FQ1: Who is your one favorite author and why is their work so appealing to you?
Roald Dahl. Not really sure why. Just kinda silly in a lot of ways, and his grownups stories are kinda spooky too.

FQ2: What are your two favorite literary subjects and why is reading about them interesting to you?
I like reading about science stuff. Science fiction is pretty good too.

FQ3: What are your three favorite books and why are each of them special to you?

1. Star Trek VI by J.M. Dillard - only book I ever read at least three times before the Harry Potter books. I like the character development and how I can picture the movie so well from it.
   
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling - my favourite of the Harry Potter books, and funnily enough the only one where the bad guy isn't specifically out to get Harry.
   
3. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton - quite a bit better than the movie, it held me fascinated for the day and a half I sat down to read it, the moment I finished my mid-year exams in second year uni. It still has some of the fundamental flaws of the movie (like who'd leave a game park with three people manning it for an entire weekend??), but the book and the chain of events that surrounded it were fundamental to the very existence of this website, my job, my friends, this house, pretty much everything about my life at the moment is the way it is because of that book.
   

FQ Author: If you had to write a book, what genre of book would you pen (mystery, romance, science fiction, biography, etc.) and what would it be about?
Probably a science fiction story. Although the only book I've ever written (a project for Year 8 english) was mostly an adventure with a teenager and a couple of kids shipwrecked on a Pacific Island with bird smugglers.

As seen at Blogography. BBC viewers rated these things the top 50 things to do before you die. (significantly longer than my original rather short list)

1. Swim with dolphins I'd love to do this!
2. Scuba dive on Great Barrier Reef, Australia I've been to the Great Barrier Reef, but I was five at the time, and didn't go scuba diving
3. Fly Concorde to New York, New York, USA Well since the Concorde doesn't fly anymore that's pretty unlikely. The closest I'll probably ever come to this is going on the Concorde at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
4. Go whale-watching I'd love to do this
5. Dive with sharks And this
6. Skydiving And definitely this.
7. Fly in a hot air balloon That reminds me, Ric and his friend and I were talking about this the other week
8. Fly in a fighter jet That'd be awesome. I actually wanted to be a pilot in the air force when I was at school, but I turned out too short with too poor eyesight. You can go on jet flights on old migs and the like in aus, but they're ridiculously expensive, presumably because of all the fuel they use
9. Go on safari Only a vague interest in going to Africa
10. See the Northern Lights That'd be very cool. The northest I've ever been is Jasper, Canada
11. Walk the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, Peru, South America Don't have too much interest in going to South America
12. Climb Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney, Australia Done it! Twice in fact :)
13. Escape to a paradise island Does it have all the creature comforts, including a shower?
14. Drive a Formula 1 car Be kinda cool I guess
15. Go white-water rafting I went on a jet-boat on New Zealand when I was 18 months old and hated every moment, I was told. I've been white-water liloing which was extremelly cool
16. Walk the Great Wall of China I'd like to do this one day
17. Bungee-jumping And this
18. Ride the Rocky Mountaineer train, Canada Came quite close to doing this earlier in the year, but we decided we'd get better value by driving.
19. Drive along Route 66, USA Road trips are always fun. If I were to return to the US though, I want to do the south and east
20. Fly in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, Nevada, USA Been to the Grand Canyon, but only by car and foot
21. Take the Orient Express from Venice to London Be kinda cool
22. See elephants in the wild In Africa, so lowish on the priority list, but would definitely be cool
23. Explore Antarctica Cool but overpriced at the moment
24. Ride a motorbike on the open road Well now if Dave had had a spare helmet that night in June... :) The only time I've ever been on a motorcycle was in our neighbours backyard when I was about seven
25. Have a go at cowboy ranching Riding horses? cool. Herding cows? no real interest
26. Climb Mount Everest Well I don't think I'd ever have the capability to climb it, but I'd take a helicopter ride to the top!
27. Wonder at a waterfall Many times.
28. Travel into space Well yeah sure I'd love to do this, but I don't have a spare $40,000,000 sorry. Actually this is on my original list of things to do before I die.
29. Explore the Galapagos Islands Be kinda cool I guess
30. Trek through a rainforest Rainforests have leeches. I'd much rather trek through temperate or subalpine forests
31. Gallop a horse along a beach Oo I'd love to do that
32. Ride a camel to the Pyramids, Egypt That'd be very cool also. Egypt is one of the few places in Africa I'd like to go
33. Take the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok I actually know someone that's done it in reverse, and that's probably the closest I'll ever get to doing it
34. Catch sunset over Uluru (Ayers Rock) , Northern Territories, Australia Done this! In 1985
35. Go wing-walking I'm sure there's some OH&S law against doing that.
36. Climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa Meh
37. Fly over a volcano The closest I've come to doing this was being at the heliport for flights over Mt St Helens. But for $99US each the parents weren't ever going to be interested.
38. Drive a husky sled Shrug
39. Hike up a glacier I didn't exactly hike, but we took a sno-coach onto the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta Canada.
40. Ride a rollercoaster Lots of them. Some of my favourites - the old Space Mountain at Disneyland, The Colossus at Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Montezuma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm.
41. Fish for blue marlin Meh
42. Go paragliding I've been microlighting does that count? I'd love to go paragliding though
43. Play a round of golf at Augusta, Georgia, USA No interest
44. Watch mountain gorillas Vague interest
45. See tigers in the wild Even if I was in the right spot, they'd be hiding I'm sure
46. Do the Cresta Run, Switzerland Never heard of it
47. Visit Walt Disney World, Florida, USA One day
48. Visit Las Vegas, Nevada, USA Been there, although it was twenty years ago
49. See orang-utans in Borneo Vague interest
50. Go polar bear watching That'd be cool, I could combine that with the northern lights perhaps

Had a busy cleaning day today. And tidying. And organising. And researching.

Pulled Jason in lego apart and put it all away. Sorted out a bunch of recent ebay purchases (I've bought a bunch of stuff recently and it's always fun going to the post office not knowing what you're going to get - Friday I came home with two packages and had no idea what was in them until I opened them - like getting birthday presents :) ). Played with my camera.

oh I know why I'm so tired. Had an Evilhouse video night at Campbell's last night - watched Spun and Cypher. Both very strange movies. Went to be around 2am blah!

From The Leaky Cauldron:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Something wicked this way comes.

Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Something wicked this way comes.

Hear the MP3 Version of the song

View the trailers

I'm *so* excited, I can't wait!!

And finally, check out the completed Lego mosaic of Jason Isaacs (don't forget to stand back as far as you can from your computer to get a better effect).

Had another nothing day today. Just too hot. I actually spent a good deal of time trying to sort out the filing on my computer. It seems I have more than 4gb of *stuff* on one drive, and the backup job is failing because you can't put more than 4gb into one file on a fat32 partition. So I thought I'd try and clear out some junk, and burn other stuff to cd as necessary etc. In the end I ended up putting *more* stuff onto the disk as I'd brought home a pile of files from my work computer to sort out.

So anyway, I decided that I'd go for a swim. I haven't been for a swim all summer, and decided that if I waited any longer for someone to swim with, well I wouldn't get a swim at all. I'd of course have to go after dark, as I hate swimming alone. So 8:30 comes around (after watching the 60 minutes 25 year anniversary - weird because they filmed the end of it on the big sound stage they have next to the car park, and had setup a marquee in the car park and I'm, like, "been there!" hehe.. but I digress) and mother calls. The funniest part of the whole conversation is that she tells me that Dad has shaved off his beard!! He hasn't shaved in 27 years!! This I've *got* to see :) So I'm in a kinda good mood, when I go downstairs. Only to find that they still haven't fixed the frigging filter and the pool is closed until further notice. They decided it was broken on *Wednesday* and were going to get someone to come out the next day. I realise now that the pool was actually quiet all weekend. *sigh* So now I'm *still* hot and sweaty. Think I'll just wash my hair and go to bed.

Here's another Mazaika mosaic - this one is of my eye. It's the best one I've done so far. I did a big one of Andrew Denton, it's on conspiracy also.

Today was so completely different to yesterday it was unbelievable. I could actually *think* and got a stack more work done. I'm full steam ahead planning our active directory upgrade. Panicking because I only have three days of James left before he disappears overseas for three weeks. If it all goes pear shaped we'll just have to go back to old ghost images of the servers.

Found a *very* cool program on Eric Harshbarger's site last night - Mazaika. It's a shareware program that lets you build photomosaics. I've been fiddling with it ever since. I'm trying to figure out which sorts of photos give the best results. It looks like pictures that don't have too much detail work the best. The pic is a section of the betta photo I uploaded the other night. I gave mazaika 11000 photos in my collection (although a decent chunk of those are thumbnails) to index, and am wearing my poor little puta out making mosaics.

Work today sucked. Someone didn't bother to turn the air conditioner on after the holidays, and the place sweltered all day (or at least the first half). Then I got home and it was even hotter, and I just about lost it. I need to be cooool dammit!!

Anyways.. I've uploaded some of the mazaika images I've done to conspiracy.

Successfully moved global catalog servers from AD DC to another on my test domain today. This was after stuffing around with dns last week doing some trials, and leaving it pointed at the wrong place, so the domain controllers wouldn't talk to each other. "frigging dns" is all I have to say about that.

Also successfully connected an OS X mac and an OS 7.6.1 mac to the servers, doing file and print sharing.

Now that those problems have been overcome I can go back to the original plan of having new print and dhcp servers setup by the weekend for a big changeover. *scary*

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ps, in case you were wondering what on earth I'm talking about.. I'm planning our work deployment of active directory. We're upgrading our windows NT 4 domain to 2003. You know those ads on at the moment that say "we're merging all these domains and making it all easier blah blah blah" to which the boss just looks at him, and so he says "we'll save $2 million a year" ... well we're nothing like that really, given that we only have one domain and two servers, but that's what we're doing. I've been thinking about it for a couple of months, but really working frantically on it for the past couple of weeks when we all suddenly realised that next year was only 6 weeks away, and we plan to go live with it mid January. fun fun fun!

I was doing some cleaning up this afternoon and looking at some of my old books, wondering if it'd be worth selling any of them on ebay. One of the books I saw was "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle. I actually stopped and thought about the book for a moment. I got it when my brother's school was getting rid of some old text books, and I remember quite enjoying the book when I read it.

So then I get back to my puta and lookup the tv guide for the night - and there it was - A Wrinkle in Time on tv tonight. Spooky!

There's some classic references in the movie though - like a reference to the Matrix ("is this a *training* sequence?" and "there is no spoon") and to Harry Potter (a direct quote of Dumbledore). Funny stuff.

Thanks Makybe Diva, you won me $25 in the office Melbourne Cup sweep! My first ever win on a sweep, it was pretty cool. Actually I didn't even know it had won until after the race when they put up the results - the tv was a bit blurry and the volume wasn't loud enough. Funny stuff.

Other useless Melbourne Cup trivia: the horse that won in 1986 was called "At Talaq" which I found out recently means "divorce" in Arabic. The horse was owned by a "Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum" .. maybe the dude was going through a rough patch when he named the horse :)