I'm having a very Mel weekend. Thursday was The Patriot, tonight Chicken Run and Lethal Weapon. I've seen the first Lethal Weapon movie but none of the others, and none of the Mad Max movies. One day... It's also been a butt kind of a weekend - Dennis Quaid in Innerspace and Mel Gibson in Lethal weapon. (Also had a bit of a drool over Gary Sinise (cf Ransom) on imdb)

Some months ago Dennis very kindly sent me the four Lego mosaic kits. Well first they went on an overseas trip, and then I did, so I've only just finished all four of them. I'll leave them up for a while, then begin work on my next project, this time in colour.

As seen on Blogograhy and Lost Pilgrim:

1. Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognizes you from your blog?
I wear the same thing to work as I wear out and on the weekends. It takes a very special occasion for me to get out of jeans and a tshirt.
2. Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered?
They're just cropped/resized.
3. Do you like it when creeps or dorks email you?
Happens rarely. Usually they're just lusers looking for stuff on kazaa
4. Do you lie in your blog?
No.. I don't think so anyway..
5. Are you passive-aggressive in your blog?
Probably :)
6. Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop?
Why on earth would I do that? I started writing it thinking that noone would ever read it, it would just be something for me. When people actually started reading it it was a bonus!
7. Are you in therapy? If not, should you be? If so, is it helping?
No. Probably. n/a :)
8. Do you delete mean comments?
Only the particularly vulgar ones, but they're pretty rare
9. Have you ever rubbed one out while reading a blog? How about after?
What on earth does that mean?
10. If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less?
Probably less. Only a select few people like me in real life.
11. Do you have a job?
Yep
12. If someone offered you a decent salary to blog full-time without restrictions, would you do it?
If I blogged full time, I'd have nothing to write about now, would I, because I'd be typing about nothing the whole time?
13. Which blogger do you want to meet in real life?
It'd be cool to meet all of them eventually. Although there is a small possibility I may get to meet Dave from Blogography soon, which would be *very* cool
14. Which bloggers have you made out with?
No comment :)
15. Do you usually act like you have more money or less money than you really have?
I don't tend to talk about money much do I? I don't think so anyway.
16. Does your family read your blog?
Me little brother does. Noone else does (I hope). The parents don't know about it, no thanks to the little brother who keeps mentioning it in front of them >:( and it'd better if they never do, since I probably bitch about them more than anyone else.. :)
17. How old is your blog?
Almost a year and half
18. Do you get more than 1000 page views per day?
No. I used to get a lot when people were looking for kazaa and typing kazza, but then google took the links down thanks to http://kazza.id.au oh well
19. Do you have another secret blog in which you write about being depressed, slutty, or a liar?
No
20. Have you ever given another blogger money for his/her writing?
No
21. Do you report the money you earn from your blog on your taxes?
pfft what money??
22. Is blogging narcissistic?
shrug
23. Do you feel guilty when you don’t post for a long time?
A little :) although I rarely go more than a few days without posting
24. Do you like John Mayer?
Who?
25. Do you have enemies?
Noone cares about me enough to be enemies. They just don't care about me.
26. Are you lonely?
All too often
27. Why bother?
Because Vic said I should and I've been doing it ever since :)

That was nothing on how I'm feeling now. I need a weekend to recover from my weekend! Thinking about taping 24 and just going to bed.

Last night went to a friend's birthday party which was lots of fun. Little bit of drinking and lots of dancing, and didn't get to bed til after 3am :) Of course, I can't sleep in past 9am, so didn't end up getting much sleep. Another nothing day. ie, got nothing done. Except for washing the sheets and towels. yay. And a lot of reading and looking up photos and reviews for my new camera. Definitely decided to go ahead with the Sony DSC F828.

I also watched last week's Blue Heelers, which they televised live. I've never actually watched an episode of Blue Heelers before, but thought this would be interesting watching. They had a making-of special beforehand, which was fascinating. The show itself looks like it went off without too many mistakes.. certainly none that I noticed anyway. It didn't have quite the same "live" feel to it watching it from video tape, I would like to have watched it live, but I was out. Oh well. It's on the tape after The Godfather part II, which I'll have to keep until I ever get around to seeing part I, so I may watch the episode again one day.

The Friday Five seems to be on permanent holiday. I think they've had about one new one in the past six weeks. Surely it can't be that hard to post five questions, especially when people send them to you!

I got my Jason fix at lunch in the oddest of places today - in the children's section of a book store. They had a photo story book of Peter Pan. I was sorely tempted to buy it, it was only $10, but most of the photos are on the internet anyway. Maybe next week.

Dropped into the new Bunnings up the road this arvo with Luc. We spent the better part of an hour wandering around the place. It's massive! About four times the size of the old one. They even had fairy floss (I haven't had fresh fairy floss in years!), clowns, musicians, face painting, and fireworks (although I only heard those from the comfort of my home, I didn't stick around to watch them). Luc left with a trolley full of stuff, I left covered in sugar :)

Finally decided, after malicious code was released for MS04-011, that I shouldn't wait til tomorrow to patch the last remaining NT4 server. So I'm sitting here waiting for people to stop working, and they *won't*. It's Friday night people! Go home!! In the end I just waited until there was a minimum of five minutes idle time all round, and rebooted anyway.

And in other news. The Moreton Bay Fig tree has had its execution date set. Next Thursday. Going to take the opportunity this weekend to finish photographing it, and collecting as many seeds as possible in the hopes of growing some. Although not quite sure what I'll do with them if they grow.. what does one do with Moreton Bay Fig tree seedlings?

Further feeding a couple of my obsessions, I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone this weekend. I want to read all the books again before Azkaban comes out. I think I am also going to make Luc read all the books. He's the biggest reader I know yet he's never read them.

I also watched Dragonheart specifically for the Felton scenes.. ;) There's a couple of amusing Harry Potter-Dragonheart links. So we have Jason Isaacs who is in both movies, plays a character called Felton in Dragonheart. There is also a character called Draco. In Harry Potter Jason plays a character called Malfoy. There is also a character called Draco Malfoy played by an actor called Tom Felton. It kinda starts going round in circles in your head :)

I also spent over half of today cleaning out dead accounts on gamera. Backups aren't fitting onto the backup drive anymore, so it was time to nuke stuff. It's such a painful process though - looking up sites to see which aren't hosted with us anymore, then checking the accounts to see which have been closed, then going through all the sites and manually removing a virtual web server entry, ftp virtual directory, web virtual directory, user home directory and entry in a server list text file. The agony. Then clearing out gigabytes of sql transaction logs. Really must write a script for that sometime.

Yes, apparently I have. Just watched The Patriot where he plays another wonderful bad guy. I think I need to go on a mission to see all his other movies :)

I also think I need to move to England. British accents do it for me.. :)

Had a thoroughly unmotivated day today. Seems to be a habit lately. Not getting anything done which is frustrating. I think I need a holiday. One where I can stay home for three months and catch up on all the things that need doing. I miss the three month holidays I used to get at uni :(

So my todo list for the weekend now all has to be done on one day. fun fun fun

I think gamera must have heard me complaining about it last night, because it decided to shut itself off at 6am this morning. I got paged, decided it would be too cruel to ask Campbell to go into the exchange for a third time this weekend, so decided to go in myself. I was out the door within fifteen minutes of waking up - all I did was have a shower and grab everything I needed.. I didn't even do my hair!

It's the second time it's hung like that this year, which is a disturbing trend. It's most likley a problem with the ide backup drive, but it could be something more sinister. Scary stuff. The sooner they hire someone to take proper care of that machine (and paid responsibility) the better. It's a three-year old installation of windows, that's been on two completely separate hardware boxes. If it weren't so impossible to move the 350-odd websites off it onto a clean box I'd suggest they do it. But as it is, it's full of crap that has been installed over the years because this or that customer wanted it, so now it's next to impossible to replicate. You couldn't rebuild that machine from scratch if you tried... sigh..

Weekend that is.

Spent a decent chunk of Saturday afternoon stressing over a couple of emails I sent to some people at cia and a problem with one of the websites on gamera. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the "support", or rather lack thereof given by one of the support guys. Some dude had sent an irate email cause noone had responded to the last one and he'd be stuffed around for months with an account setup. The support guy's response was "have you got a statement that you've paid?" I have to say that if I'd sent that irate email and gotten that response I'd be utterly furious. Anyway I called him on it, but I should probably have counted to 10 before sending it, as it ended up going to the staff list, and I'm a bit worried about the implications of it when everyone else reads it tomorrow. I'm not even supposed to be doing support mail, let alone telling the staff there how to do their jobs. Anyway. The other thing was I stopped a website cause it was killing the server, but noone called the owner, so he was a bit grumpy when he realised his site was down. So I spent ages wondering if I could have handled the two incidents any better.

We had another episode of "Cafe Church" today which was pretty cool. Got to sit around tables and have fruits and cheese and cakes while discussing Romans.

The only other thing I managed to achieve this weekend was to combine two half working computers to get one complete working computer. I've been putting off this task all year because I feared it would be "too hard". Well I was right. Ram problems, floppy drive problems, network card problems. It took *hours*. But at least now I have a system that I can do some testing of Cold Fusion MX. I'm sure I've ranted about Cold Fusion before, but if I haven't, ***don't use it!!!!!*** It's the crappiest software I've ever had to work with. Version 4.5 worked, but every time I did an upgrade after that there were problems. When we installed the Cold Fusion MX 6.1 updater, it completely broke access database connections, and hasn't worked since. I emailed their support but they said it was not within the realm of their free support. We called them and they quoted $500 per "incident". It's crap and Macromedia is a crap company.

Hrm how did that degenerate into a rant? :)

Watching The Sound of Music now.. will go to bed when it's done. Was kept up half the night by power outages at the exchange which kept my pager buzzing in overtime.

1. What was the last song you heard?
Don't remember, it would have been on the radio on the way home. But for some reason I have "Heaven help my heart" going around in my head. Which is strange because I'm sure I haven't heard it recently

2. What were the last two movies you saw?
The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns. The first one especially has the most glorious cinematography. Got em cheap at kmart the other day.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
The groceries, some meat, and probably those dvds, along with some coat hangers.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
Four? You expect me to limit my todo list to four ???

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
If you count email and icq as talking.. Striker, James, me little brother, the manager at the local franklins, the checkout chicks at the local franklins

..for this weekend is to tidy this place up once and for all. The situation is getting desperate. Maybe I should have just taken a photo of the place for yesterday's theme thursday..

Friday Five time (yay it's back this week!)

What was...

1. ...your first grade teacher's name?
Well "first grade" was Miss Rees. Kindergarton was Mrs O'Hare. I think. I could be wrong. It's been 25 years.

2. ...your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?
I always loved the Bugs Bunny cartoons

3. ...the name of your very first best friend?
Donna Bonnefin.
hrm.
Dave was just commenting on people's presence (or lack thereof) on the internet. I just did a Google search on Donna Bonnefin and the second entry was a previous entry in my blog.
/me stares in blank amazement at the screen.

4. ...your favorite breakfast cereal?
Was or is? I used to only have corn flakes and rice bubbles, but since I've been able to buy my own cereal I buy something with more substance that I won't be hungry again after an hour.

5. ...your favorite thing to do after school?
I honestly have no idea how I existed before I got a computer. I didn't spend much time with friends. I think I watched a reasonable amount of tv, but not ridiculous amounts. I think I mostly just wasted time.