Zorac's LiveJournal

I'm pleased to say that I've contributed to the nailing of an SMS spammer - I had a letter through from ICSTIS this morning regarding a complaint I sent in a few months ago. They've been fined £15,000, banned from running premium-rate 'phone services for a year and forced to refund anyone who actually called the number.

The scam itself was one of those 'someone you know fancies you' things - but apparently all it did was keep asking you to guess, and always answering no. Also, the SMS spams failed to include pricing information (obligatory for premium-rate services), which was my grounds for complaint.

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post in which I mentioned the movies we went to see, but failed to give any sort of reviews. Shame on me.

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This weekend I had my first experience of Thanksgiving, thanks to the wonderful hermorrine. I flew out on Wednesday afternoon and caught the red-eye back on Sunday night, so it was a nice long stay. Thanksgiving itself involved a not inconsiderable amount of cooking - with me acting as sous-chef (making myself useful and trying not to get in the way too much) and turkey-chef (well, there's a first time for everything). Starvation was fended off with cheese (having completely forgot about it last time), as dinner was heading for around 6pm. We had roast turkey with stuffing, green bean casserole and sweet potatoes. The pumpkin pie we put off (for reasons of time and space) until after we got back from the cinema (Love Actually). Yum!

Friday had a much later start (not having turkey to contend with, and also having no great desire to catch the 6am start of the sales), so when we headed out, lunch was the first stop (at Steak 'n Shake, where we had ...er... Steakburgers 'n Shakes). After this, we went shopping for pants (that is, trousers) - hermorrine had heard about my difficulty finding trousers that fit and had selflessly volunteered to help out, in particular with getting me into a pair of jeans (something I haven't worn for many a long year). After that, it was the cinema again (The Haunted Mansion) and then to the store (to stock up on Dew and Reese's, plus getting more immediate necessities).

Saturday featured a Super Sekrit. After that, we had time to kill, and ended up in Starbucks (my first time, despite their omnipresence) before our final cinema trip of the weekend (Brother Bear). After that, we had some rather fine Italian food at Luigi's House (and yes, the Portillo name continues to amuse me). Sunday was a quiet day at home , watching some DVDs (X2, Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas and the final part of The 10th Kingdom). Alas, all to soon, it was time to head off to O'Hare to catch the last 'plane home.

This Saturday was different from usual - no trip into Oxford for retail therapy and a movie. I had vague plans to head into London for the Apple Expo, but when I looked out the at around nine to be greeted by pouring rain, I went for plan B - which mostly involved going back to bed. Much of the weekend was taken up with watching much of the extra material from The Two Towers extended DVD set. Alas, I failed miserably to remember all the amusing quotes I had earmarked for LJ post titles, so I've had to settle for a bit of paraphrasing (yes, PJ suggested that Rohan should get a branch of Gap). Somewhere along the line I managed to get some RS coding and other useful stuff done, but it was mostly a weekend of doing not very much.

Yesterday, of course, it was back to work - but at least it's only for half a week and, besides, things have been reasonably quiet of late. Last night's movie was Highlander, something I picked up on bargain DVD a couple of weeks back on the grounds that I haven't seen it and have heard much about it. Big mistake. That movie made Revolutions look good. Yes, there were a few interesting ideas, but that was about the only redeeming feature (OK, there was the Queen music, but even that was overloaded). Crowning moment: a scene with two characters - one Scottish, and one Spanish. The Spaniard is played by Sean Connery, and hence has a Scottish accent, while the Scot is played by Christopher Lambert and has an I-don't-know-what-the-devil-it-is-but-it-sure-as-hell-ain't-Scottish accent. Nuff said.

Today, I wasn't taking any chances, so I went straight for the Disney: Hercules. The more I watch it, the more I like it - Disney most definitely not taking itself seriously - and even sending itself up (...and you are wearing his merchandise!). The input of Gerald Scarfe is a stroke of genius - he gives the artwork a very unique look and a strong visual identity (alas, the CGI work is pretty sucky - which doesn't bode well for Disney dropping 2D animation). Hades is possibly my favourite Disney villain (if only someone had shown him the Evil Overlord's handbook...) and Megara is great too.

As for tomorrow's movie, I'm at the mercy of the airline as I fly to Chicago. Wheeeeeee!

Yay! The Two Towers arrived today - there goes a large chunk of my evening. Also, new flat-panel display that I got on special offer to replace my aging monitor which has been showing all sorts of peculiarities over the last month and has developed some really bad ghosting.

On, then, to politics: an excellent post/discussion on malachan's journal coming out of the gay marriage debate. And then, a couple of issues arising from this BBC news article. Firstly, the government's desperation in dragging a minister home from Australia to take part in a vote (and then flying out a replacement) - I do hope they're not using public money to help them win the vote. Secondly, a comment from an MP who was previously opposing the government on the issue - one of the reasons he changed his mind was because "I refuse to help Michael Howard get off to a winning start just 18 months before a general election". I'm glad to see that principles go out of the window when one's job is on the line...

No TTT EE today :((

Am consoling myself with the fact that I got it really, really cheap.
Or, will have got it really, really cheap if/when it actually arrives...

As promised, I did indeed spend all of Sunday in the T00blerone. I even managed to be productive, getting a large slab of work done on my back-end code for RS.org - the author listings pages are now generated automatically (well, kinda. I haven't finished the management code yet, so it still requires a manual import-export, but the pages don't have to be hand-crafted any more). In preparation for the imminent arrival of The Two Towers extended DVD, I also re-watched Fellowship. I won't bore you all with further squeeage beyond saying "Oh, my, that surround sound system was a good investment."

Alas, TTT did not arrive today (but tomorrow is the official release date, so fair enough). I did get a package from Amazon, though, containing The Complete Far Side. This weighty tome (and I'm talking 1¼ stone/8 kilo weighty - so I probably won't be taking it to read on the 'plane next week) contains all 4,337 cartoons from its 14 year run in fantastic quality, 3 or 4 to a (very large) page. I've only looked at the first month's strips, but already the quality shines through - never less than a chuckle, and at least once a page I've been reduced to laughter liable to disturb the neighbours (for more than one definition of 'disturb') - a higher hit rate than Dilbert or User Friendly. At under tuppence a cartoon, the very hefty price tag actually looks pretty reasonable...

GIP idea shamelessly stolen from owlman, but it's one I should have done ages ago. I've had a great love for M.C. Escher's work ever since a perceptive art teach suggested I might like it way back in secondary school. This will probably come as no surprise whatsoever to people who know both me and Escher's pictures - impossible figures, nifty tesselations, etc. Relativity is probably my favourite work (I don't have the T-shirt, but I do have the jigsaw puzzle - and a right tricksy bastard it is too), and certainly one of his most famous - some of you (waves at marysiak) may recognise it from Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Also available in LEGO.

I just cleared out my spam box. Almost 50,000 messages in just under three weeks. That means that they're coming in at a rate of getting on for two per minute. This is the reason why an opt-out solution to spam is laughable - even if it were leagally enforced (possible) and actually adhered to by the spammers (highly unlikely), I could easily spend all day just opting out of spam...

Some days it really isn't worth getting out of bed. Or maybe it's the not getting out of bed until after midday part that's the problem. Either way, by the time I'd got myself organised to head into town it was fairly clear that I wasn't going to manage to grab lunch and get to my originally planned showing of Seabiscuit, so I switched to Plan B (watch Finding Nemo again). This left me time to potter around the shops (ooh! shiny discs!) and scope out cocktail kit. I headed down to the cinema to pick up a ticket before getting lunch, only to find that the 3pm showing of Nemo was already sold out and there was a huge queue for the box office (so little chance of getting a ticket and lunch in time for the 3:30 showing), so I switched to plan A' (the later showing of Seabiscuit) and went for pizza. After lunch, the queue was gone, so I went to get my ticket, only to find that contrary to their listings (including the ones on the wall of the cinema), there was in fact no late afternoons showing, only an evening one.

At this point, I decided to cut my losses, finish the shopping and head for home. In the last charity shop I went into, I spotted a book I wanted, except oops: no cash. The first cashpoint I go to, one machine is dead, and the other happily dies whilst dealing with the woman in front of me - apparently debiting her account but not giving her any cash. So I go to another bank, get some money out and head back to the charity shop - only to find that in the mean time somebody has bought the book I wanted. Argh! Clearly I need to do more work on the whole "cutting losses and heading home" thing. Bath ballistics from Lush, comfort food from Sainsbury's and I really do head home. After repeated squeeing at the Prizoner of Azkaban trailer (GIP!) and some "shooting virtual bad guys with a light gun" therapy, I am feeling much better (thankyou, Time Crisis 3). Even so, tomorrow may be the day to try out that whole not-getting-out-of-bed thing. I have wireless internet, so...

Gacked from huskyteer: Mac Eye for the Windows Guy (and there's more hilarity in the archives)

...except that in parts of The Matrix Revolutions, that end just couldn't come soon enough.
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