Melrose Drive , Tullamarine , Victoria . January 16th 2006 : 14.35 hours : Highway patrol pulls over a Workcover Inspector for doing 68 in a 60 zone. Workcover Inspector says nothing and cops the $120 fine sweet. Policeman finishes writing ticket and proceeds back to his car. Workcover Inspector in the mean time, gets digital camera out of bag, photographs the cop and proceeds to the police car where he issues the Policeman with an $800.00 fine for not wearing his hi-visibility vest when leaving his vehicle in a high traffic area. It just doesn't get any sweeter than that.

I was putting my shopping away today, and I just had to laugh at the contents of my fridge afterwards. From looking at the contents, it's just typical that I'm single. To the left is a quick photo of the contents. I don't know if I should be proud of it or not :) This makes me wonder... what's in the fridges of other single guys out there? I'm sure some people have worse things in their fridge. See, the guys who have chicks - they usually have some things of nutritional value in the fridge - but for the single guys who live of burgers, steak and pizza - then there's not much else to put in a fridge apart from what you see here. Oh - and we all know that the beer goes at the bottom of the fridge - because that's where the coldest air is. Coke and cheese just don't deserve that. And the lettice got thrown out shortly after this picture.

I went to the movies on Friday with a girlie I met not that long ago. We went to see The Producers by Mel Brooks. I have to say, it's one of the best movies that I have seen in a long, long time. I haven't seen the original version (before the movie became a play that became a movie), but I'm keeping an eye out for it at the DVD store! This was the first movie in a long time that made me laugh out loud (literally!) while watching. A great watch - if you can, go see it!

Yeah - I've finally gotten around to finishing it all up. Over at the Xplane section, you can find all of the fun stuff to do with Xplane, DAPS, and probably more over time. It's nice to have 293 files instead of 1606 to hunt through :P

This is a tad weird which has made me wonder how the hell this happened. I got some ice cubes out of the freezer that I made a few days ago, and theres these inch long spikes of ice coming out of the cube. Pics of the ice tray. Now this is interesting, as there was nothing on top of the ice trays and they were placed on the top shelf of the freezer. If someone has any ideas on how these were created, I'd love to hear it :) Update: I found a really good article on this here.

I've been getting into Xplane and VATSIM pretty heavily lately - and I've been working of the real procedures from Airservices Australia. These are great, however there are a lot of waypoints missing from Xplanes database. Airservices also have 1606 PDF files (one page per file) of all the DAPS information for Australia. After talking this through with Airservices, I have been given permission to alter these and redistribute to people using VATSIM. What I have been working on is to gather all DAPS related to one airport, then combine them into a single PDF file. This takes the number of PDFs for the average sim pilot to hunt through from 1606 to around 370 - and you only need one for the airports you use. More news on this to come as I complete this work (already taken the best part of 3 days!). I have also submitted the missing procedure waypoints to Austin to see if he can add them into an update to Xplane.

If you haven't been following the SuperDrive Petition then you might have missed that Apple have taken in my 12" Powerbook for testing. Apple Sydney sent 2 DVD discs down to my AppleStore that I've been dealing with on this to test if the drive is indeed faulty. I thought I'd expand this test and also provided 4 blank DVDs to test. The results are very interesting:

• Ritek 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 26 mins to burn 4Gb.
• Princo 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
• Yoshi 8x DVD+R. Available Speeds: 2x. 25 mins to burn 4Gb
• Datacell 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
• Apple 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x. 12 mins to burn 4Gb
• TDK 16x DVD-R. Available SPeeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb

In summary, only ONE of the discs worked as expected (Apple supplied the last two). These results have been sent to Apple, and I'm awaiting their reply with great interest.

A while ago, I picked up a copy of Xplane while there was a sale going on - as I'd played it a bit at Tims and thought it was worthy of purchase. I installed it on my Intel PC here, and soon after, version 8.21 came along for a $29USD upgrade. The interesting thing is that version 8.21 comes on NINE DVDs and installs to a whopping 60Gb! Is it worth it? Hell yes. The flight model is second to none, the graphics have improved heaps in the last version - as can be seen by these screenshots. Couple that with XSquawkbox and VATSIM and you can play online with proper air traffic control - using voice!. I have to say that it's the most realistic thing I have ever come across without actually being in a real cockpit.

It looks like a couple of days ago, WordPress 2 was released. Today I set about installing it on here - and I have to say, I'm quite impressed. While most of the changes are below the surface, the admin side of things is MUCH quicker and easier to work with. I hope they keep up the good work :)

It's that time of year again when things go crazy. Although I'm working through the Christmas period again this year, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and hope you are all safe and well for the start of another great year. Cheers!