I finally got to try one out.  And Oh Mii God! It’s too much fun.  It’s now 11:30pm and I’m sitting in a sweaty heap after only about 20 minutes of Wii Sports.  I tried them all, with the exception of boxing as the friend I borrowed the Wii from forgot to pack his nunchuck.

I thought it looked like it would be fun before trying it.  I can’t believe how instantly addictive and fun it really was.  And how easy, both to set up and to use.  The interface was easy to undestand and the in game instructions made everything quick to pick up as well.  I can’t wait till I have some time to play it with Kira, I think that will be even better then playing solo.

Want!

When we were looking for a house we found the one that we are in with the owner looking for “a family that wants to stay for a long term in the house”.  That was exactly what we were looking to do.  We wanted a place we could set up base in for at least a few years so that we could save some money, with a view to buying the next place we live in.

Unfortunately that doesnt look like it’s going to be the case.  The recent market/financial troubles have caused the owner to re-evaluate their position and they have decided that they are reluctantly going to sell this house.  We figure that this is the house they have chosen out of their portfolio as it has just finished being refurbished/renovated and they feel that they have the best chance of return on it.

This makes things particularly frustrating for us as we have to put up with the realestate bringing potential buyers through to see the house.  So far we’ve had a small group of potential buyers come thorugh last saturday, and we have another coming through thursday afternoon.

This is the first time that something like this has happened to us during our entire renting history and it has come at, what can only be described as, the worst possible time.  We can’t really afford another move at the end of our lease and with Stacey currently trying to nurse a fractured ankle it leaves most of the work to me.  I’m barely coping with everything that is going on at the moment and this added stress is not something that either of us are enjoying.

We’ve even half heartedly started looking towards buying a place of our own, but with our current lack of savings (yeah moving up here was expensive) we dont feel that we are in a position financially to do that.

Digging through multiple forum and blog posts about it I found reference to some people getting joy from ensuring that the Location stanza in their apache config had a trailing slash. After not finding the solution through google I decided to stop looking for the easy solution and started watching the log files. What I found surprised me a little.

My location stanza looks like this:

<Location /repositories/system/>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /home/www/subversion/repositories/system
SVNListParentPath on

# access control policy
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_access

# authorisation section
AuthType Basic
AuthName “My Subversion Repositories”
AuthUserFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_passwd
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/www/subversion/.svn_access
Require valid-user
</Location>

And the log was showing this error:

Access denied: ‘jacob’ GET repositories:/system

In order to compare the error to an equivalent error for a path inside a repository that is legitimately blocked I added a test user and denied them access to anything inside the project1 repository. The url for the repository is http://my.svn.server/repositories/system/project1/ and the error message that I received was:

Access denied: ‘test.jacob’ GET project1:/

Lining up the error messages and the paths that each one was reporting I found that the problem was solved by adding a permission for all users to read the parent folder of the SVNParentPath into my AuthzSVNAccessFile file

[repositories:/]
* = r

I was surprised that I needed to put it a level back up from the location of the SVNParentPath folder, and believe that this may have been why there was so much speculation on the internet about what the solution could be.

I’ve been in a bit of a dark spot for a while with a lack of motivation for many things and lots has happened since my last post. The bubba that I was marvelling about feeling in my last post is now 9 months old!! Imogen is almost walking younger then her older sister was even crawling. It has been very special being responsible for another little life in this world. But it has also been exceptionally challenging dealing with the changes to our little family.

I know that I could be coping better, and that I still have a long way to go until I am happy with myself and how I am interacting with everyone around me. I lack patience and am quick to anger at the moment. I’m sure it’s due to lack of sleep and I should attempt to address that, but I need my own time and most of the time the only way i can get it is to stay up after everyone else is in bed. I need to find an outlet as none of my traditional ones seem to work any more. But enough of that darkness….

Work has gotten challenging again recently with my changed responsiblities. I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything that is involved in my new responsibilities and I am sure that as the challenges unfold I will have many things to say about what is happening.

Any way, thats enough of an “I’m still alive” post for now. Hopefully it wont be a year before the next one that I put out.

1. Grab the nearest book. (Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or”intellectual” book in your closet) Or anything with words and enough pages to complete this task…. You remember books, those thin strips of dead trees that have lots of words printed on them bound together down 1 side. People used to have them before eBooks and digital paper.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

Operation of the clutch pedal moves the release lever, which pushes the release bearing and the centre of the diaphragm towards the transaxle.  When the diaphragm deflects, the pressure is relieved from the driven plate, and the clutch disengages.

A spring between the clutch pedal and the pedal bracket keeps the clutch pedal loaded against the stopper bolt.

I submitted the churn application on Dec 20th, wanting to move away from Westnet after I reached the conclusion that the plan changes they were implemented were detrimental to me and my usage habits. On the 21st I got an email about my order being in the system, apparently this is the email that comes through when the request is submitted to Telstra wholesale. The email indicates 3-5 business days from submission should see the churn completed.

On the 27th of December I got another of these emails. The 29th was 5 days from the original email and I called Internode to see what was happening. Apparently there had been some error at Telstra’s end and the application had been rejected and had to be resubmitted, hence the second email. Unfortunately for me the 3rd of Jan was given as the estimated date of churn.

This would push me into another month with Westnet and require me to pay another months access fees. It would also push me out of the period they were waiving the early termination charges and add that charge to my account as well. As there was no way we could speed Tesltra up with all the public holidays and stuff I had only 1 option.

I cancelled my Westnet account and had them set the cancellation date as the 1st of Jan so that I would still get the fee waived and not be charged the additional month access. This is bad because it could have seen my Westnet codes removed from my line before the churn happened. If that had happened it would have caused the churn to fail and I would have had to start the application again as a new connection which is more expensive and more delay.

Happily, this didn’t happen and I am now online through Internode.

This wasn’t enough for Optus-guy.  He asked me what those services were so I rattled off basically everything that had helped my decision to join Westnet, coincidentally the same features that they have just removed from their plans.  When he asked me to name the ISP I hesitated slightly before responding.  I figure if they use the information to check into the competitors plans that I would be sending them bad information by sending them to Westnet now that the plans have been made less attractive with the recent changes.  Luckily I did a bit of research before making the jump to Internode.  Netspace still have similar plans to the old Westnet ones so I pushed Optus-guy that way.

So I lied.  It was only a little white lie.  I would have gone to Netspace if I had any belief that the plans would have stayed as they currently are.  I doubt it will be long before Netspace change their plans as well.

A few days from now I should be a happy ‘Node customer. :)