My todo list is still out of control.

Not helped by a blackout in Glebe during UPS maintance at the exchange, meaning all cia's servers crashed in a heap, and chasing people to make sure gamera was rebooted and all it's services were working. This was after a day and a half battle with a $#!%load of "bounced" spam sending the mail server's queue through the roof. Campbell and Daniel have spent two days fighting with it trying to keep it under control so that mail can be processed for customers. It's basically been one disaster after another, and Campbell is understandably, totally over it.

Then, after shopping, went to my parent's place for me little brother's birthday dinner. Had a couple of fun games of 500 afterwards - including one game, where the first call of the game was to Dad and he called Open Misere. He won it, and so I won a game without even playing a card. In fact the game was declared won on the second round of play, when it was decided that noone would be able to beat him. Funny stuff. David was declared the loser of the night after losing the three games he played.

In preparation for tomorrow's office move, I was cleaning out my desk/drawers of crap so I could file stuff I hadn't filed in months. I started with a filing cabinet drawer that had been accumulating stuff since 1997. Plenty of memories were dredged up about the various projects I've done over the years, server info, schools support, project work, network diagrams, web design, etc etc. Had a lot of fun giggling over some of the earlier work I did and had completely forgotten about, like a complete audit I did of the computers in a couple of the units we support. Not too many of those computers would even exist anymore.

We've chucked out a lot of old computers, mostly pentiums, but the odd PII as well. We dumped a whole stack of dead stuff outside our door in the hopes that someone would steal it. Noone has.

So I guess I'm not *completely* hopeless - as in my last post on the topic of throwing things out where I just couldn't do it - I actually chucked out a pretty decent percentage of the stuff I had in that drawer.

Still not looking forward to moving tomorrow though :(

Dave introduced me to Skype tonight which is a lot of fun - the quality is fantastic!

Also spent way too much time tonight playing with and reading about Lego. I got a bunch of old stuff in the mail today, including six classic minifigs that have a sticker on their torso instead of the printed logo. I'm trying to find info on them - it seems they were very early minifigs and Bricklink only has one red one worldwide. I have six of the things - three red and three white. I'm sure they'd be worth something, but the hard part would be finding who. Maybe I should open my own bricklink store!

And to support my theory that some people have way too much time on their hands, check this site out!

Feeling somewhat better today after getting to bed at 8:15 last night. Spent the morning figuring out which machines left in the building were still unpatched (they're pretty much all done now), and the afternoon rearranging our racks with little bits of paper cutouts on graph paper. Silly stuff like that is always fun. What's not fun is trying to make proprietary hardware fit into proprietary racks. Note that they both happen to be the same company, yet their older style mounting kits don't work in their newer style racks. Thanks Dell.

I'd just put on the commentary for Twister, and the directors were talking about the Wizard of Oz similarities .. I changed channels back to live tv, and the credits for the Wizard of Oz were just coming up .. spooky! :) I can't understand a thing the dude is saying on the commentary, accent is 'orrible.

Had a cleaning day today, which is always a good thing. I think I could clean for a month and not make a dent in this place. Too much stuff I tells ya.

Had some fun laying out the space lego too (see pic)

Had a better day than I thought I would. Even after spending too much time this morning dwelling on the stuff from Friday that made me not want to go back in the first place. Somehow I survived anyway.

cia support is a bit of a disaster. I must have spent well over an hour on the support mail and still didn't make a dent in it. After spending too much time on it I put on The Little Mermaid just for fun.

It's still Tuesday in oz.. normally we don't see the This or That's til Wednesday..

1. Sexier (female)...Pamela Anderson or Jennifer Garner? Well Pamela Anderson is a bit of a turn off, so Jennifer Garner I guess
2. Sexier (male)...Ben Affleck or Matt Damon? Neither really do it for me, but probably Matt Damon more
3. The better piano player...Billy Joel or Elton John? I've seen Billy Joel in concert once and it was awesome, so I'll say him
4. Funnier...David Letterman or Craig Kilborn? Don't watch either
5. The dumber cartoon cat...Stimpy (of *Ren & Stimpy*) or Tom (of *Tom & Jerry*)? Dunno
6. A better news anchor...Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather? Who writes this stuff? More international people, please, some of us have never heard of these dudes
7. A better TV chef...Emeril Lagasse or Jacques Pepin? See above
8. The trashier talk show host...Maury Povich or Jerry Springer? Who knows, never watched them (I don't even think they're on in australia)
9. The worse fast food burger joint...McDonald's or Burger King? I think Burger King makes slightly better burgers (more veggies), but McDonalds have perfected the French Fry
10. Thought-provoking question of the week: Only a handful of U.S. Presidents have been considered to be *great* Of the following two, which one do you consider to be greater...Franklin D. Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln? Why? Well I couldn't even tell you what Roosevelt achieved in his lifetime, so I guess I'd have to say Lincoln

Well that was a rather silly one (again). If this poor standard keeps up I probably won't keep up This or That.

Had another good day today. Church in the morning, did a water change in my fish tank, as well as rearranging some of the plants. Apart from that just watched some tv and that was about it. Totally relaxing day :) (oh, and a load of washing up which wasn't too much fun, but I needed to do it so as not to feed the cockroach population)

Channel 7 have started up a new show called "Your Life on the Lawn". They empty the contents out of a family house (at least the bedrooms anyway) and the owners go through it all, sorting out the junk from the stuff they want to keep. The stuff they don't want to keep they sell at either garage sale or auction, or they throw out. And while they're at it, they give the rooms a face lift. The end result of course is quite spectacular.

If I had to do that, almost nothing would get thrown out or sold - pretty much everything I have has some sort of sentimental or "potential" value. As much as I'd love to get rid of the clutter in my life I just couldn't bear to part with anything. I just have to get more creative with my storage solutions :)

Well actually most of it was ok. I had some fun at work rearranging our rack setup on graph paper with scale cutouts. We should be able to rearrange everything in the racks without too much fussing about.

KH continues to piss me off with his lack of working grey matter though. And PM went and deserted us on his last week with us - "training" - leaving me to try and pick up all his pieces without him. As a consequence I've been putting off all the suck jobs he's left me with. Not any more unfortunately - now my Jim is on my back about it all, will have to look at them tomorrow. crap crap crap.

On a lighter note, I setup the bits and pieces I got from Daniel and Fiona last night in my fish tank. There's a couple of twisted bits of wood, and some more grassy leafy stuff. I also snipped off the last big amazon sword runner and wrapped it round one of the sticks, and moved the elodia to the other side of the tank where it can be seen. Still having all sorts of problems making the plants stay *planted* - they have this annoying habit of just floating away, and I have all sorts of trouble getting them to stay in the gravel (it doesn't help that I can't actually reach the bottom of my tank with my fingers)

Bit of a slow news day today (the kambrook timer is working well with the fish tank lights, although I've noticed the water has become a bit cloudy, probably due to a bacterial bloom, but from what I've read, no big deal at this stage).. so thought I'd give a plug to my photo server - conspiracy.cia.com.au which I use to dump all my photos so they don't waste space on CIA's system. Events and Fun Stuff usually has the most recent pics.

I still haven't decided on a directory structure for all the files, the current one works ok, but has some problems (eg photos in a directory spanning more than a year will appear out of order). If anyone wants to make some suggestions, post a comment! :)