Our apartment is perfectly positioned, according to me. It runs east and west, with our bedrooms on the east side, with large windows and sliding glass doors and separate balconies. Then on the west side is our kitchen and living room, and another balcony. It’s here that we get to spend the evening and watch the sunset every night. Some are quite flashy, and some are just a little bit of hazy yellow in a perfectly clear sky before the sun drops away over the outback. The best of them make me wish I had captured them, so I have actually tried a couple times. It’s hard to know when they’re going to really light up, but this one is alright. It’s a lot longer than the sunset itself, but I thought the time lapse of the people running about was interesting too.

Tags: Australia, Life, UQ, Video by David Graff
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I have a new way of showing images here, and I just want to give it a test. I have grabbed a few really old photos from my trip to Hawaii in 2003.

Tags: Photos by David Graff
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It’s a gorgeous Saturday afternoon here. It feels a lot like a summer day at the lake, it’s quite dry and sunny. You can smell the hot pine trees in the sun and the grass is a little dry and crunchy. The clouds are like cotton balls and constantly changing. I have a little taste of it for everyone below:

This was shot from my balcony today. I feel pretty fortunate to be living in a place like this, all the while there has been a mass exodus of my belongings at my house, with great thanks to my friends.

Tags: Australia, Video by David Graff
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The latest version of Ubuntu Linux was released last night.  I hopped on the download band[width]wagon right away, as I usually do for Ubuntu, every six months.  They put out new editions every April and October.  This new one is called Hardy Heron, and is numbered 8.04 which really just corresponds to the 4th month of ’08.

The previous edition was 7.10 and called Gutsy Gibbon.  The developers of the distribution have taken some very impressive large strides towards usability recently.  The big step in Gutsy was the ability to natively read and write to NTFS partitions.  Not really something you’d think about until it was a problem.  Gutsy was great, but on my new laptop it didn’t take full advantage of the hardware.  Specifically the WIFI didn’t work properly out of the box.  It would connect easily enough to open wifi hotspots but not at all to encrypted ones.  The issue was the chipset (Intel 4965AGN) was just a bit too new for the driver to make it into the kernel, the core part of the linux OS when Gutsy was released.  There was a way to monkey around and get it to work by adapting the available windows driver, but I haven’t had the time or patience to do it this year.  This time however the driver is there and works with no fuss at all.    The other big difference is a better utilization of my graphics card and system resources.  A small but significant unexpected improvement is that my extra mouse buttons now work, making web surfing a lot easier, and the transfer back and forth from Winblows easier.

These few small changes could make Linux my main desktop, only switching to M$ for minor unsupported things.  I don’t have time to do a harddrive install right now though.  It will probably be June before that happens.  It only takes 15 minutes, so I do have the time, but I don’t have time for any unforseen complications!  So I will wait and see.  Right now I will have to suffice with the LiveCD.  If anyone wants to check it out you can download it and burn it for free.  Just go to www.ubuntu.com and  grab it.  Throw it in the cd drive and get ready to experience OS freedom!  It doesn’t change anything on your system unless you actually install it.  Please be careful though.  I have found that if you are aware of a viable option, it’s way easier to hate the ways of Redmond.

Tags: Internet by David Graff
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Just studying a little here, it’s grey and cloudy.  It rained this morning but hopefully it will dry out over the day because I play footy tonight… We’re not very good but we do have fun and it’s good to run around a bit.  Despite thinking I was going to die the first time I played, I now could go for a bit longer games, I just start getting into it and it’s over.

Tags: Uncategorized by David Graff
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A year ago I wrote my MCAT.  I had no idea what was about to happen and how my life was going to change.  It has been quite a head spin.  More at the beginning of the year than now, as I’m starting to feel like I know my way around and what’s going on.  I have spent just over three months here now and am getting back into feeling like a student, and at the same time am starting to feel like I’m able to really get my head into the game for school.  It feels good to finally have the motor running.  Now it’s time to cover some serious ground cause my mid year exam is coming up at the beginning of June.  It’s the first written exam I will have and is the only one I’ll have before finals, which makes it feel like a big hurdle to jump.

Tags: Medicine, UQ by David Graff
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…since updating things, but that’s just because it’s been a bit busy… I held off posting before to get the pictures around, and realized like many things in life, it’s just gotta go now or never. So out they go. I found out recently that my boat sold as well, which is the sad end to a dream I had no realistic way of supporting at this point in my life. I guess in a roundabout way, I’m working on my new boat now… it’s just going to take a while to materialize. Like decades…

Goodbye Sally…

Tags: Photos by David Graff
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It was my  last night with Mum and Dad in Australia tonight, they fly out on Friday morning. After taking some time to finish up my PBL question (a weekly investigation into part of the problems we work on) We headed down to Southbank, and walked around the lagoon. We walked all over, including the market streets and up and down the water in the park.

After the walk we headed to Ahmet’s, which is a Turkish restaurant in the area. The meal took a long time to arrive, which was good, as we were just looking to chat and be together a little bit more. They have been a real blessing to me here, and I am so glad they were able to come down. Thanks so much Mum and Dad!

Tags: Australia by David Graff
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