I am going to be spending the weekend with another boy. His name is Harry. I won't be online as I will be spending every moment with him.

See you on the other side ;)

Was feeling quite flat tonight and random paging wiki and found this wonderful word:

Deliquescent
Deliquescent materials have such a strong affinity for moisture that they form a liquid solution if left in normal air for a time. Deliquescent salts include calcium chloride and zinc chloride. They are often used as desiccants.

Isn't that just a beautiful word?

Fortunately I'll have Harry to keep my company for the rest of the weekend.

Not sure what happened to my weekend. Well I do know, but it was just over all too fast.

Friday night, in bed, TTotM

Saturday, Luc's, shopping, Campbelltown (mini bookcrossing meeting up at krispy kreme), movies (saw Star Wars again with dad), parents' place for dinner.

Sunday, sleepin, chatted to Stu, caught up on videos.

I did get some scraping done in the shower, but didn't get tank five water changed.

And after all that, three days of feeling fine, this afternoon I started coughing. Guess I did come down with whatever it was on Thursday after all. Oh well.

You know you like a movie when you put it on to cheer you up from feeling Sunday-afternoon-back-to-work-tomorrow-blues with the intention of having it on in the background while you work on photos.. and end up watching it and not getting any work done :)

In this case it was Gladiator .. inspired by the Asterix book I read today, Asterix the Gladiator.

I didn't quite achieve what I wanted to this weekend. I put captions on many of my usa photos. I updated my blog and finally put up a stack of links that I've just been reading feeds for. I got a little paid job done. And I got a stack of silicone sealer scraped off the shower walls. Eight more tiles down, a coupla dozen more to go :( But I didn't get any "play" time, and I have to work tonight which is a bit sad.

Definitely need to have long weekends more often :/

So the plan for the weekend (or at least part of it) was to put all my usa photos into a mysql database, and write a set of scripts to display the files in various indexes.

Yah like that was ever going to happen.

Spent the entire morning staring at my excel file trying to figure out how I'd do it. Now sure, if it were just a directory of photos I'd have no trouble. But I have my own photos, panoramas I've created, scans of my parents photos, mpg movies, as well as maps, daily routes, state routes, extra images of National Park "splash" pictures, and some images have been used more than once, while others were added in special orders at the beginning of states etc.

The more I stared at it, the more I realised how complicated it was, and how many exceptions would need to be made to get it to do what I wanted it to do.

So I thought stuff it, I'll just make 42 day index pages, and 14 state index pages. Generate the actual code in excel (where all the data is) and hardcode it into html. Sounds like a copout I know, but I could see myself never ever getting these photos online (and it was a *year* ago that we were away).

Then I thought I should probably add some more descriptive notes to some of the images, and of course that takes hours too. That's what I did most of the afternoon/evening.

So by the end of the weekend you never know, I might actually have it done.

Unless I get the urge to go through everything again putting in Google Maps references... :)

The only other "highlight" of the weekend was discovering at 4:45pm on Friday evening that one of the disks in our main mail server had failed. However it was one of the disks we were given last year by Dell after the big stuffup with the file server. So then it was a frantic dash to get hold of our account manager, and then onto the tech support line to convince them that they should give us another disk. Fortunately it all worked out (even after not having any seagate disks of the right sort in the country (wtf??) and looking like we'd need to get one flown in from Singapore, and finally ending up with a fujitsu drive), and they delivered it to my house late Friday night. Installed it on Saturday and it spent the next few hours rebuilding the array, but luckily all went well and the raid was happy again by the end of it.

Anyone know how to configure Dell OpenManage to email me if a disk dies?

I wasn't going to do this meme, even though I've seen it on a stack of blogs in the past week. But Fiona told me I had to :)

Total volume of music files on my computer…
2.8gb. I don't listen to music on my computer, I'd much rather listen to my cds on a decent sound system (well decent compared to my crap computer speakers). I've only recently started to rip my cds simply as a backup in case they all get stolen.

The last CD I bought was…
"Where were you? 1989" - that and "Where were you? 1988", a semi-decent compilation cd from 88/89, the prime of my music life.

Song playing right now…
Lemme just go turn on the radio.. No Lies by Noiseworks (Triple-M are doing another 80s weekend).

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me…
The beauty of my cd player is that it plays everything on random shuffle, so I don't hear anything more often than anything else. I've commented in another post about favourite songs.

People I’m passing this on to:
hrm, who hasn't done it? .. How about Stu, Delmer, and Paul? But honestly I don't care! :)

So last night I did something that'll probably go down as a once-in-a-lifetime. I watched all six episodes of Star Wars. In order. Back to back. In 15 hours.

A friend of Striker's managed to get tickets to a midnight showing, so we started at 6pm with episodes I and II, then off to the cinema to see III, then back to Striker's to watch IV, V, and VI.

Was a brilliant night. The hardest part was staying awake between 5-6am, at the beginning-middle of Empire Strikes Back.

Episode III exceeded expections. That is, I had no expectations after I and II, and so was pleasantly surprised by this one. The story was good, the acting was good, the effects were stunning. It's very intense, very dark, very sad. I definitely want to go see it again.

The only two gripes I had with it (spoilers following) were Anakin's descent into evil and overuse of cgi.

I felt Anakin's change to the dark side was just a little bit too much of a stretch. I think he still had too much of a conscience left in him at the time for him to do what he did to the jedi. I actually would have found it more believable if he'd been wronged more deeply by one or more jedi and so he really was out for revenge. But it came across as he was only doing it because he was told to in order to save Padme. I think if it came down to it, choosing Padme's life over the lives of all the jedi wouldn't have been something he'd do. I just don't think he'd gotten "cold" enough to do that.

The other issue is cgi everywhere. I mean don't get me wrong, it's utterly beautifully filmed, but it just felt like nothing was tangibly real. The entire thing was shot at Fox Studios in Sydney. No location shooting whatsover (except a couple of flyby background plates). I can't imagine the actors would have had an interesting work environment. Just a few different textured floors, and lots of bluescreen. It felt almost like the entire thing was just a nice computer game.

So anyway. My 0.022c inc gst.

I still haven't actually had any sleep yet. Think I'll try not to, and get some stuff sorted out that I never get to on the weekends.

Aside from sleeping and getting dressed, I've spent a total of one hour home this weekend.

Friday night was the Unreal Tournament night and didn't get home til Saturday.

Saturday day was a big working bee at Luc's place. We filled a really big skip and half filled another.

Saturday night was Matt and Helen's engagement party (and his 21st). My dad piked cause he hates going to rellie stuff, especially where they play the music loud. Neither of his brothers came either, nor did me brother, so of the "nuclear" family, there was my mum and I, my aunty, and her three sons (one of whom was the guest of honour). And about 60 other people, some of which I see regularly at these events, including really cute uncle-in-law. Was a really good night actually, and they didn't turn up the music to deafening volumes til quite late.

Sunday morning church, then headed out to Picton for a Bookcrossing meetup. Picked up two books. I really *really* need to read some of them!! Took some pics of a steam train running out of Thirlmere then wandered back to Yvonne's and watched the entire tv series version of Hitchhiker's.

My new toll tag didn't go off on the way home, so hope they don't fine me :( Stoopid roadworks mucked everything up.

Star Wars II is on telly tonight, but I don't think I'll watch any of it, hoping to do a Star Wars marathon on Wednesday night, assuming Striker's friend can secure tickets for one of the midnight sessions..

I'm not coping at the moment. I need some time at home, even if it's only to clean up my flat! I feel like I just can't get my life in order because I'm out all the time. It's starting to stress me out.

FQ1: What's an ideal day for you when it's sunny and blue skies?
I usually try to avoid direct sunlight. I burn in about thirty seconds. Ideally I guess I'd like to be out doing *anything* but since the number of people I know that I actually get to do anything with is severely limited, I'm most likely to be spending it in front of my computer.

FQ2: What's an ideal day for you when it's overcast and rainy?
Sitting in front of my computer and/or a dvd

FQ3: What's an ideal day for you when it's cold and snowy?
Skiing of course! :)

FQ FORECAST: What's the weather forecast for your area this coming weekend? (find it at weather.com) What will you be doing out there in it?
Showers. I have to go to work to upgrade a server from NT4 to 2003. Also doing the rellie bash thing for mothers day.