Some time after 7pm last night my blog went offline.  Tried it from a couple of different networks, including downforeveryoneorjustme.com.  It was dead.

Some time overnight it came back.

But it was missing the last entry and the last couple of comments.

Looks like the content reverted to was from about midday on the 28th, so would have lost about a day and half's worth of data.  Luckily my blog gets so little activity that this is hardly an issue.

So obviously Something Bad happened, and they've had to do a data restore.  Or perhaps they were moving data to a new host but it all took so long that content had changed by the time they were done.  Either way, I'm lucky to have not lost my entire blog (or at least since the last snapshot I did, and then would have had to reconstruct it from my rss feed reader).  So I'm doing another snapshot of it now.

It's a pity that the internal Movable Type backups don't work anymore.  They used to a long time ago, but I think there's just too much content now.  I'll look into automating an sql dump at least to give me a text dump at regular intervals...

Edit: I think they must have moved to a new host - suddenly response time for posting is super snappy - normally it takes like a minute to publish an entry, but this entry only took a few seconds to publish!

Edit 2: they seem to have broken the SMTP settings.  I used to be able to have my blog email me when I got a blog comment.  Now it tries but fails and generates a bounce message (which I *do* get).  But even worse, it turns out that *all* my mail is bouncing :(:(:(:(:(

Edit 3: I called their support number and spoke to someone who confirmed that they had indeed moved the site to a new host, and he was able to fix the mail setting for my domains on the spot.  And that he'd have to go and fix a bunch of other people's domains as well heh.

Saturday we spent the entire day cleaning the house, and then didn't even get anywhere near through the todo list.  In the evening we got pizza and Kit came up and I inflicted Love Actually on everyone, and then we had on the end of the carols and made fun of them the whole way through heh.

For the third night in a row I had insomnia for several hours.  Hurrah.

So Christmas Day was a very slow start.  Then I spent the entire morning cooking and doing food preparation.  The sweetie spent the entire morning cleaning the yards and house.  Such a good sweetie. 

Chris and Zac came up and then mum arrived and we had roast pork for lunch (the crackling barely made it to the table), with home-made apple sauce, also epic potato bake, Jamie Oliver's glazed carrots, mushrooms fried in butter, and baked vegetables.

I ate too much.

And then felt bloated all afternoon.  So I wasn't much fun for the rest of the day.  Whoops.

Late in the afternoon Annie and the family came over and we had dessert and did the whole present thing which was fun.

And people braved the festy green pool and seemed to have a lot of fun.

Wednesday I organised a barbeque for nearly forty people.  It went pretty well, and we kicked on at Lachie's for a while afterwards.

Thursday night I was all set to watch Love Actually, but Chrissie wanted us to babysit Zac, so that scuttled that idea.  Had an early night, but then woke up at 3:30am and probably only got another hour's sleep so was a complete zombie on Friday.

Friday I finished off the Christmas shopping and we got home a bit early.  Had a beer in the pool with the sweetie, then the hoardes descended.  First Serena and Ben, then Chris and Zac, then Dave and Kat, then Kit.  Chris brought up some nibbles, Kit brought some cheese, and Ben returned from a Costco run with wings.  So that was dinner heh.  In the end I think I was in the pool for about five hours.  Whoops!  It also got green between Thursday and Friday which was super annoying.  So it's a bit cloudy now for Christmas :(  It was a bit late by the time we got out, too late to watch a movie.

Wednesday night I started coughing.  Spent the next few days feeling like crap.  And the next few days coughing non-stop.  Fun times.  Not.

Saturday we fed about seventy people at the club.  The sweetie had to do most of the food preparation though, because I didn't want to spread germs. 

Dave and Kat came up for the weekend too which was nice, other than feeling like crap of course.

My back hurts, I think from all the coughing :(

So after a pretty depressing day at work I met up with Heather to shop for the weekend's club event.  Well really it was for the after party for the actual event.  Except the actual event has been cancelled due to insolvency of a third party and so everyone is pretty devastated.  The after party is still going ahead, but it might feel more like a wake to a lot of people.  And I prolly won't get to see the little brother, who probably had more invested in the whole thing than anyone.

*sigh*

Also.  I'm getting sick. Hurrah.

My dad always used to refer to not touching things as not "fingerpoken and mittengrabben".  And dumb people were dummkopfs.  And rubberneckers as, well, rubberneckers.  This version doesn't talk about "cottenpicken fingers", but he used to refer to those as well.  So did mum.

I don't know that I've ever actually seen this poster though.  But it's been around for a very long time.

Friday night we had dinner with Damien and Amanda at the Dumpling Inn.  That was nice to catch up with them - haven't seen them in ages.

Saturday morning we did a bunch of shopping, then headed out to the club for a Christmas in July.  We got there a bit before 1:30pm, I put the pork on at 1:50pm, and spent most of the rest of the afternoon organising and preparing and cooking and stuff.  Had some help chopping veggies which was nice, and some people decorated the shed so it was all quite nice.  We bought a 4.8kg piece of pork.  1kg chicken roll.  Lots of veggies.  Made apple sauce from scratch.  We came home with a chinese container of pork.  People ate a lot I tells ya!  Everyone seemed to have a good time so that was nice.

This is not even all the food - it doesn't show the epic potato bake or really show the carrots and peas!

Oh we also made two pavlovas and brought some fruit cake.  Came home with three slices of pavlova and a bit of fruit cake.  Ok I didn't *make* the pavlova, just topped it with cream and berries.

Sunday was basically just housework.

Today I tried to do my usual morning routine of scanning some photos but my computer refused to talk to the scanner :(  Extremelly upsetting.  Will probably have to reboot my computer and *hope* I can connect next time.

Then Ingress was a big poo due to the last buggy release which meant needing to reboot the phone, then Optus was being a poo so missed out on glyph hacking a level 8 portal.  So I was having a crap day and hadn't even made it to work yet. :(

At work I'm feeling pretty useless.  I'm really too dumb to be in the team I'm in.  *sigh*

Tonight went with Neil to see Independence Day: Resurgence (we would have seen it on Monday but Neil had a Lion's club meeting).

Yeup.

It's basically a massive CGI-fest with a lot going on but nothing ever very complicated.

It was set in present day, but a futurised version because mankind had unified and made huge advances in technology.  That was a little odd.

No real *substance*.  Just a lot of fluff really.

Sure it was a bit of silly popcorn fun, just nowhere near as good as the original.

The worst bit was the whole "it's got it's own gravity" scene.  Yeup.

We also had one of Hoyts' new recliner seat cinemas.  Not convinced.  Those chairs are really not designed for short people like me.  I couldn't sit up straight because my legs hung uncomfortably off the chair.  And reclining was uncomfortable on my spine.  In the end I partly reclined to give my legs support and leaned on the arm rest to give my back some support and then it wasn't too bad.

Last night was get home, cook dinner, eat dinner, watch an episode of Homeland, go for a walk with Chris and Ben, and by then it's a quarter to nine, and I still wanted to process a day of photos and needed to wash my hair.  So only just made it to bed by 11pm.

And then woke up at something like 4:30 with a brain that wouldn't SHUT UP! and only a bit of broken sleep after than.

Tonight was get home, cook dinner, eat dinner, watch an episode of Homeland - and that's in between drama of people with broken down cars and freecycle people all competing for my time as well!  Gaaahhhh!!!  Drama.

Not as bad as Chrissie's dramas of course, with aforementioned broken down car (which isn't even her car).  Petrol gauge was broken and after having been assured that the car had plenty of petrol, it didn't, and she ran out of fuel.  Fun times.  Not.  Especially in peak hour traffic.  Fortunately her neighbour was able to rescue her.

And now it's nearly 8pm.

Better get stuck into the photos I guess...

At least it's Thursday tomorrow!

And here's a photo of a cockatoo, taken way back in February..

Work wasn't too stressful today.  Spent all morning going through my emails.  Spent the afternoon catching up bits and pieces.  So that was nice.

Tonight I began the long slow process of looking at all my photos, resizing a copy of them and geotagging them.  Then I can start culling to select some for blogging.  Also before too much longer I'll need to sort out the "people" photos before I forget who's who.

And here's a photo of a spider at Kit's at the end of last year..