March 28, 2005 19:09

The thing I hate about making a really tasty dinner is that after I finish eating and enjoying said meal is that I am then faced with the annoying task of cleaning up. So frustrating. Steak, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans. All so tasty.

So, yes, to the things I have accomplished today can be added making a tasty dinner and cleaning up after tasty dinner. I also (finally) put up on the wall the Powerpuff Girl cel that Ryan gave me some years ago, and I also sorted my DVDs into alphabetical order. The DVD shelf does now look somewhat tidier; the only thing that didn't fit was my Stanley Kubrick boxed set. Then I tidied up the CDs that were piling up next to the TV, placing them in their correct spots in the CD shelves. In the last couple of weeks, the knob fell off my lamp, so I finally went looking for that and found it. The light switch for the lights over my computer area (also a knob - variable power) had popped off so I went looking for that, too, also with success. I had a bit of a think about putting up my big silver fern flag and my Marconi Grand Prix poster, but I couldn't determine the best place for them. I need some interior decorating advice.

While out shopping today, I picked up the latest issue of Spin. It has Interpol on the cover, and good interview with them inside. It also came with a sampler CD. Woo! Many of the other articles pointed in directions I would like to explore musically when my next round of music shopping occurs, but it also confirmed some of my recent acquisitions and inquiries. In particular: Autolux (CD arrived today and is awesome), the Fiery Furnaces (an interesting pop experiment), and Bloc Party (which I raved about last night...er...this morning). There's also a great (amusing) article on the "66.6 Greatest Goth Moments." .You should get it. Or read it at my place.

I played a good bit of Civ today, which was a lot of fun. I haven't played a good long game in quite a while. I am definitely aiming for the economic or diplomatic victory as my troop strength, while great, is not sufficient to maintain a war of conquest. I think I might go and play for a little bit longer.

March 28, 2005 14:50

Easter Monday. I have today off work courtesy of today being a company holiday. I am making the most of it.

So far today I have made two doctor's appointments (more on that later), done some grocery shopping, dropped off some refill prescriptions, replaced the faulty lightbulbs in the kitchen, had a very tasty salad for lunch, read a good chunk more of The Peloponnesian War and made good progress in my civ game. I need to do some tidying around the place and bring my financial records up to date. That will get done this afternoon.

As to the two doctor's appointments, well, it has been fifteen months since my last physical so I'm more than due for a check up to ensure all the bits are functioning correctly. I feel healthy enough, but it's always a good idea to get a professional's opinion. The other doctor's appointment is to document my immunization status as required by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Yep, another step closer to my permanent residency.

March 28, 2005 02:12

First things first. This is a public service message to my friends who appreciate great things in music. In particular, Bianca and Martin. You mut pick up the Bloc Party album. It is just so fucking great. Buy it.

In other news, I'm somewhat drunk, But goddamn, this has been a fucking great weekend. And I have tomorrow off work (as long as the client doesn't call me).

I'm currently listening to Bloc Party and throwing my arms around the place. Buy their CD. It fucking rocks!!!!!!!

March 25, 2005 17:10

What a fucking beautiful day it is. It's a little after 5pm and it's still 79F (26C). The sun is bright and the sky is clear. Absolutely georgous.

In other news, Brandy took me out for dinner on Saturday and then joined me for trivia with Lauren, Matt and Chris on Wednesday. We came second. Which was good for the additional reason that we beat Ben, who has been waxing lyrical in his own blog about our recent successes. So it goes.

Today is Good Friday. An ancient celebration of the coming of Spring, annexed by the Christian faith for the purposes of bringing pagans into their new religion a little under two millenia or go. Back where I was born, today is a holiday. Alas, I had to work today. But it was good. My project is nearing completion, which is really cool. Most of next week will be spent writing up documentation and preparing for the transition to support. Lots of fun. And I do have Monday off work.

Tomorrow, Jenny A is celebrating her birthday with dinner at the Thai restaurant down the road, next to the Highlander. I'm up for that. Tonight I think I'll go spend some time at the Local, hopefully sitting outside, enjoying the early evening. I have changed into shorts, t-shit, and flip-flops, and am sporting a newly bald scalp. It's great!

I'm currently listening to Louis XIV, Illegal Tender. It's pretty groovy. I've found a lot of good music lately: Bloc Party, Client, My Suicide, Libertines, Arcade Fire, Zita Swoon. I'm quite pleased.

Okay, time to go enjoy my long weekend. Have a good one!

March 15, 2005 15:50

The weekend in review. As I discussed on Saturday, the weekend was going pretty well. In the evening, Brandy and I had a very pleasant dinner at Baroanda and then went to see Swan Lake. This was really good; both of us enjoyed it immensely. After the ballet we headed to Neigbors for a drink, but parking was atrocious, so we headed to Little 5 Points and the new bar that opened to replace 9 Livez. The layout of the place was much the same as it was previously, just the decor modified. And there was nowhere left to sit, so we headed over to the Brewhouse. After a beer there it was getting a bit chilly, so we went back to Brandy's for one more drink and conversation.

After leaving Brandy's I headed to the Local for a couple of drinks and then got a lift down to the Highlander, where Scott was celebrating his birthday. I believe Karen was also in birthday celebration mode; god knows she was really rather trashed when I got there. But I had a good (if brief) catch up with lotsa people (Scott, Phaedra, Christian, Genevieve, Brad, Jennifer M, Rosalie, Karen, Kary) and then when we were kicked out, Lauren, Matt and I headed back to the Local. It, of course was closing, but I wanted to check with Patrick to see if there was a game on. It looked possible, so Lauren, Matt and I went back to my place for another drink, and to watch Futurama DVDs. I think they left somewhere between 4am and 5am and the poker didn't eventuate. Probably a good thing.

Sunday was an absolutely splendid day, again in the mid-70s Fahrenheit (mid 20s Celsius). I went up to Target to buy a bookshelf and some lampshades and rather than build the bookshelf, I decided to wander down to the Highlander for lunch. It was a very pleasant stroll, and once there I read the latest Economist. After eating lunch and having a couple of beers, I wandered home. I did some reading, and decided that I really didn't feel like tackling the bookshelf.

Around 5:30pm I got a phone call from Jeremy, who was at the Local looking for someone to chat to while enjoying the early evening. So I went up and joined him on the patio for a few drinks. Which turned into a few more. I guess I headed home around 10pm, but pleased that I had managed to catch The Simpsons and Arrested Development, even if I was limited to subtitles ratther than sound. Jeremy also beat me at a game of darts. I haven't played in quite a while.

Monday was a work day at the customer site and that went well. When I got home I got stuck in to putting the bookshelf together. When I had completed that I headed up to the Local for dinner and a couple of Hoegaardens. It seems that darts is have a bit of a Rennaisance, as most of the usual bar flies were in the back room playing with the pointy things. When I finished eating, I headed back there to hang out. I also had a cool conversation with Krista. I headed home around 8:45 so I could catch the new episode of 24.

I must admit that this week's episode of 24 did not annoy me like last week's did, During the commercial breaks, I moved some of the bookcases in my bedroom and then moved the new one in. I started to move books around, and I also did some other home repair type stuff, like tightening the hand towel holder in the bathroom and replacing the lamp shades in my bedroom (with the shades I purchased yesterday). I also had a bit of a conversation online with Becky and watched CSI: Miami. Definitely a multitasking sort of evening. After The Daily Show, I hit the sack.

March 12, 2005 15:39

Saturday. And what a glorious spring Saturday it is, too. The sky is blue, the air is warm (74°F/23°C), and it's just basically a good day.

I stayed in bed late today, reading last week's Economist. When I did get up, I showered, started my laundry and then went to Home Depot to pick up a small ladder so .I could change out my faulty lightbulbs (my ceiling is 9 foot, so it's a bit hard to reach the lights). When I got home I realised that I only had one bulb, so only one light got fixed. I shall have to pick up some new bulbs before I can replace the one in my closet.

Home repairs partially completed, I decided to grab my most recent issue of Harpers and head to Apres Diem for lunch. I was fortunate enough to get an outside table, so I was able to enjoy the sun as I ate and read. After lunch I returned home to do some chores (finish laundry, empty the dishwasher, clean the kitchen) and finalise my plans for the evening: Swan Lake as performed by the Atlanta Ballet at The Fox Theatre, preceded by drinks and dinner at Baraonda.

Earlier in the week I saw Hellboy, which was interesting but didn't totally grab me. I hadn't read the comic, but apparently it was pretty faithful. I also saw American Psycho which also was interesting, but which was obviously not as graphic (although it was suggestive) as the novel.

March 09, 2005 09:43

Hehehe. Well it appears I may have been a little, um, tired, when I wrote that last entry. I apologise most profusely for the grammatical errors therein. Now that I've read it in the cold light of sobriety, I'll probably edit it somewhat, but only for content, not for grammatical correctness. Well, there might be some grammatical content I'll fix.

I'm on site right now, but there's not a lot for me to do. Hopefully that will change soon.

March 09, 2005 01:19

So instead of the post I was going to write, Joel gets his wish and I will write some more about Friday night.

Well, I left my project in good time to contact Tim and get a ride with him to the Pony. When we got there, most of the girls we were meeting there were already there. Little did we (I) know how fun these friends of Kris were.

Very soon after finding a seat, a rather large-breasted young lady came offering us shots. She assured us that her breasts were all natural, but at the time, we were all far too sober for shots; it was time to slowly wean ourselves into the evening.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, we drank lots of beer and encountered a remarkable young lady who not only took her clothes off, she also claimed to do close to 600 crunches per day prior to the removal of clothing. I must say that her abdomen looked like she did that. Chris and Joel were were very much into that concept. Me, as we all know, am not so big on the washboard abs with chicks. But these two were recurrent "conversationalists."

I did do lot of shots. First of all with the second young lady who was to come back offering shots. She came back a couple of times, and the shots were good. Craig's young lady friend did not understand the concept of the body shot. I did. And enjoyed it. To the fullest advantage.

A little later on, some strange fellow decided that our rather large group was deserving of shots, so he paid a ridiculous sum of money to buy our entire table of 13 or 14 or more a body shot each. A few did not partake (wusses), but the rest did. It was fun convincing some of the undecided women whether taking a shot from the breasts of another girl was appropariate was actually okay. And most (not all, granted) went for it and had a great time.

Tim receieved a rather lovely lap dance from a beautiful young lady, courtesy of his wonderful lady. There were one or two attractive young women of loose clothing around. I must say though that I found most of them not really that attractive, but then again, it is known that my tastes in women don't tend for the anorexic.

Anyways, the original shot girl that came around found me again, and proceeded to ply me with shots. And when the shots were done, apparently bruising my eyeballs with her breasts seemed like a good idea to her. I must admit, I wasn't complaining at the time.

When I finally gathred what was left of my wits, I found Joel and Chris still chatting with Miss Washboard 2005. Sure, great abs and great body in general, but really not my thing.

I was more than happy that Brandy was able to drive us back to the Local.

March 08, 2005 16:54

Time for a quick rant. I was watching 24 last night and I was confronted with two of the most annoying things I see commonly in television and movies.

In one scene, the main protagonist and his buddy had just discovered some encrypted files. They can't get them onto any electronic medium so they fire the documents to the printer. This is just so wrong on so many levels. An ASCII dump of the file will have a significant number of unprintable characters. A unicode dump has similar problems as unicdoe is essentially an ASCII superset and will also include unprintable characters. This means that they can't have pulled of the data, which means that even if they did find the encryption key, the data would be useless because after the first bad byte, the rest of the information in the file becomes irrecoverable. Of course they could have done a hex dump, but they didn't; it was random character data dumped to the page. Assume 90 characters per line and 65 lines per page (very generous margins there) and you get 5850 characters per page. Since we're dealing with hex, which requires two characters per byte, thats 2925 bytes per page - less than 3K per page. Considering that a word document requires 17K before you even type a single character, you're going to need several pages to contain anything of real use. Of course, it could be a simple text document. I hope that's what it is. And we haven't even gotten to the issue of finding the decryption key. Anything worth encrypting is worth encrypting well, especially considering the nature of what these documents could contain. Yes, I realise it's TV drama, and license is often taken in such things, but this is something I see over and over again. And it pisses me off.

The other thing is that right near the end of the episode, a high energy electromagnetic pulse (EMP) was released. Quite correctly they stated that this would fry all the electronics around and would take out nearby power systems. Fine. Except that when such a power outage occurs, the lights in a building don't go out a floor at a time, half a second delay between floors. Visible delays will be with range from the pulse centre, not height from the ground of the building when the building is right next to blast centre. Again, yes, I understand dramatic license, but come on people, give me a break.

Oh yeah, and there was one other thing. As the pulse generator's capacitors were charging, the CTU people were unable to make any RF contact with their people in or near to the generator's location. In the interests of some fair game, I'll accept that. But when someone in the building is successfully using walkie-talkies to talk to someone else, I have an issue. The level of EMI is greatest in the building, they would probably need to be carrying around a car battery to generate sufficient power to get a clear signal even at that relatively short range, simply due to the high electrical noise drowning the signal. Well, I may be wrong on that one, but it's annoying nonetheless.

March 07, 2005 14:50

A quick break from "Documentation Monday." I called my mum a couple of hours ago to wish her happy birthday. Her birthday is actually tomorrow, but it is already tomorrow in New Zealand. I'm such a good son.

If you have an interest in rugby, or an interest in making me happy by giving me rugby to watch, I'd really appreciate it if you could visit The Rugby Channel and fill out their survey indicating that you would be interested in a rugby channel. This is important to me since Fox Sports World changed to Fox Soccer Channel and now there is no rugby anywhere on cable TV. At least, none that I can find. Thanks.