My puta crashed this morning - beeped quietly, then froze completely. Checkdisk on startup also froze. Not good. Got into windows eventually, but lost my profile folder completely, and found 16kb in bad sectors. Very not good. This is the disk that did 10000 miles in the boot round America and Canada, so it's possible all the vibrations weren't good for it. I think I'm going to get another disk, and use the sick one as a general carthorse for copying big stuff around. But for now I need to get everything off it (as it's crashing so often being the system disk that it's unsable). I brought home a 40gb disk from work and am copying everything onto it. Then I'll nuke all the partitions and format everything on the sick disk, and with a little luck may be able to use it again. But I'm still going to have to reinstall windows at some point. I'm thinking I may put a little 3gb disk in just for windows. Easy to ghost that way to save reinstalling windoze again in the future.

Urgh, what a nightmare.

1. What did you do in 2004 that you'd never done before?
   Met someone whose blog I read
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
   This year I made up a Bible reading plan that I managed to stick to, for the first time ever. I read the entire New Testament and a third of the Old Testament. For next year I'll be continuing my effort to be more relaxed and happy
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
   Yep, Jodi at work
4. Did anyone close to you die?
   No
5. What countries did you visit?
   USA and Canada
6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?
   A boyfriend
7. What date(s) from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
   Probably the 16th May, which was when we left for the USA (the day is also the anniversary of when I settled this place, and my friends got married, and I hooked up with Vic, and my brother moved into his place).
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
   Probably switching over to w2k3/active directory
9. What was your biggest failure?
   File server disaster, with a corrupted file system and hours of down time
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
    I got sick twice, once probably from some old cheese, not sure about the other time. No flus which was awesome. Only real injury was a snowboarder wiping me out at the snow
11. What was the best thing you bought?
    My Sony DSC-F828 camera
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
    um..
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
    Probably my father's
14. Where did most of your money go?
    On the trip to the USA
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
    Probably the trip to the USA :)
16. What song will always remind you of 2004?
    Double Trouble
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
    Happier or Sadder? - happier I think
    Thinner or Fatter? - much the same, maybe slightly fatter
    Richer or Poorer? - much the same, the trip to the USA kept me fairly even
    
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
    Sleeping
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
    Complaining
20. How will you be spending Christmas?
    This year or next year? Silly question to ask for an end of year quiz
21. Who deleted question 21?
    It wasn't me I didn't do it
22. Did you fall in love in 2004?
    If you count crushes on Jason Isaacs and Dave.. otherwise no
23. How many one-night stands?
    None
24. What was your favorite TV program?
    Survivor or ER
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
    No
26. What was the best book you read?
    Probably Prisoner of Azkaban, although I'd read that twice before
27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
    Yvonne's keyboard
28. What did you want and get?
    A new camera
29. What did you want and not get?
    A dvd recorder
30. What was your favorite film of this year?
    Peter Pan
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
    Went down to me little brother's place for lunch, then went to a dance party in town. I turned 31
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
    A boyfriend
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004?
    Jeans and a tshirt
34. What kept you sane?
    dvds
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
    Jason Isaacs
36. What political issue stirred you the most?
    The US election.. even more than our own federal election, go figure :)
37. Who did you miss?
    Dennis and JC, they don't post nearly as often as they used to :(
38. Who was the best new person you met?
    Dave!
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004.
    um..
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
    "Something gotta go wrong cause I'm feeling way too damn good" - story of my life - whenever I'm feeling happy something will come along to make me feel grumpy

So another year over. Another year older. I spent far too long rereading this years blog entries to get highlights and lowlights of the year. Strangely there were more highlights than lowlights. The lowlights tended to be just ordinary day-to-day rants. The only big disasters I had this year were the file server disaster, where we lost files and had daytime downtime for hours; and Faiele in Italy stole a big chunk of my money on ebay, and ebay refused to help.

At work, we upgraded our domain to windows 2003 with active directory, which we managed to acheive without too many dramas. I setup quite a few servers during the year, but my favourite was later in the year when I migrated our main production notes web server to new hardware in a total of an hour and a half from pulling out of the box to being live. We also got audited while I was overseas, and felt very happy that I'd done detailed documentation for all the servers before I left, which probably saved my boss. Lunches with Jim and John became the norm this year, as it was a lot easier to coordinate four people with Luc in our office than when he was elsewhere.

My cia work mostly dried up, after they hired Nhat to take care of Gamera. He had his trial by fire shortly after he started, having to rebuild the machine in the middle of the night when there was a multiple disk failure in the raid array. The relief of me not having to stress about the box anymore was enourmous.

My lego obsession kicked into high gear this year, with the completion of the classic space lego collection, all the Harry Potter sets, tonnes of plain bricks for making mosaics (of which I made four instructed ones and four of my own design), and later in the year getting Yoda and the Imperial Star Destroyer.

I had several fish losses during the year, but didn't really replace any. I did however get a tankful of baby kribs which was very exciting.

I saw David Bowie in concert which was phenomenal. Been waiting fourteen years for the chance, and it was very moving for me. Also saw the Lion King stage show which was fantastic. Quidam was good but not as good as Alegria.

Crushes included a massive one on Jason Isaacs, a little one on Dave, and the ongoing one on Jim. No prospects of any boyfriends tho.

Three decent trips this year - a short one at Easter to my uncle's wedding in Queensland, a six week adventure to the USA and Canada, and a three day skiing trip in September. The USA trip was amazing, probably the biggest highlight of my year. I took 3800 photos and movies on my wonderful new Sony camera, which I still haven't finished sorting out!!

The weather this year went Summer, Autumn, Autumn, skipped winter, went straight onto Summer, and now Spring.

And now I have to get ready for tonight's general partying. Happy new year to everyone!! :):)

So in between waiting for coats of paint to dry, I installed a new hard drive, copied everything across, and reinstalled windows onto it. The amazing thing was the disk actually worked without a bios upgrade. yayy. Painting finished, rooms we did look good.

I meant to do this the other day but somehow never got around to it. Taken from Richard. The idea is to type a letter into the address bar of your browser and take the first url that comes up in the history.

I installed ACDSee today. I uninstalled it tonight.

I've been using an ancient version of acdsee for years which is quick to load when you double click on a photo, and lets you rotate by pressing ctrl-r. Simple.

But I'd really like a nice program to remove red-eye.

Some time ago I installed Google's Picasa, which does red-eye very nicely. It actually modifies the file without altering the last change file-stamp. The problem is, the folder interface is utterly impossible to use. I can't figure out how to simply view folders by how they're arranged on my hard disk. It wants to arrange its albums in its own mystical ways - seemingly by date or name or size. But I just want a windows explorer style view dammit!! I simply can't find photos I'm looking for because I don't know where it's put them.

So I was hoping acdsee would do a better job. Well the folder navigation was more managable, however the red-eye feature is messy and not as good as picasa. It's also a slower program to load, and ctrl-r to rotate wants you to save a new file rather than just modifing the exif details (and so does red-eye). I was also hoping it'd manage resizing images, as the program I'm using at the moment, Pixresizer, is ok, but it's image quality is very soft. But the other stuff annoys me too much.

Back to google I guess.

Hot again today although not as ridiculous as yesterday. Beautiful cool change swept through, although unfortunately I've been out all night so didn't get to open the windows to let the air through :( Still and oven in here :(:(

Oh I forgot to mention I saw Collateral with Striker last night. Was not too bad, especially for a Tom Cruise movie :)

FQ TOPIC: Ego.

FQ1: What is an activity that you can do better than anybody else you know?
Probably giving massages. James, Alan, Marc and Ric all give good massages too, but they don't seem to be as widely received/famous as mine.

FQ2: What is a subject where you are smarter than anybody else you know?
Probably many aspects of windows administration, mainly iis. Which is a pain in the butt when you want to ask someone how to do something but you don't know of anyone to ask.

FQ3: What is a trait you possess that makes you superior to lesser humans?
Maybe higher than average intelligence. That's text-book/test intelligence though, not real-world people intelligence.

FQ FICTION: Which of your many stellar accomplishments should be recorded in the history books? (Can't think of one? Make it up!).
um.

I hate it with a passion sometimes. Especially when you're trying to do a simple @mailsend to include a doclink. I have this one database that simply will not send doclinks. It either sends the mail without the doclink, or doesn't send the mail at all. Frustration beyond belief.

Not to mention the ridiculousness of microsoft. XP sp2 has a bunch of new policy settings to manage the windows firewall. However they haven't release the ones for the servers yet. Which means if you want to manage how XP SP2's firewall is rolled out, you first have to install a beta on a client, grab the adm files from the client, and stick them on your production server, before sp2 is released to the world so your clients don't go off getting it by themselves before you've had a chance to download it to your sus server.

*sigh*

While thinking about what to blog about, I went back to the Meme List page which I found the other day, and found Monday Madness. (This was after forcing myself to close down browser windows of Jason Isaacs.. yes Dennis, it seems to be my latest obsession :) - and I have to wait til *May* to see Peter Pan argghhgghh!! ).

This weeks' theme was on tv shows. Which was kinda funny because I was watching 24 at the time and thinking just how good this season is. The first season was intriguing because of its format, but positively painful to watch - especially the "Kim" thread! The second season started off a bit silly, but actually got good after the bomb went off. I'm thoroughly enjoying the third season.

So. The questions presented:

1. What was your favorite TV show as a child?
As a child. Hrmm. My earliest memory of a show I used to watch regularly was Whacky Races. Another kid from school would come over before school and he and my brother and I would watch it together. That would have been about 25 years ago! As for favourite show? Astroboy, Airwolf, Knight Rider, MacGyver all stand out, although I don't know if I'd count as a child for some of them :)

2. What show did you hate?
Bit hard to remember, as if I wasn't interested in a show I just wouldn't watch it :) I remember seeing one episode of Red Dwarf and thinking it was utterly ridiculous and could not see what all the fuss was about.

3. What show did your family gather around the TV to watch?
MASH ... probably others.. my mother wasn't so keen on MASH

4. What show is currently your favorite?
There's only three shows I *currently* watch regularly - 24, Survivor All Stars, and ER. ER is probably the favourite.

5. What show do you hate now?
Well again, if I'm not interested I just won't watch. The Practice used to piss me off cause they'd keep getting the bad guys off, even when they shouldn't.

I really must write down all the tv shows I've ever watched .. could be a quite a big list.. :)

I think gamera must have heard me complaining about it last night, because it decided to shut itself off at 6am this morning. I got paged, decided it would be too cruel to ask Campbell to go into the exchange for a third time this weekend, so decided to go in myself. I was out the door within fifteen minutes of waking up - all I did was have a shower and grab everything I needed.. I didn't even do my hair!

It's the second time it's hung like that this year, which is a disturbing trend. It's most likley a problem with the ide backup drive, but it could be something more sinister. Scary stuff. The sooner they hire someone to take proper care of that machine (and paid responsibility) the better. It's a three-year old installation of windows, that's been on two completely separate hardware boxes. If it weren't so impossible to move the 350-odd websites off it onto a clean box I'd suggest they do it. But as it is, it's full of crap that has been installed over the years because this or that customer wanted it, so now it's next to impossible to replicate. You couldn't rebuild that machine from scratch if you tried... sigh..