Sunday.  11th.  

Dinner at EffanC's which was very nice - pumpkin soup and miso salmon

Monday.  Slept okish I guess. Ok day at work, got some stuff done. Talked to Mum after work. Epic stress. Epic drama. Not to mention the STRESS that Mum and I are both feeling. Epic depressed about it all. The sweetie cooked some nice pork rissoles for dinner which was lovely of him.

DS9 3.14 which was pretty silly.

Tuesday.  Took well over an hour to get to sleep. This is what happens when you *don't* drink. Somewhat restless sleep. Bits and pieces at work and even managed some programming in between interruptions. Europe photo culling, DS9 3.15.

I'm not sure which I prefer.  Probably the phone photo - everything is in focus.  The Canon's depth of field is so ridiculously shallow that you can't get everything in focus, and there's abberations.  At least most of the crap on the window is blurred out.

Did I mention the shallow depth of field?

Also, rainbow

Stu cooked up some very nice bok choy with oyster sauce, and the rest of the rissoles

Wednesday.  Took til like midnight to get to sleep.  Sigh.  This is what happens when you *don't* drink. Somewhat restless sleep.   Rinse and repeat.  Pretty good progress on a script I'm working on, although hit a roadblock doing something simple. Leftover butt cheeks and cabbage for dinner, DS9 3.16. More Europe photo culling. Holiday stuff for Mum.

Phone vs Canon again.  Neither are super crisp up close.

Thursday.  Slept kinda okish. Got a few bits and pieces done. Pizzas for dinner. DS9 3.17.

Friday.  Woke up at dentist time and only got like 3/4 hour more sleep after that. Hurray. Frustrating day fighting with Powershell. I too dumb. Leftover lamb and veggies for dinner. DS9 3.18. Dumb episode.

Saturday.  Woke up early I think. Mostly uneventful drive to Sydney. Followed a Murray's coach from the Barton Highway to Picton Road which was pretty cool. At one point a Tesla passed us which had a sticker to the effect of "I bought this before Elon went crazy". No rocks on Hanging Rock Road. Bumper to bumper traffic all the way from Yarrawarra to Mum's because of Heathcote Road closure. And the fact that Sydney traffic sucks all kinds of donkey balls. Got to Mum's and we spent most of the afternoon going through holiday stuff. Also checked out backup hard drives and I backed up her computer again. Had TV dinners for dinner. Went for a walk after dinner so Mum could get some milk and I could get a beer. It got very late very quickly.

Mum has these textas of mine that she used long after I stopped using them.  I've had them since I was in primary school, so they're at least forty years old.
They still work.
Mind. Blown.


Sunday.  Slept okish. Had to have the door open because it was like 22C in the room - way too hot! It got down to about 19 by morning - just barely tolerable! :) Did some copying of Dad's photos off an external hard drive (possibly the only copy she has of his photos). Also looked at a lot of photos. Went for a long walk around lunch time and picked up a bbq chooken for late lunch. Saw David briefly, went through holiday stuff, then everyone left in different directions. It was after 16:30 by the time I left, way way way too late, so was a pretty tense drive in the dark and the rain. Two wallabies jumped in front of my near Broughton Pass, but luckily didn't hit anything. Late dinner when I got home.

This little house is for sale.  It's on a 1220sqm block.  I guarantee it will be at the very least a duplex but more likely three or four townhouses the next time I see it...

Hotham House


Monday.  Slept okish. Day of appointments and trying to keep on top of crap.

Always a good day.

Although very busy this morning and was only able to get back into regularly scheduled programming after lunch.

Pizza for dinner (it's Thursday) and finally a new episode of Discovery to watch (it's been *days* !! :) ).

I hate Logitech's Harmony remote control software.  

Twice in the past I've had to reprogramme the Harmony One remote we have.  Yesterday I had to fight with it again for the new TV.  It's an awful clunky piece of software (admittedly better than it used to be).  You need to have an online account with them which stores your remote info (why they can't store it locally I have no idea).  They've changed the software in the past few years which means old accounts aren't compatible with new ones.  And the software has changed completely and they say if you had previously programmed it with the old version you should keep using the old version.  After I'd already donwloaded and installed the new version.  

So after digging up my account details, I finally managed to get onto their site and load all the remote info in the correct version of the software.

Only to find that they don't have remote info for our tv.

Tried using something it thought was compatible, but after reprogramming everything to use it, I tested it out and nothing worked.

What a piece of crap.

Then I thought I'd bricked the thing because it kept popping up the software when I wasn't touching it and then went completely dead, but I think I'd just managed to flatten the battery on it because it had been on for so long attached to the computer.

So next up I'll have to see if I can manually teach this peice of crap software to learn the most important buttons on the tv remote.

Sigh.

I don't need this crappy drama in my life.

Still alive. Really. Just without a blackberry. Or a phone. Or a workable net connection. Some people would think "ahhh that's the life" .. but me I'm ... "give me the internet back dammit!!" hehe

Having a great time. Poking lots of animals. Dragging Stu up and down lots of mountains. Rescuing birds.

Be home soon, regular programming will resume shortly...

/me bounces round the room.

Somehow managed to avoid having to do too much real work again today. Spent an hour setting up another ups and threading power cables round the racks. A bit disturbed by how drained the battery was after it had been disconnected for a mere half a day. Will have to run some tests with it.

Spent the rest the morning and all the afternoon either in meetings or sitting behind Jim while he hacked away at the cms and I observed. It was good actually, cause I couldn't really do that programming myself, but it was good to be involved to get more of an idea of how the whole thing works.

It was also funny today.. I had kind of a "told you so" moment. I kept asking them how long it was going to be and how many problems were we going to have to encounter before we switched our thinking on how to approach a method of integrating data into our cms. They kept saying, not this version not this version. Well this morning they had had a go at doing it the way I had suggested doing it. As a proof of concept more than anything. We may not end up doing it that way, as it has plenty of its own problems, but it was funny because they kept saying they wouldn't do it, and then they did. Silly really.

So this afternoon I was bemoaning the fact I had to notes programming, and would rather be doing sysadmin.

Well one of my servers must have heard me, because it decided to get hacked. We're pretty certain it was from a vulnerability in the Backup Exec remote client. A patch had been released fairly recently, but we hadn't installed it yet (I mean who patches Backup Exec within two weeks of patches being released??). I noticed a couple of weird processes running - door.exe and door1.exe. And a bunch of other crap as well. I noted the time of the intrusion, and we caught it withing about half an hour. Stopped all the backup exec services on all the other machines until they could be patched, and so far so good.

But my poor little server was full of extra services, dodgy files and who knows what else, so we decided to go back to an earlier version of the system (fortunately recorded just a couple of hours before the intrusion). Ghosting the system back to a clean one to begin with was a disaster. For reasons unknown it just chugged through loading the image. So I gave up on that and just reinstalled windows clean, and then restored the backup over the top. Followed by upgrading to service pack 1, and windows update, and a ghost image of the final product for good measure.

Then of course came the fun of making sure everything else was patched, that backups were going to work, system account passwords were changed, etc.

Then I get home and the mail server has spacked as well and needed to be rebooted.

*sigh*

First time I've ever had a compromised machine in a seven year career. Not pleasant.

I'm still alive, honestly! And so is Dad, miraculously ;)

Regular programming will resume shortly :)