Excellent work and very interesting to read. DX9s very occasionally pop up for sale for silly small money, and now I would seriously entertain getting one just for the fun of having a crack at installing your custom ROM.
Providing updates to everyone waiting simply wastes time and resources; again, you know roughly how long it's going to take as the estimated times are provided. Hassling the agent on your case is unnecessary.
Regarding leaving and returning Australia - Bridging Visa class Bs are made available if you have good reasons to be leaving and coming back.
I can see this from two sides - my (now ex) wife went through getting temporary then permanent residency in Australia; yes, it was a pain and expensive, but Australia has high standards of living etc, which is why lots of people want to come here. The other side is this - immigration is one of the reasons why there are not enough houses to buy or places to rent, making life difficult for citizens or people who have PR or TR. So if the process of having more immigrants who also require housing is expensive or difficult, I think you'll find a lot of people are not particular sympathetic.
I remember when blue LEDs started appearing in guitar FX pedals just out of novelty,resulting in a pedals becoming harder to use as when the pedal was on the brightness meant visibility of the controls was reduced. On pedals I made I always used fine sandpaper to increase the diffusion of each LED, and the result was significantly better. Early blue LEDs,especially, seemed to have a very narrow projection angle.
I've just stuck with a single printed page, placed inside the bag and it's outside pockets, with my flight and multiple sets of contact details. However, I haven't lost a bag over hundreds of flights while doing this, so am unsure of the effectiveness.... guess at least the ritual has been working in terms of heading off a loss proactively!
Might I suggest that swearing to learn to improve your swimming skills may be more beneficial to your long-term survival? Plus a lot more fun once you have more confidence in the water.
At one stage a company I worked for was considering licensing the code for a school time-tabling application, rather than paying the company to do the (fairly minor) changes we required to meet (non-USA) state requirements. The company was started by a couple of teachers, the same people who wrote their product. It was 10s of ks of Pascal code, but with not a single variable name or function name that made any sense; everything was A, AA, AA1, X, XX, XX2 etc. I spent a few days looking at it, then recommended we keep paying the somewhat steep cost for the modifications. Then at least if anything broke it was on them to fix it.
Incidentally we had a small falling out with this company, and they were refusing to update their executable until this issue was resolved. This looked like affecting some hundreds of schools and their timetables. I did some checking, and it turned out their 'non-updated' executable was doing a simple date check on the local PC; if it was past a certain date, the executable refused to run. So I did a quick hack in our application that involved:
- setting the local PC date to prior to the 'cutoff date'
- running their executable with the required parameters, and grabbing the results
- setting the local PC date back correctly
This led to interesting negotiations as they were puzzled why their 'gun to our heads' no longer appeared to be working, and things were resolved to the benefits of both parties soon after.