Dear all,

You are quick, and generous. You are kind but brutal. I thought that calls for me to have my legs waxed were harsh, but you’ve quickly rallied together and raised the extra $500 I suggested would be enough for this to happen. And now it must. I have to say that I am dreading this.

Now there are calls for a "BSC". I’m sorry to have to disappoint but despite my hirsuteness, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I don’t have a hairy back. And since neither the ‘sack’ nor the ‘crack’ will be photographed in the name of good taste, this would be a pointless (yet painful, I imagine) exercise.

Since you have reached the $1,000 target I feel duty bound to offer more so that you might do the same. This time I am doubling the target to in return for my shaven arms and chest.

I feel I should mention that this is not an event that I am undertaking lightly. I really, really don’t like shaving my face in the morning. To shave more than that is a huge ask, so please drop by my profile page, give generously and help me help the Leukaemia Foundation in World’s Greatest Shave.

As ever, I’m deeply thankful for your support, be it financial or emotional!

Much love;

–paj

P.S: If there are any Olympic cyclists, swimmers or cross-dressers out there, I have a burning question: Do you use the same shaving products for your face as your body hair or do you use a products aimed at women?

I don’t like sending out emails to large lists of people, but sometimes needs must and yesterday I sent out two mass emails to people in order to gain more sponsorship monies for the Leukaemia Foundation.

Those emails are clearly paying off. Rather generously, you have taken my total past the $500 target and two three things must now happen. One, when the time comes I must shave my legs as well as my bonce. Two, I have to raise my fundraising target. Three, I have to provide you with some incentive to keep giving. Five, you must continue to sponsor me!

It is with great trepidation that I announce that if you help me raise $1000, I shall answer your repeated calls to not only shave my legs, but wax them too. What have I let myself in for?

So please now pop by my profile page and show your support by leaving words of encouragement, advice on how to wax(!) and most importantly a donation. Every single dollar counts. Once you have done this, please pass on the message to one friend or family member.

Deep thanks to all of you.

I forget if I mentioned that I’m taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave on 14 March 2009, but I am, so there and I’m looking at ways to raise more money.

Yesterday my delightful wife asked me if I was going to just shave at home or if I’m going to have an event to mark the occasion. To be honest, I’m yet to decide.

Please take a moment to pop over to my profile page and leave a message as to how you think I should execute the shave. Perhaps you’d pay good money to use the clippers?

While you’re over at my profile page, I encourage you to drop some coins in the collection tin.

Many thanks to all that have already donated and to those still to donate.

I have been delighted, so far, with the generosity of those of you who have donated to the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave, that I mentioned recently, am mentioning now, and shall continue to mention until I’ve extracted every penny that you can afford to give!

My friend B left the following comment on my profile page:

There are many people out there who would pay good money for you to shave your legs. But I’d hope you’d wax too….?

If those many people are reading this, perhaps they would pay that good money of which B speaks and sponsor me?

As for waxing… how much is that worth to you?

Heartfelt thanks to those who have sponsored me and to those of you who will sponsor me!

On a different note, I have been asked to note that things aren’t rosy over at Facebook. Frankly, I can’t stand the site, as I demonstrated by deleting my Facebook account last month.

Dear treasured blog reader,

I really need a haircut! But I’m putting it off for another month, because I’m taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave on 14 March 2009.

Please take a moment to look at my Profile Page. While you’re there, I’d like you to support me by making a secure online donation using your credit card. Or whomsoever’s you have to hand!

I’m told that every hour of every day, at least one person in Australia is diagnosed with leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma and that every two hours, someone loses their life to blood cancer. So, please help me raise as much as I can for the Leukaemia Foundation. Their vital work provides patients with practical support during their long and tough treatment, as well as funding important research.

Photographic evidence shall be shared.

Many, many thanks in advance!

I understand that reports of the local bushfires has reached the international news.

Thank you to those from overseas who have been concerned for us. We’re fine, thankfully.

It’s hard to know what to say. It’s devastating that so many properties and livelihoods are being destroyed and people are dying essentially due to the weather. Some of the fires have been started deliberately, which I’m still finding incredibly hard to comprehend.

Some of our friends have been affected who have families and properties out in Country Victoria. Here in the suburbs we can’t even smell the smoke, which is very fortunate.

For those wondering what they can do to help those affected by these horrendous fires, please visit the Australian Red Cross website and make a donation. If you can, Donate Blood (we cannot, because we’re POMs and may have Mad Cow Disease).

This weekend I’ve re-started on a website that I was meant to have finished ages ago. Now that I have all of those extra minutes per day having extracted myself from Facebook’s clutches, I’ve resolved to get it finished and get it finished I shall.

Rather than re-inventing wheels, like I did with my own website, I’ve opted to build this site using Textpattern. So far it seems pretty straightforward. This is ideal as I don’t intend to maintain the new website (another good reason not to hand-crafting my own Perl, PHP or Python).

One thing that did take a while to get working, however, is getting ‘Clean URLs’, those without question marks and ampersands all over the place, to work. Thankfully like so many things, this is a solved problem. For future reference, the solution was easy for the virtual host on my MacBook Pro, with just one AllowOverride line needed in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf…

<Directory "/path/to/website">
    Order Deny,Allow 
    Allow from all 
    AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>

Incidentally, I’m keeping both /path/to/website and /private/etc/apache2 under source control with Git, as I am doing with pretty much everything I do these days. Git is version control done correctly. Thank you, Linus!

Happy new year, folks!

Here’s a little utility I knocked together yesterday to decrease the number of key-presses needed to switch between unit test and production code:

toggle_unit_tests : plug-in for toggling between source and unit test files

I’ve tested it with C++ and Python and it works nicely, but should work well with other languages too.

If you find yourself doing TDD in Python using Vim, you may find the following page useful:

Integration with PyUnit testing framework.

That is all.

I’ve deleted my Facebook account. Hip, hip, hooray!

Having never much liked Facebook, it bugged me that it still occupied far too many minutes of my days. I complain too much these days that I don’t have enough time to do this and that, so spending fewer minutes declining invitations to install applications letting me know who thinks I’d make a good rock star should mean that I can spend more minutes of my day playing bass. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

I appreciate that it’s a good method for some people to stay in touch, but there are many better (and in my opinion, more appropriate) ways to do this and they work for me, thank you very much.

Here’s a YouTube video that highlights some of my many pet hates about Facebook. FaceBook In Reality - idiotsofants.com and BBC’s The Wall.

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?