I'd done this the two other New Years I've had this blog, but last New Years I was away from home and my computer, and it was too hard. But I did spend quite a bit of time reading through my blog and picking out highlights, and it seems a shame to let all that effort go to waste. That and I've spent some time today reading the icq log with Stu from June last year - that momentous June where I fell in love with him. It was certainly a roller coaster year.

I'm going to back-date this, so probably only people that get this via a news feed will see it (Stu and Dave I guess heh).

Some highlights:

* By far the biggest highlight was meeting Stu. I knew very early on that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him
* Dave & Yvonne engaged (well technically they got engaged in 2004)
* Jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane (with parachute attached). It was great, but too expensive to do regularly. That and the risk of dying and leaving Stu is perhaps a little high
* Had a great night in January where I had about 15 people over to watch a "slide night" on a data projector of my USA photos
* Installed apache on my photo server conspiracy so I could put in referer rules and stop people bandwidth-stealing my pics
* Went rock climbing with Campbell
* Saw Peter Jackson in person talking about the Lord of the Rings and King Kong
* Went snorkling a couple of times with Campbell
* Went to quite a few BookCrossing meetups, mostly to see Yvonne and me brother
* Lost many many hours of my life staring at the world from space with Google Maps and Google Earth
* Had a second lot of krib babies in May (six of which are still alive - would have been more if I'd taken better care of them)
* Watched all six star wars movies in order in one night. Probably a once in a lifetime but a must for any Star Wars geeks
* Got a blackberry and used it primarily for communicating with Stu
* Read Harry Potter 6 in a day
* Went live with a new website/cms at work after half a year of work
* Lots of trips to Queensland, one to Noosa, one to Yass to meet Stu's family
* Took up guppy breeding
* Saw Fiddler on the Roof and Topol live
* Took ~1500 photos of the renovation process of Luc's place

Some lowlights:
* Grandma Coates died in January, which was expected but still really sad
* Wasn't invited to George's birthday, came very close to never seeing her or her family again
* Expensive fire-safetyifying of the building
* Three days sick off work from two different flus, the most sick I've been since 1999
* Had a server get compromised from a week-old exploit in Backup Exec. Found within half an hour and rebuilt it that night
* Regular video nights pretty much stopped, as Striker was working over the weekends

In the fish tank department, got a brand-new-second-hand tank off a neighbour, and all its fish. Lost the biggest (4cm) tetra (which was 2 1/2 years old - old for a neon tetra!), a black angel, and the parent kribs. Took a tank to work for the krib babies and added guppys to it later. Somehow got ich in the big tank.

Was commenting to Stu today on what a mad year the past year has been. Certainly meeting him has been one of the highlights of my entire life.

So this morning I decided to reboot my computer as it was running out of memory. But when I came back, ICQ crashed just after it started - Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library - Runtime Error! - abnormal program termination. Well I didn't have too much time to fiddle with it, but it crashed a couple of times, so I tried reinstalling over the top. No good.

So then at work today, I installed NAV 10 and rebooted. And ICQ started crashing there too! Tried a dbconvert to reindex the database, but that didn't work.

I use 2003b at home and 2002a at work. I thought it might have had something to do with the latest NAV def files. Who knows.

So now my major lifeline to the world has been cut off, and other "issues" I have right now, life is pretty sucky right now.

So I noticed my papa krib (who spends his entire life hidden in his cave) was thoroughly emaciated tonight. And mama krib hasn't been happy for ages either, and also looked a bit thin. So I decided to move mama into the big tank with papa. Papa's still in his cave. Mama was even in there with him for a while, but she's out again at the moment. Hope they both do ok.

Is it just me or has there been a marked increase in medical shows in the past few years? I, personally am fascinated by them. My favourite show for a long time was ER, but shows like Nip/Tuck, House, RPA, Amazing Medical Stories etc grip me. But they also scare me. Well sorta. Nip/Tuck was enough to turn me off plastic surgery (which I'd never been interested in anyway, but the procedures are positively *brutal*). In fact all surgery looks brutal. The idea if people cutting into me and poking at me and drilling holes and using screwdrivers, for heavens sake, is rather repulsive. And then there's the cancer stories and stories of what could happen when things just go *wrong* with bodies. And I'm not afraid for myself. I'm afraid of what might happen if a loved one (specifically Stu at this point) had a terminal disease or a life-threatening injury. The thought is terrifying. Have I ever mentioned I'm rather fond of Stu? Sorry, have had one too many beers I think :)

I haven't done a Thursday Challenge in ages, but lacking inspiration for a post tonight, I thought I'd put up an obligatory fish photo. These are from my second lot of baby kribs, with their mother off in the distance. Shown larger than life size :)

This was in my TopStuff blog, but I'm nuking it, so moving it here.

Just a few of my favourite things :)
This was compiled from stacks of online quizzes, and then sorted into some sort of category order.

Not a terribly imaginative title, you can blame Stu for that - I asked him for a title for this entry and that's what he came up with :)

So today began at 4:20 when I woke from a disturbing dream that Robin had gone skiing with Jim and John earlier in the year. I woke up thinking it could actually have been true and lost all enthusiasm to go to work early heh

So after a little bit of a sleepin, I wandered into work to cut up images for the frontpage of our website. The thing was, we decided to cmpletely redo the graphics on the front page of the site - on thursday last week. Final mockups were obtained at 4pm yesterday! So this morning it was a frantic rush to redesign the layout of the page and finalise a design we liked - a few executive decisions were made by us hackers on the final look, and while others stood around me desk we finished it.

So next I called comms as going live involved a dns change. So they did that at 1pm and suddenly six months of work came to life. It was all actually pretty exciting. Then a little over an hour later Stu's new website went live too, which I thought was pretty darned cool.

The afternoon was spent on general fixing things up and sorting out redirects and the like.

And then (after dinner with George) I got on a plane and flew a thousand kilometres to be with my boy :):). Terribly excited :) Being a night flight it was useless for photos, but I did record a several minute long movie of the lights of the Eastern Suburbs which just looked magical. Have I ever mentioned I *love* flying? The other nice part of the flight was the moon over the water near Brisbane and the actual landing with the Brisbane lights.

I brought up some plant from my tanks for Stu's new tank, which makes his tank look a whole lot nicer. We're going to go shopping for other bits and pieces while I'm here and maybe even some fish :)

But now it's tomorrow and finally time to sleep.

<posted from the BlackBerry>

As seen at Dave's, then Karla's: (editor's note: just saw it on Neil's too, but I'm a bit behind on his blog cause he posts so frequently heh. Second editor's note: it was on Kevin's site too, but I'm a bit behind there too heh)

Seven things I plan to do before I die...

1. Get married. Preferably to Stu if he'll have me
   
2. Spend at least three months touring Europe
   
3. Tour the south/east of the USA/Canada
   
4. Learn to scuba dive
   
5. Watch a (human) baby being born
   
6. Go to Tasmania
   
7. Go into space. OK so this really isn't a realistic one, but I'd still love to do it
   

1. Give a half decent massage
   
2. Touch type
   
3. Play the recorder at a basic level
   
4. Keep tropical fish
   
5. Take care of windows servers
   
6. Program perl at a very basic level
   
7. Follow instructions
   

1. Eat wasabi
   
2. Eat blue vein cheese
   
3. Lie convincingly
   
4. Play the piano (more than the very basics)
   
5. Not stress over "insignificant" things
   
6. Relate well to people
   
7. Imagine life without Stu
   

1. Smile
   
2. Eyebrows
   
3. Skin and hair
   
4. Confidence
   
5. Humour
   
6. Generosity
   
7. Affection
   

1. Ping
   
2. It wasn't me, I didn't do it
   
3. Are we having fun yet?
   
4. Can I go home now?
   
5. Doh!
   
6. Damned flipping
   
7. Good morning!
   

1. Star Trek VI, by JM Dillard
   
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
   
3. The rest of the Harry Potter books
   
4. Boy, and Going Solo, by Roald Dahl (actually anything by Roald Dahl)
   
5. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
   
6. Fox in Sox, by Dr Seuss
   
7. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, by Robert O'Brien
   

Although I just noticed there were only six groups of seven.. odd..
(editor's note: the seventh group of seven is for tagging seven people, but I don't *do* tagging heh)

Sunday. Not nearly so interesting as Saturday. Kept myself in an impossibly good mood with the Babe soundtrack, reliving yesterday's conversation with Stu. Did some work on the new CMS in the arvo, although not terribly successful getting things actually done. Ended up reverting to cleaning out the baby krib tank which was starting to putrefy due to lack of attention.

Then dinner at Alan and Marylon's, where much fizzling was to be had. Still fizzling away quite happily here.

And then Stu says, oh have you seen Aurelius' blog? To which I go and look and it's like "wtf????" .. I guess he'll explain himself one day. Either that or I'll have to rely on msn for updates on the life of Aurelius :)

<must keep head horizontal> .. for a while at least anyway :)

How is this for a really sweet song:

If I had words
To make a day for you
I'd sing you a morning golden and new
I would make this day
Last for all time
Give you a night
Deep in moonshine

I recently ripped my Babe soundtrack cd and this morning I sent the song to Stu. To which he responds: "the original tune comes from Saint Sean's Symphony No. 3" .. and I'm like "it does?!?" I had no idea! I assumed it was written for the movie. That boy never ceases to amaze me :) He then proceeded to find me some better variations on it, and promised to play me the whole thing one day, or even better see it live in concert. And then he likened that part of the symphony to a musical orgasm and I tell you I'll never watch Babe in the same way again :)

And speaking of songs I'll forever associate with him.. the other night I put on "Where were you, 1988" before I went to bed, something I really rarely do. And the song "Perfect" by Fairground Attraction was one of the songs on it. Now when we went to World Expo 88 in Brisbane, I had a walkman that I was listening to the radio on in the car the whole way up and back, and while there as well. And two songs really stuck with me from that trip - "Perfect", and "You'd Better be Home Soon" by Crowded House. As I had to change radio stations every so often on the trip up, I heard those songs over and over again on the different stations. So whenever I hear them now, I think of that trip to Queensland. Well the other night when I heard it, I made the association with Queensland as usual, but my association with Queensland nowadays is all about Stu, so as I lay in bed listening to it a new association developed. This was cemented today by Aurelius saying how he liked the chick in the band (which, as it turns out, was actually false, but too late now the damage is done ;) ).

What else. Well Crossfire sent me a link today that totally spun me out. Turns out he knows one of the guys in my office, and this guy has had a blog for three years. He posted me the link to his description of the BitComet bust we made the other day. So then I read a decent chunk of the rest of the blog. Will finish it soon. Problem is, it's a livejournal, which don't have rss feeds as far as I know, and I'm hopeless at keeping up with those (CC, JC, this means you as well ;) ). But then I vaguely worried if Crossfire knew about my blog (he probably does) and may in turn send Jake my blog, which could be a bit scary :)

I had plans to do some overtime today to get our new website a bit closer to a Monday release. But I spent most of the middle of the day talking to Stu, and half the afternoon talking to Aurelius, and suddenly it's 4:20pm and I haven't even started yet. Oops. :) And I need to do some water changes and the filters everywhere keep dying (two filters and an airpump have all gone this week). Gonna have to make a pilgrimage to Strictly Aquariums to get some more.

Then tonight it's the dilema of what movie(s) to watch. On 9 there's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (perhaps not a good idea to watch if I'm gonna see the Tim Burton version), and Ransom (Gary Sinise is *brilliant* in this movie, much drooling to be had). And on 10 there's Star Wars. But I also thought it would be nice to watch Babe. Or I could just not watch anything and get some overtime in.

And so that's Saturday in the life of Kaz. :)
Oh yes, and I just remembered, I *finally* finished Rising Sun - it only took seven months!