I’m Peter Lyle

Just a quick update to confirm that I am not in fact dead.

Thinking at this stage a use for this blog might be to document the final weeks of my honours thesis, because of course in the final weeks of any sort of epic dissertative (word not found?) work one needs to have epic procrastination and distraction. I have no doubt that my house will be incredibly tidy and everything non-thesis in my life will be up-to-date by the time the due date comes around. As to whether I’ll have something to submit, who knows.
(more…)

It has been a while. I’ve been working hard, both at work and at uni. The semester is over (for now) and I’ve just arrived back from holidays to the mainland (think nice warm beach, by contrast I’m back in the cold and wet).

I can now say I’ve been exposed to a ‘proper’ game of Talisman (a fun board game, albeit for the high ‘chance’ factor) with errata and both expansions. Thanks to the wonders of chance I managed to have 3 characters killed in a short space of time, meaning I had the pleasure of checking out a number of the characters added in the expansion.
(more…)

Like many others, I’ve been a big fan of the Tiki Bar podcast, so it’s great to see some friends of mine are making the official game Day of the Tiki. (more…)

Every now and then I have some success at something. This time two of my fellow classmates and I have scored AUC honours scholarships, which is fantastic for all of us.
The University of Tasmania has been doing particularly well over the last year or so in terms of participation and application for AUC events, which has generally been rather awesome, and something I hope to encourage. (more…)

Seems the airport connection issue is resolved. Downgrading and upgrading the firmware did the trick. I am however down to 1 external hard drive providing me with a mini and not-hugely-fast NAS off the USB port of the extreme (I say slow as it seem like a bad idea to manage photo libraries remotely over a wireless network, but I’m not quite sure of the best alternative to this, given its current and ever-expanding space requirements). The second hard drive is either at fault (it’s a smaller 2.5″ external drive that requires 2 usb connections), or the powered USB hub through which it was connected. (more…)

Seems some people have experienced some odd behaviour on their Airport Extreme’s with the latest firmware. Downgrading and re-upgrading looks like it may just have resolved the issue for me. On the flip side I had a scare coming home last night to add photos from the recent maclab dinner party, seems I’ve confused iPhoto (or perhaps it’s just me), and my largish collection (stored externally due to hdd space limitations) seems to have ‘disappeared’, and the iPhoto Library bundle seems to think it’s a couple of factors smaller than I’d expect. Viewing the package contents reveals it’s all still there, hence the confusion. (more…)

So, bit of a splurge this week, installing a couple of airports, both domestic (express) and international (extreme) in my house. Didn’t bother with planning approval, and now have a total of 4 wifi networks derived from the word ‘intertron’.
Airport Extreme, upstairs, hosting a couple of hard drives for time machine and network file stores.
Airport Express, downstairs, allowing me to press play on my iphone, which presses play on my macbook pro, which makes the good speakers produce noise, which makes me relax. (more…)

I’ve had Manning tell me many times this week that I look tired, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve always felt it, but he may indeed be correct.
On the flip side, I’ve had to deal with some changes at work outside of my day-to-day stuff, non-work meetings with supervisors, not-objecting to being voted onto the TUCS exec committee, and other unrelated project updates.
Overall, I think I’ve given up a week of life for nearly a week of work, almost breaking parity. (more…)

So I’m sitting here minding my own business and chatting to friends on IRC when Gentle Nicholas decided he’d share with us all the wonders of Bacon in all it’s glory. My wife’s immediate reaction was to forcibly close the lid of my laptop and threaten vegetarianism.

It has been alleged that a significant number of people will be receiving a cash handout from the Federal Government sometime in the not too distant future to the tune of 900AUD (or thereabouts). Rather than look at any the political debate that surrounds this, I’d like to take a brief look at the more important question: Which camera lens should I buy? (more…)