Saturday Kit and I went to the Milton Show.  She had a free ticket because she'd been doing an agility demonstration with Biscuit the day before.  Mine was $17.35.

It was a bit noisy and confronting at the start, because you walk into sideshow alley and showbag stands, and they had chainsaws going to chop up wood for the woodchopping demos.  So that was a bit stressful for all of us (we took Mr Floofy).  

Walked past all the bright coloured noisy things, and I went in to see the chookens.

Including this hilariously dyed one

There was a sculptor there selling big metal sculptures which were pretty cool.

We could hear them talking about a bullock train but the speaker was coming out nowhere near where they were.  Did see some off-duty brahman bulls though.

And I did get stopped by the reptile show.  The dude brought out all these venomous snakes which was pretty cool.  They were all very sluggish, I wonder if they keep them in a cool box so they're docile when they bring them out.

Common death adder

Tiger snake

Eastern brown snake

King brown snake

Baby salt water crocodile

We got to pat the baby saltie

Then saw the end of a motorcycle show

Wandered down to the Puzzle Art Australia tent which had a lot of very cool jigsaws.

Past a bunch of emergency vehicles.

Said hi to Kit's friends at the My Wife's Hot Sauce tent

Marvelled at all the Lego Minifigs.  I have a bunch of these!

Went into one of the pavilions and looked at all the flowers and veggies and cakes and craft and art which was pretty cool.

Then went down to watch the Milton Ulladulla Dog Training Club's demonstrations on obedience.

Then wandered out, past the bulls

Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours!

Sunday.  23rd.  Back dated.  Leftover pork and veggies for dinner.  Stu found a recipe on RecipeTinEats for crispy eggplant to try with Tony's other eggplant (since the other one went very slimy).  I tried and it actually worked, although if anything I set the oven to be *too* hot heh.  

Also All The Garlic!

DS9 1.3 with the Duras sisters, so afterwards I watched Star Trek: Generations.  Dumb movie.  The whole premise of it was dumb.  He got into the nexus the first time by being in ship that crossed into it, so why not just do that again.  

Monday.  Not super great sleep.  All the crap at work.  Looking at proxy procurement crap.  Started feeling a bit crap after work like I was having an immune reaction.  Finished up a little early and had a bit of a lie down.  No sleep of course.  Leftover veggies for dinner then DS9 1.4.

Also.  Ketosis!

Tuesday.  Slept fairly well, but feeling like I had a bit of a sore throat.  So went back to bed.  Rested all day, but no sleep.  Leftover blue cheese veggie bake and salad for dinner.  DS9 1.5 and Stranger Things 1.5.

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep on account of being in bed all day, but did eventually sleep mostly ok.  Still feeling off and bit of a sore throat, so another day in bed.  May have had a meltdown at one point.  Also wondered if my achy neck was simply from lying down for two days.  hrmm. 

The currawongs were feasting on the Virginia creeper berries

Microwave pork crackle for lunch!

Leftover blue cheese veggie bake and salad for dinner.  I had in my notes DS9 1.5 and Stranger Things 1.5, but actually think it was 1.6 for both.  And somewhere around here watched DS9 1.7 but don't know when.

Thursday.  Don't think I had a sore throat anymore.  Either I was never actually sick and it was all in my head (entirely possible - during covid I was convinced I had a sore throat literally every time I went out in public), or I beat whatever it was.  Took a bus in for HBZ's farewell which was nice, but it was super hot.  Got home, had a shower, and just collapsed.  Pizzas for dinner, DS9 1.8, feeling unwell in my stomach.  Too much stress probably.

Friday.  Took til like 1am to get to sleep, then awake from like 5.  Sigh.  Busy morning, then stressed trying to get everything ready before I left...

Monday.  10th.  Backdated because I spent the time I should have been blogging on cooking instead.

Stormy overnight.  Woke up around 2, then 3, then 4, but managed to get back to sleep each time.  Not a terribly productive day at work - fighting all the crap.  Found out HBZ is leaving.  And I immediately started feeling a sense of impending doom.  So did Con.  Yummy dinner of slow cooked pork neck and all the veggies.  Beyond Paradise 1.4, then bed.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  The BS started as soon as I logged in - a product used by our security team needs direct internet access, *apparently* doesn't support a proxy (to be confirmed).  Seriously this is a SECURITY product???  Didn't get anywhere with the errors on the new mail servers.  Although we were able to do a restore of an old one to a new one and it's working ok.  Mince and cabbage for dinner.  Beyond Paradise 1.5.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Was stretching just after I got up and felt a bit of a twang in my shoulder which hurts a bit.  Another unproductive day of dealing with crap and no word back from mail server vendor.  Nearly two weeks into keto and I'm already sick of food.  Sick of cooking.  Sick of having to think about what to eat.  Some retard used my Gmail address to book a hotel in South Carolina.  Very tempted to cancel the day before so he gets charged the first night fee and has nowhere to stay.  Stressed with travel agent who hasn't been communicating very well.  And finished Beyond Paradise, which had a nice crossover into Death in Paradise at the end of the 2023 season.  

Thursday.  Slept okish.  After emailing the mob in South Carolina last night that someone had booked the hotel using my email address, I got a thing back from them to say they'd cancelled the booking.  Lolz.  Another day of not getting much done due to all the crap.  Some of Con's grad cohort came to drinks which was a bit of fun.  Pizzas then started into Return to Paradise - a spinoff series set on the South Coast, with filming locations on the South Coast as well as Avalon.

Friday.  Had a bit of time for scripting in the afternoon.  But couldn't get a simple foreach to work.  Sigh.  Kievs for dinner, then Stranger Things 1.2, then the first two episodes of Meltdown: Three Mile Island.

Saturday.  Slept okish until about 4:30. hrmm. 

When you pack up the majority of the carbs in your pantry (I couldn't move in there).  Will slowly start going through this in a few weeks.

Stu found a keto muffin recipe that's actually quite good

Had a busy morning including house stuff, booking flights to Adelaide, taking my brand-new-second-hand saxophone for a service, going to Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  It's still got most of the vibes of the Green Shed in terms of range of stuff for sale.  But all the bits and pieces are arranged mostly by colour.  Odd.  It's also a bit expensive, like the cheapest stuff is still a dollar (sub dollar would be better for something small), cheap plastic glasses are still $2 which seems a bit high.  Jigsaws are somewhat variable but mostly $4 (Green Shed was $3 per jigsaw flat rate).  However, they retain the colour coded bargain weeks that Vinnies do, which means that that $4 jigsaw is only $1 or $2 depending on the coloured tag.  So I wasn't going to buy anything.  And then I did.  Whoops.  More house stuff in the afternoon.

Stu cooked creamy mushrooms and cauliflower rice for dinner - yum!

Return to Paradise 1.2, then finished the last two episodes of Meltdown: Three Mile Island.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Another busy day of house stuff, but this time had a bit of time for hobbies.  Played some clarinet for possibly the first time this year.  hrmmm. 

Dropped into the reptile place at Gold Creek.  They *still* don't have a 48" 10% UV light, but they did suggest an edison screw heater with UV that I could try in the meantime.  But I'm a bit worried about giving Stumpy sunburn, he hasn't had any UV all summer.  The baby blueys are so cute though!!

Did you know you can buy garlic cloves by the kilo?  Only $12 too!  Bargain!!

Lots of cooking in the afternoon, so no time to blog. 

A big veggie bake, a heap of garlic, and one of Tony's eggplants with ham and cheese.  The eggplant went very slimy though

Lachie's breakfast lasagna

Watched Stranger Things 1.3.  Tried to start on Chernobyl, but, technology.  Turned on the NAS for the first time in months.  The thing booted which was nice, but the admin interface and sharing protocols are so old my computer wouldn't talk to it.  Had to fire up an ancient version of Firefox I had lying around to be able to connect to the admin interface.  Reenabled SMB 1 on my computer but will need to reboot to use it.

2024. Pretty standard year really. Busy busy busy!

Our big trip this year was to Tasmania. So no overseas travel, but does overstrait count? We spent a month there and had a great time. We could easily do the same route around the island and see all different things if were to go again, there's that much to see. I took five days off in January so I could get a nine day break, to make up for the shortened break at Christmas (which essentially only felt like a long weekend after the whole leadup/Christmas/post Christmas family stuff). In early February we went to Tumut with Tony/Frank/Karen for the TRBC Tumut River Tap Days. The day itself was hot but it was a lovely afternoon with beer and friends. I went down to Junee/Wagga for the Lego show in Wagga Wagga which was great and uncrowded, then stayed with David the night and caught up with Kellie's family. Sydney in May for a tour of WestConnex, the Ramses Gold of the Pharaohs exhibition, and Rachel and Hayden's wedding, with a couple of days playing tourist with Mum in the middle. In September we went up to Port Macquarie for Jeff's 80th birthday party. It was a lot of driving for just a day there, but Jeff had a wonderful time with most of his family there. Stu went up again in December for Potty's 50th. In October we flew up to Queensland for Ben and Sarah's wedding. It would have been nice to stay longer and have a proper catchup with Chay and also David, but Stu was too stressed with work to think about it.

My job continues to generally be "Sadie" - lots of decom work. A couple of bouts of being the Naughty Email Intervention Layer when Neil was on leave. On one of those I did a bunch of work in the test environment to make it match prod. We setup a new notifications db and decommissioned like half a dozen others. Looked at a proxy as a POC sorry POV. Not overly impressed. Cloud stuff just really is too.. nebulous.. troubleshooting and logging is invariably crap. The biggest project of the year was migrating a couple of thousand VMs to a new environment with a new version of the firewalling software. In advance of the move I spent two days deleting 10% of the rulebase so there'd be less rules to migrate. Then we had to maintain two environments while we spent a month migrating everything. But it generally went quite well, and we did the majority of it during business hours with no outages. Of course none of Daniel's scripts work in the new environment, so with a jump start from someone in security, and a lot of help from Nick, we managed to get a bunch of them working with some new powershell modules. I've learnt a lot about powershell, but I'm still really dumb so it's a struggle. Socially, there was a gin night while I was in Tassie, but was able to have leftovers when I got back. We won a trivia night in July, but luckily someone else volunteered to run the next one, which we were in no danger of winning in October. The social club had a 70th birthday "cocktail" night although it was primarily beer, wine and bubbles. A great night anyway. A couple of work Christmas parties, then my Christmas bbq at the lake in December for 58 people. About the 11th year in a row I've run it. Good times.

I've generally been pretty healthy this year. Other than being fat. Hit the fattest I've ever been in January, so went low carb and did lots of walking up Mt Rogers and managed to lose a few kilos quickly so I didn't have to lug them up mountains in Tasmania. Had the usual bouts of insomnia here and there. Did a sleep study in September. I have a bit of sleep apnea when I sleep on my back. No surprises there, I avoid sleeping on my back, except when I'm asleep and don't notice. Had a couple of sore throats in October, but if they were colds they only lasted a day or two. Got new glasses in November. Should NOT have gone to Specsavers. This time the optometrist was like "eh close enough" with the vision check so I never got that whole "oh wow I can see moment" when I first tried on the new glasses. Also one of the pairs I got was far too small and I can't get them to fit right, so wearing the "spare" glasses that don't have the anti-reflective coating on them.

We've had a relatively quiet year with friends. Stu has simply been so stressed out by work that doing any sort of socialising is too much for him to bear a lot of the time. David came up in January to look at the oven. Met up with him and Shane and Jess for dinner in October, and he came for dinner later in October. Stayed with Mum a couple of days in May and we played tourist which was kinda cool. Kit came to visit with Oreo in February and May, and by herself in June. Had multiple visits to Herbert's with Tony/Frank/Karen as well as with the Chrises and Neil. Had Tony and Jo over for dinner in April. Had cocktails at Molly/Hippo and dinner at Molly/Bar Rochford/Akiba with Luc in April, August and October (busy year for him in Canberra! Here three times!). Picked up the sweetie a few times after drinks with Dennis. Had drinks/dinner with Ding at the Lighty in April. Went over to Nick and Tab's for dinner in May. Met up with Luc and Cynthia in Sydney for dinner in May. Had Fred's 50th at Herbert's in June. Went over to Chris and Geoff's for raclette in September. Had a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's which was a lot of fun. We caught up with Chay, Daemon and Augie in October, the first time we'd seen them since 2016! James/George/Josh/Rachel took me to afternoon tea in December on their way to Melbourne.

We went out to the club five times all up. See aforementioned notes above about Stu being stressed by work. We went out for a Remembrance dinner near Anzac Day in April. Ian and Chris's anniversary formal night in June. There was a working been in July. I did Christmas in July for like the tenth year in a row (except for 2020, stoopid covid). And Rob and Fiona's Christmas party in November.

Had another busy year of photo processing. I got my Turkey 2014 trip photos culled, labelled and blogged in time for the ten year anniversary of our departure in May. I started processing David's America 2023 photos, but didn't get very far through it because I had too many other projects I was working on. Got Tasmania photos online in time for the six month anniversary of that trip. I got our Queensland 2014 trip photos culled and labelled, but couldn't get them online on the tenth anniversary because Vodien broke my database. So they were a month late. I've also been doing a lot of filing/organising of general Canberra photos, Stu's family photos (pulled out 600 photos of Immy cause she hardly has any of her as a little kid), and pulling photos in case of having to need them for Mum's funeral one day (easier to get that done now rather than being in a hurry if things happened suddenly).

No big changes with the fish. The upstairs two foot has countless guppies, and I'm having to weed all the java fern out of it regularly. The four foot has a loach, three male guppies and two female guppies, and 11 congo tetras (I think). I still have Chrissie's two clown loaches - I've had them for nearly seven years now. The "angel" tank has maybe ten or so guppies in it. The downstairs two foot has a big sucking catfish and two female guppies. I've been meaning to give them a boyfriend for a while now... In January the filter clogged up the outlet on the "angel" tank and water backed up and leaked over the back, which was super annoying and made a big mess. In October the stone I had weighing down the filter wool to stop a repeat of January drifted over the well with the wool and got stuck in the outlet. Water backed up and leaked over the back, which was super annoying and made a big mess. Stumpy's UVB light died in December, but two pet stores and the reptile store at Gold Creek don't have them. Waiting for Gold Creek to get more stock.

I had a big Lego year this year. I've spent ages on Vic's Lego all year. I finished inventorying loose pieces so I knew what was left, then used that to pick parts for some more sets that looked somewhat completable. I then wishlisted all the missing pieces (a couple of thousand of them! eep!) and noted the average price for them (to compare seller prices). I bought a big batch off a dude in South Australia and it's taken weeks to mark everything off and file them into sets. I did build a few of the smaller sets that are complete, but was hoping to do a lot more over the break that I just didn't get the time for. I made a 31x31 mosaic of a QR code that will take you to my blog. I borrowed Jo's (originally Riley's) Winter Holiday Train (10254) and bought some missing pieces to complete it. Of my own I did Scaled-Up Lego Minifigure (40649), Minifigure (3723), Moving Truck (40586) and Notre-Dame de Paris (21061). All a lot of fun.

Jigsaws continue whenever I have time. Which is not often at home. I still haven't assembled the Disney jigsaw as I don't have anywhere I can do it.

I pulled out my Spirograph in January and had a bit of fun with it. Also had a play with my Rubik's Rings puzzles (never could solve those things). I'm still playing the clarinet. I'm still not very good at it. Spent the year working through a Crystal Creations koala. While it was all actually pretty good quality, the colours they provided were all off, so it looks dumb. I got some Diamond Dotz ones for Christmas and have done one and started on a bigger one.

It's been a warm year. Had our usual share of storms, rainbows and even some hail. It snowed out at the club in July which was pretty awesome. The humidity in January and December wasn't fun.

Windows 11 continues to piss me off with its trash - like files opening on a completely different desktop to the one you're on, even if the app is open on your current desktop; notepad search sucking donkey balls and just dumping you at random places in the file when you close the search box (but keeping unsaved files open over reboots is nice, although only at home, not at work); refusing to shut down when I tell it to; refusing to eject hard drives some times. But at the beginning of the year we found it will FINALLY let you ungroup taskbar items. Google may be improving the security of the internet by FORCING https, even without consent, but it did break my blog because Chrome refused to load the http css/js content on a https page. Vodien broke my blog/database in June - from broken CageFS file system errors and script errors, to broken cpanel passwords, to a mysql database reverted to October last year, to a completely broken website. Took weeks of yelling for them to fix it. Then in August they broke my database AGAIN, by reverting the database to the same point in October last year. Took weeks of yelling and pleading to finally get a complete export of my database taken after my last blog entry but before they broke it. I took that database and moved to CloudLoop, who have been amazing. I used the opportunity to do a massive cleanup of all my blogs. I fixed up all the things I'd been meaning to fix up for years, got my holiday blogs to a consistent design, got everything working in https, and cleared 14000 image assets so my blog entries publish in seconds instead of minutes. We bought a new printer in October (an Oki) because the old Brother one had a fault with the fuser and was smudging all the prints. Such a waste. Why is everything so crap these days? We bought a new lawn mower in November because the starter rip cord ripped right off on the old one. Stu has used it once. I've used it three times. In December I coded up some Perl to pull weather data from BOM's API and put a little widget on my blog to show the current weather. I dispute their "feels like" temperatures though!

Around the house. A second element died in our POS DeLonghi oven on New Years Day. After not being able to get a replacement for the previous dead element, we decided to piss it off and get a new oven. The old one was only four years old. Such a waste. Why is everything so crap these days? David came up in January to do the diagnosis on the old one, and did the installation on the new one. So nice to have a qualified electrician in the family! Although funnily enough the new one has a standard plug and doesn't need to be wired directly in, but it did need a new power point. I grew two mini capsicum plants out the front (the ones out the back got eaten by snails in like one night). They're stoopidly slow growing (not helped by completely infertile soil out the front and very little water) so only a few ripened by June before the frost finally got to them. The fridge made a loud clunk in April when it was turning off which sounded ominous. Sure enough the next time it ran it was a lot noisier. But it's still running, loudly, so there's that I guess. I dread having to buy a new one. This one is at least twenty years old. Anything new won't last anywhere near that long. Our Solar Edge solar system for reasons unknown didn't charge the battery at all for three days in April (it was sunny!). Our lemon tree totally went off this year. By June it was completely laden. In August I started juicing lemons that had fallen off. In November a branch with 112 lemons on it broke off. I've given away dozens of lemons and litres of juice, and made multiple lemon cheesecakes and lemon pepper chicken, and there's litres of juice in the freezer. I drink about an ice cube a day. But more lemons keep falling. All. The. Lemons. We had various problems with ancient electronic timers. Either turning on and just not turning off, or losing time. About three have had issues this year. The turdburger crimson rosellas came back again this year to eat the house. The gas heater died in August - nothing on the control panel. Fortunately a complete reboot of the whole heater at the power point fixed it. First poppy of the season flowered on 1 September. There's still one or two left. We had more purple poppies and epic dandelions. In September I planted out a stick of geranium that had been lying on the ground since January!! How is that even possible that it's still alive?? We had a scheduled power outage in October. The Solar Edge solar system dutifully kicked in and kept all the fish tanks running all day, but it didn't charge the battery. That's not what we were sold on. Annoyed. Got lots of strawberries in November/December. Although I didn't get to eat half of them - the currawongs kept stealing them. They didn't find the ones in the pool though, and neither did the snails so that was a win. In December I heard dripping in the washing machine after it was finished/emptied. Seems the thing is leaking. The first time I let it go and it leaked a *lot* into the drum over a few days. And then one day I found water all over the laundry floor. So it's leaking in two places. So now we turn the water off when we've finished washing. I dread having to buy a new one. This one is at least twenty years old. Anything new won't last anywhere near that long. Redid the silicone sealant on the shower in December - further up the wall this time. Our ExtendaLine that David installed in 2020 had another line break in December. Now I can't fully extend the thing which is super annoying.

Did a reasonable amount of eating out this year. Kinn Thai in Civic is a favourite, we went there in February, April and December. Chong Co is another favourite, with delivery in April, August, October. Same with Dumpling Inn in February, July, September and November (twice). Many visits to Herbert's with Tony/Jo/Frank/Karen/Chrises/Neil etc, including tap takeovers by TRBC (farewell tour) and Hopsters Cooperative Brewery. But they gave me grief over ordering from the kids menu the last time, so I lost it, and very likely will never go back. Dumb business decision will (and in fact already has) cost them. Dinners before/after ANU events with Tony at Badger&Co, 10 Yards, Terra. Some new lunch places with Neil at BZ Burgers, Uyghur Cuisine and No. 10, a few team lunches at Ikko (twice), Ramen-O and Vanilla Pod. Molly, Bar Rochford and Akiba with Luc the three times he was in town. Went to the Burns Club in Holt with the Chrises in January, and at Kambah with David and Kellie and some of David's friends during the Airport Open Day. Kimchi in Dickson with David/Shane/Jess and a colleague of David's in October. Cypher for Wello's birthday in October. Raku with Annie and Stu in May. Had Grease Monkey from their food truck at the Belco markets in May. Pattysmiths in January and June. Pizza at TRBC in Kingston in July, which turned out to be the one and only time I'd ever get there. Pappa Rich before Twisters in August. Returned to the Aussie Crepe House (previously Crepe Cafe) in October for the first time in a few years to avoid the mall food court during school holidays. Beess & Co in September and Gang Gang in November. Four Winds with Tony in November, repeat of the previous year. Yat Bun Tong and Kinh Do delivery/takeaways in May/July.

As usual I somehow ended up doing a whole lot of cooking this year. Staples included Sunday night roasts, Thursday night pizza (mostly made at home) and often Brown-Food-Fridays with chicken Kievs. Did slow cooker lamb in January which was amazing. Lemon dill chicken in January, then again in December with my own dill. Cheese mince and cheesy taco casserole in January (keto ftw!). Tried a carbonara from AntiChef in February but it didn't really work with alternative pasta. Might try it again some time though. Barramundi bake in March, although not as good as basa, and a few tuna bakes. Luv-a-duck cheats Peking duck a couple of times - pretty awesome each time. Did three Mexican things from Nagi Maehashi's Dinner book in May - slow cooker Mexican shredded beef, taco slaw, Mexican red rice which were all excellent, and beef ribs from her website in June, which would need a bit of tweaking to do again. Osso bucu on August. Lemon pepper chicken a couple of times in November. French onion soup in December. Also made Not Quite Nigella's peppermint slice a couple of times, and lemon cheesecake a few times.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions/Tours
* Canberra Airport Open Day in April. In the rain. But nice in the afternoon.
* Journey of Australian Science series at the Shine Dome
* Lego show in Wagga Wagga in April
* Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs in Sydney in May. Too many people and not enough room and no flow made it super stressful for me
* Ralph Heimans exhibition at the portrait gallery in May
* Questacon to see the Ryan "Brickman" McNaught Lego exhibition. During school holidays. Not recommended.
* Beethoven's 9th in August
* Questacon again on my birthday in August. Much quieter and more civilised.
* Dark Matter in the Pub in August
* Mint in September (and back again a week later to swap out the earrings I bought)
* Scrivener Dam tour in October

Movies (at the movies)
* Twisters

Movies (TV)
There may have been more that I forgot to blog about or forgot to add to this list
* The Queen
* Mona Lisa Smile
* Mash
* The Sound of Music
* Fantasia 2000
* The Shape of Water
* The Good Son
* Parasite
* Barbie
* A Night To Remember
* Iron Man 1/2/3
* Miss Potter
* Twister
* 9 to 5
* The Door Into Summer
* Mean Girls
* TRON / Tron: Legacy
* Freaky Friday (2018)
* South Solitary
* Wonka (2023)
* Grave of the Fireflies
* Inside Out 2
* Golden Kamuy
* Salt
* My Old Ass
* John Wick
* Die Hard / Die Hard 2
* Love Actually
* The Santa Clause / The Santa Clause 2

TV
We were getting into a good routine of Death in Paradise on Thursdays, The Orville on Friday or Saturdays, The Crown on Sundays, as well as Mash, The Simpsons and Futurama over dinner. Then they all finished and we haven't been watching as much together. There's a few things I want to watch so hopefully will get into a routine again in the new year.
* Death in Paradise - from mid season 7 to mid season 11
* The Orville from mid season 2 til the end
* Mash from mid season 2 til the end. Fun seeing various people pop up that became famous later - like Mr Miyagi, Larry Wilcox, James Cromwell, GW Bailey, Patrick Swayze, David Graf, "Larry" Fishburne
* Sex Education from mid season 4 til the end
* The Crown from mid season 6 til the end. Although there's 20 years of the Queen's life left so they may make another series.
* Some Big Bang Theory on tv in Tassie
* Shogun all of season 1
* Laid Back Camp season 3
* Start of The Apothecary Diaries. It didn't really grab me (maybe it would have gotten better) so Stu watched it by himself.
* Lego Masters Australia vs The World
* First three seasons of the American Lego Masters, and a Christmas special
* Documentaries - Brats, Pretty Baby, The Movies that Made Us (on Friday the 13th), Feminists: What were they thinking?
* Start of Girl Band Cry. Another one that really didn't grab me.
* Amazing Race season 8 (another celebrity edition)
* Black Mirror - all of it
* The Simpsons - some of season 36
* Futurama - whatever this year's season is

Weddings
* Rachel and Hayden
* Ben and Sarah

Other stuff
* late night on NYE watching the fireworks
* went out to Cotter Dam on New Years Day because it was spilling. It was quite crowded out there. Walked all the way up to the viewing spot.
* took a *lot* of photos of flowers. And food.
* remembered the January 1994 bushfires thirty years ago
* went shopping for jeans in January. Failed. Did get a bra though.
* bought some jeans at Vinnies of all places in January
* also managed to get some "skinny" jeans in January at Kmart because that's all that was left in the store. Hate.
* impressed with a Seiko battery from 1998 that was still working, and has been powering a thermometer all year
* got my first Charlie coin in April
* got grunty at Access Canberra because MyWay cards can expire and they expect you to fork out $5 for a new one (no credit on new cards) so they can transfer the balance. Decided to ignore the problem until the new MyWay+ system came along in December, and Stu could transfer his balance.
* saw a kangaroo in our driveway in May (sounded like it smacked into the fence) but it disappeared before I got outside
* ABC Classic 100 "Feel Good" in June
* had my nails "professionally" done in June
* watched the Olympics opening ceremony but nothing else
* had a play with ChatGPT. It's trash. Asked it to write a trivia night round on current events. Most of the questions couldn't actually be answered because they were wrong.
* saddened to hear that TRBC was closing down in September
* found some five leaf clovers in September
* wandered round Yarralumla in September and saw the old brick works
* saw Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in October. Well, my phone did, I didn't
* found a two leaf clover in October
* visited the Lake Ginninderra spillway and wetlands in November
* encouraged the epic dandelions around the place
* watched lots of Jamie and Julia
* booked another holiday next year with the mother type person
* did the Plonk beer advent calendar
* got a random Blue Screen of Death in December
* got to level 15000 in Candy Crush just before the end of the year
* saw a rat among the daisies under the lemon tree

My biggest stress this year is simply a lack of TIME. I desperately want to retire so I can actually slow down and enjoy life and just do my hobbies and have a quiet life. Even over the Christmas break I spent too much time trying to get All The Things done, and not nearly enough time on my hobbies. Didn't really feel relaxing at all. I have heaps of photo projects I want to work on next year as well. And I'm desperate to get Vic's Lego out of the house, but so little of it is complete. Deep breaths. It'll all be ok in the end.

Happy New Year to everyone, I'll try and have one too!

Thursday.  Boxing Day.  Took a while to get to sleep but then slept mostly ok.  Weeding first up then planned out my todo list for the break.  Alternated between house stuff, Lego stuff, dotz and blog reading.  Pizza for dinner (from Dominos - eep!) then Death in Paradise 11.1.

Sole survivor mini capsicum

I did the Plonk beer advent calendar again this year which was a lot of fun.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok, except for the storm around 04:00.  It wasn't very big and it was very quick to pass over, but I did still get up and disconnect the computer.  Alternated between house stuff, Lego stuff, dotz and blog reading.  Leftover Christmas Eve feast for dinner.  Then watched a documentary on AlphaGo - the first computer program to be able to beat top level human players.  

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Weeding before it got hot.  Then got a random Blue Screen of Death which was a bit upsetting.

Alternating All The Things, although didn't get very far through it before we headed out for a big pantry shop.  Brunch/shopping/lunch and three hours of my day just GONE. Sigh.  Luv-a-duck Peking duck for dinner.

Death in Paradise 11.2 then back into Amazing Race celebrity edition (v2).

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Hit 15000 in Candy Crush (nearly 3000 levels this year, 5000 in the past 18 months).  I really want to stop because the ad experience is just so trash, but what else am I going to do when I wake up at 5:30am??  Probably should delete photos off my phone.  I have like 60000 photos and the thing is nearly full.  

Maccas at Emu Bank was super quiet in the morning and there were no kids in store.  Parking was easy everywhere around Belco.  Shops were (generally) uncrowded.  I guess everyone must be down the coast.  All The Things.  Leftover Christmas feast for dinner.  Death in Paradise 11.3.

Monday.  Slept ok, but awake 5:30.  Feeling the same Monday morning stress I feel every week.  Yes I didn't have to go to "work" but my todo list is a full time job and my break is too damned short to get it all done.  As of 9:15 I'd been at it two hours and hadn't had any "fun" yet.  Sigh.  All The Things.  I swear my todo list is only getting longer not shorter.  I've barely had any time for "fun" this break.  Having to file all the Lego and do my blog year in review certainly didn't help.  Lost another congo tetra.  Resealed the shower.  Over the past couple of months mould had been growing *behind* the sealant.  We're guessing water is seeping down from the grout further up.   So pulled all that off, exit-moulded it, cleaned/dried it, and resealed a lot further up the wall.  Even managed to use the existing tube of sealant.  Did I mention I've barely had any time for fun this break?  Leftover Christmas feast for dinner.  Death in Paradise 11.3, then the finale of The Amazing Race (celebrity edition v2).

Tuesday.  New Years Eve.  Took ages to get to sleep - restless legs.  Then awake early.

Can you see?

A full on RAT was under the daisies when I went on my daily easter egg hunt to gather lemons.

Morning was mostly housework.  And Oh The Humidity.  And then all the blogging.  Have I mentioned I've barely had time for fun this break?  I did finish filing the Bricklink order though.  We lost another line on the ExtendaLine this morning.  This time it jammed into position part way out.  But it won't let me extend all the way, so can only go half way now.  Won't go in *or* out.  Doesn't bode well for having to wash sheets.  Why is everything so crap these days?  #grunt.

Sunday.  1st.  Summer!! Final countdown to Christmas!!  Christmas music on the clarinet!!

:)

Also, Tony and Karen&Frank and I are doing the Plonk beer advent calendar again this year!

Roasted up some veggies and had it with leftover turkey from the club night.

Black Museum on Black Mirror.

Oh did I mention I picked up my new glasses last week?  The vision in them is *ok*.. I mean it's a bit better than it was.. but I certainly did get that whole "oh wow I can see" feeling from them.  Sigh.  Should NOT have gone to Specsavers. Also the ones with the anti-reflective coating are too tight and keep sliding down my nose and they're driving me NUTS.

Monday.  Slept fairly well.  Busy time before work just trying to catch up with life.

My washing dried in about five minutes outside.

Did some work on some decom tickets, and was able to use my new scripts to do the hard work for me, which was super exciting.  A few copy/pastes and it's done.. whereas to do it manually would be like twenty or way way more clicks per group.  Late finish.  Had a brief break before dinner and looking at holiday stuff after dinner and suddently it's nearly 20:00.  Sigh.  Labelled pics from our recent Queensland trip.  At one point it smelt like aviation fuel coming through the cooler.  Maybe that Virgin plane on its way to Adelaide that just flew over was leaking fuel.. hrmm.  Striking Vipers on Black Mirror.  

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy morning trying to keep up with life.  More decom work at work, and did up another script.  Cooked more veggies for dinner and finished off the lamb from last week.

Started into the 2024 season of Futurama, whatever they're up to now.  Mum photo picking then Smithereens on Black Mirror with Moriarty heh.  An episode with "present day" technology for the most part, but gripping.

Wednesday.  Restless, took a while to get to sleep, but still woke up early.  Busy day.  Got some bulk deleting scripts working to save me even more time on decoms.

Went back to Specsavers to try and get my glasses adjusted.  They pinched the nose piece a lot closer together, so now they don't slide down my nose - they just stick out way too far and hurt.  Sigh.

Have I ever mentioned how TRASH Windoze 11 is?  Today I opened a text file.  It opened in notepad on my main desktop no issues.  Five minutes later I opened the text file again.  This time it decided to open ON MY OTHER DESKTOP!!! WHICH I HAVEN'T EVEN USED TODAY!!!  What the actual F MICROSOFT?? 

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too on Black Mirror.  Miley Cyrus as herself much?  I found the house they filmed in on Google maps.  It's actually a place you can rent for like $8000/night.  And it's surrounded by a lot of electric fences.  

And that was the end of that for Black Mirror.  I've finished watching all the episodes so far.  I could easily rewatch them all (if the sweetie ever wanted to watch them).  I found the show fascinating for the most part.  Although it's usually very dark and often twisted.  

Thursday.  Slept okish. 

I have a jungle in the back yard

Had to take the bus to work (the sweetie came out at one point a complete zombie from a few nights in a row of not sleeping on account of being so stressed out by work).  Got to try out the MyWay+ app QR code.  Which you have to hold low enough for it to read it.  And currently you're not meant to tap off until they can work out bugs.  Half the people got free rides.  Kids just didn't even bother trying, they just walked on.  They're doing road works near one stop, which meant the GPS wouldn't activate because the bus wasn't close enough, so everyone there got a free ride.  Other people weren't scanning things the right way or tapping properly, so some of those just went meh and ignored it and got a free ride.  And there's still no real time location tracking of buses.  Lame.

Busy day.  Ok drinks.  Pizza/ice cream/Death in Paradise 10.6.

We had some slippage...

Friday.  Restless sleep - too hot and humid.  Awake from maybe 4.  Another decom day and more looking at scripts.  Made a lemon cheesecake after work.  Leftovers for dinner (too stinking hot and humid to run the oven for kievs).  Christmas movie season started with Die Hard.  I've learn almost all the words in German to sing along at the end :)

Saturday.  Slept somewhat ok.  Did I mention all the rain and storms this week?  Busy house day doing All The Things.  Went out for a bit of food shopping and errands.  Apparently Knead's sourdoughs mostly failed because it was so humid they wouldn't rise.  Tried two places to get a replacement light for Stumpy's tank which started flashing on Friday.  Failed.

Twin buses...

Pork/parmesan/truffle sausages for dinner and cheesecake!

Death in Paradise 10.7.

Sunday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot/restless/itchy.  Did I mention the humidity?  Everything is damp.  Not looking forward to this being the new normal for Canberra with global warming.  At least today was a lot less humid.  The cooler was actually useful as a cooler and not just a humidifier.  Went out to the Reptile Zoo at Gold Creek after lunch to try and get a UV light for Stumpy's tank.  I actually even called them before we went to see if they had one.  They said they should.  They didn't.  They had a 5% one in 48", but she reckons blue-tongues probably need like the 12% ones.  Which of course they didn't have.  They barely had any four foot lights at all.  There's all sorts of random sizes nowadays, like 46" wtf?? 

If/when Stumpy carks it, we'd be very tempted to get a bearded dragon.. they're so awesome!

Made some French onion soup, although probably made it too liquidy.  Might be an epic disaster.  Also blogged Notre-Dame in Lego.  Been meaning to for a while, but they just reopened it this weekend, so thought it would be a good time.

Dear Vodien, 

Here's a bowl of petunias:

Tuesday 27.8.24.

I went to update my blog because I realised I'd forgotten to add a photo from last week's entry. Loaded the blog interface but got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Loaded terminal through cPanel. Which luckily worked (no CageFS errors this time). Ran my test perl script which connects to SQL and got this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
DBI connect('db:localhost','<user>',...) failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at common.pl line 18.
Cannot connect: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

In phpMyAdmin in cPanel I got:

mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied for user '<user>'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Fricken great. Just what I need. Feeling like I should be buying a bowl of petunias for Vodien.

Wednesday 28.8.24.

I remembered that I'd had the phpMyAdmin error before, and the fix was to just reset the cPanel password. So I did that. Great, phpMyAdmin loads.

Except.

My MySQL database had been reverted to a point in time from last October!!

!!!!

AGAIN!!

Yeah so the exact same problem as in June where they reverted it back to the same spot in October. In June, after a week or two of yelling at them, they restored it.

So of course I yelled at them.

I didn't send them a photo of a bowl of petunias. I should have.

Now before you ask, yes I do have recent backups of my database, having learnt my lesson from last time, but that's not the damned point. In fact I'd taken a backup the Sunday before, so I was only missing one entry from my blog. But as it turned out, having my own backup was not going to help. But we'll get to that later.

Thursday 29.8.24

Vodien ticket escalated (supposedly) to the sysadmins.

Friday 30.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Saturday 31.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Sunday 1.9.24.

Still no response from Vodien - three days now. Started a new ticket. Which they promptly closed.

I changed the permissions on mt-comments.cgi so noone could post any comments. They would either fail because the entries don't exist, or break the site with a republish. And I didn't want more mess to clean up.

Monday 2.9.24.

Vodien provided a restore of the database in an .sql file and said here you go. But it was the database at the "bad" restore point from October last year - so it didn't have any recent data in it.

Tuesday 3.9.24.

One week in.

No progress getting Vodien to restore the correct database for me.

Wednesday 4.9.24.

Vodien basically keep telling me I have to restore my database myself. Which I was considering doing, assuming I actually had the right data. I did end up getting a copy that was taken a few days before they broke it, but I decided to keep pushing for the whole thing.

Then I went to my blog interface to check it and got

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@<domain> to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And logging into the terminal in cPanel I got

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to mount /var/cagefs/35/<user>/home2 -> /usr/share/cagefs-skeleton/home: Too many levels of symbolic links.

So either they were trying to fix it or just making it worse.

Thursday 5.9.24.

Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. At least the cagefs file system on my website was working again in the morning. But the database is still bad.

Friday-Sunday.

Long weekend in Port Macquarie.

Sunday 8.9.24.

Checked my mail when we were near home. I shouldn't have, because the lack of useful response was just making me more and more depressed.

Monday 9.9.24.

While not getting to sleep last night I wondered if maybe there were two database servers on the server. It always used to be MySQL, but the restore they did recently (and I think I might have noticed this previously) was from Maria DB. Same only different. My latest theory is there's actually the old MySQL database server still on the host, and for whatever reason the pointers for Perl and phpMyAdmin have been pointed back at it (again). I mentioned this to them, but their only response was "what's the URL of your blog entry manager?". Yeah right like I'm going to let you into that. So I gave them a command line command that they could use to query my address book database, which has also been impacted by this whole drama. That was in the morning. No response by evening.

Tuesday 10.9.24.

Two weeks in.

No response from Vodien. Eventually they responded with something that didn't make sense, so yelled at them again to put this through to a senior sysadmin.

As an aside: if you Google "Vodien is trash" (I literally did this) you'll get links to review pages that have page after page of people ranting about how utterly trash Vodien is. One star reviews all the way.

Wednesday 11.9.24.

Awake from after 3. Vodien sent me a database restore. But restored from 19 August which was before my last backup anyway.

Tried to reload my blog index, but I got:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@kazza.ciapics.cia.com.au to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Turns out they've blatted all my cgi scripts permissions to 644 instead of 755 or 744. Every single one of them.

WTF?? I mean seriously, WTF???

So now what. Do I take their database, restore it, and hope they don't flip over to the other database at some random point (which I couldn't even find out from them if that's what had happened). Or do I just give up and take my clean backup to a new hosting company. Ok I'd pretty much made up my mind I was going to move. They've broken my site multiple times in the past few years, and it always takes days or weeks of yelling to get it resolved. I'm sick of it.

Thursday 12.9.24.

Apparently they've restored a database again.

Friday 13.9.24.

Tried opening my blog interface and got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yet my Address Book scripts still work. Ok, gave it some time and it came back. But database was still from October 2023.

Saturday 14.9.24.

Resolved myself to spending my entire weekend sorting out this mess.

Step one: find a new hosting company.

Back in 2020 I tried VentraIP. It looked to have everything I wanted and was a good price. I talked to them online before I joined and said I had a Perl/MySQL setup and they said that was fine. But when I went to get it going I found they didn't have the DBD::MySQL perl module and my blog wouldn't work. So that was a complete waste of time. So I wasn't going to try them again.

Had a look on https://www.productreview.com.au/ and someone recommended CloudLoop and they had excellent reviews. So had a look. $10/month for a basic plan which would cover what I needed. They didn't have an online chat, so I emailed them asking about Perl/MySQL. This was fairly early on a Saturday morning. They responded in MINUTES! I was impressed. So I joined up. Pro-rata til the end of the month it was only around $5, so even if it didn't work out I wouldn't lose much.

After the account was activated a short time later, I logged into cPanel only to find they don't have Terminal enabled. Fricken great. So set myself up an SSH private key to try and use ssh. But Internode blocks ssh doesn't it. Fricken fricken. So tried to log into Internode, but their MFA is trash and I had to log off/on a few times before I could finally get in. Also, Stu's phone number is out of date, but we can't update it because:

Your contact details cannot be changed at this time
Unfortunately, your contact details cannot be viewed or changed online at this time. Please contact us to update your details. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thanks Internode, sorry iinet, sorry TPG.

Anyways, eventually got in and turned off the firewall, now to wait and see if it will work.

In the meantime I emailed support about Terminal in cPanel. Again they responded in minutes. They said it was not available for security reasons, but they enabled ssh access and I had to whitelist my IP address in the firewall. Which I couldn't actually find.
But.
Terminal now showed up in cPanel! Great! That's really all I need anyway. Let's do this thing!
(I think they may have mixed up ssh/cpanel terminal - so ssh is disabled which is fair enough, but the terminal in cpanel had been enabled which is all I needed anyway).

So first step is to make sure Perl will work with MySQL. I imported my address book database (it's only tiny) and tried out one of my scripts.

Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (you may need to install the CGI module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at quickie.cgi line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at quickie.cgi line 3.

Turns out CGI.pm hasn't been around since Perl 5.22. Vodien has 5.16. CloudLoop has 5.26.

So I get CGI.pm from CPAN. Add a line to my script to use lib and the path of the file. Works!

Next up my blog script (mt-check to start with). It wanted Util.pm so copied that up as well.

But then it wanted FCGI.pm. Got that too, but this time I got this error:

Can't locate loadable object for module FCGI in @INC

Which I think means it needs to be properly installed/compiled for binaries, which I can't do. hmmmmm

Ok so then ran mt-check on the web. It actually ran! It complained about a bunch of modules, but then it complains on the old site as well. It loaded enough that I might be able to work with it.

So next I need to get my database imported. I still didn't have the most current database export from Vodien (their exports are a different format to mine), so I used my own backup. But I was running into all sorts of problems. phpMyAdmin wouldn't import the file, giving sql errors when importing the "blob" data. And the file is 50MB so trying to edit it and cut it down to just do individual tables was proving problematic. Now I didn't have these problems when I tried VentraIP a few years back, so I'm guessing there must be some versioning problems or something?? But I was getting super frustrated with it. I did have a go at using Vodien's sql file and that one did import, albeit with old data.

Sunday 15.9.24.

So with some actual blog data in the database I next had to get an eighteen year old release of Movable Type working on a modern server. Yes yes I know I should update to something else. But newer versions of Movable Type are $499USD. PER YEAR. And I've seen the dramas people have moving to WordPress. Stu has threatened to spend his retirement moving it to a more modern platform heh. But in the meantime, I just want my blog to work.

So first up I try running mt.cgi on the command line to see what sort of errors I'd get.

[user@server MT-5.2.2]$ perl mt.cgi
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at lib/MT/App.pm line 1821.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Got an error: Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/{{ <-- HERE support}}/?/

Yeah so now you need to escape {} characters in regex strings. Think I fixed that.

So then did a test post and that actually worked!! (using a hosts file entry on my computer so I could test it out on CloudLoop before changing DNS anywhere)

Well that was good enough for me to commit to moving the site across.

Tarballed my directory up on Vodien. ~2.5GB. !! Downloaded it to my computer, extracted it, saved into a number of smaller zip files, uploaded them one at a time, extracted them. Uploading large files must be a bit upsetting for Internode, and I kept getting dumped out of FTP because our IP address kept changing. Have I ever mentioned how trash Internode has become since they got bought out by iinet then TPG? Also I have a 5GB size limit on CloudLoop. Anyways, got there in the end.

Now all that's left is to get a proper copy of my database from Vodien. They did have a restore file taken on the morning of 26 August - the morning after my last blog post. But the files were owned by root and I had no read access. After a few chats/emails back and forth I realised there were actually two copies of the files, one in the root and one in my website. So got them. And they were perfect! Well, they had my latest data in them anyway.

Right, so tried to use phpMyAdmin to import it, but got errors again (didn't record what). But then I found this command

mysql -u database_username -p database_name < file.sql
from this site https://support.hostinger.com/en/articles/4536306-how-to-import-a-database-over-ssh
And that worked perfectly.

But it was at this point I realised that the export sql file was full of funky characters. Somewhere along the line "special characters" from foreign languages lost encoding and were broken. Tried doing search/replaces in vi, but it didn't want to play. So put that aside for now.

Tested posting some blog entries and they worked, so hopefully the database is working well enough.

But I was getting SSL certificate errors - saying it was self signed. I changed the DNS A record in Vodien and waited for it to change over, but I was still getting errors on https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=kazza.id.au

Emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a response in minutes. And then sslhopper was picking the certificate up properly. Not sure if they did anything or not, but I was blown away by the responsiveness and usefulness of CloudLoop support. It's like a breath of fresh air after dealing with the faceless Vodien.

Monday 16.9.24.

Before all these dramas started I'd already been meaning to fix up my blogs properly. I'd fixed the style sheet on my main blog to be hardcoded to https, but I hadn't published it to everywhere, comments were still broken on https, and I wanted to get all my holidays blogs using a consistent design. I also wanted to replace the defunct Google Analytics scripts with the new ones. So after dinner I spent ages working on my holiday blog templates - fixing everything so it all works in https, fixing style sheet locations etc. I picked the Americas 2023 blog (the last one I did) and made sure everything worked properly, then made a Theme from it.

Tuesday 17.9.24.

Working through all my holiday blogs using the updated theme/design. The special characters in my Turkey blog were proving problematic :( Some of the characters I can do a search/replace in the blog interface and it'll go through and change them all. While this works for some characters (eg umlauts) it wouldn't work for some of the characters in the Turkish language :( I also found and fixed a time zone setting in my blog that has been annoying me for twenty years haha.

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday

Work on fixing holiday blogs.

Saturday 21.9.24.

Finished fixing up my holiday blogs (including the Australian Holidays blog which has a slightly different config to it, although have since found a couple of problems I still need to fix).

So then it was onto my behemoth of a main blog. There's over five thousand entries in it. The last time I tried to publish after design update it took over a day. Look I even took a screen shot! 

So I was dreading the pain it was going to cause. I'd taken notes during the fixing of my holiday blogs design, so it was pretty quick to repeat the changes in the main blog. But before I committed, I wanted to test the design with a test post to make sure it picked up everything ok.

Took a while and then BAM..

500
Internal Server Error
An internal server error has occurred.

The good news is the entry did actually post. Although not properly, and it was intermittent. Like it'd mostly update the entry page, but then not the archives page etc. So thinking there might be resource limits. I didn't see any real spikes/errors in the cPanel Resource Usage thingie though.

I tried clearing out the entire activity log. This cleared nearly 9MB out of the database. But it didn't help. I tried a few other Movable Type config options as well with no luck.

So I emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a super quick response. And a stack trace. And they looked while trying to reproduce the problem themselves. This was all well and truly above and beyond the level of support I would have expected. I was astounded. But a definite possibility was the Assets. Since Movable Type 4, whenever you upload an image it would save it to the database as an asset. This annoyed me when it first started because of all the extra clutter, but I did like it simply because it'd read the image and put height/width info into the html. But after sixteen years, I had 14000 assets. !! So I deleted them all!! (well, firstly I tested what would happen if you did. I found it would delete the asset and the image itself, but it left the html alone. So all I needed to do was restore the images once I'd deleted the assets, and all would be well).

Then I did a test post.

It published.

In SECONDS.

!!!!

After a bit more testing of posting and commenting I was ready to release the hounds. I republished the entire site. I did it in chunks, but it was all done in under ten minutes. And search results are returned super quickly too now. My blog hasn't been this fast in YEARS!!!

The only real remaining issue now is the foreign characters. I download the mt-entry table (16MB) and did some search/replaces and was able to fix a lot of it. But there's some characters that I just can't publish because it won't talk to the database. There might be a way to fix it. Something about telling perl to talk to MySQL with the right version of utf-8. But I'm too dumb for that sort of thing. Replaced a good chunk of the bad characters. Almost accidentally blatted the .bak table because I forgot to change the table name in the insert into lines (yay for it not importing duplicate entries). Had to redo the whole thing again because I didn't escape ' and " characters. Then republished again. Nine minutes, fifty seconds. I should probably republish all my holiday blogs too.

Sunday 22.9.24.

Spent most of the afternoon blogging entries from the past month.

Monday 23.9.24.

Wrote up this post so far.

I still haven't changed my mail or DNS configs over yet. Or the websites for my subdomains. I'll do that first before I post this.

I haven't decided what I'll do with johnson.id.au or trainman.id.au. I'd actually prefer to keep trainman where it is, because then I'd be able to email David again (currently using my account as an SMTP server, which intercepts mail for trainman.id.au and delivers it to me instead of David).

I also need to figure out how to backup my database properly. I'll have to do some testing of exporting/importing the data on the same version. Otherwise I'm going to need to figure out a better way to backup the blob data in the database. If I hadn't been able to get the Maria DB dump from Vodien I would have been a bit stuck as I wasn't able to properly import my own database backup, which is quite upsetting.

Tuesday 24.9.24.

Started going through and documenting everything in my Vodien cPanel setup. Found a place for mail forwarding, so tried setting trainman.id.au to an external MX record to see what would happen if I sent mail there from my account. It hasn't bounced back to me, so maybe it did deliver to David. This is good to know if I end up moving trainman.id.au to CloudLoop. Also found another backup section which lets you download MySQL databases. This has the same format as what Vodien sent to me. Interestingly the Vodien export is full of trash characters, while the CloudLoop export is fine. This is good news. Dropped my TTLs on mail to 300. Setup my mail accounts on CloudLoop. Tried them out in Eudora. TLS errors to start with, but easily fixed by setting TLS to Required, Alternate Port in Eudora. So changed the DNS for mail.kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. So inbound mail all working. Had a look at migrating ciapics over. But it's half a gig. And I only have five on CloudLoop. Considering leaving it there, but I really want to take all of kazza.id.au off Vodien. Next up - SMTP. Got it to auth and send ok, but now to battle with the SPF record. Adding the IP address of my host didn't help. Or adding relay.mailchannels.net. hmm. On a lighter note, cPanel and DNS are actually integrated on CloudLoop which is nice.

Wednesday 25.9.24.

Tested mail again and my SPF record has propagated around so that's nice - can send to gmail now. Although this is all likely to be moot once I switch the nameservers across and use CloudLoops DNS which already has all this stuff. While clearing stuff out of Vodien I discovered that at some point they'd actually fixed the ownership of the db restores. Lolz.

Friday 27.9.24.

Setup johnson.id.au as a domain on CloudLoop.  Copied over the content (there's like, one page).  Then changed the nameservers from Vodien to CloudLoop.  Tested email once DNS propagated.

Saturday 2.11.24.

Been on CloudLoop for like six or seven weeks now. No issues. Today I changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. Pointed a few A names of my photo subdomains back at Vodien. They have a lot more storage so keeping my photos sites there.

Sunday 3.11.24.

Cleaned out most of kazza.id.au off Vodien, including my blog database. Left an entry in my addressbook database and make sure the scripts were working to access it. So I'll be able to tell when Vodien break it again.

In conclusion.

I knew as soon as Vodien broke my database AGAIN for the second time in three months that I was going to have to finally move my blog. This was reinforced over the next few weeks by being impossible to get anyone who actually cared or had the capability to look at the issue and fix it. No matter how much pleading and yelling I did I just couldn't get anywhere. It made me seriously depressed for weeks. I was also upset that the backups of the database I'd been dutifully taking weren't necessarily going to work properly.

On the flip side, the support and responsiveness of CloudLoop (Karthick) was utterly outstanding. They definitely deserve their five star reviews.

In the end my blog is a lot happier. The holiday sites are consistent in design and everything works properly in HTTPS. The culling of the assets out of the database means my entries publish in seconds. Every new year I'll clear out the previous year's assets to keep it trimmed down.

Let's hope I don't have to write another one of these posts any time soon...

Monday.  7th.  Labour Day.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Woke up ~6.29.  Fish and gardening stuff all morning.  Then setting up and fighting with the new printer (needed another driver to print double sided).  Then trying to sort out tax stuff.  And getting stressed at everything.  Adulting is hard :(

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Catchup day at work really.  Shine Dome talk in the evening. Prof Nanda Dasgupta talking about the research of Prof Mark Oliphant, and Dr Ed Simpson talking about his work with particle accelerators and making new elements. 

Bronte Cormican-Jones's "Of Line of Light" outside the NFSA

Dinner at Badger&Co after.  Talked into buying more food than I wanted.  Like a LOT more.  Oh well, leftovers.  Hurrah.  Also Badger is pretty hit and miss, and more misses with the specials.  Like the "crispy" pork belly bites that weren't crispy.

Wednesday.  Awake from before 1:30 til after 4.  Hurray.  Zombie day.  Did go to the Crepe Cafe for lunch to avoid the food court in school holidays.  Hadn't been since pre covid.  Except they're the Aussie Crepe House now.  I had the stroganoff crepe (up to $17 now, ouch).  It probably had a bit more cheese filling, but the beef was TOUGH.  

Cooked cheese kranski chipolatas for dinner, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of them for the next 24 hours or so!

Thursday.  Ok day I think.  Herbert's after work for a final TRBC tap takeover.  Tim came which was nice.  He might be looking for IT work in Canberra, although his wife is not keen on them leaving Tumut.  

Friday.  Crap sleep.  Ok day.  Kept a bit late at work and then had to race down the hill for a bus, which I only *just* caught, to go out to Cypher for Wello's birthday drinks.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day trying to catch up with life.  Stu was also too stressed with life so we didn't go to the club working bee. 

In the evening was a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's.  I did a very half-hearted attempt at Eddie (couldn't find a wig or vest, or borrow a saxophone, but did find a scarf which matched and made a slingshot).  

The sweetie went as Dr Scott.

There were frank n furters, meatloaf, and rocky horror road.

Ian even let me have like one of the last ever TRBC beers I'm ever likely to have!

Ended up staying up wayyyy too late, but it was fun.

Sunday.  Got like five hours sleep.  Cause I wake up early no matter what.  With sore throat.  Spent the day continuing to catch up with life.  Managed to get all my Queensland photos online, only a month late.  Also went and did food shopping.  Tuna bake and veggies for dinner.  Early night.

18.5.24

Back in May was Rachel and Hayden's wedding.  Not really sure why we were invited, we've barely seen them in the past 17 years.  Rachel was just a little kid when I left Sydney and I've really only seen them a few times since then.  But we were, so off we went.

It was scheduled for 11:00.  So we got there at 10:30, so we'd have plenty of time to find parking.  We ended up all the way down the street.

They were late.  So the cermony started at 12:00.

!!

It was a lovely service.

After the service was morning tea.  Even though it was 13:00 by now.  And it was raining.  And I was stressing about so many people.  And it was a dry wedding.  I did end up going and talking to a couple of my old friends.  But felt pretty uncomfortable.  And the sweetie just avoided everyone heh.

They tried to get a photo of everyone outside.  In the rain.  Yeah that didn't work.

And there was lunch.  Talked to more of my friends.  Did I mention it was a dry wedding?

There were various family/friends photo shots throughout the afternoon.

And there were speeches.

With bubbles.

Of cider.

Alan wrote a limerick!

And there was cake cutting

Photo shoots carried on

When we finally had a chance to leave Marylon said we should sign the guest book, but you were meant to do a photo booth thing and keep a copy and stick the other one in the book.  But there were lots of people and we didn't know what to do with the machine and it was all very stressful.

And then of course I couldn't think of anything useful to say in the book.  Oh well.

We finally left at nearly 16:30.  Six hours after we got there.  On the way out we saw the MASSIVE car park under the church.  Yeah that would have been nice to know about in advance.

It was a lovely day, but we were both utterly exhausted by the end of it, with a 3.5 hour drive ahead of us to get home.  I spent the next day or so *cringing* over the crap I said because I was so anxious.  This is why I don't socialise sober, people!!  But I think Rachel and Hayden had a wonderful day, so that's really all that matters!

Sigh I just blatted this entry.  Let's start again shall we..

Monday.  9th.  Backdated.  Long story.  

Took forever to get to sleep. Stressing about my database. So a crappy nights' sleep. Then another busy day at work. I was going to try and sneak off a few hours early to catch up with crap but just too busy. Went to Chris's and got some chicken and cooked up some Chicken Tonight, but it was a bit.. gelatinous.. Not bad, just not super epic awesome. Did some culling of Tassie hotel photos. Not that I can post them any time soon.

All the pink and purple crap this week!!

Tuesday. Awake from some time before two til after three. Hurray. Depressed about hosting. Depressed about my health. Everything is awful. Although we did do a prod cutover and noone's screamed yet. Cooked up some mince/pasta for dinner. 

Wednesday. Awake from after 3. Never got back to sleep. Busy day migrating. Got results of my sleep study. Yeah a bit of sleep apnea. Hurray. Depressed and overwhelmed at everything.

Thursday.  Woke up. Wondered what the time was. Estimated about 5:30. Looked at my phone. 5:29. Cool. Busy day of migrations. Nice drinks but only a couple of other people. Made pizzas for dinner.

Then watched Mean Girls. Aww man I don't miss high school one little bit.

Friday the 13th. Slept mostly ok. Feeling overwhelmed at life. Today was ten years ago that we left for our Queensland trip. But I can't post it because my database is still broken. Two and a half weeks later. So this weekend instead of catching up on everything, I have to find a new hosting company for my blog. Because even if Vodien fixed it this time, they'll still break it again in the near future and I don't have the mental capacity to deal with their BS. I'll be putting one star reviews wherever I can find places to do it. Leftovers for dinner, Mash, then I watched TRON, which I think I might have seen once when I was a kid.

Saturday. Slept mostly ok. Did some house stuff then went looking for new hosting.  Went out for lunch and shopping.  Hungry Cracks are doing a parmi burger.  It was a sloppy mess.

The flowers at Jamo were pretty

Saw this in Coles.  I have a mandolin.  It's awesome. But it doesn't have a gaurd.  So I have to be EXTREMELY careful using it.  Yes I have cut myself on it.  No I wasn't drinking.  But I was distracted talking to people.  So it might be kinda nice to have another one for when my current one gets too blunt to use...

Leftover pasta and salad for dinner, Mash, then I watched Tron: Legacy. I didn't think I'd ever seen it, but then where they go into Jeff Bridges' fancy house I was like, that seems familiar.  Weirdly Disney kept changing the aspect ratio.  In some places it'd be widescreen, but others it was much closer to 4:3.  Weird. Oh and there we go - I have seen it.  Yay for dementia and not remembering anything.

Sunday. Spent much of the day trying to fix my blog. Had leftover raclette from Chris on toast for lunch.

Then.. OMFG TRBC is closing down!!!!!! Drank one of the last of three we have in the house. Stu is drinking one of the others. The other is a dark lager so Stu will drink that. I'm half tempted to do a sneaky trip down for one last visit. But aint noone got time for that.

Roast beef for dinner but overdid it :( (1.75 kg in 1.5 hours).  Stu liked it though. And I guess it will do well as leftovers.  Then watched the 2018 version of Freaky Friday.  Wait, what, it's a muscial?  Lolz.  Only 3.8 on IMDB too heh.  I think there's one more version I still need to see.

I wanted to have a hanami party this year.  I messaged Nat and Andrew ages ago but they never got back to me.  Then I was going to invite Chris and Glenda (they're going to Japan in October).  But with all the stress and drama going on, I just didn't feel up to it.  You know I'm not doing well if I pass up an opportunity to have peeps over for a little party ...