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The LS crew headed over to Dreamworld for some fun times and lots and lots of rides! Props to Joshua again for organising the event and getting adults in at kids prices! And just like Dreamworld we were able to stick as a group for majority of the day which always make the rides that just bit more fun.

I didn’t do the giant drop even with tons of encouragment from Stacky, Franger and even Cara. Standing underneath the tower for ages looking at the people going up probably didn’t help. It’s not that I ‘cant’ handle the heights, it’s just that I really, really didn’t want to. Last time I did it I felt pretty shaken up… so instead Carsy and I headed over to the Tower of Terror whilst the others did the drop and we raced up and down another two times.

Even with it being cold we had to do the water rapids ride! The girls weren’t too impressed with me trying to lean into the corners on the ride, I always feel it makes it a bit more exicting making the boat rock that little bit more. Karma might have gotten the better of me (probably just physics) as literally I was the only person to be soaked from head to toe out of the six of us.
At least everyone could laugh at my wet butt when we walked aroudn for the rest of the day.

Finally we did a few more rounds on the Claw before we left. Carsy had this interesting idea of what to scream as we rode it, to shout out the new Nintendo Consoles name! Sooo… I gotta admit, the ride operators were looking kinda funny at a couple of adults howling ‘weeeeee’ as this giant claw thing started to move, but it worked out quite well (see the video!).

Note the ‘rock and roll’ by Stacky. Strangely singing ‘weee’ made the hold right just that bit calmer.

So tally for me was
Dogems: 1 ride
Claw: 4 rides
Tower of Terror: 4 rides
Reptar: 1 ride

Thanks to Joshua for organising this event!

My good mate Greg has taken his lovely girlfriend Maria and they’ve jetsetted their way for a two year adventure in the U.K.!
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Being the hip and happening people they are, they’ve got a funky new blog which I suggest you check out at gregandmaria.com.au.

Hope you two have a great time over there! My only regret is not getting to know Maria better before they left, but I’m sure I’ll find out everything when they (eventually) get back.

Things are meant to be simple right?

I had an outstanding issue with a client who purchased a rather nice proprietary VOIP system. Problem was that the inbuilt faxing system would only allow them to see the faxes online with their machines. Handy for sending faxes around the office and to off-site workers, but not very easy for the poor lady who’s job is to ensure hard copy’s are kept stored.

With the proprietary vendor saying that it simply ‘wasn’t possible’ I went back to the drawing board… here is what crazy scheme I cooked up.

1. Incoming Fax received by VOIP fax server
2. Fax server tells Client PC that it’s got a fax, ready to be viewed on machine
3. Using Proprietary’s inbuilt filters, all incoming Faxes to the user will be automagically send an attached TIFF file via e-mail.
4. E-mail is sent via local Linux (soapbox) server and caught by Postfix’s alias automation
5. Email is piped to a PHP script (tried ruby, but got pissed off by ActionMailer’s reliance on Rails too much and went with good ol’ PEAR MailMimeDecoder) which decodes the E-mail and extracts the TIFF image.
6. TIFF image is converted to a multi-page PostScript file with tiff2ps
7. The newly created PostScript file is then whisked away to a CUPS Que.
8. CUPS then sends off it’s job to a Netgear print server which passes it’s data on to the Brother printer
9. Brother multifunction printer prints out the fax AND uses yellow paper to boot

Surprisingly it’s been working fine for a while now and I think I need to work in some duct tape and bubblegum in there somewhere to make the process… complete.