Disaster one nearly happened at the old SNASM clan Christmas bbq thingie. They all decided to play Munchkin before lunch, which at the moment is a symbol to me of how few friends I have, and that even then ones I do have I don't get to play games with. You see they all play it often enough to know the rules and what all the cards are, but I have played it about twice in my life, and then years apart, so I just can't play. Nearly lost it, and retired to the computer room for a while to recover. Aside from that, the day was fantastic, and much food was eaten by all. I even managed to get "Lavender's Blue" right repeatedly on the keyboard, which I've been struggling with for weeks. The scary thing is, I've played some of the songs in the book so often that I'm starting to remember the pieces by feel, and can play a couple of them without the music. I guess kids can do that a lot more easily, and it truly is a case of practise makes perfect, or at least better.
Disaster two had nothing to do with me - kaos karked it in a heap, so I have no mail at the moment :( And I hadn't downloaded my mail since the 1st of December, so if they can't get the disks back I'll have lost three days of mail - doh!!
FQ1: Who is your one favorite author and why is their work so appealing to you?
Roald Dahl. Not really sure why. Just kinda silly in a lot of ways, and his grownups stories are kinda spooky too.
FQ2: What are your two favorite literary subjects and why is reading about them interesting to you?
I like reading about science stuff. Science fiction is pretty good too.
FQ3: What are your three favorite books and why are each of them special to you?
- Star Trek VI by J.M. Dillard - only book I ever read at least three times before the Harry Potter books. I like the character development and how I can picture the movie so well from it.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling - my favourite of the Harry Potter books, and funnily enough the only one where the bad guy isn't specifically out to get Harry.
- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton - quite a bit better than the movie, it held me fascinated for the day and a half I sat down to read it, the moment I finished my mid-year exams in second year uni. It still has some of the fundamental flaws of the movie (like who'd leave a game park with three people manning it for an entire weekend??), but the book and the chain of events that surrounded it were fundamental to the very existence of this website, my job, my friends, this house, pretty much everything about my life at the moment is the way it is because of that book.
FQ Author: If you had to write a book, what genre of book would you pen (mystery, romance, science fiction, biography, etc.) and what would it be about?
Probably a science fiction story. Although the only book I've ever written (a project for Year 8 english) was mostly an adventure with a teenager and a couple of kids shipwrecked on a Pacific Island with bird smugglers.
Been a bit slack the last couple of weeks with the Thursday Challenge. Thought I'd get around to it this week, even if a little late!
The perennial favourite - three generations of space lego men:
One of better shots of fireworks I've taken (even if it's more pink that red):
And one I just found looking for something to post for the FridayQ - this swatch of paint on a wall earned my friends $500! Some photographers came around to their house, painted a wall, and paid them for it. Cool huh!
Another one of my friends found my blog this morning. Ironically it was from a google search on "upgrading 320 emms" or something similar. (The upgrade we tried in our disk array this morning was a dismal failure and he was looking for tips from google). I think he was a bit surprised to find it, but when he went to look at the site he said "that's very sad". hrm. So whether he comes back again for another look or not who knows. Luc if you do stop by, leave a message so I know you were here :)
Had a frustrating lunch waiting in post office queues, trying to fill in bank deposit slips in a bank branch with no pens, and rain to make it all interesting.
Spent most of the rest of the day researching quota software.
I didn't mention last night that I'm going skiing! It couldn't have been easier. I did a Google search to find a mob to go with. Then I just called them up and said "I want to go" and they said "cool what's your credit card number" and that was it. Too easy. Sadly I'm going by myself because I don't have friends that ski. Actually I have three. Two of them I may have gone with but they both piked to due family and boat committments. The other was going on a "family holiday" and I was told in no uncertain terms that if I to the same resort as them in the same week I'd get in trouble. yay. And George sided with them which annoyed me. But I was not going to let this great snow go unskiied, so stuff them all, I'm going by myself.
And trying to clean up all the crap in my flat. There's just too much stuff that doesn't have homes, so it all piles up in heaps that must then be sorted through.
Watched Sleepless in Seattle with George tonight. We're both hopeless romantics at heart.. kinda like the friends in the movie heh. Was cool seeing Seattle and the Space Needle for the first time in a movie since actually being there. Really need to watch Short Circuit again to see Astoria.
Had a very frustrating day today looking at ways of managing quotas and reporting on user disk usage. QuotaAdvisor 4.1 (by wquinn) doesn't work on Windoze 2003 server, and it's since been bought out by Veritas, which means paying them $2500-odd for an upgrade. Well QuotaAdvisor has always been a bit crappy, so now I'm thinking it might be time to look at something else.
I was also looking at some sort of tool to report the disk usage by a user. w2k3 comes with a tool called "diskuse" but it barfs on certain directories which isn't particularly helpful. Not to mention that file ownership is a mystical thing that sometimes bears no relation to reality. Especially if that file is copied somewhere by an administrator, and forevermore is owned by the administrators group, not the user. yay.
Was even thinking about disk usage by directory. FullDisk is a great utility I've been using for years, but our file server now has so many files that it kills the machine just running it. So it's not the most practical application to run regular reports for people who want to know where all their file server space is going.
It's all too much really. I really don't want to go to work tomorrow :(
ok so I rarely get sick. And when I do get sick I rarely let it interfere with my social life. Which means I get pissed off when other people, or their kids, get sick and pike on doing stuff. Like dinner tonight which was meant to be a somewhat of a birthday celebration, and two of my best friends didn't show up. Yay. All you can do is drink wine and try and forget about it for a while. Thanks to George for the lovely cheese cake though.
100 things about Kazza the Blank One. Bren has had one of these for ages, and I've been thinking I should probably put one together. Just recently Dave and Dennis put theirs up, so I thought I would too. Some of my ideas were stolen shamelessly from them :)
I can't sleep. Lying awake stressing over what a pack of criminal bastards ebay is.
So downloaded the last two weeks of photos I somehow hadn't gotten around to doing.
Tradition has it that I photograph my friends new cars the day they get them. Well when I was away, I lent my car to James for six weeks. They got so used to be a two-car family that today they went and bought a new second car. Scary really. And it's all my fault.
I think also the fact that I have to get up early means I can't get to sleep tonight.