I'm having continued problems with my rear-end. The abscess that flared up at the end of January and responded to antibiotics kinda returned. But just like last time, it settled down a day or two before I saw my surgeon, only this time I wasn't on antibiotics. He's a bit perplexed about what's going on and wants me to have some examinations. In April I'm off to Concord Hospital (inner-west suburb of Sydney) to have an endoscopic ultrasound of the area. But before then I'm having a colonoscopy because the surgeon is wondering if there's something "up stream" that's coming down and causing the infections. That's on Thursday. So tomorrow I begin the fun job of preparing by fasting and purging. I've got this stuff called "picoprep" (sodium picosulphate) that causes a big case of the squirts so that my guts are cleared out when I get probed. Oh, and it'll be under general anaesthetic, so I get another damn catheter. I hate needles and I hate recovering from anaesthetic.

In other news, I have a new phone! This is my second phone ever, after using a Nokia 5220 XpressMusic for almost 2 whole years. I've replaced that with a Motorola Milestone (for U.S. readers, essentially the Verizon Droid). Yes, it's not really a new phone. It's over a year old and the Milestone 2 has been out a little while. But that makes it cheaper, much more so because I bought a second-hand unit. I didn't want to give money to Motorola because they've locked down the boot-loader and kernel, and told people to buy elsewhere if they wanted to mod phones. I was really wanting a hardware keyboard though and there's not many of them about. The only other good phone with a keyboard seems to be the HTC Desire Z, but that is still quite new and hence pricey. So I decided on the Milestone, but to buy second-hand to avoid rewarding Motorola's behaviour. And now it looks like their signing key may have been found, opening the way for complete modding anyway! some arsehole claimed to have found the key to troll us.

So I have my first Android phone. The stock 2.1 firmware only lasted a few hours before I installed Cronos Froyo (2.2). You see, the boot-loader and kernel may be locked down, but everything else is replaceable once the system has been rooted. Then it was onto Cronos Ginger (2.3), but that was unstable and buggy. So I've been running CyanogenMod 7 release candidates since then (Cronos is based on CM anyway). And installing lots of apps. And adjusting overclocking settings, and more recently memory manager (lowmemkiller) settings. It's been a great toy and I've even used it as a phone to make a few calls! Oh, and the hardware keyboard is worth it. It has its own problems, but I prefer it greatly over the on-screen keyboard. The screen is great too. Higher resolution than my Dad's iPhone 3G S!

The only photography news I can report on is travelling down to Bateman's Bay to visit my brother Glenn and his wife Tania. It's been almost two years since we were last there! I shot two thirds of a roll of Velvia 50 in my Electro 35 on the beaches and cliffs over a weekend. I really need to finish this roll because I already have three other E-6 rolls to send off for processing. Oh, and a few 220 rolls too, since I can't get them processed locally any more.