Zorac's LiveJournal

Woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe
Woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe
Woe woe woe woe woe
Woe woe woe woe woe
Woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe woe

So, I had that strange feeling that something wasn't quite right on the way to work this morning. Come lunchtime, I figured out what it was - the missing weight of my bag on my shoulder. No bag = no wallet, no wallet = no way to buy lunch. Thankfully, I have a well-stocked snack drawer in my desk. Even less fortunately, my web browser had a tasty meal of freshly prepared LiveJournal posting. Meaning I'm retyping the whole blasted thing now.
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Arg. My browser just crashed on me as I was about to finish a long article I spent most of my lunch hour composing. Wah.

I was going to post this yesterday, when the timing would have been a little more auspicious, but hey ho. The target of today's rant is the earliness of Christmas - yes, christmas stuff has already started appearing in the shops - three months ahead of time. Doubtless, in another month or so the decorations will be going up, the holiday music will be playing and the shelves will be packed with naff gifts. Oh, joy.

It's just wrong

I may be a confirmed atheist, but that doesn't stop me from finding the over-commercialisation of Christmas tacky in the extreme. The fact that we're bombarded with it for around a quarter of the year robs the day itself of being anything much special. If I had my may, they wouldn't be allowed to go all Christmas until December - and having the decorations up beyond twelfth night would be not only unlucky, but downright illegal.

See my new icon? That's today’s Dilbert strip - whatever day you're reading this (except Sundays at the moment). Nifty, huh? I have a bunch of perl which grabs the latest strip from the Dilbert website, cuts it up, resizes the parts to make an animated GIF then uploads it to LJ in place of the existing one.
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Update: W00t! It works! Todays strip is there completely sans human intervention.

The rebuild of Visar into its dinky new case is finished for now. I finally gave up on trying to get the PCI ADSL card working last night and fell back to the USB modem I was using before - and which I had working in ten minutes flat. Meh. At least I have my routing an firewall all working again. Currently it's running Red Hat 9, although I'm leaning towards putting Debian on there, but probably not until Sarge goes stable. I guess this means that I can go back to software rather than hardware hacking this evening...

Went to a t00bage this weekend chez wednesdayschild in aid of her birthday and that kazzik (who was there, despite what some retard might claim). Having smugly found myself maps, I made the fatal error of walking from the station to the mansion in the unexpected heat (Hello? Where did that come from? And, more importantly, where did it go?), so it was straight to the shower for me. Having made myself a bit more presentable, I met up with eleveninches, petulans and starcrossedgirl and a pair of cute fluffy white dogs. Eventually, we were joined by pinguthegreek, marysiak and titanic_days and took advantage of the weather to sit out by the pool.

Supper was an amazing spread laid on by wednesdayschild's mum with numerous salads, cold meats, etc, etc. Yum! As per tradition, the t00bery continued well into the night, although with a fairly restrained amount of alcohol consumption (managed not to kill anyone with the champagne corks - go me!), with some folk heading home for the night and the rest of us bedding down upstairs. Needless to say, none of us were up particularly early on Sunday morning. There was another fantastic repast for lunch, then some of us had to head homewards. A fun weekend, and a special mention to wednesdayschild's parents for fantastic hospitality above and beyond the call of duty.

Oh, and we all got the news about GT. Really, we should be sad to see the passing of any archive - and yet, somehow, I just can't seem to care.

Dear Weather,

It's Make-Your-Mind-Up time

Love, Mark

Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday dear zorac,
Happy Birthday to Me!

Yes, folks, zorac is exactly one year old right about now, having racked up 268 entries, 968 comments posted and 1,351 comments received. Mark, on the other hand, is exactly 27¾ sometime today, so it's another three months until the proper birthday.

Last night I t00bed into Oxford to meet up with jiggery_pokery who was passing through. It gave us chance to catch up and gossip about other t00bs. Also, an excuse to go to G&D's for ice-cream. (Note to self: excuses not actually needed)

Today, most of the bits for New!Visar arrived, so I attempted the transplant operation. Unfortunately, all did not go well - it showed no inclination to boot off the old disk, and getting into rescue mode merely showed up some more funnies. Final score: Video BIOS: Lots, zorac: 0. Bleh, will do some research and try again on Monday.

Tomorrow, in a massive feat of coincidence, both hermorrine and I are off to places called Springfield. She to the one in Illinois to visit the new twins, and I to one somewhat closer to home for a t00bage. Neither of them is populated by bright yellow cartoon characters (OK, I don't know that for sure, but I reckon it's a fairly safe bet).