Well I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Years Day.
Sienna and I went with Catherine to her sister’s place for lunch. We got there after 10am and stayed until after 4pm. From there, we headed to my uncle’s place and had dinner and caught up with my cousins as well. Sienna had fun with Catherine’s nephew as he was closest to her age out of all the kids. The two girls are in their teens (iirc). Sienna and I both got presents we were not expecting from Catherine’s family. We were pleasantly surprised. We didn’t stay long at my uncle’s as I was very tired from not sleeping well the night before.
Striker and Alison arrived on Boxing Day afternoon and we wanted to take them to Springbrook to show them the mountains and waterfalls and walking trails, but it has been raining since Christmas Day. Springbrook got 300mm rain over the few days at the start of this week.
We didn’t do much for NYE or New Year’s day. Striker and I had to get up early on NYE morning (I woke around 5:30am) and drive to the airport hotel to pick up his dad and the ute, drop off his dad at the International Airport then drive about 100km to drop off the ute, then back again. We picked up Catherine on the way back and stopped at my place for lunch. Striker and Alison went out for a few hours and Catherine and I went back to her place. I came back not long after to let Striker and Alison back in the house. We went to bed early-ish. There were no fireworks in the Brisbane/Gold Coast/Ipswich areas any way due to the rain and high winds.
Over the last few days since the weekend I’ve been putting together a new Linux server. I’m using Catherine’s old Soundblaster brand Pentium III 933 with 256Mb RAM. I tested PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint before reading a lot of webpages and finally settling on Simply Mepis. It seems like a very good distribution. It has codecs for most multimedia, comes pretty much complete with applications to do most things, uses the Debian repositories and works well. I made a post on the MepisLovers forum regarding my experiences looking for and finally settling on a Linux distribution. It’s not complete, but more of a summary of what went on. Check it out if you are at all interested.
A while ago I joined the Freecycle mailing list for Brisbane and Ipswich. You should check it out as people give away all sorts of really cool and useful stuff. In fact, I have a lot of things I need to clear out of my place and will be offering them some time this year to whomever needs them. Recycle things you no longer need or get things for free you do need 
