Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I’ve been a UNIX sysadmin for something like a decade now. Way back toward the start of that I did a little bit of Sybase DBA work, just basic stuff. Never touched it again.

Until today. Remembering lots of stuff, starting to feel comfortable with it again: I don’t remember everything but I’m in that dangerous phase where I feel confident I can figure most things out reasonably quickly.

In any event it looks like my job will be evolving to UNIX sysadmin with a bit of backup DBA thrown in. It’s Sybase, so not quite as marketable in the longer term as Oracle, but I’m enjoying it anyway.

And it’s a whole lot more fun than ClearCase.

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One of the key reasons why property in the “inner” suburbs (i.e., those where there is any reasonable public transport) is so expensive is the negative gearing system we have. In simple terms, if you buy a property as an investment by borrowing, any interest paid is tax-deductible.

The idea is that it encourages people to buy investment properties to increase the rental pool.

The hitch is that there is no such tax deduction for owner-occupied property, so essentially the same level of income provides far greater buying power as an investor than as an occupier.

Making interest paid on a mortgage on your primary residence tax deductible, with various limitations — e.g., a cap on the amount/year deductible, some sort of limits to stop people simply re-drawing on the mortgage to effectively live tax-free forever — would rebalance this without causing the problems that made the Federal Government run scared last time they tried to take away negative gearing.

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There are any number of reasons why being a renter in Australia is something you want to avoid if you possibly can. They mostly boil down to this: renters are second-class citizens. It is assumed that you are either poor (and thus safe to ignore) or it’s merely a temporary state until you buy something and become a Real Person.

And thus we arrive at the current source of stress and anxiety.

Three and a bit months ago we were served with a 120-day Notice to Vacate plus a letter saying we were welcome to re-apply for a lease on the house we’re living in. We’ve been here for going on three years, and they pulled the same stunt last time. Their goal is to avoid periodic tenancies, because they figure it’s a desirable-enough area they can be picky about it.

Anyway. We get back to them at the start of January saying we’d like to renew the lease. The agent appears to be having trouble getting hold of the owner, or getting him to tell her what he wants, or something. She’s sufficiently professional to be stonewalling us pretty effectively.

In any event we’re now in a position where we have two weeks to negotiate a new lease, probably including a rent increase, with no idea how big an increase that is likely to be, and if we don’t have that new lease sorted we are legally required to leave.

So if it comes down to it, we could easily be in the position of having to choose between becoming homeless or paying a rather large rent increase.

If we don’t have anything useful from the agent by close of business today we pretty much have to assume that we’re going to have to move, and start hunting again in earnest. Finding a new home and moving in the space of two or three weeks in the current rental market is not a happy thought.

Update: the agent finally got back to me. She’s been leaving messages for the owner, who has thus far not been responsive. She doesn’t think there’ll be any problem getting the lease renewed, expects there will be a rent increase — that’s happening everywhere at the moment — and while she claims to sympathise re: the probable extremely short notice on rent increase prior to end of the lease “that’s why we asked you to decide two months ago”.

Unless the increase is in the three-figure area I suspect we’re going to have to just put up with it. This will hopefully be our last rental lease before we buy, and I suppose we will at least have lots of time to look for our new place over the coming year.

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Yes, yes, all the cool kids installed Leopard a month ago and the big reviews are all done with.

I put off buying a copy because the G5 iMac at home has been going largely unused for a while — it sits downstairs in the living room and is occasionally used to check TV guides — but I finally got around to snarfing a copy this week with the idea of poking at Front Row and seeing if the TV-out support is any better than it was last time

I tried.Haven’t actually got around to trying TV-out yet. Front Row on Leopard breaks Perian’s support for subtitles — lovely — but the playback of VIDEO_TS folders is nice stuff and if our TV could take VGA it’d be a no-brainer to use the iMac for that. S-video… not so sure. Converting VGA->YUV Component seems to be a bit of a dark art with several rather expensive options available, and it may be better to simply wait until we replace the TV with something that has DVI/HDMI inputs and get a Mini instead.

As to the rest of Leopard… Loving Spaces. It’s a nice implementation of virtual desktops. Safari 3 seems to be doing OK so far, rending some sites (like Bigpond Movies) that have given me a little trouble on Firefox with no problems at all.

The new Terminal is shiny, and I wish I had a Leopard-capable machine at work for that alone. Why there isn’t a usable tabbed terminal on Windows that doesn’t cost a bunch is beyond me — I’ve resorted to a Gnome 2 install via Blastwave into a Solaris zone then running gnome-terminal via the Cygwin X server.System generally is fast.

Not a fan of the translucent menubar but am getting over it. The dock is less stupid on the side of the screen, I believe there’s a hack to make it do the same thing at the bottom but I’ve always preferred it on a side anyway.

My one real complaint so far is that writing a DVD seems to result in occasional system pauses. Could be the media I’m using, or the application, don’t recall it happening on Tiger.

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