Joining the Society

As part of a belated birthday gift, my wife is signing me up for the local astronomical society. I'm quite excited about this. Apart from the usual monthly meetings and newsletters that astronomical societies offer these days, they also have their own private obervatory out west of the city (about an hour's drive). The observatory is the home to a 12" reflector and a 16" Schmidt-Cassegrain. You can get trained on these two instruments and then book time on them for visual or photographic applications. That will take care of any aperture fever I might get over the next few years! The observatory site itself also has an observing area, consisting of multiple tables with power points, red lamps and WiFi. This means that even if you don't get checked out on the bigger scopes or someone else is using them, you can take your scope and set up at one of these sites. I think it used to be a missle base. Anyway, for $25.00 a year for membership it seems like yet another bargain!

In other big news, my son FINALLY pulled off a Number 2 in the dunny/toilet this morning. He'd been asking for nappies every time he wanted to go and this morning I had enough. So I plonked him down on the dunny seat and followed some good advice I had received (which was to promise lovely toys if he'd do it!) and despite the fact that he held me for dear life, it just plopped right out! So I literally called out to the world that he'd did it (which put a hell of a smile on his face) and this afternoon we're off to Walmart for a new racing car.

My Socceroos played again this morning. Admittedly, not many of them have been turning up to practice or games, but we got five out of the six players this morning and gave it our best shot. Naturally, the other team had super ninja soccer player on their side who scored goal after goal after goal, which pretty much demoralized my little band but we got a few in ourselves.

It's also two months into the new job and I am just loving it. Having to put in some serious overtime but when you love what you do then that's not a problem. The software we build for the airlines operations guys is really impressive, and now that I've seen more of it as my development teams have exposed me to more of it, I remain thoroughly impressed by it all. I was able to explain a fair bit of it to my wife last night, including how we are looking at tracking flights real time via event processing/updating and then determining probable future flight disruptions or legal issues, and she was impressed too. I've also come in somewhat at the executive level so I'm being taken very seriously by the other VPs and managers, which is a really nice change from the last gig.