You hear that, Mr Andersen?

The sky outside is wet and grey...

To those trapped in other climes - the Madness quote of the title is a complete lie. The weather continues hot and sunny, reminding us that summer only really starts when we're back at work.

***

You know what my life is reminding me of? It's reminding me of the kind of game where the GM decides that strife is interesting, so every time you appear to be on top of things, they throw another element in.

It turns out that the IRD thought I've been living in Hanson St all this time; it's my own fault for not keeping better track, but a couple of outstanding GST bills are no laughing matter. (There was also the provisional tax that I thought I'd better pay now, rather than risk forgetting about it in March when it was due.) This was less of a major problem than a minor pain - thanks to house-buying, I actually had all the relevant records to hand - but it was an unexpected expense, which I don't really need at this point. I really need to get an accountant - after all, this is the sort of thing that brings my inevitable audit that much closer.

Finally went and talked to the lawyers today - they were very pleasant, which given how much I'm going to have to pay them, is probably just as well. I've signed and initialled a whole bunch of papers, so I hope I don't wake up in a bathtub of ice-water, no kidneys and a yellow post-it thanking me for my generous contribution, as agreed in this contract that I signed thinking that they were actually lending me money rather than asking to "borrow" organs. One of the good things about using lawyers that know your family is that they know that, for example, someone should probably act on your youngest sister's behalf if you bequeath stuff to her. Unfortunately, they didn't know my sibling's middle names, which meant that I was thrown back onto the vagaries of my memory when specifying my will - luckily, Mum has confirmed that I managed to do so correctly, hurrah!

Still got insurance to do, and have to put a slightly unexpected $4k into the account for buying the house; there's also the power and gas still to set up, and some movers to hire. Doesn't look like I'll have the trust set up in time, since I've decided to do everything through the lawyers - but the peace of mind of getting everything done with a few days to go outweighs the extra cost, and/or the possibility of me starting a three-year live-in relationship with someone in the next month or two that ends in bitter recriminations and a hostile break-up. Yeah, I think I'm pretty safe there. ;)

Only six days until settlement. [knock on wood]

***

As some of you will have read, scam artists have a new tool - international character sets. It's basically the same type of problem that you get from fraudsters registering 'paypa1.com', but with characters in the Unicode set that look exactly like letters in the normal character set. So for browsers who support umlauts, graves and cedillas in the URL (as is the upcoming standard), yet another danger from clicking through - which may kill the 'Buy it now' and 'Donate now' buttons. Bah, and argh. Here's a typical story on it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/07/browsers_idn_spoofing/

Weirdly enough, my workmates were talking about this problem about a week before the story broke. (Apparently, you can turn off unicode recognition in Firefox.) I guess registrars don't care, since it's a bunch more domains that comercial entities will have to buy.

One positive outcome - I looked up cedilla on the web, and found out some interesting stuff on the problems of trancribing Romanian, and the word "ogonek".

***

Listening to "Les Blues Stars", which is somewhat surreal - imagine J-Pop, but swing jazz, and French. The lyrics are almost all English, but the accents are definitely not. Which reminds me - I wonder why groups like Pizzicato Five use French as their third language, after Japanese and English? Is there some special cultural status that French has in Japanese culture that German, for example, doesn't have? Any of our students of Japanese culture wish to comment?

***

I seem to have volunteered to help write the LARP for Kapcon 15 next year. I read the advice of the person who ran it this year with interest - unfortunately, the most emphatic bit advice for those who are thinking about running a big game is "don't". :) On the other hand, we've got a whole year to organize, right? Right??

Right.

Posted by svend at February 9, 2005 7:05 PM