So for the time being I've been downgraded from a 1400 to a 1200, ethernet to usb, adsl modem. Marc couldn't figure out why mine won't get an ip address, so I've left it with him and have borrowed this one.

And I'm in this weird messy state between computers, and feel somewhat lost. At least I have shell access again, which I didn't have on the dialup, so that's a plus.

Gosh, it's been a while since I've blogged (a whole four days heh).

Let's see. Friday night the boy arrived in Sydney which was lovely - three weekends in a row - woot!

Friday was also me mum's birthday, so Saturday was her birthday party. Dave, Stu and I were the only people there under the age of about 55, so that was a little .. er.. heh :) But I was assigned task of official photographer, so ran round taking photos of stuff. Mum got a caterer in at Yvonne's suggestion, and that worked really well. The caterer was really nice too, even giving Dave and me offcuts of the end bits of the roasts and the bones to pick at :):) Coolfullness :) Mum did this quiz thing where she wrote a whole stack of questions and everyone had to try and answer them. I think I probably got more right than anyone, but I wasn't scoring cause I really didn't care heh. The prize was a bag of jaffas that went straight into a bowl and got shared around :)

After the party we went shopping and got Stu a new battery for his phone and a coffee and some bits and pieces from Big W, and went and looked at the fish shop at all the cichlids. Then we came home and crashed and ordered pizza - bacon and cheese burst crust - evil!! :) Definitely ate too much though, and ached the rest of the night.. oops...

Today was a complete morning off. Slept in, and just pottered around the house. I patched servers while Stu read his css book. Had two computers setup in the study so we can work on one each which was cool. Then I did some more fish stuff - moved Fred and George into the study, so now I have all my fish in here.

Will probably be going to play a game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit later.....

So someone in their wisdom thought it might be a good idea to extend daylight savings by a week, all because it was going to end during the Commonwealth Games.

This person should be shot.

When all of this first surfaced, there was a patch available that added a new time zone to windows computers, and you could select that time zone during the games. You then would have to change back afterwards. However it meant applying a patch to all the computers in your organisation and then changing the time zone. Painful.

Then came another patch which actually just modified the existing Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney time zone. This was available to computers that ran windows update manually, but not for SUS.

So today the patch was released for WSUS. But not SUS (because it's not a critical patch as such). So I've been trying to get our server upgraded from SUS to WSUS. And today the patch appeared. All well and good, but I still haven't gotten the server working, and don't want to just go blithley passing out patches without testing them properly first. So I ran windows update on my old w2k desktop and installed the patch.

Well.

Appointments created in notes on a computer without the patch show up an hour in the future on computers that have the patch applied. That is, any appointments already created for the week 27 March to 2 April will be an hour out when the patch is applied to users' computers. And vice versa - appointments created on patched computers show up an hour earlier on unpatched computers.

I haven't even tested what will happen when appointments are created during that week and then the timezone is reversed (which will take another patch). Although I haven't tested it yet on two computers using notes 7.

Exchange/outlook systems would be even more fun. There is a separate patch for those systems, however it won't be available to WSUS. Presumably this patch will actually *work*, although I wouldn't enjoy having to go touch every system to apply it.

The official word from Microsoft is "put the time of your appointments in the subject line, and don't create any appointments during that week".

Well that's just great.

Well my 1k entry. Not going to be anything earth-shattering.

Saw Batman Begins tonight, a freebie courtesy of Dell (although I didn't see any Dell computers, I'd have to look harder the next time I watch it). Was pretty good. (Spoilers:) didn't like the whole weapons of mass destruction thing. I mean if you're going to vaporise all the water in range of the microwave, it's not going to vaporise just water in pipes, it's going to vaporise the water that makes up 90% of humans. I guess that's a massive plot hole they overlooked for the sake of entertainment.

Because of the movie I went into work, but I should have stayed at home. I was feeling like utter crap and coughing. I ended up just staring at my screen all day not being able to concentrate on anything. Was probably a net loss to come in at all.

So anyway. Will chuck a sickie tomorrow and try and recover a bit.

For some reason all I manage to achieve on the weekend on my blog is fluff. Whereas in fact I actually got quite a lot done.

Friday night was meant to be a video night at Ric's to watch the Running Man, but we lost interest in that and ended up just listening to music and bopping.

Saturday morning I cleaned out a bunch of stuff from the flat and garage. I threw out four computers, a monitor, a printer, and a couple of old pots and boxes for the next council cleanup. By Sunday afternoon the whole lot was gone. Go figure.

Saturday night dinner at the parents. Saw a spectacular moonrise on the way home. It was a half moon, but almost at 45° It looked really strange.

Sunday after church walked up to the shops to look for jeans. After swearing I'd never go to jeanswest again after they changed their sizes without telling anyone, meaning I had two pairs of jeans that were too big for me for two years. But I was out of options cause the other jeans shops don't make jeans that fit bodies like mine. So back to jeanswest. Strangely enough (after choosing a size smaller than my previous pairs) they fitted perfectly first go. Sigh. Not only that, but $45 cheaper *per pair* than the other jeans stores had. What can you do really.

Got my garage swept out and all the boxes and packing materials sorted, and suddenly it feels a bunch more spacious. Coolness.

Weekend finished out with my favourite beef stew dinner at Alan's, and some fizzling. Took some fairly cool sunset photos.

Tonight while sorting out some lego I found I was almost visitor 8888888 to Bricklink, so I reloaded the page a few times til I got there :)

FQ1: What's something you often must do that's a complete waste of time?
Talk to a couple of the guys at work.
FQ2: Who's a public figure you wish would stop wasting everybody's time?
George Bush
FQ3: What's something you'd like to do more of if you had extra free time?
Play (lego, computers, piano, dvds, take your pick)
FQ CLOCK: What time is it where you're at right now, and what time zone are you in?
6:05pm. GMT +10 (actually it's +11 at the moment due to daylight savings)

5am. Get up, turn off servers remotely, head into to work to turn off the remaining ones, the upses, the air conditioner, and several other computers around the place run by other people (power outage all day).
6:45am. Go home again and sleep for a couple of hours.
10:00am. Spend a decent chunk of the day cleaning up my hard drive and sorting out backups. Start thinking about the year's final blog entry, then literally half an hour later see Dave has found a meme version.
3:45pm. Head into work to turn everything back on. Ghost a few machines while I have the downtime.
6:45pm. Drop in on Jim and John who are jack hammering Jim's bathroom. Admire the carnage.
7:15pm. Decide the painting we finished yesterday isn't actually finished, and that the cutting in done with the last of the first tin is a different colour to the rollering done with the second tin. Ralph decides to come back down from the central coast to fix it up.
7:30pm. See someone do a u-turn at a traffic light, think "but you can't do that", then feel rather satisfied to see a police car follow them round and pull them over.
7:30pm. Eat dinner and catch up on crap.
9:30pm. Spend the next three hours redoing the cutting in with the correct coloured paint. Decide that the first tin must have been prepared incorrectly, because the new tin matches the kitchen a lot better.
1:20am. Send detailed instructions to the boss on moving some servers, as he wasn't able to make it in today to help me with it.
1:45am. Catch up on blogs. The old fashioned way, since FeedReader lost all it's settings when I moved hard drives.
2:00am. Crash into bed.

After comments had been turned off all day (I renamed the comment cgi but didn't rebuild), I turned it back on tonight and immediately the waste messages started coming through again (usually those sorts of scripts die after a while if they don't have access). So I've banned all of 66.*.*.* 67.*.*.* 68.*.*.* 69.*.*.* and 24.*.*.* as these were where the majority of the messages were coming from. I have no idea what impact such a big ban will have, so email me if you have any problems.

Unfortunately it hasn't stopped all of the messages, there's just too many hacked computers all over the world flooding me :(:(:(

It seems there is a new technique for comment spammers to get their revenge on those of us running mt-blacklist - spamvertise non-existent sites. Use compromised computers all over the world to create entries with random character urls, so that no two comments are the same, and therefore impossible to de-spam with mt-blacklist. All you can do is delete them manually one at a time >:( And of course the only way to stop an attack is to rename your mt-comments.cgi to something else.

I can see no point in spammers doing this, other than pissing off bloggers that have mt-blacklist installed blocking their sites.

Got in early to have another go at the pdu. Found the file server had hung. It was actually still working and serving files no problems, but the backup had died halfway through and we couldn't log onto the console. I probably should have rebooted it on the spot, but instead stayed back late to do it. So was at work for over eleven hours. yay. At least I finally got the new pdu installed.

10pm and I can think of nothing but going to bed. Sad really.