FQ1: In addition to the dearly departed Julia Child, who is your favorite food personality?
Jamie Oliver is vaguely cool but possibly a bit up himself. I like Aristos (Surprise Chef - he'd come to people's houses and cook up a storm with whatever was already in their fridges, very cool)

FQ2: What meal would you have this culinary genius prepare for you if they asked?
I dunno.. something involving lots of meat and lots of creamy sauces

FQ3: If they refused, and you could eat at any restaurant you wanted as a consolation, which one would you choose?
The Little Snail in Darling Harbour is pretty good. On the other end of the price spectrum, Tum's Thai in Randwick is fantastic also.

FQ KITCHEN: Share with us a favorite recipe or cooking tip.
A strange recipe of my own design:

cook for another hour or so until golden

Watched Sleepless in Seattle with George tonight. We're both hopeless romantics at heart.. kinda like the friends in the movie heh. Was cool seeing Seattle and the Space Needle for the first time in a movie since actually being there. Really need to watch Short Circuit again to see Astoria.

Had a very frustrating day today looking at ways of managing quotas and reporting on user disk usage. QuotaAdvisor 4.1 (by wquinn) doesn't work on Windoze 2003 server, and it's since been bought out by Veritas, which means paying them $2500-odd for an upgrade. Well QuotaAdvisor has always been a bit crappy, so now I'm thinking it might be time to look at something else.

I was also looking at some sort of tool to report the disk usage by a user. w2k3 comes with a tool called "diskuse" but it barfs on certain directories which isn't particularly helpful. Not to mention that file ownership is a mystical thing that sometimes bears no relation to reality. Especially if that file is copied somewhere by an administrator, and forevermore is owned by the administrators group, not the user. yay.

Was even thinking about disk usage by directory. FullDisk is a great utility I've been using for years, but our file server now has so many files that it kills the machine just running it. So it's not the most practical application to run regular reports for people who want to know where all their file server space is going.

It's all too much really. I really don't want to go to work tomorrow :(

ok so I rarely get sick. And when I do get sick I rarely let it interfere with my social life. Which means I get pissed off when other people, or their kids, get sick and pike on doing stuff. Like dinner tonight which was meant to be a somewhat of a birthday celebration, and two of my best friends didn't show up. Yay. All you can do is drink wine and try and forget about it for a while. Thanks to George for the lovely cheese cake though.

FQ TOPIC: Ego.

FQ1: What is an activity that you can do better than anybody else you know?
Probably giving massages. James, Alan, Marc and Ric all give good massages too, but they don't seem to be as widely received/famous as mine.

FQ2: What is a subject where you are smarter than anybody else you know?
Probably many aspects of windows administration, mainly iis. Which is a pain in the butt when you want to ask someone how to do something but you don't know of anyone to ask.

FQ3: What is a trait you possess that makes you superior to lesser humans?
Maybe higher than average intelligence. That's text-book/test intelligence though, not real-world people intelligence.

FQ FICTION: Which of your many stellar accomplishments should be recorded in the history books? (Can't think of one? Make it up!).
um.

The Weather Pixie is back!!!! Yaayyyyyyy!!!

From their site:

News Flash: The reason Weatherpixie wasn't working last week was due to a denial of service attack on the server hosting Weatherpixie. This happened whilst the two people who could have fixed the problem were off at a music festival camping in a field with no access to the internet.

100 things about Kazza the Blank One. Bren has had one of these for ages, and I've been thinking I should probably put one together. Just recently Dave and Dennis put theirs up, so I thought I would too. Some of my ideas were stolen shamelessly from them :)

I just saw I, Robot. Thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it was a little predictable.

Went with Sami, he rearranged his social life and could make it. It was a 6:00 "arrival" so that's when we got there, and wandered in with the rest of the crowd down the red carpet - very exciting, never done that before! :) Media and fans everywhere, not to mention rain! hehe Of course all the fans were waiting for Will Smith, and there was a stage setup where Will was going to perform a few songs. But us, we wandered down the red carpet and before we knew it we were in the cinema already. They had the screen setup to show the action outside though, so we got to watch the whole proceedings from inside, out of the rain! We actually saw Paul Mercurio arriving on the screen. Then Will arrived and took him about half an hour to make it down the red carpet, before he got changed out of his fancy suit into rapper gear and did his songs. When that was finished the people that had braved the rain outside joined the rest of us.

We were a group of mostly competition winners by the sounds of it. The people next to us won it from their newspaper in South Australia. The press and celebrities must have been in another cinema.

Someone that had just come in said that Will was waiting outside and was going to come in. First I think it was the producer came in and introduced the film and Will Smith, which was very cool. He just said how much fun the movie was to make and a few other things that I didn't really pay much attention to because I was trying to get a photo. I took my old camera cause it was easier to hide than my big beast, but in the end I needn't have worried, and I should definitely have used my flash, as other people were taking photos of him and didn't get stopped. So alas, none of my photos turned out, but you get that.

The movie itself was highly entertaining. If you liked Minority Report you'd probably like this too.

Thanks TripleM for the freebies, good to know being a Freq was finally worth it :)

I have a memory like Peter Pan for this sort of thing. I looked at these questions last night and couldn't think of any answers then. I'm not having much better luck tonight.

FQ1: Admit it, sometimes you are not the sharpest tool in the shed. What's something stupid you've done recently? (The FridayQ doesn't count!)
Gave a stack of money to a twat in Italy and believed his stories about customs delays.

FQ2: Children do idiotic things all the time because they just can't seem to help it. What's something stupid you did as a kid?
I vividly remember stealing half a dozen full sticks of chalk from school when I was in kindergarten. Of course then I had to lie about where they came from when I got home. The guilt was so powerful even then that I've never been able to lie very well ever since.

FQ3: Sometimes, being a bit of an idiot is required (or fun!). What's something stupid you will be doing in the future?
Spending ridiculous amounts of money on Lego

FQ OBSERVER: People are morons. Without naming names, what's something stupid you've seen somebody else do?
(pwd = /)
cd <some non existant directory>
rm -fr *
ok I wasn't actually in the room when it happened, but it was pretty infamous, especially on a production mail and accounting server. Fortunately he realised his mistake before it got too far through /bin

ok that took about an hour to get through.

Sami mentioned yesterday that BigW had a lot of Lego on special, so today I trekked to the local BigW to get some more Harry Potter Lego. Well Lego wasn't just on special, the Harry Potter Lego was *slashed* in price. The best saving was the Hogwarts Castle, which was $114. Now the normal price at BigW was $144, and the recommended retail is $159.95!!! At $45 off retail I could put a couple away and sell them in a year or two and get a 50% return on investment easily, perhaps more. I've actually already got a couple of sets stashed away unopened that I got on special for just this purpose. Of course the biggest problem with all of that is storage, so I won't be holding on to them forever that's for sure :)

Sitting at Striker's computer for this. The others have done a shop run, and with four people in the car I decided not to make it five :)

The subject of skiing came up at lunch today. Now you see before I went away I asked John if he was going skiing this year and if I could go with him. At the time he said yes. But today he said he was too exhausted to organise a trip and someone else would have to do it. This is where panic sets in, cause would leave it up to me or Jim, and we haven't discussed this at all. I have this horrible feeling that Jim will question the appropriateness of it all and won't want me to come. So now I have this scared feeling I won't get to go skiing this year after all :(:(

I saw Nina again this afternoon - she's very big now (8 months) and very cute, although seemingly not very happy. Took much effort to get any sort of smile out of her. Got some very cute movies though.

I'm also looking for someone to see I, Robot with me on Monday the 19th (won a free double pass on TripleM). Three people have already rejected me for varying reasons. I once had a similar problem getting rid of a free movie ticket. You'd never think it'd be so hard to get rid of a free movie ticket, but for me it is.

Well that was all very depressing. Hope this is not a trend. Silly because I was actually in such a good mood tonight. Maybe it was the fact that John (different John) had the music up so loud in the car on the way here that we couldn't talk. Very antisocial IMO. But anyhoo. The guys are going to be back soon, should run.