The really big news from this week is that Julie has been offered a 6 months contract as a Temporary Employee by General Dynamics, which means that she will be employed directly by them without going through the head hunters. And she will also be paid for public holidays, as well as the standard (for Australia) 4 weeks a year of annual leave. She will have to sign a thingy for Defence to say that she undertakes not to enter any classified area in the office (namely the conference room) or handle any classified material. She is just so chuffed that these people are so willing to go right out of their way to keep her on.

A very big thank-you to Doug from General Dynamics for inviting us to his place last night for dinner with a few other work colleagues & wives. We had a fantastic night. Doug is in the apartment on the north-eastern corner of the top floor of the new My Space building on Northbourne Avenue in the city. Nice!

The rest of the month has thundered past, as it seems to do these days. I went with the guys from work to donate blood & decided to get back into the plasma donation program. Because the red cells are not depleted in the process, donations can be made as frequently as every 2 weeks, although I've decided to make it every 3 weeks. Boy the process has changed since I did it 30 years ago. Back then, they would get you to sign a sticker with all of your details on it, which was then stuck onto the donation bag. Then take off about a litre of blood, switch onto a saline drip while the bag went off into the centrifuge to separate the cells from the plasma, they would then manually express the plasma into a second bag & return the red cells. Check the details & signature to make sure that it was yours, then mix some saline in with the cells & transfuse them back in. I should note at this point that the centrifuge operated at 10 degrees C (about 50 F), so the stuff coming back in was nice & cold! Which was great for catching a train home in the middle of a Sydney summer. These days, it's an all-in-one machine with lots of little pumps & control mechanisms. It mixes anti-coagulant into the main line, puts the whole blood through a centrifugal filter, immediately drops the plasma into the collection bag & puts the red cells into a collection reservoir. Whenever the red cell reservoir is full, the machine stops, then reverses the process & transfuses the cells back into the arm. It also stops for things like clearing the filter, & has numerous checking points to make sure that only plasma is collected, no air gets into the system, things are flowing correctly, etc. Quite a painless procedure really, just takes a whole lot longer than a regular donation.

I have also spent quite a bit of time developing scripts that work with Google Maps to produce custom made map images & satellite photo drill-downs. Click here to start. Then Julie got all excited about the results & we have worked on putting in all of the old addresses for both of us, as well as places where we have worked, lived or visited. Colour codes on the main pages are: Blue:Julie, Green:Rodney, Purple:Both, Red:Other. Colour codes on the pages that are date sensitive are: Red:50's, Orange:60's, Yellow:70's, Green:80's, Blue:90's, Purple:Since then. And on the recent travels page, the colour codes just run in order of the rainbow.

Both the grandchildren turned 1 this month, but we didn't make it to either of the celebrations.

We went to do the trial test for our Provisional licences - rock up, pay $10 & do the test, which includes riding around cones, stopping correctly, doing a U-turn, an emergency stop & an avoidance action. I passed, although I hit one of the cones & put my foot down in the U-turn, but Julie failed so badly that the guy suggested she take some private lessons. We were talking to others who were there for their real tests & they told us where the practice areas are marked out in car parks around town. We'll be doing lots of practising!