Lost & Found

It's lunchtime on 1st December and I've escaped from the cricket for an hour or two (doubt i'll miss much - it seems normal service is continuing with England on a paltry 43-2 having won the toss and decided to bat) to catch up on a bit of work back in UKLand. I'm delighted to report that my domain/email nightmare seems to be over. It would appear that the ISP in question, UK2 bless 'em, have not been enjoying much fun of late:

From: UK2
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:18:04 +0000
To: Mat Lemmings
Subject: Network Update from UK2

Dear UK2 Customer,
You may have experienced some network accessibility issues yesterday, if so I would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened.
UK2 were the victim of an incident called "IP Hijacking" which means that another organisation (an Indonesian ISP in fact) stole a part of the IP address space which belonged to UK2. This is a very rare occurrence and is due to the unrestricted nature and varying levels of security in some parts of the Internet (read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking). The impact was that some customers traffic was routed incorrectly, causing sporadic network downtime, delays and in a minority of cases the loss of data.

May I apologise for this inconvenience and re-assure that you that the UK2 team worked extremely hard to identify and rectify this problem, and all services were fully operational and back to normal last night. We also took immediate action to reinforce our network even further.
I would like to re-iterate that everything is now under control and that all services are fully operational and back to normal.

If you have any further questions or issues, please do not hesitate to contact our support team by raising a ticket via http://support.uk2.net/.

Kind regards

Ditlev Bredahl
Managing Director, UK2

The journey from Queensland over to South Australia was not the best -- I found the first flight (Brisbane-Sydney) a little too bumpy for my liking (I've travelled God knows how many hundreds of thousands of air miles in my life and I still don't enjoy the bit between take-off and landing very much) and then Qantas go and ruin their excellent first impressions by forgetting to send our luggage on to Adelaide. Fortunately it only spent a couple of hours at Sydney before being forwarded and was delivered to us just before midnight. The upside was we all got Qantas overnight kits - so we're all kitted out with airline T-Shirts and pyjama shorts now. May come in handy for something, I suppose. Something to change into next time there's a session in Chandler's hot tub if nothing else.

We're renting a fantastic split-level house in Maslin Beach, which is about 45 minutes south of the city. The views are fantastic and the beach is great [and features SA's only nudist bathing 800m South, which seems to have pleased Hoopy ;-)]. Even better, it's only a 10-minute drive to the metro station at Noarlunga, from which trains run to Adelaide several times an hour, meaning the door2door commute to the stadium only takes one hour. There a sea views from most parts of the house and there's a nice breeze along the coast which makes the daytime temperature (around 34 yesterday) somewhat more bearable than in Brisbane.

Having the same accommodation for 14 days is really nice -- we've actually been able to unpack and, gasp, *hang clothes up* and *put things in drawers* so we can actually FIND them. Having a washing machine and dryer on tap makes a big difference too. It's just like being at home really, save for the freezing cold, pissing rain and floods. Can't imagine why I wanted a holiday at all.

The first gold star of the holiday is awarded to Hoopy - he's now a fortnight down without a cigarette. I've had one, so on that basis a packet of 20 will last about 9 months. Be interesting to see how we do once Ali & the boys have returned to UKLand and the evening beer sessions resume in earnest.

I'm still hoping to get across to Tasmania to visit friends but if that happens it now won't be until between Perth & Melbourne, just a couple of days before Christmas.

Whilst Mike, Hoopy & I are at the Adelaide Oval today, Ali and Chaz are exploring (shopping centres, it would seem, based on Ali's SMS texts so far). Seems that Ali has found out about a local skydiving place, so we could be saying Adios to her and Hoops after all.

Vicar : "So, for the service, what were Alan's last words?"
Me : "Fuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkkkkk......"

Best get back to the ground now, Australia could well be batting...