Captured outside my house.

The fun stuff you can find growing in your yard if you go looking with a camera.

I have finally taken the plunge and booked my flight to London. I will be taking the red-eye on Tuesday September 13. It is a direct flight with one stop in St. John's. So that means I have a little over a week until I go and I will admit that I am anxious. Not necessarily in a bad way or a good way, just anxious.

There is much to do before I leave like buying a couple of large pieces of luggage to haul as much of my stuff across the pond as I can. I also need to figure out where I want to host all of my photos that I am likely going to want to share. I might have to break down and get a flickr account.

Fortunately when I get over there, I am going to be staying with my aunt for a week or so which will help ease the transition by providing me with somewhat familiar surroundings. She is also going to be putting me to work building a web application for her spa. All told it promises to be an interesting phase of my life and I will be sure to share that with you as best I can.

I think I am going to bite the bullet and sell my PowerMac G5. It is just one year old and in mint condition. However, I will be gone to school for 18 months and I won't be able to take it with me. So instead of letting it sit idle around the house, I think I will turn it into money so that I can buy a new 15" Powerbook which should serve me a bit better during my studies abroad.

The price I'm looking for is $2700 and that will include a 19" ViewSonic CRT (one of the nicest CRTs I've ever seen). It is a dual 2.0 GHz G5 machine with 1GB of RAM and a 250 GB SATA hard drive. Gigabit Ethernet, Superdrive and optical audio in and out — not to mention the internal high speed bus and all the other features that make the G5 a sexy machine in anyone's book.

I can deliver the machine anywhere in Halifax on Friday (Sept. 9) or possibly Tuesday (Sept. 13). I am also able to deliver it anywhere in Pictou County. Other locations negotiable. Let me know at g5sale@rhuvok.com if you are interested.

A different perspective on what is essentially a weed on the side of the road.

If do any PHP coding and you don't have a perfect photographic memory, you likely forget some of the syntax for the thousands of functions that PHP has. There is always the PHP Manual online, but you aren't always online when you need it.

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Today was a nice day in mid-September terms, but by no means a scorcher. The sun was out for much of the day and carried some heat with it and since Adam and Sarah were here, we all decided that we should go for what I'm expecting to be the last swim of the year in our pool.

The water was only 22°C which isn't bad, but cold by our recent standards. It was also filled with a number of fir needles — the ones that I wasn't able/inclined to skim out. I guess that is a danger of this time of year. However, it was refreshing and one final reminder before I depart on Tuesday.

We were trying to remember when our last swim was for the past couple of years, but weren't able to pin point the dates. So let this be a record of the date that we last used our pool for 2005. Maybe. I guess if it is really nice in the next week or so and the conditions permit, you might find someone in the pool, but in all likelihood, this is it.

Today was the day that I realized that I'm going away for a long time and I am not at all prepared for that. As I reluctantly backed up and purged my files from my desktop machine I was also packing what amounts to almost all of my clothes into two huge pieces of luggage. Deciding what to bring and what to leave home at first wasn't a problem, but the later it got, the more stressful the whole ordeal became.

All day I have felt the physiological effects of my situation start to encroach on me. Loss of appetite and what I guess would be best described as butterflies in my stomach. I just feel fortunate that I really enjoy flying, or I would be a total mess. The biggest factor is that I just have no idea what is going to happen with this program, and there are a lot of questions that I don't have the answer for, which makes it feel like I am totally unprepared.

But deep down I know that it will be OK and that I should be enjoying every second of this remarkable opportunity. And I will.

I made it! I am currently safe and sound sitting in my aunt's flat in London. I am very tired and not just a little bit sweaty. The transatlantic flight was long, but uneventful. A couple of turbulent spots which I seemed to weather a fair bit better than the woman sitting next to me. Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess) the two people I was sitting beside didn't speak much English. I did manage to get an aisle seat for my bum knee and that meant sitting at the very back of the plane which I loved. I also got to watch Monster-in-Law which wasn't terrible and read about half of my book.

What I didn't get was any sleep — luckily my uncle was at the airport to drive me home so I didn't have to fight the tube with my luggage. Customs wasn't a problem and now I am living in the UK for the next 3.5 months. I haven't set up a site for my photos yet, but that is on my list of things to get done sooner rather than later.

Slept like a baby last night. Off to a healthy start of the day today — went to the gym with my aunt and uncle and then had a salad for lunch — who would've guessed. And surprise surprise it is raining in London. So instead of going downtown to the Apple store as I had planned I went to the bank to get some pounds out and then came home to decompress some more.

I realize that I am going to have to do something about the time zone difference between me and the majority of my readers. I guess it isn't even so much the difference as it is that I am making this post shortly after 1pm here, yet it will show up as 9am. Not that it is a huge deal, but something I might address. Anyway, that is me thinking out loud.

I have finally gotten things off to a start at europeadventure.ca. It isn't a sprinting start, but it will certainly do the trick for now. Eventually I hope to have my posts that are on that site be cross posted here, but at the moment, that is not the case. The site also doesn't look the hottest right now, but that is on my list as well.

I certainly don't want to neglect this site and if that starts to happen, there may be a temporary merging of the sites, but right now that is a wait and see type of scenario.

I have had my laptop for over 2.5 years now and as a testament to the durability of Apple laptops, it has a current uptime of 56 days and 17 hours. During that time, I have taken it on a roadtrip to Ontario and now it has gone international. At no point since July 26 have I needed to reboot it — and I imagine that at that point it was restarted to install some updates. And it isn't as if this is a server running in the corner, this is a laptop that I use everyday and for the past week has been my only computer.

But now I have 7 updates that it needs and 4 of those require restarts, so in the interest of staying current I am going to bite the uptime bullet.

While not drastically different, keyboards in the UK are arranged in a way which is slightly annoying especially when programming. Most notably the @ is generated with a Shift-' and the Shift-2 is now the " (double quote) character. While most people may use the @ more often for emails now, when programming, I like having the double quote handy.

I think that with the new site, I will need to change the focus of my posts and change the display nature of the site. Instead of talking about the daily nuances of my life, I will keep this site for general geekiness.

As with other sites of this nature I may not be able to keep up to my usual quota of at least a couple posts a week. I think that I have done well over the past 3.7 years of this site to keep up the content — much to my own surprise at least. But now, I will revert to the system that I usually set other people's sites to — that is displaying the last N posts instead of the last N days.

Thanks.