Instinct. Reason. Duality. Dichotomy.

Lucidty in lunacy, this is my Lycanthropic Dreaming.

Recent News
I recently handed in my resignation from a position that ultimately turned out to not work out as well with very young kids as I had hoped. So, I'm on the hunt again, and the resume is now up-to-date with current employment detail. Nuff said, really, except perhaps to provide the link to the calculator. With all the global financial craziness going down lately, I've been drawn back into watching it with interest. Of course, I also want to also have a feel for how my money has changed value over time so I spent the effort tonight to ressurect my mothballed development environment, and update the CPI calculator to cover all Australian CPI figures released to date. So, here is the freshly reminted CPI calculator. Happy down-under dollar watching. Hey all. I finally decided to tackle my rendering blues between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. The pages should render as intended with Firefox 3 now. I was bored of the old colour scheme, so I gave that a scrub down to something a little more suggestive of greenery while I was at it. Stay tuned. I've got some very out of date applets that need loving now that I can actually see the web page again. Oh dear, It's been over a year since I've done anything with these pages. It's been an intense year though. I'm now a father, and have started at a new job, which are enough in the way of diversions that all sorts of things just aren't getting a looksee, not just this webpage.

Still, I've been haunting Facebook lately with my reduced free time. Swing by and say hello. Then again, perhaps you're just interested in the bubby detail. Here's a photo album of Hannah, who's now 9 months old, and babbling like a happy little muppet.

For the regulars (and the logs tell me you're there), my whims on asthetics have begun to drift again. I've been hacking up the menu section of the front page for sh*ts and giggles.

Oh, the pageset is a broken under Firefox 3 Beta at the mo. I've informed the relevant people for page-fixing goodness. Till then, Firefox 2 will deliver you the intended look of the pageset. IE rendering remains broken, and shall remain so for the forseeable future. Hi all. Just a quick heads-up to let you all know that I've moved contact emails. Hotmail was beginning to irritate me with it's "We clear your inbox if do not check it regularly" game, so I've decided to list my gmail address as a point of contact from now on. Find the emails address on my contact detail page. I realised a few days ago that I had not been watching inflation lately (after comments on a friend's blog made me realise that I had a little hobby I'd not been indulging in). That's a bad thing, because my applet was out of date by two quarter's worth of reporting. It's all good now though. Find the newly updated calculator on the Applets page. Yes, I've been a little slack on updating all sorts of things lately. No excuses. I've just had distractions from several vectors to simultaneously entertain me for quite some time. After a small holiday over the Xmas/New Years break, I'm almost certain that these distractions were a necessary part of the post-PhD healing process. I've only just recently felt the desire to start getting back to typical pre-thesis writeup Linds behaviour.

Without further delay, go find out how much of a pay rise you need to ask of your employer just to maintain the purchasing power of your hard-earned Aussie dollar. Of interest to Australian CPI watchers, the most recently recorded quarter was most heavily influenced by escalating packaging and distribution costs of food. Dominating here is the massive increase in the price of bananas, which after cyclone Larry, are 45% more expensive than they were in June of 2006. Owchies.

Hi all. I finally got around to updating my resume today. Here's a link for those who are interested. Hah! A project that had been stalled for a very long time has now been finished. The stopwatch applet is now a dual applet and stand-alone java application. Underneath the hood, there are also some tweaks. But enough; go time something pointless! Hi everyone. Long story short... My desktop PC died as I was writing up my Thesis (oh the tales I could tell about how ridiculously busy my life has been this past year). It wasn't until last weekend that I finally found time to take the old HDDs to a friend's place and retrieve the data (Hi Matt!).

Guess where the CPI Calculator source code was? Anyways... the applets page now hosts the CPI calculator covering all the Australian CPI figures ever published by Bureau of Statistic. So what are you waiting for? Go find out how badly your Aussie money is loosing its purchasing power.

Such a long time since the last update. The PhD thesis draft ended up being an all-encompassing time of DOOM. But it's behind me now, and I've had some time to myself for a change. Two updates: Some mods to the links page, and the research page now delivers a copy of my final thesis slides (not that I expect to see anyone sucking them down the pipe).

I've just shuffled about the links page a little (for my own amusement mostly). What I really wanted though, was to supply a link through to Freemind (a freeware mind mapping tool). What's mind mapping? Something I've become a real fan of as I do my PhD. Go on, learn something new. It won't hurt... much.

Health care and transportaion are the stars this financial quarter in therms of increasing costs in Australia. Yes, I know, the CPI figure's been out for almost a month now. Still, better late than never. Joy and prosperity, as you stare, rapt at the scintilating entertainment that is inflation watching.

Interesting inflation changes this quarter. Health care and education took big jumps, but don'tcha sweat it, cause it's still cheap to buy your household goods. Anyhoos, once again, I bid you and yours a riveting inflation watching experience.

I've had some trouble getting my University web-pages updated with changes to my publication listings recently. Given that nothing's guaranteed in life (like my continuation into a research career at QUT), I've decided to host my publication detail here. You can find my publications in my Research page.

I've been on a learning push with LaTeX for my PhD thesis lately, and in the process I decided to scrub down my LaTeX page. There is a new entry on using subfigures, and a new style file showing my research log format. I've also dropped a couple of LaTeX links that are now defunct.

My CPI calculator is once again as up to date as can be expected. Happy inflation watching.

I finally got my old Peak Oil Poetry back (thanks to my Gorious Bleeder), and celebrated by writing another.

Better late than never, my CPI calculator is now back in sync with the Australian Bureau of Stastics. Find the applet here.

A little while back I became inspired to write my own Shadowrun Dice Roller. After a little negotiation with WizKids, the owners of Shadowrun copyright, I'm now allowed to release the applet to the general public.

Enjoy, fellow Shadowrun addicts.

Well... my computer games page was going nowhere fast, so I've dumped it in favour of a poetry corner where I'll stick up some lyrical nonsense I've written in my time.

*groans from the audience*

The CPI applet now, finally, covers June's CPI figures. Gods, could I do with a time machine right now.

Ok.. the homepage is fixed now and rendering how I'd like it to. I tried looking at it under Internet Explorer 5.5 this morning, and it was horrible. So... guys and gals, the web-page has been re-designed for a CSS1 compliant web browser with a minimum resolution screen of 1024x768. That leaves Internet Explorer users and ancient monitor users out in the cold I'm afraid. The homepage is currently still table based. I need a time machine. 8(

Hmm.. as I transition to non-table layout, certain menu rendering looks broken. As I get time over the next few days, I'll slowly get things back to normal. Finally, the pages underneath the homepage are rendering how I always wanted them. No tables, and the header and footer stay where I actually want them to be.

You might have noticed that the menus have been renamed slightly. At the same time, there's been alot of work put into reducing the header and footer size of the pages even further. I'm trying to remove my usage of tables for layout now that Mozilla is doing most of the CSS1 standard quite well. Bare with me as I make small adjustments here and there over the next week or so.

Not sure how the pages look under Internet Explorer, and I don't care anymore. If you're still using IE, you've got far bigger problems than having my pageset render poorly.

Today the YAWLEditor was released into the big bad world *sniffle - such a beautiful baby*. The editor represents over six months of one day per week's work building what is effectively my first drawing package. This work belongs to QUT, but it's been LGPLed. I put a link to it from my Free Stuff page because... well... it's free... and... and I wrote it. Yeah. *shrug*

Also, the March CPI figures have been released, which means my the CPI applet has been updated to cover the new quarter. Seems vegies are the main reason for the spike in inflation. Seems the weather is the reason why vegies are so damned expensive. The resturaunts are gouging you. I see it in the numbers.

I was fixing a small problem my application version of the the Stopwatch Applet had this afternoon. While I was there, I pulled off those irritating tooltips from the start/stop and reset buttons. So... The applet got the same treatment.

Happy time tracking, and remember, wir haben keine zeit.

I've just updated the CPI applet. with the Australian December CPI figures.

I built my first GDM Login screen theme today and I'd like to share. As a result, I've shuffled things about a bit with the web site. The applets page has moved, and are now part of a new Free Stuff page that the GDM theme also hangs off.

Last night was a very special night for me. I got Fedora printing on my new Epson CX3100. The night before I got scanning working. Thanks to Jon Wright for telling me that following the CX3200 instructions for printing would work a treat for the CX3100. What does that all mean?

Finally, after 6 months of slowly finding alternatives to the things on Windows I can't live without, I'm done! There is absolutely no need for me to enter my Windows partition ever again. I'm reclaiming that partition and good riddance to Microsoft. With my WineX licence now happily existing in Fedora, even all my old Windows games are useable. Yay for Linds!

I've celebrated by turfing most Windows software links now that I'm really using the Unix equivalent anyhow. The only ones left are still needed for my Windows 2000 box at University.

More inflation goodness available via the CPI applet.

For some crazy reason, I've been stumbling onto lots of quotes that I've really enjoyed lately. You know where to find them, right?

There's now a "set time" pop-up menu item for my Stopwatch applet. On friday, I also found a new Java Optimizer called JARG. I put it through its paces, and it seems to do a much better job than jOpt on my java code. So... Even though there is new functionality, the size of the stopwatch should have shrunk a little. All hail JARG the Java optimizer.