.. and the frigging little sparrow has taken to hiding behind things, rather than trying to fly out the windows.  Which makes it nearly impossible to catch.  Wasted twenty minutes of my life this morning chasing the little bugger.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Vista?  If you take a memory stick out of the card reader while you still have its window open, explorer crashes so completely that new explorer and internet explorer windows simply won't open.  Until a frigging reboot!!

Played pool with the soss guys tonight.  We lost two games and won one.  Lotsa fun, even though I'm crap at it.

Then off to the Dumpling Inn with Damien.  Food was amazing as always.  Especially the shredded beef peking style :)

Then took some cool rainbow photos.


Then to Scotty's to watch some more Firefly.

ok here's one that's not in Google yet..

If you run windows command line ftp in vista, it starts you off in your users directory. If you then lcd to a directory that doesn't exist, and then try to download files, you get this lovely friendly error:

Replace Existing File with Temp File:I/O Error

Of course you get this error *after* you've downloaded the file, so no idea where it puts it, but you've just wasted that time/traffic downloading the file.

The solution? Make sure your destination directory is correct :)

ok so I've been using Vista for less than a day now.

It completely and utterly sux.

I should have listened to everything I've ever heard and gone with XP.

Problem 1: Crap backup

You don't get NTbackup anymore. You get some other homegrown Vista backup. Which is crap. You can't actually choose a folder to backup. You can just choose the type of files to backup. Completely and utterly useless. Apparently people have complained so much that Microsoft has made ntbackup available for download for Vista. Unfortunately it only does restores of XP files. To do actual backups you still need to grab ntbackup from an XP machine. This of course doesn't let you do system state. Presumably one of the other recovery options lets you recover the actual system if it gets lost. Haven't read up too much on that.

Problem 2: Moving Files

In every other (Windows) operating system released by Microsoft, moving files on your hard drive was a simple drag and drop and would be done in a split second. Now when you move files it sits there and *calculates* all the files you have to move. WTF???? I aborted a move of about 10gb of files after it said it was going to take 90 days to complete. Only to find it had moved about half of the files after about 5 minutes. Did the other directories piecemeal so that I could watch them go. What a piece of frigging crap.

Problem 3: Mysterious Permission Denieds

When I was moving some of my files, at one point it barfed and said permission denied moving the files. No explanation why. I moved on and did other directories and came back to the problematic one later. I tried moving the subdirectories themselves, only to have it finally say it couldn't move the putty directory because it was in use (I was actually using putty at the time). Why it couldn't tell me this when I was doing the upper level directory I don't know.

Problem 4: Stoopid views

If you have a directory with mostly images, it decides they're photos and makes stoopid views accordingly. Like with tags and ratings and "date taken". Give me standard columns dammit!! So I set my views back to the way I like them and say reset folders. Except that it won't do that to *all* folders, only folders of the same type was what I'm in now. Picture folders are their own type and you have to do them separately. So I try going to an upper level folder and going customize and setting all subfolders to be this type and CRASH EXPLORER!!!! Strangely enough, it seemed to actually reset all the sub-folders to the default style I'd set, even though it had crashed.

Problem 5: Memory

Vista is bloatware to the max. To the point of only running it for less than 24 hours and it had completely run out of memory. I have 3gb of physical memory. You'd think that would be enough. Apparently not. It seems you need to reboot every six hours even with 3gb of memory and not actually *doing* anything. When I got back from dinner it had gone into powersaving mode and couldn't be recovered. The hard disk was churning away, but nothing would come up on screen. No frigging idea what it was doing. Ended up cold booting the bastard.

Problem 6: Weird IE translations

WTF? Every time my mouse hovers over a word I get some weird translation of what it means in some other language?? Huh??? What is that? How do I turn it off????

Really really pissed with Vista (and James). I should have listened to my heart and gotten XP.

Driving down at sunset now..

Friday night drank lots of beer (five for me - which is a lot, but not an insane amount, over course of evening but somehow it hit me hard and the motion sickness when we went to bed made me chuck .. doh!) and made Stu watch Moulin Rouge! which he enjoyed.

Saturday we wandered into town to where Stu's rellies were staying, and had morning tea there. Very nice place they had..

Then wandered out to Gungahlin to the park so the kids could play and Scotty could do bogan impersonations

Biggest (heaviest) kid - so heavy kept hitting the ground on the way down

Saturday night had leftover mushroom soup (from Friday night) and watched Bring it On.

On Sunday headed out to Yass for a roast dinner with various members of the extended family.

Princess Lily

Kids and Scotty

A rare nice one of the kids

They have chickies! Stu WANTS chickies!!!!

Sunday night had leftover crackers and watched some Star Trek.

Today I telecommuted, and it was good. Made pizzas for dinner, and they were very good.

I'm amazed at how thoroughly useless my higher school education was. Really. I mean it was useful for getting me into and through uni, but the real world? I use basically *none* of anything I learnt during the HSC in real life. In fact the only mathematics I use is pretty much just simple arithmetic. When was the last time any of you needed calculus to run a windows server? Some of the general science stuff I suppose stuck, but really just as general knowledge. I had a bit of a giggle over my year 10 geography notes (1989) which were predominantly USA and USSR. Ah the joys of the cold war lol.

As you may have guessed, I've been purging my old high school stuff. I am keeping some stuff, mostly things that were creative, or that I put a lot of effort into, or were useful or informational. I've also got a pile of stuff that I'll scan before chucking.

And remind me never ever to move house during summer, or overpack book boxes.

1. Elaborate on your default icon. Neil referred to his favicon. My favicon for this blog is a small version of the pic of me I have. My friend Gavin took the pic about five years ago when he was practising his portrait photography and needed a guinea pig. Currently it's a renamed gif file, so it works in Firefox but not in IE7. Will convert it to a proper ico file when I get around to it...
2. What�s your current relationship status? Happily engaged to Stu
3. Ever have a near-death experience? Does jumping out of an aeroplane count? :)
4. Name an obvious quality you have. er... I dunno.. I asked Stu and he said "um.. hair?" ... hehe
5. What�s the name of the song that�s stuck in your head right now? "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" (is that the name of it??).. it was on Video Hits this morning
6. Name a celebrity you would marry. None
7. Who will cut and paste this first? Maybe Woosang
8. Has anyone ever said you look like a celebrity? No
9. Do you wear a watch? What kind? Yup, a Citizen I got for my graduation in 1996. It has the day and date on it, which is really rare in a women's watch
10. Do you have anything pierced? My two ears
11. Do you have any tattoos? No
12. Do you like pain? No
13. Do you like to shop? Sometimes. I like windows shopping. And buying "cool stuff".. not clothes shopping though urgghh
14. What was the last thing you paid for with cash? The groceries this afternoon
15. What was the last thing you paid for with your credit card? Some wine and vodka I got at the bottle-o last night
16. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone? Some dude from Freecycle
17. What is on your desktop background? A picture of Stu taken at my parent's place on my mum's birthday party
18. What is the background on your cell phone? A greyscale gradient - just a default Blackberry thing
19. What was the last movie you watched? Casino Royale
20. What was the last book you read? The last book I completed was Harry Potter and the Half Blood prince. I'm still reading Cordelia's Honor, and Body Clutter

This blog is four years old today.

On previous January 8s I created a blog, complained about windows and watched my angels lay eggs, jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane, and spent the last day of a two week holiday with Stu.

Today I had an uneventful day at work. :)

Don't have a whole lot of energy for this tonight. But I left it so long last year that MT couldn't figure out how to place the entry, and it only ended up being viewable in the day-to-day links, and not in the monthly archives. So I'm just going to do it a bit quickly.

Did quite a lot of travelling this year, although only locally. Several trips to Queensland, including spending a nice first week of the year there. Much time spent with Chay and David, singing badly but eating well :) Got to visit them for a couple of days at the end of the year too which was nice. Also many visits to Canberra (more on that later), including taking hundreds of photos at Floriade. Another nice little trip was down to Batemans Bay and Mogo Zoo.

At work we moved offices again. I got *squished* in the seating arrangements, but several fish tanks and many guppies helped keep my sanity. Got a new Blackberry 8700 to play with, which I'm very attached to - although more for Poker and Solitaire than anything else I think heh. The main file server threw a disk in March which corrupted the file system *again* and once too often, so we decided then and there to replace the machine. Also spent time playing with windows firewall on all my servers, and locking down the vlan to block most incoming stuff. Towards the end of the year they (oh sorry, there is no "us" and "them" anymore - we've all been assimilated) centralised us in order to cut costs. My boss got seconded into the whole change process, Luc became my boss, and we all ended up with extra crap to deal with. There will be a round of redundancies next year, although noone knows when yet, and I'm hoping to get one and jump ship and go be with my boy. But the whole process and change has left me completely *dreading* going to work at the moment. Which is a shame, because it really is (was?) a wonderful job/place to work. We had a "wake" the Friday after we found out - to celebrate what once was, and the end of an era.

On the fish front, tried twice to breed blue guppies, but both lots died as soon as I got them. One lot in an established tank, the other lot in a fresh tank setup. So no idea what was going on with them there. My big girl angel is my only remaining original survivor, after the death of the other black angel and the three glass catfish. She keeps laying eggs which is kinda sad. Setup a way cool Macquarium at work. Yes, an aquarium in an old macintosh case. It's way way cool. Put three guppies and a betta in there and they've been doing splendidly. Guppies at work (and at home) continue to go nuts. A "fun" morning at work a few weeks ago when the girl in the Macquarium had her babies and the betta at them all heh. At home, got a bunch of glowlight and black neon tetras. The black neons have been doing well, but the glowlights not so well. The plants in that tank are going nuts though. Stu gave me some of his baby multies, which have gotten big enough in the last couple of weeks to start excavating the gravel around their shells. And finally, one of my favourite fish was found murdered on the floor after I accidently left the lids off one night. I was really sad cause he was such a wonderful little fish.

Didn't do much with Lego this year. Just got a lot of it put away that was dusting up my surfaces. And then built all my Harry Potter Lego, photographed it, and put it all away again. After the holidays will try and sell a bunch of it on ebay, so as less to move to Canberra.

Been mostly healthy this year. The usual colds/flus and a few days off work. Flat feet and crap quality shoes caused me some problems, which went away after wearing better shoes. Also dug out my old scales, and (assuming they're accurate), seem to have lost a couple of kilos in the past couple of months. Will be weighing myself a bit more regularly and try and get it down a bit.

Other bits and pieces:

* me little brother got married and I got a neato SIL. Very happy for them
* finished reading the Bible again (in three years read the whole Old Testament once, and the New Testament three times). Longest and most consistently that I've done that *ever*
* several poker nights at work and at cia. Lost all the cia ones, but came first, second and third in work ones.
* been slowly getting FLYwashed and slowly starting to get the hang of things, and having things like a clean bathroom all the time, which is completely foreign to me!
* bought a Netphone for Stu and me, but Stu's has been sitting uselessly in a box because he hasn't been able to get broadband where he is, so that was a complete waste of money. We'll likely be living together before he gets adsl.
* read The Half-Blood Prince again over Easter. Other than that, continued reading Cordelia's Honour which I'm *still* struggling to get through.
* saw a couple of free movies courtesy of IBM and Dell - The Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean 2.
* rearranged the furniture/tv in my flat
* finished indexing my USA photos, after 2 1/2 years.
* watched all bar one episode of the first three seasons of TNG
* walked on a piece of glass 300m directly above Sydney traffic on the Sydney Tower Skywalk

And finally.. Stu got a job in Canberra and moved down there at the end of April. Made seeing each other a heck of a lot easier, but the drive is starting to get tiring. Hopefully we won't have to do it for too much longer. Although the prospect of changing jobs is a scary one for me.. Things with Stu have been going wonderfully, and on Christmas Eve (well technically Christmas Day), we got engaged. No wedding date set yet. We'll deal with that next year.. oh wait... it *is* next year... hehe :)

Gosh, well that was a lot longer than expected. Ooops. :)

Did this today. It was pretty cool. Looking 260m straight down to the street below, over the edge of the tower, and being so close to the panelling I'd only ever seen from afar, and seeing the windows from the *outside*, and seeing the view without having to look through a window.

It was a bit pricey for what it is, but the mid-year special certainly helped (at $50 off!). And they get you again with the photos ($20 for a single print-out?? hrmm).

But it was a great afternoon, and spent nearly two hours doing the whole process. I think Mum enjoyed her birthday present :)