You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Kung-Fu, Lasers, Studio Ghibli

I saw The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter last night - 1983 kung-fu classic. Pretty darn good, with some very nice fight sequences towards the end, and some strong female roles.

But! I was giving a friend a ride home afterwards, had parked in Ellice St to let them out - and a couple of random drunk girls knocked on the window of the car, and begged to be given a lift around the Basin to Douglas St (on the basis that it was both raining and freezing). I'm not sure quite how it happened - I'm tempted to suggest that my brain was still broken from trying to wrap itself around the movie - but I ended up actually giving them the lift.

What I really don't understand is - why did they try it on in the first place? I mean, it's not like the car looks that much like a taxi... do I give off "kind-hearted" (or "sucker") vibes so strongly that they can be detected through darkness, rain, and glass? Who sees someone parking their car, and thinks, "Hey, maybe they'll give us a lift, and not attempt to abduct us?" Just... weird.

I hope they got to their party, and home, safely.

***

And from a weird thing to a cool thing - I've just been lent thirteen Studio Ghibli films, many of which I've never seen. I'd tell you the titles, but the packaging is in Japanese/Chinese (though they have English subtitles), and I can't be bothered working it out from the pictures, though I can spot Porco Rosso, My Neighbor Totoro, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, what I think is Grave of Fireflies... Now, all I have to do is find an appropriate time to watch them.

***

Since I seem to have some readers who're interested in film and so on, someone out there might find it useful to know there's asteadicam built from Lego. And speaking of media-type-stuff, most of you have probably had your daily photoshoppery fix by now, but on the off-chance you haven't, here's Human Descent. Some quite nice examples there, actually.

***

Stupid addictive flash games. Bah.

***

I really quite like the current weather. While I'm inside, anyway. ;)

The best bit is being able to bring the big feather duvet down from on top of the wardrobe, and snuggle under it. Of course, anything that makes getting up harder in the morning is probably a bad thing... which reminds me, I should be getting home.

Eggs, Lists, Car

The saying may be "never trust a skinny cook", but unfortunately, that's not quite the same as "always trust a chubby cook". Sadly, I fear my days of culinary-based untrustworthiness are well behind me now.

***

Someone hid easter-eggs all through the facility. These weren't chocolate eggs, mind you - these were plastic eggs, filled with random things like a small fishing line, or toy racing cars, or (in my case) two pipe-cleaners, a material-covered cotton ball, and two googly eyes. If I remember correctly, last year I got a small packet of miso soup concentrate.

I have made a sort of sproingy-tailed creature. I do not feel compelled to name him yet, as he has no mouth. My line of reasoning is clear to me, all right?

***

I'm getting prepared to run Changeling, so this comic seems remarkably appropriate.

***

I feel that people may benefit from songs in list format.

• Contents of desert (initial):
  • Plants
  • Birds
  • Rocks
  • Things
  • Sand
  • Hills
  • Rings

• Observations - Day 1:
  
  • Fly (w/ buzz)
    
  • Sky (w/o clouds)

• Name of Horse:
  
  • (unknown)

• Advantages of desert:
  
  • Out of rain
    
  • Can remember name
    
  • No pain

• Observations - Day 2:
  
  • Skin discolouration (red)

• Observations - Day 3:
  
  • Riverbed (dry) (dead?)

• Observations - Day 9:
  
  • Reached border desert/sea
    
  • Released horse
    
  • Presence confirmed:
    
    • Plants
      
    • Birds
      
    • Rocks
      
    • Things
      
    • Sand
      
    • Hills
      
    • Rings
    
    
  • Correlation of desert/sea noted (subterranean population of latter)
    
  • Cities contain:
    
    • Heart of ground
      
    • No love
    
    

Well, it's shorter than this book report on "To Kill A Mockingbird" that I accidentally watched. I blame Jamie, for reasons that seem good at the moment.

***

Finally, some life-related nonsense - the car needed a WOF, and I asked about the weird "clunk" when I wind the driver-side window up and down. A bunch of stuff had to be done, including replacing one of the tires, and the "clunk" is something non-essential that commonly rusts in these cars, and needs replacing (but because it's a common problem, I probably won't be able to get a part second-hand). There was some other stuff, but as my accurate and complete description of the window problem may have implied, I'm not really a car person. All I really need to know is (a) if I die while driving, it'll probably be someone's fault, rather than something simply breaking; and (b) if I get stopped by the police, it will be for, say, excessive use of puns, rather than driving without a WOF. Oh, and (c) a bill from the garage for an unspecified amount will appear in the near future, which I will pay promptly and cheerfully, or at least promptly and with upbeat resignation.

See? Weren't the song lists better?

Dolls, iPods, Blackcurrant Rum

In compensation for wittering on about moderately obscure unix command-line follies, I offer what I believe to be the stereotyoped equivalent of powertools and race-cars. A male compensatory link will be given when I find one.

Now, when they say "If you are a Nyanko Cat or cake lover, you'll love this plush," do you think that they mean you'll love the Jumbo Nyanko Cat Party Cake Limited Edition Plush if you are a Nyanko Cat? I suppose it's possible... but I'm disturbed by how many of these items seem to be pushing a "cats are good food" theme. Possibly I'm reading too much into it, and the message is actually a "cats are good food if and only if you enjoy eating fabric".

***

I made a flying visit to the incomparable Debz & Matt, and we discovered (a) that I have a lot of books on British mythology, and (b) Danish blackcurrant rum is good (tasting something like fruit mince pices), and would probably go quite well with shortbread. I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked talking about next year's KapCon LARP, but we did get some useful discussion done. :)

Another useful outcome from yesterday was that I may have sourced the upcoming chemistry student a bed, via the lovely Emba. Of course, since this means that the majority of the emails I've sent the woman are bed-focused, she may have formed a very odd, furniture-driven picture of me. :)

***

Candy floss, left by itself, undergoes a weird tranformation into a brittle toffee-like substance. It's not as good, certainly, and I'd recommend eating candy floss (or "cotton candy" to our American readers, or "fairy floss" to some other unspecified group) fresh. But when you're trapped at work, and you find that you've absent-mindedly tucked a bag of candy floss in your coat pocket, well, it sometimes becomes necessary to eat sub-optimal candy.

[later] You know how you can tell you're going to regret doing some things, but you do them anyway? Yeah, well, in the same way I can no longer eat spoonfuls of sugar from the bowl, or toast-bread soaked with golden syrup, I don't think I should have tried to salvage the ex-floss. I guess I can only hope that you can all benefit by learning from my mistake.

***

A friend suggested "Socratic restraint" as a replacement for "herculean restraint". As long as I don't have to drink hemlock or appear in a Keanu Reeves movie, I'm a relatively happy man.

***

The Register is running an article about an Australian headmaster who is banning iPods from her school, on the basis that they're anti-social, which The Register spins as "they're never going to have fun or get laid". I wonder whether iPods are a schoolyard phenomenon in NZ yet...

***

One final link - A Future That Loves Us. Choice quote:

"Deep Time purpose of science, technology, art, culture: to provide adventures of sufficiently seductive beauty to seduce humanity away from mass-suicide."

T-shirts, No 2nd Flatwarming Yet

Even though crew gear and vendor swag has accounted for my t-shirt wearing needs for the forseeable future, I'm really tempted by the Boolean Operator t-shirt. Actually, the "Status Quo Now!" and "I'm not your damn search engine" tees from Non-Zero Chance are also tempting, as are "Not a Doctor" and "The monkey represents sharing" from TopatoCo, and a number of items of quality merchandise from ThinkGeek.

I will exercise my traditional herculean restraint (or Brobdingnagian lethargy) and not do anything.

(Actually, I guess Hercules wasn't exactly famed for his restraint, so perhaps I should go for a different adjective. I'd do with "Tantalian", but I guess that he wasn't restrained so much as under restraint. Classical scholars, answers on the back of a postcard, please. Or a comment, either will do. :)

***

I investigated getting LiveJournal to read the RSS feed, but it looks like that requires you to have a paid account, so that (said John) is that.

It occurs to me that it might be a useful exercise to write a little perl script to read the RSS feed and post it automagically to the LiveJournal copy - I'm sure knowing how to do that kind of web automation would come in handy for other things. Unfortunately, I don't see a big chunk of time freeing itself up in the near future... there's a bunch of stuff I should be writing right now. Which is presumably why I'm writing this, rather than doing that stuff. ;)

(Huh, looking for the A.A. Milne poem referenced above gave me a poem defending cats, and incidentally musing about Christian morality. How can you not like a medium that has this, a collection of pictures of silent movie stars, and the Uncyclopedia? Hmm, okay, I guess asking that question on a blog is kind of dumb. ;) )

***

Didn't get to Breaking News last night, owing to the other party having a migrane, and to me having a "was out until after midnight the previous evening", a disorder that becomes more and more debilitating the later in life it occurs - like chicken-pox, only much more rarely fatal.

Chatted to my flatmate today, and he seems ambivalent to the idea of a flatwarming - he claims he doesn't know many people. I'm tossing up between having another biggish gathering (so he can meet people), a slightly smaller cocktail party (since I've been planning to do that for a while), or holding off until the French chemist comes, and having some sort of do at the end of April.

I guess they're not mutually exclusive. Well, apart from the "holding off" bit. ;)

***

Mum just called, and she and Louise are heading out to the Lyall Bay Warehouse, so I'll hang out with them for a bit, and then it's off to Hix's party in good old Aro Valley. I don't miss the mold that grew on my shoes, but I kind of miss living in that area.

Anyway, possibly more later. :)

Giffy's, Other NZ Music, Dinos & Buddha

I had a very pleasant evening at Giffy's birthday last night, followed by a brisk stroll home. Giffy was stunning in a swishy dress and swishy hair, and there were plenty of interesting, funny, and engaging people to chat with. I managed to restrict my drink-buying from everyone and his brother to everyone and my brother, which is a positive step for me.

Plus I got a stereo arm-punching from two Classics scholars for casting nasturtiums at their beloved subject. Good times, good times. :)

***

Really enjoying listening to Minuit - specifically Species II and Menace, which has a neat video... hmm, I wonder whether Menace could be done as a kind of lounge/swing thing? I've agreed to run a Changeling-esque game (not using the WW rules) set in Wellington, and I've been thinking about NZ music a bunch - what music would work well with certain groups, whether there are any scenes suggested by certain tracks. I'll certainly be using Cloudboy/Dermarnia Lloyd for some of their Sluagh encounters, for example.

Heh, I'm sure I'll be able to use The Offbeat's version of Dad's Army for something... :)

"So, who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler, if you think we're on the run..."

***

I just learned a neat trick for any command-line unix users in the audience... man, I just realized that I could totally start a sentence like that, and then say something completely scandalous, and the only way people would notice is if there was an irate comment from someone about how my story about Mundens and the inflatable sheep had nothing to do with the unix command-line, unless I'm still using the outmoded "inflatable sheep" shell.

Uh... where was I? Oh yeah - when grepping the output of "ps", put the first letter of the thing you're looking for in a character class, to guarantee that you don't also get the "grep" command itself returned. For example, ps auwx | grep [h]ttpd - very handy.

***

I was delighted with Dinosaur Comics today (I think I'll let an assumed future history which agrees with my current position be the judge of THAT!"), and was moved by Hitherby Dragons.

I would not surrender it.
I would not let go of you, my child,
I would not set aside that love for you,
For all the treasures of the Earth.

I know you will pass.
And yet I cling.
That is the Maya-Dharma.

"So this is the Maya-Dharma?" asks Siddhartha. "'Cling without clinging?'"
It is a challenge, but it is not mockery.
His voice holds nothing but respect.

I don't think this will be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it affecting.

Svendelmaus, D&M, Vera Lynn

I've created a LiveJournal account to mirror this stuff into, for the convenience of some readers. (And because I don't want to prove my ability to do pattern recognition every time I comment.) I kinda wish I had gone with the spelling "Svendlemaus" rather than "Svendelmaus", but spilt milk, etc. I don't imagine I'll be changing what I write, so I doubt I'll be doing any of the memes, tests or other things that proliferate in LJs.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a nice way to show when there are comments already - I've decided to keep comments here, rather than scattered over both. And I'm tossing up between showing the whole entry, or simply having the first paragraph or two, and then having a "cut" (which would be a link to the actual entry) - I tend to bounce randomly between topics, but perhaps people would just use it as an indicator that I've written something.

Since I'm doing it for the convenience of you, the readers, comments one way or the other from those affected would be appreciated.

***

I'm contemplating how to provoke Debbie (and Matt) into posting on their blogs more often; though maybe the magic would be lost if they had to "force it". Maybe if I offered to make them a cocktail for every ten entries? I've got some crazy Danish blackberry rum (made by Peter Herring, the same people who make Cherry Herring) that I'm sure could be the basis of something... interesting. >;)

At least there are some people I can rely on to write something most days - I'm lookin' in your direction, Jenni. Yes, that does mean that I'm not planning to offer you cocktails, sorry. How about candy instead? :)

***

"Oh, What A Night" is currently playing brain-tag among some of my co-workers - one finally manages to get it out of their head, and then they're re-infected by one of the others. Someone talked about getting "99 Red Ballons" stuck in their head for two weeks, which nearly caused their partner to throw them out of the house.

Unfortunately, I was trying to think of some other song - any other song - and now I have Vera Lynn singing "Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye" stuck in my head. I'm not sure that this is actually an improvement, since I don't actually know all of the words. Maybe being able to get through to the end will expunge it. I'll try the "random other music" treatment first.

Rogue Element Award, SDR, Busy

The "I.T. Rogue Element of the Month" award arrived, and was presented with due ceremony to February's winner. I'm not sure whether you can see it, but the thing on top of the cup is the back part of a horse.

They had a whole box of these at the trophy shop.

Ironically enough, on the same day that the award was given for last month, we got a candidate for this month's winner - a screw-up that involved accidentally piping the output of ls -arl to bash, as root, on one of our old IRIX boxes. This caused many mysterious and worrying problems, like having many of the basic unix commands disappearing from that (moderately important) machine. However, the person responsible for that particular faux pas may still have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, since there's still a week or two of March to go.

Incidentally, one of the positive outcomes of this award is that it spreads knowledge about what not to do. Last month's winner showed us the dangers of running a script that deletes stuff without doing some testing to make sure that you know exactly what you're going to be deleting, and this month's winner emphasises the dangers of running as root by default (and that handing the output of ls -l to bash can cause problems because soft links look like redirects from not-existent programs, and make the target zero-sized). So it's not just a public mocking of brain farts.

Though there is an element of that, too. ;)

***

I'm single too, but I think I've gotten slightly further through the game than this guy... on the other hand, I don't have his Solar Death Ray, either.

***

I haven't actually seen my flatmate for a couple of days - I think he leaves around six, and I haven't been home until quite late. In some ways, it's pretty restful - I never went into his room anyway, so it's quite similar to having the house to myself. :) No doubt I'll have to interact with him at some point over the weekend... but not tonight, because of Jenni's; and not tomorrow, because of Giffy's; and probably not Friday, because it looks like I'll be going to a movie with a girl I met at the Carnival.

Oh, and her partner. ;)

(She was one of the senior students when I was working for Vic - it'll be nice to catch up. :)

***

Is it actually being inscrutable when you've nothing that people could scrute? I guess it's hard to say...

***

I'm taking advantage of the relative lack of full-scale disaster at work to write documentation, and plan how to write the FileMaker databases for our next project. It's nice to be thinking forward and tidying up for a change. Unfortunately, I think I've got a mild dose of whatever cold it is that's going around, so I'm not quite as quick-witted or able to concentrate as I normally would be. Not bad enough to stay home (especially not with a mortgage), but bad enough that I notice. It's kind of annoying.

Of course, it probably doesn't help to stay up until 11pm reading and/or writing stuff on the Net. I guess that's my cue to go to bed. ;)

New flatmate, Carnival, Glitter

I now have a new flatmate named Tom - he seems nice enough. The other room isn't let yet, but has been promised to a French chemistry student who's arriving in April. She's only staying for four months, but that means I don't have to think about getting a second flatmate for about five months, which I'm pretty happy about - and if I can't get a roleplayer, someone exotic and well-educated seems like a good compromise.

Not that roleplayers can't also be those two things, of course. :)

I've rung the insurers and told them about my change in flatmate situation, and now all that remains is for me to send off the bond to the tenancy people. I hope I'm a good and competent landlord.

***

The Kong wrap Carnival was pretty cool - free alcohol was a given for a wrap party, but free icecream, free candy-floss, free carnival rides (like a bronco ride, ferris wheel and an inflatable human foozeball table), and free food stalls was a nice bonus. It's weird how much of a difference it makes to be given a chicken satay stick, burger or pork noodles and then not have to pay for it. Goldenhorse played near the beginning, which was kind of a pity, since people weren't going to be in the mood for a boogie that early. Then Fat Freddy's Drop played, which was a nice and mellow background for wandering around ground-level 1930s New York; and then Neil Finn came out and played a set, which was pretty darn good - as well as Crowded House and Split Endz numbers, some random stuff like "Twist and Shout". (I ended up near the front with a group of friends - my calves still ache a bit from the pogo-ing.)

A couple of engagement parties and a BBQ later, and I was glad to try out my bath - which is very good, by the way, nice and deep. Foolishly, I also used some of the bubble bath from Lush that I was given for my birthday, which I didn't realise had glitter in it until much later. Since then, I've gardened a whole lot, scrubbed the shower stall, had several showers, and slept twice.

I still have glitter on me. That stuff is insidious.

Also, pretty difficult to explain plausibly. :)

***

Did you know that Wellington had it's own "Springheel Jack"? Apparently he was quite tall, dressed in a phospherescent-painted sheet, and would knock on doors late at night. When the poor householder answered their door, he would omniously intone, "Are you ready to meet your doom?", and leap off into the night. No-one was ever hurt by the apparition, but the police were told off for not doing anything effective; after a while, he simply stopped appearing.

The past is almost as peculiar a place as the future.

Sims, Socrates, Award, No Money

Want an adrenaline rush? How about looking at your bank account, and see that it's been driven a little more than $1000 over your overdraft by three mysterious withdrawals of about $600 each? All of which are apparently to "Andersen Svend Arthu", all of which went out the day before?

Then I realised that it's just my mortgage. Which is good, since I didn't look forward to having to change passwords and so on. I can't remember whether it's fortnightly or monthy - I'll have to look at my documents - but it's a good thing I got paid last night. (And that I did an extra nine hours last week.)

***

Went into town yesterday lunchtime and bought a trophy on behalf of the people in my room - 'the "I.T. Rogue Element of the Month Award", presented by the Weta Digital Systems team'. It is a mighty trophy - I'll see if I can get a picture when it gets here, but a picture of the template is on the left, though instead of a posing man, we have elected to go with... something different.

It should turn up this afternoon, and we've already decided who award it to for February. Now the competition will be on for March!

(There's some controversy as to whether vendors are eligible for the award - people have worried that both Telecom and Foundry have too big an advantage over any individual I.T. person in terms of messing the facility up. However, given the problems that they've given us in the past, they'd probably have to raise their game to an impressive extent for us to notice the problem over the noise. ;) )

***

Here's an interesting article on using the Socratic Method for teaching. I think that one of the best points that it makes is that it's not an easy teaching method - you have to do a lot of prep beforehand, and you need to be flexible within the lesson. I see a few echoes of good GM practice in these notes, actually.

***

The guy who's behind the Sims is making a new game, that looks as cool as I thought SimEarth would be, back in the day. There's a a preview here. The only problem I can see is - what's to stop PKs from swarming Bezerker-like through the universe? It's hard to know precisely how cool this game will be until we see an actual implimentation - but my first impression is that it'll probably be pretty damn cool. :)

Housewarming, random garden notes

Running out of toilet paper is a sign of a successful party, or a terrible curry - so on that basis, at least, it was a successful party. :) (I hadn't actually run out of toilet paper - people just didn't know where to look, and didn't ask me where I had put it.)

One of the conversations I remember having was with Blair and mundens, on how I could use up the remaining brie by crumbing it, deep-frying it, wrapping it in bacon (since anything deep-fried can be improved by being wrapped in bacon), and drizzling it with maple syrup... which means that you'd need waffles, with vanilla icecream and chocolate/kaluha sauce, and maybe an orange sorbet. And then you'd move on to the fryup... I remember us feeling our hearts shutting down just contemplating this stodgy stew of goodness.

There was a fairly good turnout, and people hung out outside a lot longer than I thought they would. A bit of fraternisation went on between different groups - I'll be interested to see how one particular bit of light "fraternisation" I saw towards the end of the evening turns out, actually. There were a number of people there that I hadn't seen for too long, and I'm glad I got to chat to them, however briefly. It was really cool that Livia was able to come, for example (though I didn't really get to "chat" with her, per se - but I did get to make her a house out of cushions :).

All in all, I think I can say that the house was successfully "warmed". And I basically had the house tidy one or two hours after the last guest left, at which point I went to bed. :)

***

I went to Yum Char the next day, which was nice... but I was called away to work, because of various database problems. I was there for about four hours, when I would much rather have been in my garden.

I'm hoping for a little rain sometime soon, since it makes weeding a whole lot easier. I got two plants in the housewarming, and I planted the outside plant in the garden yesterday - which made me realise how much I need to weed some parts of it. I've been told that the right time of year to plant is really winter, and one thing I could consider is buying plants now (while they're cheap), and just leaving them in their packaging until it's time to plant them. This sounds a bit complicated for me.

I'm slowly learning some stuff about gardening - unlike my parents place, I've got quite a sandy soil. My father has quite rightly pointed out that I should think carefully before bothering with vegetables, since when they'll be ripe will be the time when they're incredibly cheap at the supermarket, so it may make more sense to expend the effort on other plants. There are some things I'll probably plant anyway, like cherry tomatoes, but I'm not sure I'll bother with, say, carrots.

Still have no flatmates, and haven't really done anything about it. I'll be making a proper effort this week.

Dogs, DBs and Immanent Warming

While Dinosaur Comics is awesome in its own right, it also gets kudos for pointing me at a blog all about dogs this guy meets while he's walking around San Francisco. "HYPNOBASSET ENGAGING OCULAR DEFENSE SYSTEM". Heh.

***

We had the other database shoe drop on Tuesday, by the way. We had both the replicas on the same blade, which everyone agreed was a bad thing, and that we'd change that after this weekend - but then one of the AC units broke, and that caused the blade the replicas are on to overheat and start acting bizarrely. Which meant that a whole lot of stuff that use the replicas (like the intranet, the command to get phone numbers, some steps in rendering) broke.

This was in the middle of the day, and very very bad.

We were able to get back up and running fairly quickly, we learned some useful things, and I didn't have to miss my Tuesday game - so on the scale of Terrible Things, it's not so bad. But when the problem initially came up, and we thought it might be a MySQL 4.0 problem, I thought I was in deep, deep trouble.

But it must have been fairly painless, since we're now talking about upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 in the next month... :)

***

The Tuesday game was interesting, as usual. I'm a little disappointed with myself - Gino offered an awesome opportunity (a young girl my minion character had befriended saying, "I won't let you do this, even if I have to become like you to stop you"), and I choked, and was unable to raise my game to meet the opportunity that was provided. On the other hand, there were some good, memorable moments - being able to suggest that the reason the pope turned into a giant tentacle monster in the first game was because he was a nightmare monster from a previous attack, for example.

However, overall it often felt we were fighting against the system - but that may just mean we weren't playing the kind of game that it was meant to facilitate. I'm not sure whether it's just the way this particular game was run, but the system seemed to be geared towards players having individual scenes - which isn't my personal preference. So... while I thought Gino ran a good, interesting game, I don't think I'd be interested in any more My Life With Master.

I've agreed to run a Changeling game in about a month; I'm considering trying to convert the rules from The Shadow of Yesterday, since my grasp on the WW mechanics is limited at best, and I have no real desire to improve that grasp. I'm not entirely sure how to deal with Transcendence, but hopefully it won't be an issue, since the game should be fairly short. Originally I didn't have a very good idea of what I'd actually be doing with the game, but I had a nice chat with my brother last night that brought up some interesting ideas. :)

***

I'm a little nervous about the party tonight - what have I forgotten? Who have I not managed to contact? Will there still be people there when the contingent of friends who've told me they'll be there really late arrive? Will I manage to get everything done before people start arriving? (Well, I know that the answer to that one is reliably "no". ;)

I tend to overcater, and I've tried to restrain myself; but that just means I'm worrying that I haven't got enough food. I'm pretty sure that I'll be fine; and if not, there are two all-hours supermarkets just down the road. I dragged Mum along to Moore Wilsons today and bought a bunch of bulk foods (samosas, brie, corn chips, etc), so that should extend things. If (as I hope) there's plenty of food, I'll get the opportunity to cook with my favourite ingredient - leftovers. ;)

***

The Big Primate-sponsored wrap party is Saturday after next, in the set of 1920s downtown New York that's sitting in the Hutt. I'm currently planning to take my father, if he's free - he hasn't gotten to go to anything yet, and I figure it might be interesting for him. Unfortunately, while the invite talks about bringing "your immediate family", it means your partner and children, rather than your parents and siblings. Bah.

The next big party will probably be in about eight months, for the wrap of the digital effects. I selfishly hope that I have a partner by that stage to take, but I suspect I'll just end up taking something random again. (I'm sorry, Morgue you're out of the running - you got to go to my first wrap party, as I recall. ;)

Housewarming; also Eggs, Sandman, and Stressful Sundays

Okay, weirdness time - there's a cute cartoon flash video of why it's good to eat eggs, which is, as it turns out, a translation from the original Korean; and there's even a I Love Egg website.

I'm not actually sure how I got to there from here; a weird coincidence, given Jenni's random white egg.

***

Housewarming on Friday evening - I've sent out a bunch of email, but in case I'm a dumbass and have forgotten to send you an invite, just email me and I'll reply with the relevant details. I'm hoping the relative spontaneity will mean that I won't stress about properly catering too much. One downside - it's a Friday and still Lent, so while I'll be providing a BBQ, I won't be eating any of the Sizzlers.

I hope it all goes well. On the plus side, I haven't been in the house long enough for it to get very messy; on the minus side, I spent my weekend doing Other Stuff, so the only things that will be done around the house are whatever I can squeeze into my evenings and/or lunchtimes.

***

The big DB migration, moving our production servers across to new machines and upgrading them from version 3.something to 4.0 went well. Like, really frighteningly well. I'm still waiting for the thing that will go horribly wrong, wipe out days of production, and cost us millions of dollars - which will be All My Fault. It hasn't happened yet, but I can't stop knocking on wood every time I say that it all went smoothly.

Oh, it wasn't perfect - it took longer than I thought it would, and there were one or two minor hiccups. But it was a change to one of the core things in our system, so if it had all irrevocably gone to custard, it would have been very bad indeed - which was why I was pretty darn careful to try to make sure we could back to where we were originally. I'd done the same migration with three or four less critical systems in the recent past, or we wouldn't have considered making this change so far into production; but we were recently bitten by one a big problem that's easy to deal with in 4.0, and quite hard to deal with in 3. This will protect us if it happens again.

(For the curious - our big, big win is replication. It's a lot easier and quicker to be able to go "LOAD DATA FROM MASTER" on the slave, than have to go through the seven or eight steps manually copying the files from the master and installing them on the slave. This is a big deal, especially when you're trying to deal with whatever caused replication to fail in the first place.)

Anyway - a very stressful, but so far successful, Sunday. I hope that we don't try anything like that again until after delivery. Of course, the worst thing would be if something went wrong now, and we suddenly had to move a day's worth of data back... [sounds of furious wood knocking]

***

Four paragraphs on database migration? Well, come on, it's a database administrator's blog! ;) Besides, I didn't even write about how I was freaking out on Friday, because "LOAD DATA FROM MASTER" was mysteriously failing with a "Net read error", and it turned out that the problem was that some of the tables were ISAM, rather than MyISAM... Okay, okay, now I'm done. ;)

***

I mentioned to some people that I'd found one of the Sandman screenplays. I've just finished reading it - interesting. I'm reminded that Terry Pratchett's Patrician preferring to read sheet music, rather than seeing a bunch of overweight musicians hitting the occasional bum note and drooling out of their clarinets. Reading unfilmed screenplays has a certain clarity to it; one of the interesting things is what is seen as essential, and what's superfluous.

I'd still quite like to see a finished Sandman project, though.

Oo, what a nasty job...

I'm not sure whether it's a guild requirement, or some sort of karmic law, but the way that the tradesperson previous to the one you're currently dealing with has always done a terrible, sloppy, half-arsed job is somewhat disturbing. I mean, perhaps it's merely a reflection of the ongoing trend towards perfection of the world, so that work that was good enough a week ago is slip-shod by today's higher standards. I mean, I wasn't paying the guy connecting up my telephone (or rather, what he said to me had no influence on what he was paid), so it can't be an attempt to pad the eventual bill. My only guess is that evil Trade Ninja come along and mess with the pristine workmanship of tradespeople as soon as it's confirmed by Trade Ninja HQ that they won't be returning to the worksite.

Okay, maybe not my only guess.

One of the interesting claims made by the TelstraClear tradesperson is that the reason that their service is so shocking is because there's a severe staff shortage. Now, I can believe that this might be true for the installation part of the equation; but I have twice rung Contact power, and been connected to a real human near-instantly, rather than having to wait for quarter of an hour or more. Given this experience, and even though I'm given to understand that unemployment is at a very low ebb, I find it hard to believe that Telstra is unable to find enough bodies to man their call centers adequately. I mean, I don't expect Contact's spooky prescience, but I don't understand why Telstra are so slow, even at offpeak times.

Anyway - I now have a phone number. It is different from the one I was told I was going to get, but that neither bothers nor astounds me. I have also got cable television - though I can't watch it yet, since I'm still at work, making up time for the five hours I wasted on Wednesday. (I'm currently waiting for a long-running process to finish, so I can get on to the next stage of my task - hence the blogging.)

I will send out an email to Likely Interested Parties with my new phone number in the near future.

***

People are already talking about the Oscars next year, and speculating about what our competition will be - the smart money seems to be on The War of the Worlds and Revenge of the Sith. Given that we've seen little or no footage from either (and there's not been much coming out from us), it all seems a little premature. Of course, you could legitimately ask if the Oscars were important - to which I would answer, in my best Sir Humphrey Appleby voice, "No... but in some sense, yes, Minister." I don't think it's a particularly safe guide to quality; but it is important when it comes to getting more work, and Weta's continued productivity is what's paying for my house.

***

To answer Jenni's question, the Studio Ghibli movies playing at the World Cinema Showcase are Only Yesterday, My Neighbors The Yamadas, Pom Poko and Whisper of the Heart. Weirdly, I can't find a website - they're usually pretty good at that sort of thing. The best I can do is a list of the films at this arts news site.

***

Okay, all of that was written between 7pm and 9pm yesterday; I've since gone home, and watched my first movie on cable. Unfortunately, it was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I know I've read about how a perfectly good screenplay can be ruined, but... goodness. This just wasn't very good. I mean, I have no particular problems with the effects, for example. But how did such a hodgepoge get made? What was most annoying was that they'd occasionally have small gems of dialogue, and then bury it under nonsense and illogic. Bah!

Anyway, off to a meeting. Bah again! :)

Flash, Film, Fone.

Metaphysik is an addictive game. Curse you, Hix, and curse me for following that link when I know that I am so weak-willed...

No tea means no biscuits, which is probably good for me - but not as many breaks, which isn't. I'm trying to drink the same amount of liquid, since that's important if I don't want my arms to fall off from OOS.

***

Listening to Mutha Funkin Earth by House of Downtown... I never know how to describe music nowdays, but SmokeCDs seems to be calling them "funky dance", which is as fair as anything, I guess. SmokeCDs also has some handy samples, so you can see what they sound like.

I haven't bought any music in months - pretty much since before I went overseas, I think. I've got a bunch of recommendations from SmokeCDs sitting in my Inbox, but haven't looked at them yet. One day, when I have some spare time, I'll have to go through them and make a wish-list - though obviously, I'm going to have to be a little restrained.

On a related note - picked up a World Cinema Showcase booklet, which was probably a mistake. Unlike previous years, I was planning on a drastically reduced viewing schedule for the main Film Festival, and yet there are about 19-20 films that I'd really like to see just in the Showcase - and I'm not even a Film Society member any more. :( Four Studio Ghibli films! Three Blues documentaries! Hotel Rwanda! Argh. No, quite apart from the money it would cost to go ($13/film!), there's the money that I'd lose if I went during the day. I'll just have to hunt around work - I know there are some Ghibli fans, I might be able to scare up copies of what's showing. It's not quite the same as going to the movies, but it'll do. Yeah, yeah, boo-hoo, poor me. :)

***

I get a phone tomorrow. I hope. There's currently a storm of dislike and indignation about Telstra/Clear, with plenty of people waxing eloquent on horror stories they've experienced. This did lead to one funny exchange:

thats nothing. this woman had problems with telstra-satan, they
disconnected her phone and came around in the night and killed all her kids.

Oh come on,

do you really expect us to believe that Telstra do night callouts?

It's a pity they're the only alternative to Telecom.

***

I really need to get on top of the "advertising for flatmates" thing. And get an accountant. I really don't know where all my momentum has gone. Maybe I'll get more done tomorrow.

Addendum - no phone.

I went out to check my mail at five, and found that the technician had left a card saying they came at 12:30, and left at 12:45, and there was no-one home. I rang, and they said that the technician said they came to the house at 12:34, and there was no-one there.

Since I was writing the previous entry during that time, I'm pretty annoyed.

I mean, I had the front door open; I changed the batteries of the front door-bell so it didn't sound like drunken electric guitars; I even had the curtains drawn, so I could look out the front to see whether anyone was coming down the driveway. My only guess is that they saw the front gate closed, and no car in the driveway - which there wouldn't be, since I parked in the garage. And I guess you can't tell from the road whether the front door is open - but it'd be obvious once you get even partway toward the house.

So - they've booked me in for Thursday, with a call to my cellphone 30 minutes before they arrive. I was very close to switching to Telecom regardless- if it had been another week, I would've. And now I've got to make up the five hours of work that I've lost in the next three days, or come in on Saturday. Argh.

They better not be charging me for triple service at the moment.

No flatmate, no Oscar

Well, I'm at home at midday, waiting for the Saturn guy to come connect up my phone and tv. I hadn't really thought about it, but I do use my land line a fair bit - enough that I've really noticed not having it in the last week or two. I'll be seizing the opportunity in a little bit to rustle up some lunch - probably pasta, since the weather's turned cold again.

Other home-based news - still no flatmate. I was going to advertise again at Weta yesterday, but that was the day of the Oscar party, so very few people were ever going to get anything productive done. I'll be placing an online ad with Flat-finder and mailing out to our internal lists one last time today - though I quite like living alone, every dollar I get now is several dollars somewhere down the track.

I've made a valiant attempt on the random boxes of junk that were sitting, waiting to be sorted - it's not done, but there was a significant dent made. I got my china cabinet and chest of drawers back, and things are gradually settling into position. (I could probably still do with a pantry, though.) I look forward to the day when everything is set up and ticking along, and I can stop thinking about it, and instead just come home and blob in front of the TV or computer in the evenings. :)

***

The Oscar party wasn't quite as interesting this year - if only because no-one we knew won anything. (One of the people involved with Two Cars, One Night was there, since their partner works for Weta - there would have been a fair amount of cheering for them if they'd won, I suspect.) At least we got name-checked in the Effects award; I hope we at least get nominated next year for Kong, since that makes it all the more likely that I'll still have a job in two years time. ;)

Still, plenty of fun to be had, and got to chat to a whole lot of people I otherwise only see in passing or not at all. Unfortunately, B didn't feel well towards the end, so I still haven't watched the extended RotK; still, that's not going to go away.

Aw - a track from Dark City just came up in my playlist. I really want to get that on DVD sometime.

***

I might cut this entry short, and go pull dandelions out of my front lawn while I wait for the cable guy. See you guys about.