Something I often wonder - and maybe even gives an interesting insight into my personality - is the answer to the question "What would you be doing if you weren't working with computers?"

Some things which appeal and which I can imagine myself doing are:

- Driving trains, not suburban tincans which I'm sure I could do but don't know if I'd really want to, but large heavy freight trains across possibly vast distances.

- Winemaking. I love wine, and, combined with my University study in chemistry, probably makes me someone who could easily slot in there.

Despite the fact that things have been "going to change" for a period of months now, I don't think I could have ever imagined how things are now.

- 6 months ago I made the decision was made to shift (yet again)

- 3 1/2 months ago it actually happened and I boarded a plane bound for Sydney

- 3 months ago I got a good job (after starting to get a bit dismayed at the lack of responses, an interview came up at short notice - and I got the job)

- Just over 2 months ago I moved into my place at Arncliffe and a few days later...

I've just this weekend gotten everything configured and set up on my server and I'm now officially the NZ mirror of the squid-cache.org website.

You can find the site here.

It'll be interesting to see just how much traffic it generates. For NZ users it should be much quicker than anything offsite as my ISP has connectivity to both the Auckland and Wellington Peering Exchanges where most NZ ISP's share traffic for free (and have low latency usually ethernet connectivity to each other).

I've had a number of dealings with the cisco TAC over the last few years - mostly as an employee of a cisco Premier or Gold Partner where I've needed the TAC occasionally for troubleshooting or helping me resolve problems. In the past we have for one or another reason tried to keep the number of TAC cases opened to a minimum as this affects the discount we get from cisco in the coming year when we buy gear from them. That is why I would be lucky if I've opened 3 cases a year in the last 3 years.

After some time living in Auckland, I thought perhaps we should finally go and visit Westfield Railway yards. This is the main Auckland yard where most of the shunting and rail movements happen so I figured it would be a good place to see some real trains.

We got all dressed to go - it wasn't a real nice day, Liam wore his hi-viz vest which we had fixed up for him. It's a normal S sized vest which has had basically every dimenstion taken up so that it fits. He looks very cute in it. Here's a picture of him here.

Other pictures mostly of the trains themselves are up on my gallery, here.

A few weeks ago I bought a brand new cisco 7941 phone to replace and old ATA at home which we use to call Sydney a lot. It's a whole lot cheaper than using Telecom, our NZ carrier, for these calls, and the setup has worked fairly well with the ATA. However as I was able to get a real phone at a good price through work I decided I would do so before circumstances changed and I had to pay full retail.

Sarah got onto this band a few weeks ago and got me to cough up for some CDs from this band. So we got them, and I coughed and swallowed the $100 price a bit begrudgingly - not knowing what I was being asked to pay for.

However now that we have them I must admit that at least one of these CDs is a brilliant piece of creativity that I have found a real pleasure to listen to - and I've stolen the CD so I can listen to it all in the car.

Ariels is one of those upbeat CDs that has simply superb use of chords, bass and lyrics. It's easy to listen to but shows immense talent on the part of the authors. The lyrics are also quite good ("Handstand in the grass" out of "The Waters Deep" for some reason is one line that I always remember).

As a Network Engineer, I occasionally find myself trying to figure out reverse wildcard bits for Cisco router access lists. For some reason Cisco use these reverse wildcards instead of normal ones in ACLs.

That's fine, except I can never work them out in my head as I know the most basic ones by heart, the slightly less basic ones I can calculate in my head, but the tricky ones are a bit hard going.

Well tonight I did need to work one out (for Microsoft, 65.52.0.0/14) and so found a tool to do it, and posted it up on my website so that it runs on my server for anyone to access.

Go to http://ipcalc.reub.net/ and check it out. It's very simple but does the job wonderfully.

Over the last few months the amount of spam I have been receiving has been increasing, so I thought I'd have a tidy up and try keep more of it out. Fortunately Thunderbird/Spamassassin has been doing a really good job of classifying spam as spam, and putting it in my junk folder.

I've now removed most of my catch-all domains in Postfix, so now if mail comes in to an address which I have *not* specifically configured, it will be rejected at the SMTP layer. This does not apply to addresses where I have suffixed a keyword after my name though - but a handful of those are now blocked too.

Also removed the contact to me at the bottom of each page. Use the contact form if you need to send me email, or just send to username reuben (at this domain name).

Someone asked me at the weekend what I thought about being a Dad. I answered at the time that I did enjoy it.

But I was thinking about it today. It's a big milestone, and it is something that I *really* do enjoy. I hope that the person I was speaking to didn't think that I was apathetic about it. I enjoy playing with my son, tipping him upside down, imitating his silly sentences and words, taking him out to look at the diggers working on the road, and buying him books. And I'm looking forward to him getting older, not least of all so that we can go out watching trains and other big machines together ;-)