Had our "internal" farewell at lunch today - just a trip to the pub. But it was so much nicer and more relaxing and I had a couple of beers and John came and it was just so much better.

Threw out about 50cm of paper today. Emptied out my old boss' filing cabinet. Most of the stuff in there was filed in around 1999 by an admin temp we had at the time. Virtually nothing had been filed since. So I tossed pretty much all of it. It was an awful lot of fun :) I also tossed 3/4 of the stuff I had in my personal filing drawer. Very liberating :) And in two years time someone will say "whatever happened to xyz document?" and I won't be there to say I tossed it .. mwooohahahaha. I'd post a photo but Stu is about to call (have a mounting pile of photos I need to blog .. one day...)

So I have this dilema: I can't get to sleep easily on my back or side, but if I lay on my tummy my nose either drips like a leaky tap, or alternatively, blocks up completely whereby I'm forced to breathe through my mouth, resulting in puddles of drool on my pillow.

Enough fun imagery so far? heh

So I lay awake in bed for another couple of hours last night, feeling completely miserable because I couldn't stop coughing, couldn't breathe, and therefore couldn't sleep. Not to mention every position simply *hurting* my head and neck. Not fun.

Today I ran out of pain killers and, even more disastrously for tonight, tissues. So it was off to the local shopping centre. Which I *hate* doing on a weekend. Even when I'm not sick. Things were only mildly traumatic getting there, I found a parking spot right by the entrance to the car park (you always want a spot near the exits, not the popular spots by the shops - is good to be able to make a quick getaway).

First stop, the pharmacy. There's about a billion different cold and flu medications. The thing I got last time doesn't exist anymore. Well it does, but it has phenylphrine instead of pseudoephedrine. Cause we can't have the druggies making stuff out of them can we? sigh.

The supermarket stop was ok, although I did buy about three times as many things there that were on my list. Including a chook that I'll roast tomorrow (hey, it was on special! heh).

However coming back to the car, some hothead was trying to reverse into a spot, and someone was in their way behind them. The first I knew of this was when one of them (dunno which) BLASTED their horn just metres from my already throbbing head. With two arms full of shopping I had to endure it. Arrgghhh!! Ouch!! :( What a bunch of bumheads.

Have taken drugs. Hope they kick in soon.

Funny how that whenever corys swim into open water it looks as if they're flying. Don't know what it is about them. Maybe I'm just always used to seeing them at ground level...

My mission for today was to sort out fish stuff. All of it. There were piles. And more piles.

So dragged everything out of the various rooms they'd been scattered in and sorted everything into categories. At which point I ran out of steam :)

Stu was up to travelling, so we went to the Hub for lunch and then to Magnetmart to find some storage containers. We got four smallish containers that held a decent chunk of the stuff, just not the bulkier stuff. Will have to deal with that another day.

Tonight Stu cooked a chicken curry which was a tad warm but not too bad, and we watched Funny Videos and some more Veronica Mars.

Saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with Kirk and Ric tonight.

Loved it!

Enjoyed it much more than 3 and 4. It was definitely a lot more fun than the book, which was downright depressing. They did have to leave a lot out of course (especially stuff with the Order itself), and changed a few things around a bit, but not too badly, except for maybe how they find out about DA. The passage of time felt more real in this one, cutting in an out of the DA meetings and classes. And they kept a lot of the look and feel from 3 and 4, without changing it like they did after 1 and 2. Strangely enough I missed Harry not smashing up Dumbledore's office at the end heh.

Dudley has grown up to be sufficiently thug-like. Not much Draco but plenty of Lucius (*drool*). Ginny definitely didn't get enough lines (she barely had any lines at all :( ). Percy is there but doesn't get any lines. Luna was very cool, liked her a lot.

The visual effects in this one were fantastic. Probably the best made movie of the series so far.

So it's 5:15, and Kirk calls me up. They've had a drop out and did I want to come along to see Transformers. And I'm like.. Free movie? Gold class? Count me in!

So you've gotta go into these movies not expecting much. You enjoy them a lot more that way. And really I did only have one major gripe - that the transformed robots were a lot "bigger" than their vehicle alter egos. I'm happy to accept a certain degree of "movie physics" but not when it involves magic as well (that's for Harry in a couple of weeks ;) ).

That said, it's has that wonderful big-budget feel to it with great cinematography, gorgeous scenery (not to mention the "been-there" factor with Hoover Dam heh), tonnes of action and some cool military stuff. It was just a whole lot fun all the way through.

Worth seeing on a big screen, if you're ok with extreme morphing the whole way through :)

ok so I had so much fun doing last week's edition I thought I'd do it again. No matter if hardly anyone comments. I think I will do these every week for a while, until I run out of places. This is the "miscellaneous" edition of stuff I actually gathered last week...

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Answers next week!

Well, sort of anyway. Got a burst of enthusiasm to digitise some of my old audio tapes. Which lasted about four tapes, until I had a faulty tape that wouldn't play properly, and then it became a bit too hard. Then raided my wardrobe, and pulled out maybe 1/4-1/3 of the stuff there to either throw out or donate to charity. Then got a bit overwhelmed with the amount of crap I have that I can't bear to just throw out, and trying to figure out how to get rid of it all.

Finished off the weekend with Dead Man's Chest, which is also a lot of fun even as a repeated viewing. Will make a valiant effort to watch through some of the special features so can get the dvd back to Kirk soon.

And I even remembered to patch some servers!

Today promised to be another fun day of removing viruses from machines. Except that at 4:30am, someone sent a malformed email to our mail server which crashed it. So I restarted it (when I heard the pager at 5:50am). Only to have it crash again a few minutes later. Lots of memory dumping type things happening on the screen. And what appeared to be a spam. Restarted. Crash. Repeat several times. At some point the email must have either gotten through or bounced, because the last time it crashed was 9:03am. But I had to sit and watch the thing most of the morning in case it crashed again. So that was fun.

Now we'd logged a call to IBM because the server was clearly having issues. They didn't have much to offer except upping the logging. Then late this afternoon they said "oh, yeah, there's been a stack of calls logged in the States as well, we're looking into it". Yay.

After lunch I thought it might be safe to leave the server and go and do some antivirus stuff. Except I failed abysmally. This one machine simply would not upgrade SAV, or even remove the previous (vulnerable) version. So I'm here to say right now, never use Symantec Antivirus!! It has to be the crappiest software I've ever had to deal with. Refusing to uninstall. Refusing to upgrade. Hanging on stopping services. Poor pickup of new viruses in the wild. Not to mention listening on ports to the outside world, and being buggy and vulnerable to buffer overruns!! The number of hours wasted simply *waiting* for it to do something and waiting for reboots.. we could have bought an entire new anti-virus system!! This virus has been doing the rounds for two and half days, and it took until this afternoon before its definitions recognised the system.exe file as a virus. Even worse is these machines are now riddled with spyware that SAV won't remove, even when it says it has removed the various trojans and spyware (or will after reboot).

If I ever had to make a decision on what anti-virus software to run, it would NOT be Symantec Antivirus.

For Christmas, Stu gave me a way-cool scanner. This week I've been going through my "letter drawer" and scanning the cards and letters and postcards and such things, with the idea to then toss it all. I can look at things on my computer if need be.

The funniest thing I have found so far is a birthday card my friend Sally Miller from high school gave to my eraser.

You see, two years earlier, for my birthday in 1987, she gave me a toiletry (dilly or diddle) bag full of cool stuff like stationery - there included some foil stars, coloured paper clips, an eraser, and some other bits and pieces. (The toiletry bag, paper clips and stars I still have!!) It was a cool present in terms of thoughtfullness. So two years later when I turned 16, and I was still using the eraser, I must have told her about and that the eraser was now two years old. So she made me a birthday card for it.

I really need to find Sally .. and Ann ..

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other bits and pieces:

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

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

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