The last couple of days have been really stressfull. I had to say goodbye to everyone, finish up a late assignment, complete my final exam, sell my furniture, pack my stuff, clean my apartment and organize the trip home. It's been a lot of work but now I'm finally done!
But now all my furniture is sold off, the apartment is cleaned out and vacated and I got done most of the things I wanted to do. I spent one day at Stradbroke Island with Carina and then another day with her at the Gold Coast, walking along the beach and shopping in Surfers Paradise and at the Pacific Fare mall. The trainrides were good for studying to my final exam, and after it I even managed to go a couple of hours at the end of semester party at the Port Office Hotel, to do final goodbyes with everyone! And tomorrow morning, Carina and I will be getting on a plane bound for Narita Airport, Tokyo, Japan!
It's going to be so much fun!!! ^_^

After getting increasingly frustrated and started looking into if there is any of my insurances that would cover the loss of my cellphone, my mother told me the phone had been answered by a man when she tried calling me a bit earlier. I had tried calling my phone a couple of times before without getting an answer, which was to be expected as it was set to silent after having been to the movies, but after hearing this news I immediatly tried calling my phone, and the taxi-driver answered!

It turned out that the phone had fallen out of my pocket in the taxi we took home from the movies, and he had just found it while cleaning his car. He wanted to give it back, but didn't know how and was worried that the battery might run out before he got in touch with me. Luckily it didn't, so I paid the taxi-fare for him to drive the phone to me here at Cathedral. $16 AUD is a small price to pay to get a $500 phone returned, and it saved me a lot of trouble and paperwork. Thank you very much unknown taxi-driver!

This means that my Australian number is active again, but only until the 1st of July when I leave the country for good. Just one exam left now!

Today I printed, binded and handed in all the work I have done on my bachelors thesis over the last year. I can't even describe the relief I'm feeling from finally having completed it, as it is the thing that has given me the most worries lately as a lot of my future plans are depending on it. If I get a passing grade on this project and on my final exam the 29th of June, then all that remains is to get everything I've done in Australia approved at my home institution in Norway before I can call myself a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science!

The final report and file-outs of the sourcecode I've written for Squeak can be found here. The site will be updated with a full Squeak-image and some more content when Telstra manges to reconnect my DSL or when I have returned home.

With this out of the way there is only two exams and 9 days left until I leave Australia for good. On the way out I will be spending a week in Japan with my girlfriend Carina, before enduring a long long flight home to the land of the midnight sun and the place that I call home!

Last night Carina and me went to Indooroopilly Megaplex to see "Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkhaban" at Gold Class. Despite a hefty pricetag the experience was definitively worth it! Not to mention that the movie was quite entertaining as well. My judgement of the movie would be well on the good side with a 7/10 score.

Unfortunatly the night ended with me loosing my mobile phone somewhere on the way home. It might show up from the lost and found at the taxi-company, but I highly doubt that. For anyone who needs to know this means my australian number is now permamently unavailable, and I'm back to using my norwegian number. And while I'm at it, does anyone have suggestions for which new phone to get when I return to Norway?

Yesterday I called my ADSL provider to set up cancelletion of service for when I'm moving back home in two weeks. They confirmed that my currently paid period expires the 30th of June, and sent a message to Telstra to disconnect my ADSL at this date. This morning I woke up to find my internet connection dead, and after a few hours the dsl-link light on my modem turned dark.

Usually Telstra needs 10 days to connect a service, and according to WebAce they usually need about the same time to disconnect something. What I can't understand then, is how on earth they managed to disconnect me within hours of them opening this morning, especially since it weren't supposed to happen for another two weeks ?!?
I knew Telstra was bad, but I really had NO idea...

Of course this had to happen on just the day I need internet the most to test a web-proxy server I had to write for a Perl Assignment. So now I'm stuck with the even worse dial-up services from QUT, which doesn't even allow me to use MSN or check my e-mail twice without restarting the program. *sigh*

Today Carina and me were downtown shopping and suddenly decided to stop by the cinemas to watch "The Day After Tomorrow". Despite its obvious flaws, like a thin plot and undeveloped characters I really enjoyed this movie. Especially because of its relevant theme about enviromental damage, global heating and polar melting and the effect they might have on our world in the future.

It's relevance is obvious, and for some people more than others. Just recently I read an article about the small island state of Tuvalu in the pacific, which stated "For Tuvalu, there is no day after tomorrow". The islands are slowly beeing flooded by the rising oceans, and are expected to disappear below the waves in just a few years time. The government have already made arrangements to move the population to a new permanent home on New Zealand, and everyone is just waiting for time to run out... these people will be the first permanent refugees of climate, and they will never be able to return to their homeland.

I just found a game called Petals Around the Roses. As always I'm very intrigued by brain-teasers and challenges so I naturally had to keep trying until I solved it. Took me about 15 minutes but thats not important.
The game is simple, one person (the leader) that knows the rules of the game throws five dice. Anyone can then guess at the answer, before the answer is given to them by the person knowing the rules. Then the dice are thrown again, and the answer for the new dice throw provided.

The players (other than the leader) are only allowed to know 3 things:
1. That the name of the game is 'Petals Around the Roses'.
2. That the answer to any throw will always be zero or an even number.
3. The answer to any given throw of the dice.

The point of the game is then for the players to figure out the rules that determine the answer, and prove it by beeing able to guess the correct answer 6-8 times in a row. Once one has figured out the rules, one qualifies for membership in the Fraternity of Petals Around the Roses.
To try out the game without having to search for a leader, play this javascript version online. Remember not to tell anyone the answer if you figure it out, let them have the challenge to figure out for themselves. Also the page has a cool story about when Bill Gates was frist tried in the game.