You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Alan Moore, Arahan, Adieu (to boxes)...

I can never tell whether I'm ahead or behind of the curve, in terms of cult Internet stuff. For example, had everyone else seen Sinister ducks, with vocals by Alan Moore? Or the female version of Ronald McDonald, as envisioned by some Japanese advertising campaign?

***

We've got a big deadline coming up, so it's no surprise that there's been a series of catastrophic IT problems that have stopped all work for hours. Yesterday's emergency had a delicious database center, which meant I had to come back from lunch and spend a couple of hours trying various approaches to sorting it out. I'm just very, very grateful that none of it was actually my fault.

I'm thinking about popping into Catholic Supplies and picking up devotional pictures of St Isodore of Seville, St Jerome, St Catherine of Alexandria, and maybe St Anthony (since it's losing data that we're worried about). And given our current situation, St Jude is pretty appropriate. :) Maybe St Veronica, too - though her official remit is laundresses, she's associated with photographers and filmmakers as well. And there's always Theodosius the Cenobriarch, since he appears to be the patron saint of file-makers...

Actually, Editorial has already done something like this - they have a Wall of Faith, with icons of various religions watching over them as they work.

***

I popped to the parents house briefly to pick up a few things that I'd managed to forget, and Mum pointed out a box and a bunch of bags that I'd forgotten about. (In fact, when she mentioned them, I remembered thinking, "Huh, I bet I forget that I've put something here," when I put them there; in my defence, they were behind all the furniture.) In the box was a bunch of alcohol - I'd noticed that some of it was missing, but I'd disconsolately assumed that I'd left it behind at the flat. Of course, the ironic thing is that I don't drink by myself, so I can see that I'll probably end up just like Dad, with a bottle of Cointreau from thirty years ago. On the other hand, I'd be pretty happy to end up like my father in most things - possibly not in the amount of time he spends at work, but most things. ;)

***

Saw Arahan on Wednesday, which is based on a South Korean cartoon, and by the same people as Volcano High. I quite liked it - things like an old kung-fu master complaining about lack of activity: "Nowdays I only levitate to change the lightbulb!" And there was a quote from the bad guy that I liked, too: "A sword can slaughter a pig, or cut through the world." I think that on the whole, I preferred VH, but it's certainly good fun.

***

The saddest thing about unpacking, I found, was disposing of the boxes afterwards. Some of these boxes had "Brooklyn St Cafe" on them - that's the Todman St flat! And I think that some of the A4 paper boxes were even older than that. That these boxes, that served me so well for so long, were going to be collapsed and recycled... well, it seemed a little unfair. I saved some of them in the roofspace, but most of them are now in the garage, waiting for me to take them to recycle bin. But I'm glad I've taken the time to remember them here - thank you for your good and faithful container-ness, mighty cardboard guardians of my stuff. :)

Aaaand - that's all I got, for the moment.

Movies and Housies

As previously promised, here's an actual picture of the inside of my house, as captured in wonderous Blur-o-vision on my mighty Palm:

And a picture from the room shown above out into the garden. Yes, it was a very sunny day indeed:

***

Been a while since I wrote anything. There are various reasons for this - mostly, I've been tidying up my house. I've also been reading through the Wordplay columns, which I find entertaining for many of the same reasons I like reading L.E. Modesitt's descriptions of woodworking or blacksmithing in the Recluse books. Of course, I don't intend to start writing screenplays or move to L.A., any more than I want to build chairs or forge horseshoes - but it's interesting to read about what I should do, if I did want to do it.

Of course, there's also Query Letters I Love, which is pretty much the other end of the spectrum. As Trimethius described himself, they're "harsh but cruel". :)

***

I just read the phrase "a low cost, web-based business model" as "a lost cow, web-based business model". I had to re-read it two or three times before I worked out what it actually said. Weird.

***

No doubt you've all seen the animated gifs of "if LotR was done by roleplayers", but on the off chance that you haven't: one, two, three.

***

Bad news on my quest to find flatmates - I thought I had a couple I knew lined up, but they decided that they'd pass. (One has some mobility problems, which made the bathroom problematic.) That was the only bite I got with my (admittedly not that great) advertisement, so I'm investigating other avenues. Argh, so annoying that I don't have a phone number! :(

Of course, if it weren't for the sweet, sweet cash, I'd just live by myself. Bah. :)

Fake zodiacs, spit, and console gaming cliches...

The Register has a disheartening story called Spam gets vocal with VoIP. The basic formula goes:

Voice over IP => much cheaper telephone calls => Spit - SPam over Internet Telephony.

Coming soon to a voicemail in-box near you. Le sigh.

I'm feeling particularly disgruntled about spammers at the moment, because I'm trying to write up the next session of the Buffy game I'm running, and they've totally trashed the wiki we've been using to keep track of the game. So annoying! I think I have paper copy backups of the stuff I wanted to reference, but there's probably stuff there that's gone for good unless the person hosting the wiki is able to pull it back. And now we're going to have to enforce authentication or something. It's like coming back from a holiday and finding someone has smashed a window and peed in your front porch. Stupid spammers.

***

Mum sent me an interesting refutation of the Celtic zodiacal system found in Robert Graves' The White Goddess by a modern scholar in Celtic studies. Here's part one and part two. Of course, the first thing I thought while reading this stuff was - nifty material, how can I use it? :) I've put it here mainly because I didn't get a chance to read it at work, and I didn't want to lose it - but I figured that I might have other readers who'd be interested, too.

***

Speaking of nifty material, no doubt many of you have already seen The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, but it was new to me.

"189. The Moral Of The Story (Ghaleon Rule)
Every problem in the universe can be solved by finding the right long-haired prettyboy and beating the crap out of him."

***

At work, I'm in the unusual position of actually going back through my email and trying to deal with some of the issues that didn't require my attention right at that minute. It's quite satisfying to be able to knock off some of the small jobs that have been hanging around in your inbox; maybe one day I'll get the number of emails in my main folder down below a thousand again.

Hmm. Maybe I should have bigger goals at work - but then again, at least that's an achievable goal. Probably. ;)

***

Went and met a bunch of people at pool - of course, by the time I got there, they'd pretty much finished, and were heading off to dinner. Yet another downside to finishing at 6pm, I guess. Oh, and I managed to get a parking ticket because I misread the times when you needed to get a WCC pass thingy. Weirdly, it feels like I saved money tonight - I didn't buy a drink, didn't buy dinner, didn't buy a Fluid (though I was sorely tempted), and didn't pop into Whitcoulls to look at the DVDs. I think it may be because I don't have a target amount in mind, and the ticket feels a lot more like one of those random expenses that just have to be paid, like petrol or rates - it's only annoying in that it's another thing I have to remember to do.

Anyway, I've got stuff I'm meant to be writing, so I should get back to that.

All in.

Why will this be a short entry, Svend? Because you're tired, that's why.

Everything is now moved in. It's spooky how well my stuff colour-coordinates with the house's colour scheme. Mum keeps saying that she can't understand how all my furniture fitted into the girl flat. I'll post some pictures soon.

***

Had an even shorter day at work today than I anticipated, as the movers called to say they were arriving a half-hour earlier than I expected them. Rushed into Kilbirnie to get cash for them, and then unloaded the car while waiting for them to arrive. (Flatmate #1's bedroom is currently full of stuff, slowly emptying as I move it to its eventual destination.) Since I miscalculated with the fridges, and had to swap them around with the help of Mum, I have a good idea about how painful it would have been to do it all myself, and am very greatful that I didn't try.

Oh, and hurrah for the mad mutant monks of Mary-Kate and Ashley, and for Jenni, who helped me pick the fabric - those robes made excellent protectors for the floor when we needed to slide stuff like wall units and fridges. Who says roleplaying has no practical applications? :)

I've basically been assembling, unpacking, setting up and wiping down all day, and I feel a lot more tired than I thought I'd be. (The house was a lot less clean than how we left our flat, other flatmates! Thank you, Sok, for showing me the Way of the Pink Paste, without which my cupboards would still be really gross!) Mum was a big help all day, and Dad helped a lot with things like screwing together the table. Erik pitched in too, with a bunch of wiping and some light carrying. Very late in the evening, my youngest sister arrived from dialysis - she'd seen the house relatively empty last night, and she thought the couch was a Very Good Idea.

(Huh, just realised that Erik has accidentally stolen a set of keys. I hope he doesn't lose them, 'cos one of them I don't have any copies of yet.)

Emba & B came over, which was very nice - I hardly ever see those two, and I was glad that B got to see my new place before traipsing off overseas for a couple of years. B got to borrow the extended Two Towers, so it wasn't a total loss for them, either. :) They both seemed in good health and fair spirits, and I'll hopefully see them again tomorrow.

***

Anyway - the cable modem seems to be working, and that's the important thing. :) Must get things tidied up as soon as poss., so I can get flatmates and start paying off my enormous debt at a faster rate.

Off to bed for the first time in my new house. I hope I've set my alarm correctly.

100th Entry - now with house!

And now the real reason for my frequent updates becomes apparent - I wanted to hit 100 posts on the day of settlement. (And I love you guys, and want to keep you informed of my exciting and dynamic life, obviously. ;)

So - to everyone who reads these entries, happy hundredth post. I hope that there's an occasional nugget of something interesting, useful or amusing. I'm pretty sure my rate of posting will slow down now that I've reached this milestone, so readers may one day look back at this time as a Golden Age. Or possibly a Dark Age of Far Too Many Posts To Read, who can say... :)

***

Walked through the house as an owner for the first time today. Weird feeling. I checked in the shed and garage - no, wait, I checked in my shed and my garage... huh. Still weird. Anyway, checked in those places on the off-chance there was a ladder so I could get into the ceiling, but no dice, so I wandered down to Mitre 10 and bought one - the first permanent thing that I bought for the house, I guess. (I've just realised that I left the light on in the attic. First time for that too, I guess. ;)

Before leaving, I set off borer bombs, and watched through the door to see the cool fumes - which meant I was still around when the security system went off. Luckily, I'd talked to the monitoring guys, but it was really annoying, because I thought I'd dealt with this when I deliberately disconnected the fire alarm. Anyway, I dived into the thickening fumes, poked ineffectually at the keypad, gave up, went to the kitchen, went outside, tried to work out from the manual how to turn off the shrieking siren, went back in, poked at the keyboard some more until I happened on the appropriate combo to turn it off, and then got out as soon as poss.

So - still a weird feeling, but how much of that is the aftermath of borer bomb fumes, I really can't say. :)

I was going to be playing in a game with Jenni and others tonight (henchmen of a Bond-style villain), but Jenni isn't feeling up to snuff, so I'll do house stuff instead. Nothing big, since the furniture will be arriving on Thursday - but I loaded the car and the van in anticipation of doing something like this last night, so I should be able to shift a fair amount. I keep telling myself - every box I deal with now is one I won't have to deal with later.

Actually, if I can manage to move my matress, I could even move in tonight. Exciting!

***

"It was pragmatic!"
"It awasn't pragmatic, it was sloppy and lazy!"
"It was pragmatic - it was a work-around for a bug in my brain-code!"
- justification for making a tonne of machine-name aliases, so the person in question doesn't have to remember which way around a two-part name went.

***

I've recommended Hitherby Dragons before, but I just wanted to share this awesome quote of optimism with you from Ms Bergstrom's replies to her comments:

"We live in an age of miracles and fuckheads, and the secret truth is, the fuckheads have always been there, and the miracles haven't."

This is a sentiment that I'm totally in sympathy with.

***

Called TelstraClear today, to find out what my phone number is. As it turns out, the guy who booked me to be connected up on Thursday was only shifting my cable modem - I wasn't going to get the phone or TV then, and they couldn't tack activation of them onto the Thursday visit. So I won't actually get a phone or tuner until March 1st, though I'll get the important one (cable modem) much sooner. I guess it's good I'll be able to work from home that day while I wait for the mythical Saturn guy to appear.

In a way, it's reassuring - it helps fill up my quota of stupid little annoying things that I have to deal with.

***

When will I have a housewarming? This is a good question. Not this weekend, definitely - maybe the 4th of March? Maybe I'll have flatmates by then. :)

Happy day-before-settlement day!

One day to go!

***

Busy day on Sunday - after hitting my head against a brick wall for ages on Saturday, I realized that I hadn't taken into account that FileMaker's default decisions about what files to open might be different from I might consider "sensible". So - in the unlikely event you're administering FileMaker, be aware that if Database A has a relationship to Database B, and it'd normally open the copy of Database B that's available over the network, but there's a copy of Database B in the same directory as Database A, it'll open that copy - and you might end up with records that look like they're missing when you're looking through Database A, but you can see are there in the (network copy of) Database B.

If that's not very clear - well, that's why it took so long to work out what was going on.

Anyway, once I worked out what was happening, it was pretty plain sailing. I'm a little nervous that I've uncovered what looks like a huge, awful and as-yet undiscovered problem in the course of some routine tidying up - but since no-one seems to have noticed it yet, I have hope that we'll be able to fix it before it becomes apparent to the end-users.

And as an added bonus, the work I did on Sunday should cancel out the time I'm going to have to take off on Thursday to do cable/furniture stuff. (And if, by some miracle, it's all done early, then I can come in and work, and some of Sunday becomes delicious-tasting Overtime. :)

***

Even without considering work, it was pretty busy Sunday. I wasn't planning on going to 10am mass, since I'd set up a meeting at the new house at 11am; but Farmor hadn't been feeling well for a few days, so I went along to keep her company. This meant that I rolled up to Coutts St a bit late, but with a full crew - both parents, and my father's parents. Since it was my father's family that the estate agent had gone skiing with, there was a happy reunion, and then we got down to finding out where things like the fusebox and gas meter are.

It's always a bit weird, coming back to a place that you've only visited briefly - especially in this case, where I had floorplans, so my mental picture wasn't too out of kilter, but introduced other weird biases. There was also all the fixtures that came with the place, most of whcih I completely failed to remember. No particularly nasty surprises, though I have found a cupboard in the kitchen that's probably annoying enough that I'll replace it early in the "home improvement" cycle.

Then, on to Puggle's birthday, where I gave her a nice five-piece, four-person cutlery set. Lots of lovely people there, and I got a bit of sun. (Unfortunately, because I wanted to look respectable for the land-agent, I'd worn the only collared shirt I could find, which was black - so in addition to looking as grim and serious as I normally do, I was very, very hot.) Some idle talk about setting up a Monday-night game with some of the old WSotB crew - we'll have to see if that goes anywhere.

After ferrying people places, it was off to the parents to drop off debris, and then on to a fairly productive 4 or 5 hours at work.

***

It's St Valentine's day, so I guess it's an appropriate time to wish all the people I know who are in new relationships (or old relationships starting new phases) the best of luck, and all those in any relationship a fun, happy and enjoyable rest of the year with your partner. (I've never been particularly concerned about any holiday becoming comercial, since I don't actually pay enough attention to advertising or watch enough TV to notice that sort of thing - I've no doubt I'd enjoy today too, were I in a position to do so. :)

And to the other singletons out there - yeah, it does seem unfair that there's no corresponding day for us, but I'm not entirely sure how the Hallmark cards would work. "Happy Singles Day - one year closer to being a crazy old bachelor uncle!" It might take a bit of marketing work before that particular holiday became firmly established - it doesn't have the instant appeal of "Annonymously throw fruit and vegetables at people you don't like Day", for example.

***

And speaking of days - only one day to go!

Spam, Saturn, Saturday

According to IBM's Global Business Security Index Report 2004, 70% of all email traffic last year was spam. 70%. But someone must be buying something, otherwise they wouldn't bother - it's not like the virus field, where people do it for notoriety, curiousity and arrogance. (Or at least they did, before organized crime took over.)

I remember when this was all newsgroups, as far as the eye could see...

(Actually, that's a complete lie. When I started taking notice of this stuff, Mosaic was already available - I guess that merely makes me middle-aged (in internet terms), rather than a true oldie. But I know plenty of oldies... ;)

I wonder how long it will be until text messaging is unusable in NZ because of spam.

***

Of the things that I've overheard in my office that are contenders for 'most representative slogan for the room', the current frontrunner is probably: "Whoa! Check out the enema equipment!"

***

I have very mixed feelings about making links pop up new windows - but that's probably because I've set my middle mouse button to do it by default. I know there are plenty of tab-using people out there, too, and I don't really want to dictate their browsing experience. Plus, it's more typing unless I can somehow make it a default via the style-sheet - and if I were going to do that sort of thing, there's plenty of tweaking I'd play around with before getting to new windows. (Like resetting the link styles and colours to the defaults, for example.) I suspect that laziness will win in the end... sorry, Phreq! :(

***

I booked movers for a time that nicely overlaps the period I've got to be at home, waiting for the Saturn cable guy. (Most likely waiting in vain, if my past experience with Saturn is any guide; but you've got to go through the motions, I suppose.) I was going to sign up with Contact, but there's been several discussions about different electricity providers on our internal mailing lists - looking over them, people seem to have had significant and persistent problems with Contact, so I went with Genesis instead. It was a slightly weird experience - I rang, pushed '3' for a new account, settled in to wait... and after one ring, I was connected to an actual, helpful and cheerful person! There was an unexpected added bonus, too - as I'd already had an account with them (back in Ellice St), my existing credit rating meant I didn't have to have a bond. So - is avoiding a semi-expected cost the same as actually getting money? Bank-balance says no, but desire for goodies says yes! :)

***

All of the above was written on Friday, on and off - this is written on Saturday. I'd tried to concoct a reasonable excuse not to be in today, but I didn't manage it, so here I am - trying to make sure that a swap of hardware will be suitably painless on Monday, and trying to work out how to reintergrate a couple of tables that hold basically the same information, but have drifted apart through usage. It's all a bit of a pain in the bum, but there's a big deadline for the end of February, so here I am, trying to streamline part of the process on this sunny weekend afternoon.

On the upside, next week I won't have as far to come in; and before long, we'll have rotten weather, and it won't matter that much if I'm not able to get out on the weekend. :)

Three days until settlement.

That burns a building down...

Okay, remember what I said yesterday about the hypothetical GM, injecting complications into my life to make it more "interesting"? I now officially hate that guy.

Severe stress today, caused by a series of events that are almost classical in its shape. I haven't had enough time for perspective to kick in, which will no doubt allow me to find the funny, but the basics are: it turns out something that I thought had to happen by, say, Monday, had to happen today for me to meet the requirements of my lender. And I'd got the forms to apply for this thing this morning, and it's already nearly midday when I find out the correct deadline. Much hurried consultation, pulling out of hair, stress - and then I'm told that it probably won't be ready until tomorrow morning. So more stress, more imagining of horror scenarios, and I try to get hold of the lender - who tells me that it should all be fine, call my lawyers and get them to phone the lender's head office to confirm. I do that, and the lawyers say they'll do that, and everything is as dealt with as I can make it.

And then I get a call about 3pm (which is about quarter of an hour after I organized to work around the no-show) confirming that my application has been approved, and it's been faxed to my lawyers and my lender.

...

I am never, ever buying a house ever again. Ever. Unless someone gives me a house, or I somehow win a house somewhere, this is the house in which I will die. And I will be happy when I die, for I will not have had to buy a house again, ever.

And if, when I die, I find out you need houses in heaven, I will buy a tent.

Maybe giving up the soothing powers of tea for Lent wasn't such a great choice after all.

***

Very little else to say, really. People at work are being pretty understanding about me taking longer lunchbreaks when sudden crises arise and need to be dealt with. I'm really, really glad that nothing catastrophically bad has happened - both because I don't like it when catastrophically bad things happen, and because I would hate to be put in a position where I had to chose between getting into a morass of trouble with my house, or causing the facility to grind to a halt and being fired.

(Note to sadistic GM of my life - notice the knocking on the wood? See the holding of the thumbs and crossing of fingers? Give one of the other characters some damn spotlight time, and leave me alone for a while!)

We're about to cram another body into the office, which will involve a mighty shifting of desks. I've not been booted down to the Production floor just yet, but I suspect it's only a matter of time.

According to one of the artists, at Weta Digital there are ~80 women and 290+ men. I find that weird, since it feels like the ratio is a lot more even; however, there are a large number of women in highly visible roles (like 16 of the 21 in Production), and there are a large, large number of unsociable men, so that may account for my skewed perception. (For comparison's sake, there are two woman in the 26 person-strong IT department.)

***

The newest member of the IT department is currently bewailing the fact that there are no decent open-source shared-calendar applications, as she's meant to manage the head of IT's appointment book. She talked at one point about using ical, which I found a blast from the past - but it turns out there's a Mac program with the same name as the fairly primitive Unix app I was thinking of. (And it wouldn't have solved her problems anyway, since using iCal would have meant having two calendars, one that the CTO could modify, and one that she could modify.)

I'm glad that I have the bare minimum of meetings to deal with, and so don't have to care; still, it's a weird feeling, knowing that there's something that Outlook does better than any open-source solution that the fairly savvy set of sysadmins we have can think of.

***

Five days to go. Nothing more to do, except movers and power/gas, and maybe find out what my phone number will be.

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.

Sun and rain...

Happy birthday to Puggle, who's a year older than last year today! May the cool stuff of this year equal or better the cool stuff of last year!

***

"Ah!" he will cry, and grasp his heart. Technically he will actually grasp at his chest. If he physically grasped his heart the bargaining would take an unexpected turn. "Ah!" he will cry. "You have defeated me. I will give you a new bed, only a small service charge."

If you look at him hard enough and project good thoughts, you can make him yield the service charge; but if you think bad thoughts at him, he'll probably be bitten by a heavily drugged mongoose. It's up to you to choose!

How I love Hitherby Dragons.

***

In a recent aritcle on Groklaw, there was a quote from the US Supreme Court: "[w]e are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final". I've known system administrators with a similar attitude - which is often more pragmatic than prideful. The article, which contains some interesting material on the US judicial system, is here:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050204091628429

***

Sleeping at my parents is somewhat weird, in that many of the things that I'd normally have, like my computer, or the bedside clock/alarm, seem like they're too much trouble to set up if I'm only there for another week and a bit. It makes waking up a bit of an adventure, though - so far, I've woken up with plenty of time to get to work, but who knows if this will last an entire week? That's why it's an adventure!

Settlement is a week from today. I go in to sign a variety of papers at the lawyer's tomorrow, and have rung the real estate agent to arrange a visit to the house to find out about fuseboxes and the like. Still have to arrange for power and gas, and to go into Kilbirnie and close bank accounts and get my mail forwarded. I guess I should start going to places like Real Groovy and changing my account addresses - now that I have a permanent abode.

Only a week until permanent abodeness!

***

On a Changeling-related note - had an excellent chat with Jamie last night, talking about the nature of Dan, what the Gate after the Gate of Iron might be, and whether we're in the Fourth Age yet. Oh yeah, and whether the Nockers who are building a Tardis have an end-goal of trying to make time-travel impossible.

If you would be king, a crown forged by Nocker;
If you would stay king, a crown forged by Dougal.

I'm tempted to write up our musings in a faux-academic manner. We'll see how we go.

***

Overheard a conversation at a party where, as examples of how much a loser a person's ex-boyfriend was, they said that he used to play Dungeons & Dragons and Ultimate, and that he'd invited her over to play boardgames. The fact that the person talking was currently despondent over the fact that their most recent paramour had what they regarded as a stupid last name should perhaps be taken into consideration.

***

It took a while to get the house clean. A long, hot while.

A matress nearly fell on me from upstairs. I'm glad I hired movers for my stuff.

Given the descriptions of the state of the flat when the original crew moved in, we left the place a lot cleaner than when we arrived.

***

34mm of rain in 20 minutes at 6pm down in Dunedin. Goodness. Hope all the Dunedinites are all okay.

We are family...

They were an hour or two late, but Coolmoves eventually turned up, and everything but my phones and kitchen gear are now taking up most of the parents' garage. So - I guess I'm now pretty much moved.

I'm really glad I didn't try to do it all myself - I mean, I could have done it, but it would have been a pretty miserable exercise. As it turns out, I had almost exactly one truckload of heavy furniture, and just enough cash to pay for the hour's worth of moving. What's more, it all fitted into the garage fine - I was even able to clear the boxes out of the room where Giffy is going to be staying.

Now, all I have to do is help the others - probably a bit of light moving on Saturday, and some heavy stuff on Sunday. And then that will be the end of the Nairn St flat.

***

I was trying to write something earlier, but my youngest sister was watching TV in the same room. Normally the problem with this situation would be the mesmerising effect that television has on me, but that wasn't what drove me from the room. No, the problem with being in the same room as my sister when she has the remote is that you've no chance to be mesmerised - the channels are flicking by too fast. This is just one of the adjustments I'm going to have to make now that I'm living at home for a while.

Another is much, much later meal-times, and later activity in general. It's not uncommon for Dad to wait until Mum and my youngest sister are back from dialysis to have dinner - which means dinner at 10pm. I used to be a bit of a night owl, but I think I've lost the habit; I guess if I want to eat earlier, I'll have to start cooking earlier. :)

It's interesting how different people deal with being thrust back with their parents. I think I get on pretty well with mine, but I wouldn't want to live at home for an extended period - though I might feel differently if I had access to all my stuff while I was here. Staying here for the two weeks until my settlement date should be fine, though.

Speaking of which... I guess I should put some thought towards a housewarming type of thing.

***

Good day at work today - and not just because I left at 3pm. :) I was able to finally finish a bunch of stuff, and do one or two neat things for people that should mean that some stuff that I've been doing by hand-crafted one-liners can be made the responsibility of someone more appropriate. Lots of SQL-y goodness, too.

As I've mentioned to some people, yesterday I asked a senior production person why we were so busy so early - surely we were quieter at a similar stage for the other stuff we've done? His take was: we're scheduled as if for an action film with some CG components, but we're actually doing a CG-heavy film with some action components. On the other hand, we don't seem to be doing to badly when it comes to turning stuff around, so I guess we must have learned something from the other films.

***

Those of you who've been typing a while - do you ever notice how fast you're going? Like, how your fingers just go duh-duh-duh-duh, and you've just typed "australopithicus" or "notwithstanding"? (Or if you're anything like me, you've typed "noteithstanfing" or something - but for commoner words, and with a more familar keyboard, I do better.)

I think I did once try one of those "teach yourself typing" programs, but basically the reason I can type at a decent speed is two-fold - the old university BBS, and programming. It may be different now in the days of gui graphic designers, but back in the day, the simple fact that you've got to churn out so many lines of code means that you get pretty fast by the end of your degree.

Also, as a free bonus, you got OOS! We didn't know how lucky we were...

Okay, I can tell I'm tired - I'm tempted to sing along with Dora the Explorer. "Boingy, boingy, boingy, get the stones to sing!"

Okay, yep, I'm going to bed. Goodnight!

(11 days until settlement!)

Through foggy London town the sun was shining everywhere...

As some others have noted, we've had weird weather today. Driving into work, I looked up Pirie St into Mt Vic, and saw fog covering the hill, with a band of bright blue sky above. Even weirder was driving along the waterfront, shrouded in mist, and then getting through the cutting to find Mirimar basking in sunshine.

One of the reasons for the fog is the lack of wind - Wellington is still, almost eerily so. And hot, too; our air-conditioner was working overtime, and because we're at the top of the building, the stairwell became a chimney. We attempted to keep the door closed as much as possible.

Amusing sidenote - someone made the trek up to ask me for FileMaker help. I came down with them to try and diagnose the problem, while encouraging them to make Support their first port of call. They thought that they had been locked out of FileMaker, because they were unable to type anything in; after watching them unsuccessfully try to enter a number, I suggested that turning Num Lock on might help.

Okay. Well, amusing to me, alright? :)

***

At hix's request, I did a quick write-up of the InSpectres game that I ran at Kapcon14, called Operation Icebox. It's written from the point of view of trying to describe how I adapted the game to a nonstandard setting, and what good and bad things I found about running it, rather than a description of what happened in the game, but I figured that there might be some readers who'd find it interesting.

To post, I had to create an account on the Forge. I'm quite lucky to have a fairly distinctive name, since that means I can often just use use it in these situations, rather than being "fluffycamel" or "svend103432". (This came up today when I was setting up a trust - while there may be an "Andersen Family Trust", there probably won't be one with my full name in it's title.)

Anyway, it ended up branching out into a discussion about the Jeeves & Wooster idea I had - that discussion ended up here. Interesting stuff, if you're interested in that sort of stuff. :)

***

This is probably my last night in the Nairn St flat, and the last time I use this internet connection. I've cleared out my room apart from furniture, bed stuff and the clothes I'll be wearing tomorrow, and I'll be carting the computer downstairs once I've finished. I'm glad I moved into this flat. I've had some fun times here, and I'm really happy that I got a chance to know some people better - Sok, for example. Some neat stuff has happened while I've been here too, like the European trip, finally getting back to Hatepe, and having exotic backpacking visitors.

Still, onward to new adventures! Of course, so far these adventures seem mostly to be giving people money, or being told by people how much money you're going to end up giving other people. But the end is in sight, dear readers - before long, I will be insured, trusted, willed, power of attorneyed, inspected, valued, mortgaged, conveyanced, settled and firmly ensconced in this strange new world of Home Ownership, where I will learn the mystic arts of Pink Batts installation and general house upkeep.

So - time to post this, turn off the computer, pack the last remnants of my room away, and sleep in Nairn St for the last time.

I don't like change, but I think I've made my peace with this one. :)