into assorted open-house inspections.

Anyway, I never thought I’d come across one of these, but for one of the properties, I found this Special Condition in the contract:

The Vendor discloses that there may have occurred within or upon the property the most extreme human and/or other obscenities the Purchaser can imagine. Without limiting the scope and meaning of “obscenities”, they may include extreme acts in violation of the criminal and other law, acts of sacrilege, Satanism, hedonism, acts in abuse of culture or custom and acts calculated or likely to induce disgust, dread, horror, repugnance and/or revulsion on any scale in good men and women.  The purchaser acknowledges that it is a matter for his due diligence to exercise his own imagination for the purpose of this Special Condition.

I wonder what happened…

I recently came across this article that outlined an experiment performed by the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University.

In a nutshell, the participants were asked to watch something that mimiced loading of medical websites, and were asked questions about these sites.  Thrown in for good measure were some fake popups, and the researchers were really only interested in how the participants would respond to these popups.

Now, I haven’t actually read the full experiment and its findings, so I can only go by what the article says.  Apparently, the conclusion was that users are still clueless to popups because they’d click on them even when they’re fake.  I’ll let you read the article yourself for the gory details.

I wonder whether the researchers considered the fact that people probably cared less about malware on public university computers, than their own.  It’d be interesting to repeat the experiment, but the participants were required to view the websites on their own computer.  Would they expect to see the same “idiocy” rate?

Wow I haven’t written in such a long time. Wedding stuff is going well, it’s funny how photography was the first thing we discussed! We’ve got the deposit down for the venues (St. John’s Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Regal Restaurant), the ‘all-important’ wedding gown (Maggie Sotero, it was on sale! $898 :D), pre-marital retreat, and I’m looking to finalise flowers, bombonniere, invites, bridesmaid dresses this month! Not to mention getting the gift registry done. It was a huge relief to find out the other day that Myer has FINALLY got their act together with the gift registry such that you don’t have to write down every single barcode manually anymore! Phew…

There have also been other things to prepare for such as for a place to live in. Hopefully when Keith’s work releases their hold on him he will have time to look into getting us a loan. But most importantly, these past few months have been a good time to think about marriage itself, and not just the wedding. The wedding is just one day and sure, it’s an important day but I believe that one should also prepare adequately for the challenges of marriage.

From doing the pre-marital marriage inventory, Keith and I have found that our ‘growth areas’ aka weaknesses are conflict resolution, communication and something else I can’t remember. It’s been really helpful to sit down and formally think through things with an older, wiser and impartial third party. I’m thankful to God that Keith and I have many strengths together: marriage expectations, relationship roles, spiritual beliefs and leisure activities. It’s going to be interesting in our next session discussing the contribution of our family of origin into our relationship.

Please pray for us as we prepare not just for our wedding, but also for a lifetime together of commitment, love and service to one another and to our Lord. Over the months God has really hit it home that I can do nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. So please pray that we would love and follow Jesus and allow the richness of that to overflow into our love for one another.

Well, it looks like the date for the wedding is set — March 28th, 2009.  I guess we should start making some efforts preparing for the big day, since there’s only eight-ish months left…

Anyway, Joyce and I recently met up with the minister who will be conducting the ceremony.  He seems like a very nice guy, and full of wisdom — he reassured us that after being in the business of marrying people for 37 years, he can run the day with his eyes closed.

One of the things that he mentioned was regarding the part where he would ask the ceremony attendees “… if anybody has any legal reasons as to why these two should not be married, please speak now or forever hold your peace.”

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Tags: wedding

I wonder how much attention transit officers pay when examining tickets.  I got approached by one this evening on my way home from work — he asked that I show him my ticket, and I gladly obliged.  I pulled out my ticket and showed it to him, he looked at it for a few seconds, nodded, then proceeded on to the next guy.

Now, this all sounds pretty normal.  However, the only problem was, I pulled out a ticket that expired a while ago by mistake.  (I really should get rid of these old tickets from my wallet…)

If the whole purpose of a revenue protection officer is to protect revenue, then these guys arn’t exactly doing a very satisfactory job.  I’ve seen plenty of times when people just walk through the barriers without a ticket, sometimes in the view of such officers and other station staff, who don’t seem to care much about it and continue chatting with their friends.

In a sense, I don’t blame them. Having read an article on SMH regarding the powers (or rather, the lack thereof) of transport officers, it must be somewhat difficult for them to do anything considering the offender has the right to walk away without being detained (and since I’m not a lawyer, I’ll just assume the article is factually correct).

Which then begs the question:  why have revenue protection officers that don’t actually have the necessary powers to do their job?

Software patents — there’s plenty of debate as to whether they’re actually useful or not. For most people, they probably don’t care since it doesn’t affect them (well, not directly anyway). In fact, I’d hazard a guess that most people in my industry probably won’t give much of a thought about it, since it’s something that only a vocal minority group complains about.

Now, I’m not a lawyer (and trust me, intellectual property law is something that goes way over my head), but I’ve had my fair share of mucking around in this area since a chunk of my time at CiSRA was spent dealing with software patents (avoiding infringement, and drafting my own), so here are my thoughts on the whole debacle.

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