Sometimes you have an ok day. A few things fall into place at work. A couple of small successes. You have fun doing Christmas shopping for your parents based on the same quite successful idea of last year. There are even nice Christmas carollers in the shopping centre. An instant roast dinner of leftovers is very yummy.

But sometimes even just thinking about Certain People and the massive todo list lurking in the background is enough to make you just sad.

So we'd both been at work late tonight, so we decided to go out for dinner. We went to Bella Vista in Belconnen.

It was fantabulous!

The food was great, the wine was spectacular (a Mt Majura pinot gris), and the service was excellent.

Highly recommended.

Obviously other people thought so too. It was full, even on a Tuesday night.

So the boy is flying off to another country tomorrow. A country where they blow people up. Where they arrest people for drug trafficking and if you're "lucky" you only get a life sentance and not the death penalty. That's assuming your plane actually lands in one piece and doesn't run off the end of the runway.

Can you tell I'm a little bit worried about him? :(

Still alive. Really. Just without a blackberry. Or a phone. Or a workable net connection. Some people would think "ahhh that's the life" .. but me I'm ... "give me the internet back dammit!!" hehe

Having a great time. Poking lots of animals. Dragging Stu up and down lots of mountains. Rescuing birds.

Be home soon, regular programming will resume shortly...

ok so I've been using Vista for less than a day now.

It completely and utterly sux.

I should have listened to everything I've ever heard and gone with XP.

Problem 1: Crap backup

You don't get NTbackup anymore. You get some other homegrown Vista backup. Which is crap. You can't actually choose a folder to backup. You can just choose the type of files to backup. Completely and utterly useless. Apparently people have complained so much that Microsoft has made ntbackup available for download for Vista. Unfortunately it only does restores of XP files. To do actual backups you still need to grab ntbackup from an XP machine. This of course doesn't let you do system state. Presumably one of the other recovery options lets you recover the actual system if it gets lost. Haven't read up too much on that.

Problem 2: Moving Files

In every other (Windows) operating system released by Microsoft, moving files on your hard drive was a simple drag and drop and would be done in a split second. Now when you move files it sits there and *calculates* all the files you have to move. WTF???? I aborted a move of about 10gb of files after it said it was going to take 90 days to complete. Only to find it had moved about half of the files after about 5 minutes. Did the other directories piecemeal so that I could watch them go. What a piece of frigging crap.

Problem 3: Mysterious Permission Denieds

When I was moving some of my files, at one point it barfed and said permission denied moving the files. No explanation why. I moved on and did other directories and came back to the problematic one later. I tried moving the subdirectories themselves, only to have it finally say it couldn't move the putty directory because it was in use (I was actually using putty at the time). Why it couldn't tell me this when I was doing the upper level directory I don't know.

Problem 4: Stoopid views

If you have a directory with mostly images, it decides they're photos and makes stoopid views accordingly. Like with tags and ratings and "date taken". Give me standard columns dammit!! So I set my views back to the way I like them and say reset folders. Except that it won't do that to *all* folders, only folders of the same type was what I'm in now. Picture folders are their own type and you have to do them separately. So I try going to an upper level folder and going customize and setting all subfolders to be this type and CRASH EXPLORER!!!! Strangely enough, it seemed to actually reset all the sub-folders to the default style I'd set, even though it had crashed.

Problem 5: Memory

Vista is bloatware to the max. To the point of only running it for less than 24 hours and it had completely run out of memory. I have 3gb of physical memory. You'd think that would be enough. Apparently not. It seems you need to reboot every six hours even with 3gb of memory and not actually *doing* anything. When I got back from dinner it had gone into powersaving mode and couldn't be recovered. The hard disk was churning away, but nothing would come up on screen. No frigging idea what it was doing. Ended up cold booting the bastard.

Problem 6: Weird IE translations

WTF? Every time my mouse hovers over a word I get some weird translation of what it means in some other language?? Huh??? What is that? How do I turn it off????

Really really pissed with Vista (and James). I should have listened to my heart and gotten XP.

Woke up a bit after five feeling the after effects of last night. Might have gotten back to sleep except I remembered I hadn't unpacked the fishies from their baggies last night after I brought them home. So got up and did all that. Then did a final wipe down of the shower. Then went shopping (cause needed cash for the tiler and thought would pick a few things up).

All of this before 8:30am. (!)

So tiler dude came to regrout the shower and I tidied up the flat, and had some people come and take away both my couch and the hobby table. Which is a huge relief cause I didn't think they were going to get taken (Freecycle let me down) and I didn't want to move them.

The rest of the day was packing and organising and scanning.

Here's two of the cooler things I scanned today...

Triple M's Dr Dan logo. I traced this from a newspaper ad and coloured it in. I think I did this in about 1989.

A fractal expanded from the one in the book of Jurassic Park. The idea is you draw a small line. From the end of that line, you pivot 90°, giving you an L shaped line. You then take the end of that and pivot the L 90° giving most of an S. And so on. You end up with a kinda S-shaped fractal. I colour-coded as I went so I wouldn't get lost.. although that didn't help near the end and I did stuff it up.

Had a farewell thingie for me today. Not many people from outside our unit came. This made me sad. I think I'll go eat worms. Well perhaps not, some unexpected people did come, and Luc said some nice things about me, and I didn't even have to give a speech.

Incredibly weary. Things would be easier if I was planning to keep everything and not get the place done up. Then I'd just pack it all instead of trying to keep tabs of a dozen people and what they are picking up and when.

*hiccough*
more on that later :)

Where were we? Friday?

Well Friday the boy came up early and we went out to dinner with various current and ex cia peoples. Was a very pleasant night at the Bavarian Beer Cafe.

Saturday we had a bit of a slow start but eventually got going and headed down the coast to Werrong Beach. Was about a 30 min walk inbound. Not too crowded and not too rough so headed out for a swim. It was.. hrmm.. *bracing* .. but after getting used to the water it was pretty good. Swam for a bit, then had a sunbake, then a 40 min walk outbound back to the car.

Then it was a trip to the far other end of Sydney to J&G's new place in .. South Gosford.. heh :) Had dinner there and it was all very nice and then came home cause we were quite tired.

Today it was an interesting day at church - we had actual roast lamb for a Passover feast celebration.

Then it was back here to do some scraping and cleaning, before sending the boy home ( :( ) and going off to dinner at A&M's.
Except I managed to get myself the hiccoughs. Which is *really* annoying. Have not had them in prolly fifteen years. And quite over them. Already. Really!!

So tonight we had the CIA et al company mid-year dinner. Which for the first time I was actually um-ing and ah-ing about going. I'd gotten home and had decide whether I should go out again to see people that I didn't know as well as I always used to. But I needn't have worried. It was a really nice night (even tho I didn't get to sit with Kirk (sorry!) ) and got to talk to Vic and generally have quite a nice time (even tho the restaurant tried to squeeze 40 people into a tiny room really only designed for 20). Feel like it will probably be my last cia event ever :( which I suppose after not having worked there for now exactly ten years is kinda understandable....

So after the others had finished playing at AFK yesterday, we adjourned to the tables and had lunch. We had beer-battered fries, a mexicana pizza, and a caesar salad. All were excellent. Willett and Chef have done very well with the cafe setup. Very relaxed atmosphere, nice mix of peoples (normal people to geeks :) ), great food. Apparently the coffee was good too, but I can't be judge of that :)

If you're in Brisbane, go check it out. It's near the Gabba on Stanley St.