Life is in boxes; about fifty boxes of purest cardboard. The removalists came this morning and in three hours the lovely apartment in which we have lived for the past year and a bit was a warehouse.

Tomorrow we move 18km (11 miles) across Melbourne to take up residence in our new house, which will be, I think, my nineteenth "permanent" address since I was born. It will be great to live in a house again, having lived in apartments since we moved to Melbourne in February 2006. I shall miss the terrific view that we have enjoyed from the tenth storey since moving in though. It really is glorious particularly on sunny days such as today.

Now we have mortgages in both of hemispheres, which seems terribly grown-up. I don't feel terribly grown-up, not even just passed my 2⁵th birthday.

The good news for those of you who are fed up with updating your address books each time that I move home is that the Post Office Box address, which you've had since we landed in Melbourne remains valid. You can thank me later.

The bad news for those of you who like to keep in contact via electronic means, such as Skype or (the other multitudinous instant mithering and social networks to which I am connected) is that it shall be a little while before we have broadband connected in the new abode. I shall sporadically check my email on the iPhone, of course. I may even tweet, who knows.

But first, we must celebrate K's birthday. Just think of all of the presents (read: "boxes") she'll get to unwrap tomorrow. Aren't you jealous?

Following a question not long afterwards by another friend who enjoys playing the game as to the whereabouts of the website, I dug a little deeper. Google's cached snapshot of http://www.scrabulous.com/ as it appeared on 26 Sep 2008 07:32:13 GMT said:

The site is taking a coffee break. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Probably not a DNS issue, then. The news pages tell me that the name "Scrabulous" has been ruled a trademark violation. The Wikipedia page on Scrabulous has some better news, though. It mentions that from the ashes of Scrabulous rises Lexulous.

It looks like Lexulous is not yet fully-functional; I cannot see a way to invite others to an email-based word game (I daren't use the 'S'-word, lest Hasbro leap on me litigiously), but it has got my user information from the old site.

Good news, Mum, it looks like you won't have to find a new pass-time after all!

I suggest New Zealand police check the local convents. I suspect the thief has disguised himself as a nun and is hanging out with an Eric Idle lookalike.

Buying the house has proved a lot easier than buying the house in the UK. It's all good. If you're going to be in the Melbourne area in October, keep the last Saturday free for a housewarming party. Details to follow.

I'm a bit concerned, though. According to Internode's website, they don't have ADSL2+ coverage in our new area. And Google Stret View seems to cover ever street in Melbourne, apart from our new street. What have I let myself in for?

It seems that since I last posted, back in June with this throwaway entry, the commentage box has had a bit of use. So somebody's reading...

Yay Portsmouth!! But Paul Daniels a celebrity? He's certainly infamous...

Paul Daniels is certainly a celebrity.

Then there was this rather strange comment, which appeared twice...

Nice Site! http://google.com

Google is clearly a very useful site, but I cannot take credit for it. Thanks for sharing the link, though. I'm sure somebody will find it useful!

You may remember me mentioning some spam I received...

Regarding this Mary , from Melbourne ( she writes "Melburne" asking for merchandise to pay using her visa card.

The merchandise she ordered is around U$ 400.00 ,but the courier she recommends , "bringingworld" supposedly in UK, charged over U$ 900.00 to get it to her, and we are supposed to pay the courier .We never heard of "bringingworld" courier , neither did the Google. Now any one can cancel a VISA operation after we pay the U$ 900.00 to the courier . . . It does not seem to be a sound business . All be advised . . .

Christopher Svoll

Clearly, Christopher, it does not seem to be a sound business. Perhaps I didn't state clearly enough that the message was spam. I cannot emphasise enough the first rule of spam prevention: Never reply to spam. And while I'm on the subject, never buy products from spam.

Apparently, the colours of this website were changed automagically on July 4. I'd forgotten that I'd done that.

ARGH MY EYES MY EYES. Thankfully this 4th July thing only comes round once a year. This colour scheme is a tribute....right???? Lou x

Sorry, Lou.

Someone, or some process (more likely) wants us to...

have a nice day!

That's very kind of you. You have a nice day, too!

I have another couple of blog entries brewing, both on new purchases. But they shall have to wait until after I have been bouldering.

Here's the latest one:

SCATTEGORIES - it's harder than it looks! Copy and paste into a new email. When you have answered all the scattergories, send it on to friends but DON'T FORGET to return it to the person who sent it to you. Use the first letter of your first name to answer each of the following. They have to be real places, names, things - nothing made up. Try to use different answers if the person in front of you had the same first initial- which by the way is hard if you already have read their answers! You can not use your own name for the boy/girl names.

1. What is your name: Pete
2. A 4 letter word: Pick
3. A vehicle: Pick-up
4. A city: Portsmouth
5. A boy's name: Paul
6. A girl's name: Pippa
7. Alcoholic Drink: Port
8. An occupation: Postman
9. Type of Clothing: Pantaloons
10. A celebrity: Paul Daniels
11. A food: Pasta 'n' Sauce
12. Something found in a bathroom: Perfume
13. Reason for being late: Passed out on the tram and ended up at the depot
14. Something you shout: Pint, please, barman!
15. An animal: Platypus
16. A body part: Patella
17. Word to describe yourself: Pedantic

It's bad enough that they charge you $8/hour, but to give you a cut-down version of Internet Exploder 6 where you're allowed one poxy window, reducing the amount of things you can do with the Internets dramatically in that short period of time that you have is really extracting the Michael.

Thankfully there are such things as web-based SSH clients that allow me to connect to a computer at home and access email, web, etc., in a GNU/Screen session, but it's not ideal.

Well... time's up. I'll let you know all about our holiday when we get back to Melbourne at the weekend.

Hello,
Greetings from AUSTRALIA .
I have high interest in you product which iwill want to order by mail,i
will make payment to you by credit card(visa/mastercard) and
i want you to quote me on .....
which i willsend to you later after confirming this mail
MY DELIVERY ADDRESS
130 melbourne central
MELBURNE ,
NSW,
AUSTRALIA
Also, I experience difficulties when it comes to getting items to
myaddress here in Australia, It would best if you contact the shipperwhich
i used in the past.(bringingworld@h..., you can alsonotify them
with my customer
id# SA32051272L.
Regards
Mary

I can see why Mary is experiencing difficulties with getting items (whatever they may be, the email isn't very clear) to her address. You see, Melbourne (with an 'o') hasn't been in the state of New South Wales since the State of Victoria was established in the mid nineteenth century.

Under Hardy's predecessor, Gutsy Gibbon the connection to our HTPC (which is still running Windows XP Media Center Edition) had been a little flaky, which meant that often I would transfer files between the two using an SD card rather than simply copying them using smbfs.

It turns out that smbfs has been deprecated in Hardy and the time has come for me to move over to CIFS. This was actually pretty simple, but I understand some people have struggled with the conversion, so I thought I'd document what I did here.

1. Unmount the old smbfs mounts for the last time:

           sudo umount -at smbfs
       

2. Grant all users full access to the mount point:

           chmod 777 /media/mountpoint
       

3. Update /etc/fstab to use cifs rather than smbfs, changing the masks to modes and ensuring that the octal modes have leading zeros, thus.

   Before:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        smbfs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,fmask=770,dmask=770,rw
           0       0

   After:

   //server/share     /media/mountpoint        cifs
           auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,rw
           0       0

4. Mount the CIFS mounts:

       sudo mount -vat cifs
       

And that's it: fast and easy!

No email, no Google Reader, no Scrabble, no instant messaging or Twittering and no Skype for a whole twenty-four hours. How will I cope?

The day after is, of course May the Fourth, which will mean lots of photo-taking. It should be a good weekend!