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Tomorrow is a big day for The Kid. School starts again, so it’s her first day back as a grade 1 kid. A new set of classmates and a new teacher. She’ll do just fine though.

Also starting up tomorrow is the Friday afternoon basketball skills clinic for little kids. It isn’t an organised game — more of a basic skills session so that in a few years when she’s able to compete she’ll know what she’s doing. I actually think she’s more excited about the basketball than going back to school.

Our youngest has been kind of commando crawling and shuffling around for a good few weeks now, but she’s now started genuine 100% tummy-in-the-air crawling on all fours. I think we’ve probably got another 3 or 4 days of sanity left before nothing in the house is safe any more.

I’ve written a hacky little .NET utility that turns a JIRA workflow (exported as an XML file) into a JPG. It uses graphviz as the underlying graphing engine. If you can make use of this, you’re welcome to it. The file is a zipped VS2005 project (renamed to .DOC so WordPress lets me upload it). Download source code (17kb).

It’s Australia Day today. Central Goldfields Shire recognized the day with a series of speeches from the major, town dignitaries, and our special guest for the day, Channel 10′s Mike Larkan. We said hello to him, and Lisa spent some time watching the speeches talking to his wife and kids. A really nice family, and a truly professional presenter.

A number of people who live in the shire went through their citizenship ceremony and became fully fledged Australians.

The shire also gave out a series of awards: one for community group of the year, one for young Australian of the year, and one for an overall Australian of the year.

Once that was done, the final thing to do was hand out a medallion to all of the kids that were born in the shire during the year, so our youngest got one. Today she’s exactly 8 months old, and she had a good time looking around, listening to the band, and wearing dad’s Akubra.

There’s a gallery up on SmugMug.

Tomorrow, 26 January, is Australia Day. It was on this day in 1788 that Captain Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney Cove to establish a colonial penal colony. Since then we’ve lived through drought, flooding rain, rum rebellions and a civil war that lasted about 20 minutes, all the while loving our vast plains, far horizons, beautiful beaches and an extremely laid back lifestyle.

To honor Australia Day there’s a bit of a celebration at work. The idea is that you dress yourself (or your workstation) using things that you feel are representative of Australia. On my desk is a stuffed emu wearing my Akubra, and my Drizabone is hanging over the chair behind me. One of the project managers I often deal with came in wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, shorts, thongs and lugging an esky. The finance department is decorated with eucalyptus branches, Australian flags and green and gold ribbons. Some of the HR people have their faces painted green and gold.

My team-mate Nick turned up looking like he usually does, but claimed that he was doing the Australian thing of turning up late for work and doing nothing all day. He was planning to be truly Australian by acting as cannon fodder for the British, but it was too hard to work out how to do that within the context of an 8 hour work day.

I bought the camera in and I’ll try and get some shots during the morning team of what should be traditional Australian food.

Is it just me, or is today really, really humid? I’m sitting at my desk in what should be air conditioned comfort and I’m covered in perspiration. Maybe I’m just riddled with disease. Hard to tell. Still have my sniffle from earlier this week.

Just shut up.

I just finished watching Deep Water, a film about Donald Crowhurst. He was a competitor in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single handed, round the world yacht race. There’s a trailer for the film on the the official film website.

Warning – spoiler follows.

In order to compete he had entered into a financial arrangement with a local businessman, as this was the only way he could fund the boat he needed. The contractual arrangement was such that if he didn’t finish the race he would need to repurchase the boat from his financier.

He was extremely under-prepared. His sailing skills probably weren’t up to the job, he didn’t have any real experience in the open water, and his boat was only just constructed in time. His overall lack of preparation caught up with him during the race, and he ended up falling far behind the rest of the field. He then started misreporting his position and taking a shortcut back to the start line.

The final section of the film is about his mental state unravelling as he realised that he couldn’t continue with the lie about where he was, because if he did win his logbooks would be scrutinized and the game would be up. He was caught between the prospect of financial ruin or shame and humiliation. His only option was to finish in second place and hope that his logbooks weren’t looked at too closely. That option disappeared when the boat in front of him sank, virtually handing him victory. Knowing that he would be publicly humiliated he turned his boat around.

It was later found by a cargo ship, but he wasn’t on board. His body was never found.

The photographic records he left behind, along with his journal and logbooks (both accurate and falsified) paint a picture of how the human mind can come undone in situations of extreme stress and isolation.

It would be easy to dismiss him as simply being a cheat, and although he did that, the film left me feeling sad for him and the family he left behind. The pressure of the situation he found himself in simply overtook him, and he was left in a position where he could see no clear way forward. It was a very moving film.

I had a little bit of a sore throat yesterday, and didn’t really think much of it. Today, however, I woke up just after 4am with a really, really sore throat. I feel like death warmed up. Great.

The Kid went to a birthday party at the weekend. I stayed and photographed the event. I like doing this, because it frees the family up to enjoy the party with their kids and not worry about having to take photos at the same time.

This was a difficult shoot, however. The light was ugly. It ran from late morning through to mid afternoon, and was held in a 40′x80′ shed lit by having two huge sliding doors that were wide open. The blend of bright sunlight coming from two doors into a large area that was much darker inside was a real challenge. I ended up using the external flashhead but the obvious side effect is that the shots were naturally vignetted because of light falloff in such a large area.

I still got some reasonable photos (they’re up on SmugMug) but they’re not as good as I was hoping for.