Like all the great annual traditions, Easter has come and gone, it's passage marked with a long weekend, and precious few scary bunnies hopping around. As part of the long weekend, there is a mass exodus from Sydney, where everyone runs away in the hope of catching that last bit of elusive sun (which I missed a whole lot of thanks to my travelling) before winter sets in.

This year, my voyage was towards the Snowy Mountains, located down near the border of NSW and Victoria. A camping trip had been organised this year in Sawpit Creek, and we all piled in to our respective cars for the drive down to the mountains. Apart from regularly missing exits for rest stops and watching a car spin out onto the wrong side of the road, the drive down was uneventful - which is surprising given how crappy traffic is these days. We managed to get down to the campsite by 3pm (6 hours travel time), which was handy, as our campsite wasn't quite reserved for us :).

The whole mountain retreat area was really a bit of a luxury camping zone, equipped with all the mod-cons such as firewood and modern bathroom amenities. I was secretly hoping that I would have to do a bit of wood-chopping or something, turning into a bit of a modern day Robinson Crusoe (minus all that shipwrecked malarkey), but the presence of these facilities really ruined that illusion. Just to pound the illusion fully into the ground, I ate junk food for the majority of the weekend, apart from some apples (Thanks for carrying them up the mountain Ed!). To give an idea of what my diet was like - I was eating Shake-n-bake pancake mix. Every morning. We also discovered that Tuna can be mixed with anything to produce a new fantastic foodstuff, and that potatoes are self-igniting. Something to do with proteins no doubt.

You can see a photo from the trip to the left, and the full gallery of pics can be found here, and here.

Does anyone else find it amusing that it's World water day, and it's pouring down with rain in Sydney? No? Okay.

Robot Chicken (2) is a show from the venerable Adult Swim cable television channel in the US. Home of other classic shows such as Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Sealab 2021, Robot Chicken continues in the grand tradition of being thoroughly ridiculous.

The image above is taken from the third episode, which involves a behind the scenes look (of sorts) at the day the animals were set to board the Ark. Another highlight from this episode is "Three Fast Three Furious", a spoof of "The Cannonball Run". I strongly suggest finding copies of these programs somewhere, lest you receive a bat bitch-slap.

I ordered in a Mac Mini for my parents - to be used as a replacement for an aging Windows 2000 machine that I'm growing tired of maintaining. It's your basic email and web surfing box, with a few multimedia capabilities thrown in. Specs are as follows:

• G4 1.4 GHz
• 512 MB ram
• 80 GB hdd
• Airport built-in
• Superdrive

I'm hoping this will encourage them to start organising their photos, and hopefully share them too. If I'm going to be overseas I'll be damned if I'm going to be disconnected. One of the challenges with introducing a Mac is the compatibility issue. I've been asked numerous times whether the Mac is really compatible with the Windows world. I initially thought that the Mac would just be a drop-in replacement for the old machine. Transfer a few of the old files across to the new machine, and it would just work. It's never that simple.

Panasonic printers are notoriously crap. They usually use these half-baked drivers, and for a long time were just Winprinters. The printer I've got (a KXP-7510) is thankfully more sophisticated than a Winprinter, as it can supposedly talk PCL5. I've had my linux based print server running well using the "HP LaserJet 3P w/ PCL5, Foomatic + ljet4" driver - which was a bit of a miracle in the first place. To cut a long story short, to get the printer working on the Mac (if you have an ethernet card in the printer) you need to:

• Add a printer using IP Printing, and the Socket/HP Jet Direct printer type
• Set the printer model to "HP LaserJet IIP series", which you can get with the latest version of Gimp-print

The computer is yet to be handed over for use by the parental units, but I'm pretty sure I've ironed out all the problems that they would have in the switch.

And you people laughed at me when I said a Banana was a herb! Laughed! (Okay - so the actual banana part of the banana plant is not a herb. It's actually a false berry, but not a fruit!) More on bananas.

Google finally got around to indexing this page again, so you'll notice on the left a little search box which will automagically search the site for whatever you are looking for. While I was on Google, I decided to do a bit of a vanity search. Alas, my Google ranking is fluctuating between poor and shit-house. I blame this on the sheer number of people who really have no business using my name.

I ended up stumbling upon an ancient looking site that my brother hadn't updated for a while. On it was a link to the Penguin Abduction Centre. The Penguin Abduction Centre (or PAC) as it was known then, was my first bit of real estate on the internet. I spent hours in Paint Shop Pro crafting logos and literally minutes writing various witticisms to fill up the page. It was truly a work of art. Naturally, I felt the need to nostalgically gaze upon the page, and as always the Web Archive came to the rescue. The pages it cached were copies from around about late 1999, but the page had existed since about late 1996 (at my reckoning). So - for your viewing pleasure, some selected pages from the PAC:

• Main Page
• Abduction centre be sure to read the guest book
• VRML! Does (did) anyone actually have a VRML plugin any more?
• Penguin guide
• Abduction guide

Once I got out of high school, the pages got a little slicker - as seen here.

I was reading through Slashdot earlier this afternoon, and stumbled across an article (or more accurately short blurb) on Epidemic simulation . I didn't read the article, but it's something to do with simulating epedemics (Who would have guessed). That's not the important part though. They had a link to a slightly more important simulator - that is the Zombie infection simulator. It's strangely appropriate since I only just re-watched Shaun Of The Dead a few days ago. It is very cool to see these puuny humans run around in a panicked state when a Zombie appears around the corner. Naturally, I will not be running around clueless and powerless to stop these zombies, because I will have a copy of "The Zombie Survival Guide : Complete Protection from the Living Dead" handy. Yes, that's a hint for someone to buy it for me. No. My birthday isn't coming up for a while.