Your Mum's a Blog

What the Fuck is Wrong With You, Mike?

Living with ADHD for 50 years has been a wild ride.

adhd

What the Fuck is Wrong With You?

Hi! I’m Mike. I recently turned 50 years old, I’ve been an IT professional for about three decades now, I dropped out of school at age 15 (and again at 16, 17 and 32), and have lived in pretty much every housing situation on the spectrum from homeowner

Hiking the Lerderderg Gorge Circuit

When I left home on a slightly chilly Saturday morning, my only plan was “go for a walk somewhere” and I knew in the absence of any sudden…

hiking

Lerderderg Gorge Circuit

Latest UpdatesWhat the Fuck is Wrong With You?October 22, 2022While it’s been something that was obvious to me for for a very long time, it was only a month ago I was officially diagnosed with ADHD by an actual psychiatrist. Now that my diagnosis has been validated and

cars

RAV4 Sunroof Repair

The first thing I had to do with my pre-loved RAV4 was fix the sunroof, which leaked. The first step was to undo someone’s previous attempt at fixing it. A previous owner, faced with water coming in, had decided the best approach was to pour silicone sealant over every

Cape York

Hitting the Road

For some time now, and as documented on the blog here and there, I’ve been ticking off visiting some of the Extreme Points of Australia whenever an opportunity presented itself. I’ve also been accumulating long service leave at my current job for over a decade now, and I’

garden

Building a Better Wicking Bed

Last year, I hastily assembled a basic wicking bed in my garden, mostly using scraps of stuff I already had lying about. I think my biggest investments were a length of slotted agricultural drainage pipe and a couple of bags of sand. If you’re stumbling across this article without

Building a Better Wicking Bed

A cheap and low-maintenance garden bed for vegetables

beans

Building a Wicking Bed

One thing I know about myself at this point is that I only ever really learn anything by trying it and fucking up a few times. For me then, it’s best to keep the stakes really damn low the first few times so that starting over later isn’t

cheese

Coca-Cola Salad

Last week I saw a couple of people posting a recipe from and old cookbook, probably from sometime in the 1950s. It was short, and the title contained an unusual combination of things that don’t usually go together. Putting aside issues with the stretched (but not unprecedented) use of

Coca-Cola Salad

One man’s attempt to recreate a bizarre-sounding recipe

c64

How Many Computers is Enough?

When I broke my Commodore 64, it was the only computer I had. This meant that for years afterwards, I simply didn’t have a computer any more. I still encountered them from time to time of course. I’d visit friends, we’d stay up late playing games, and

c64

How I Broke My Commodore 64

If you didn’t read my last post, you’ll need to know that a) about 30 years ago I broke my beloved Commodore 64, and b) I recently bought a new one to pick up where I left off. I want to tell you how I broke my computer,

nostalgia

Nostalgic Computing

The Commodore 64 wasn’t my first computer, but it’s the one I got deepest into. My first was a VIC-20, I was still in primary school when I got it, and even then I managed to find it limiting – even if I didn’t fully grasp why. Still,

fdp

Tintinara Revisited

Tintinara In 1997, during a road trip to Adelaide, the greatest garage band in the world made a stopover in Tintinara and were not impressed by what they found. It’s getting a bit hazy now, but at some point Matt wandered off slightly with his guitar and came back

christmas

The Return of Cyberpope Moses

Back in 2002, I got what I claimed as “The Worst Present Ever” in a family Secret Santa gift exchange – a small figurine of Moses, complete with tablets. I have absolutely no history of religious interest, Moses isn’t really related to Christmas in the first place, and well … I

extreme point

Extremely South

Hiking to South Point You might also want to see Extreme Points and Me if you’re reading this. Spoiler warning: I made it. When my mate Ben said he was coming to town and suggested going for a walk, Wilsons Promontory was a pretty easy decision. We’d considered

extreme point

Extreme Points of Australia and Me

About ten years ago, I picked a fairly random ambition out of the air for no good reason. I decided to visit the extreme points of Australia for the hell of it – the northernmost, southernmost, highest, lowest … you get the idea. While I nearly visited a couple of them in

comedy

An Interview With Me

I don’t update my personal blog much these days, do I? I keep posting everywhere else but here, it’s not that nothing ever actually happens to me. I got interviewed on SYN last week about how I came to end up running Mad Dog Comedy and a bunch

authentication

XMPP Perfection

I just came across a post titled In search of XMPP perfection while researching some stuff, and it’s a pretty solid set of words that gels with my own feelings about the state of the XMPP network. You should go and read it if you’re interested in the

chinwag

ChinWag Lives

This article is part of an ongoing series of posts, there’s an index here. Well, after a bit of work I got a rather nice-looking front end up for ChinWag.IM. I’m not going to digress into a “how to set up WordPress” article because there are, to

chinwag

ChinWag - First Draft

It’s a long way from ready, but it’s nice to see the project really starting to take shape. More development posts to come, of course. Amazing what you can do these days with just a handful of free stock photography, an off-the-shelf theme and a quiet evening at

bosh

Jappix, Prosody and Nginx

This article is part of an ongoing series of posts, there’s an index here. Installing Jappix on our little baby XMPP server is a very quick win in a lot of ways. In one hit we get a web-based front end to registration so we can eventually disable/redirect

chinwag

Conferences, Rooms, MUCs ... What?

This article is part of an ongoing series of posts, there’s an index here. I was originally going to write a post on setting up Jappix before covering MUC configuration, but changed my mind. It’ll be good to have a working chat room to join when we test

chinwag

More Prosody Modules

This article is part of an ongoing series of posts, there’s an index here. Welcome back! Let’s get good old Chinwag operational! I had a very busy April, but life’s settling down again now so it’s time to get rolling with this again. OK, so if