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Today was a DIY day. I designed and built this enclosure for the blue tongue skinks this morning. Start to finish around 2.5 hours.

The base and sides are medium density fibreboard as are the end and centre pieces. the bottom is braced with 3x2 batons that also work as feet.

The centre top piece is a bit of MDF, and the end mesh pieces are bits of an old bird cage that was lying around in the rubbish heap to be taken to the tip. Now it forms the essential part of letting light in and keeping our snakes and stopping the skinks from escaping. One end is hinged ad allows easy access to the skinks while the other end is fixed but has two openings in it.

Job well done.

Oh and Heidi helped Tim the Toolman as well.

Life has been going by too fast to write about it. Sorry about that – but sometimes it happens.

Here's a quick summary of the last few weeks.

• Major software development project that the Jethro team has been working on coming to the point where it is to be installed at the clients for testing. Now in testing, bug fixing and finalisation stages. This has been a massive project and taken almost every weekend for the last 2 months.
• Another software development job coming to completion this week.
• Firming up new contracts with clients so as to ensure a steady income stream for potential new full time staff.
• Finalising the hand over to Gordon of the Web Services Management. He now handles most of this on his own.
• Installation of two new servers and decommission of three old ones. Migrating all the users, setting up remote access for all our staff and troubleshooting the inevitable problems.
• Basketball coaching – preparing for a competition in September.
• Football – have had to skip due to some niggly injuries and inability to play.
• Photography – Nelson Lai came to me to take me through a professional shooting tutorial, followed by a real live model shoot and then post shoot editing techniques in Photoshop. Wow what an amazing day. I have started editing photos and will slowly display them as I get them done. There are already some up on facebook for those who connect to me there, and the public  flickr and redbubble accounts get the better quality versions.
• Family – with so much work on I have prioritised family time over other activities (including blogging). Hence why I have not gone to football training and skipped a game I would dearly have loved to play in. We went to see Ice Age 3 the other day and have also gone to game zone, gone to the bike riding park and spent a lot of time watching Masterchef together.

From the bike park

Windows 7 – the news keeps on coming in!

• How low can you go? What is the minimum hardware requirement for Windows 7? SO far the record is a Pentium II with a 266 MHz CPU, 96MB of memory, and a 4MB graphics card.
• Nick Hodge is in charge of getting 58 palettes of HP Netbooks preloaded with Windows 7 for Tech Ed 2009 delegates! – i could go – but I’m going sailing instead!
• Susan Bradley has webcasts on using the XP mode in Win7
• Upgrade and retail pricing was announced for Win7 for USA and Australia this week.