Well Saturday. The array finished rebuilding around 5pm. Spent a little while preparing for the failback. Nervous moment as after a remote reboot the machine didn't come back - turned out the network interface just didn't come up - a common problem on 2650s. Met up with Jim and we began the failback and restore procedures. Files finished copying back in the middle of the night on Sunday. So Sunday morning checked all the files and reenabled the server service. And that was the end of that little drama.

Then this morning I got paged because the server room temperature was rising. I was running in slow motion after quite a lot of wine last night (dinner at Alan and Marylon's, needed to unwind of the stress of the weekend), but eventually dragged myself into work. Dead aircon. Yay. Opened up the server room door and mounted a couple of fans in the doorway. Waited for people to turn up to come and fix. Turned out other circuits were dead too. The sparkies switched back on the other circuits but wouldn't touch the aircon circuit. So had to wait for the aircon contractors to turn up. They flicked the aircon curcuit back on but it died a minute or so later, taking the other circuits with them. Yay. So they left it off, brought up a portable aircon, and decided there was a faulty compressor, which will take a few days minimum to have replaced.

So I was a zombie for most of today. Went home early and had a bit of a sleep, only interrupted by occasional calls from telemarketers etc.

No more disasters allowed for at least another week. It's the rules.

So Stu and I had a dirty weekend away. Except there was no sex involved. Heh.

No in fact we spent the whole weekend getting *actually* dirty in an emergency working bee at Arian's. Much progress was made, although much still remained by the time we had to leave.

Except for pizza Saturday night, all I ate all weekend was maccas. Two salads, two breakfasts and two small fries. Considering the amount of physical activity I put in, I wonder if I lost any weight...

Thoroughly exhausted now, and my right hammies are killing me....

Gosh today was stressful. Well at least the morning was. Hammering, drilling, partitioning, NOISE! And trying to fix broken live things and get everything done before the weekend. The afternoon was a little better, although worried that when Jodi comes back next week and everyone moves in they'll want to start throwing things out. Bit stressed out I won't be there for moving day :(

Have had some Drambuie and vodka and watching the Grammys and feeling significantly better...

Pretty sucky day actually.
Don't want to go to work tomorrow. Was there too much this weekend :/

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 the rest of the weekend ..

Saturday went into work to shut down my servers while they did some electrical work. Then turned everything back on. And then upgraded our main notes web server to Domino 7. Didn't seem to have any problems.

Came home and slept for an hour. Talked to Stu for a little bit, cooked a roast pork, then went to J&G's for a games night. Yes, shock, horror, I was actually invited to a games night! In advance! That hasn't happened in like 8 years or something ridiculous. We played Rapidoh, and I actually won a game against Lizzi (who always wins, and won one game). Then Fluxx - fun but somewhat confusing, and definitely would be better with smaller numbers. A game of Emperor/Scum. Then a marathon game of Carcassonne. Guy had an expansion pack which I hadn't seen in the version they play at work. Got home at nearly 1am. Oops.

And then this morning - the curse of being a morning person. Woke up at 6:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. So two nights in a row of only five hours sleep. Yay. Gave up at 7:30 and got up. Which was good in a way because I had time to wash my hair, which had been annoying me all weekend.

Then to L&L's for the friends Christmas party. Which was all perfectly pleasant. Got home totally exhausted. Going to need an early night tonight methinks.

oh yes, I forgot to mention yesterday - the second mother dropped her load of babies over the weekend, so now I have at least 20 babies swimming around their little tank :)

heh, it seems I've used that title before :)

Saturday.
Unpacked 13lb of lego I got from Canada in the post this week. There's a couple of cool space sets, but the rest of it is just classic lego, not terribly interesting. Took over three months to get here by surface mail - yuk!

Then went out for Thai with J&G and a bunch of their friends (which is impressive in itself since neither of them will eat spicy food). Experienced the joys of going to places alone.. after being held up behind an accident for fifteen minutes, so was running late, then had to navigate as well and try to find out where I was actually trying to go to, then had to park right in front of everyone which meant I hit the curb - twice, and after all that couldn't drink because I was driving. Except then James offered to drive my car home for me, so I finally relaxed and enjoyed the night. Which went very late. Didn't get to bed til 2am - whoops.

Sunday.
Today after church (through the pouring rain) and a bit of a chat to Stu, I cursed undergravel filters, as I had to pull the entire tank apart to clean it. Pulled out the undergravel filters and am going to stick to power filters. This was after the second tiger barb died, probably due to fetid conditions in the tank.

And tonight I went to the parents with Dave & Yvonne for dinner. After dinner we played Scategories (which mum won) and Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, which is a heck of a lot harder than I thought it would be. We didn't use the dvd because mum was watching telly, so just did all the questions from the cards. I declared the game finished when Dave finally got all six wedgies (I had five). Think I need to watch the movies a few more times. And read the books. And watch any making of specials (one of the questions was what did they mix with glass beads to make fake snow for Hoth). Much fun to be had with that game methinks. And I kept getting annoyed at Dad & Dave getting easy questions all the time. Oh, and if in doubt answer "Obi-Wan Kenobi" - it's seriously the answer to half the questions in the game ;)

Here's a selection of the (many) photos I took on the weekend (extended entry)

Just put my boy on a plane. So now it's back to reality. And reality sux. Truly.

Very very lazy morning. Let Stu sleep in til 11:30 (!) before getting him up and taking him to the aquarium at Darling Harbour. He quite enjoyed it, as I thought he would. Then it was home for pizza for dinner, and then off to the airport. And so endeth another lovely long weekend.

(just having a play on my tenor recorder which arrived today off ebay - sounds really nice, but really hard to play the lower notes cause my fingers aint big enough!)