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.

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).

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.

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).

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).