Weekend that is.

Spent a decent chunk of Saturday afternoon stressing over a couple of emails I sent to some people at cia and a problem with one of the websites on gamera. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the "support", or rather lack thereof given by one of the support guys. Some dude had sent an irate email cause noone had responded to the last one and he'd be stuffed around for months with an account setup. The support guy's response was "have you got a statement that you've paid?" I have to say that if I'd sent that irate email and gotten that response I'd be utterly furious. Anyway I called him on it, but I should probably have counted to 10 before sending it, as it ended up going to the staff list, and I'm a bit worried about the implications of it when everyone else reads it tomorrow. I'm not even supposed to be doing support mail, let alone telling the staff there how to do their jobs. Anyway. The other thing was I stopped a website cause it was killing the server, but noone called the owner, so he was a bit grumpy when he realised his site was down. So I spent ages wondering if I could have handled the two incidents any better.

We had another episode of "Cafe Church" today which was pretty cool. Got to sit around tables and have fruits and cheese and cakes while discussing Romans.

The only other thing I managed to achieve this weekend was to combine two half working computers to get one complete working computer. I've been putting off this task all year because I feared it would be "too hard". Well I was right. Ram problems, floppy drive problems, network card problems. It took *hours*. But at least now I have a system that I can do some testing of Cold Fusion MX. I'm sure I've ranted about Cold Fusion before, but if I haven't, ***don't use it!!!!!*** It's the crappiest software I've ever had to work with. Version 4.5 worked, but every time I did an upgrade after that there were problems. When we installed the Cold Fusion MX 6.1 updater, it completely broke access database connections, and hasn't worked since. I emailed their support but they said it was not within the realm of their free support. We called them and they quoted $500 per "incident". It's crap and Macromedia is a crap company.

Hrm how did that degenerate into a rant? :)

Watching The Sound of Music now.. will go to bed when it's done. Was kept up half the night by power outages at the exchange which kept my pager buzzing in overtime.

Or lack thereof. Was awake til probably 2:30 this morning stressing over this ebay thing. Still haven't decided what to do about it.

Came home and had a siesta for an hour and a half this afternoon, but still very sleepie.

Looks like I may have had my first ebay burning. More at a later date.

Feeling rather stressed about it, even though at the moment I have nothing much to lose except my rating (which is not so bad for me as the buyer).

urgh
it's spoiling the movie I'm watching too

...
addendum.
1:30am and I still can't get to sleep. I can't believe how much this is stressing me out >:(

That's how long my w2k server was up for before the blackout the other night. Four days short of a year! Pretty impressive for a little w2k box - it's only a PMMX 233 with 256mb ram. And it was nowhere near using up its resources - the memory line was still almost at the bottom. Oh well. At least it gave me a chance to move it into the other room, I'd been holding off moving it so I wouldn't have to break its uptime record :)

The heat/humidity is suffocating. Trying to move computers and hubs and network cables and switch box cables and getting stressed cause I was feeling sweaty, which makes me sweat even more and then stress out more. arghghh! Bit of a vicious cycle really.

anyways, here's a friday five:

1. Are you superstitious?
Not really.

2. What extremes have you heard of someone going to in the name of superstition?
dunno

3. Believer or not, what's your favorite superstition?
Well the one I'm most likely to believe in, even though I don't, is that if you go out without an umbrella it's more likely to rain. I suppose that's not really even superstition but there you go

4. Do you believe in luck? If yes, do you have a lucky number/article of clothing/ritual?
Rationally no, everything's God's will.

5. Do you believe in astrology? Why or why not?
Nup. Load of rubbish.

hrm not a terribly interesting Friday Five. oh well. Time to go find alcohol, or food, or both.

I never realised how much contact the outside of the middle knuckle of the the middle finger gets with the world. Until I scraped it while cleaning the office yesterday and have been knocking it on things ever since. ouch.

Spent a decent chunk of today stressing over the air conditioning, or lack thereof, in the server room. A part needs replacing, but of course they don't have any in stock, so we have to wait. So we hire a portable from Kennards, which only works intermittently. So they swap it. Then there's the problem of where to vent the air, when it's a sealed room with no access to the outside. It all becomes too much. 10 hour day today with no sign of letup tomorrow.

/me goes off to collapse into bed.

And so another year comes to an end. A year full of highs and lows, but then what year isn't?

Some highlights from my year included:

One that has bigger feet, so that I can go to a store and buy boots. I tried in three more stores today. Nothing in my size. Not even ordinary hiking boots, let alone black leather ones. Completely pisses me off.

Also one with a decent brain chemistry so that sort of thing doesn't stress me out to the point of crying.

It didn't help that I went to the Powerhouse Museum today for the last time on my membership card, only to find that the exhibition I wanted to see is only open between 10:30am-12:00pm Monday to Friday. Yay. Membership expires tomorrow. As do the four remaining free passes that I somehow never managed to find anyone to give them to.

Now feeling completely and utterly unmotivated to do anything. Only 8 days of holiday left, with more todo that can be done in that time :/

23 hours ago I was at drinks at the Corro which was meant to be a reunion of the previous batch of support guys. As it turned out, all three of them piked at the last minute. onya guys. not.

6 hours ago I was on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was fabulous. Although we nearly got blown off - it was blowing an absolute gale. Fortunately it didn't rain, that would have been pretty miserable. Thanks to George for letting me have her ticket.

1 hour from now I'm meant to be at a Christmas party for work. But only one of the guys from our office is going that I know about (well my boss might be also, but he doesn't count cause he doesn't talk to me in social situations), plus being my wonderful partnerless self, and given that this stoopid party is in Mosman, which is a useless place to get to, means I have to drive, by myself, which means no drinking, and I don't think I could face spending the night there with a bunch of people that I really have nothing in common with without at least a decent mugfull of eggnog to keep me going. And have I ever mentioned that I *hate* going places by myself at the best of times?

The alternative is a video night at Striker's, but I'm feeling too depressed about everything to even be bothered with that (sorry Striker). My place looks like a bomb's hit it; I've basically not been home for the past two and a half weeks. The cockroaches, even with me not leaving food around for weeks, live off the sticky gum used to seal envelopes, and who knows what else, and are just as abundant as ever.

So I can go out and get stressed out, or stay home and get depressed. Great choice.

I've had such a sucky day. I was positively bouncing yesterday compared with today. Perhaps it was sleeping in a different bed. Perhaps it was the hour and a half commute. Perhaps I just ran out of serotonin - used it all up yesterday or something :/ At any rate I had no energy all day and everything pissed me off. My boss even managed to stress me out within 30 seconds of coming into the office for the first time after he'd been away for a few weeks.

I've been looking for new boots for months but they don't make women's black boots, except in winter, if you're lucky enough to find them. So I'm going to have to get shoes instead or something.

I did find a very cool craft shop today, though, and got some plaster of paris. Going to try out the plaster and icing sugar mix and see if it makes any difference to the cockroach population here.

I had a bet going with one of our customers about the cia support mail. I said they wouldn't ask me back, he said they would. I lost.

Not entirely sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet. I was starting to get used to the idea of not having to do the support mail when I got home. Although I am in a much more of an "I don't care" attitude. So I'll do what I can and not stress over it. I was only asked to help out until the new staff can be trained up. :)