Zorac's LiveJournal

RIP visar :-( My trusty Linux server appears to have died an untimely death, taking my lovely ADSL networking with it. Oh, and about 25% of the final ever episode of Buffy that was downloading onto it. Argh!

The damage appears to be terminal: on pressing the power button, it's beep-beep-beep-beep-poweroff. The useful manual of course doesn't tell me what this means, but I'm sure it can't be good. I do have the connection up and running on zorac, the Windows XP box, but this means nothing else on the network (e.g. the iBook) can connect to the 'net. Woe! Having managed to grab Bittorrent for windows, I then find that the site with the .torrent file for Buffy 7x22 has dropped off the net since earlier this afternoon, and eMule hasn't brought me a single byte yet.

The only thing currently stopping me from asking if this day can get any worse is the certain knowledge that if I do, it will...

Update: Have managed to find an alternate source, and Buffy is now downloading again, but the delay and lost data mean it's very unlikely to be done in time for me to view it tonight.

Hmm. It has come to my attention that I've been somewhat neglecting my LJ of late. Part of my excuse would be spending the weekend in Chicago with the wonderful hermorrine (write up and piccies to follow... eventually). Yesterday was a second viewing of X2 and purchasing of ticket for Matrix Reloaded next Wednesday (hooray for preview showings). Today I got distracted by web geekery and did some cosmetic work on my website and an overhaul of my LJ styles - mostly done, just need to conjure up a bit of imagery. Anyway, I'm off to bed...

Since I last cleared out my spambox on the 25th April, it has accumulated 6,124 pieces of spam. That's around 23 per hour - not counting the ones that SpamAssassin didn't catch and ended up in my INBOX.

All Spammers are Evil and must be destroyed!

There has recently been much debate (heated and otherwise) in the fandom on the subject of "is disliking slash homophobic". Here are some of my thoughts, more on the debate than on its topic. These are my personal opinions - people with a different perspective may well see things differently.

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OK, so as vaguely promised, a quick, first-impressions, no-spoilers review of X2: It rocks!

X2 is very much a worthy sequel to the first film, and has the advantage of many of the characters already being familiar to the audience. There are, of course, some interesting new mutants - and I'd say that the powers are put to more imaginative uses this time (although a minor gripe would be the level of power some of them have). The opening sequence had to follow the Matrix Revolutions trailer (on big screen. *drools*) and does so admirably - a neat idea well-executed. Beyond that, it's a cracking example of the Big Action Movie formula - enough of a plot to keep you interested, but not so much that it gets in the way of the Big Action and Spectacular Effects, oh and it doesn't take itself seriously and there are a good few laughs to be had. Oh, and there's one moment towards the end of the film.... I was smugly thinking I knew what was going to happen. I was wrong. I like it when this happens. If I had to struggle for a gripe, it would be that the music's a bit limp - no rousing theme like the first film had.

To conclude, Go! See! Now!

Last night's compsoc talk by Apple was pretty interesting, a fair amount of stuff I already knew, but some details on the internals of OS X (for example, how Rendezvous works). Plus there was a look at the developer tools which I've only played with a little - it certainly clarified a few things that I hadn't quite "got" from going through one of the tutorials.

I managed to get the new camera working without too much difficulty - just a case of tracking down some XP drivers. Unfortunately, I managed to lose the LJ article I was working on when it got to the inevitable reboot. *sigh* I'll have to try that again at the weekend. Anyway, exciting sample photo: ( Collapse )

Things to do this evening:
1. Vote - although I stupidly left my polling card at home this morning. Gah. Will be voting LibDem, not least because he was the only candidate who put any effort into campaigning - if the others can't be bothered to put any work into getting/keeping the job, how likely are they to put any effort into doing it?
2. Go to the cinema to see X2.
3. Watch the latest episode of Angel (assuming eMule has finished downloading it).
4. Write killer app on iBook.

I was actually mildly productive this weekend - while Saturday morning/afternoon went on a fairly fruitless trip into town (although I did get a ticket for X2 on Thursday evening) and much Xboxing on Halo, in the evening and for much of Sunday, I got work done for ( Collapse ) I've also been messing around with the back end on my own site, in terms of ( Collapse ) And somewhere along the line I manage to find the time to watch a couple of ( Collapse )

Yay! Finally have swanky new work computer fully functional. It is fast and wonderful (hey, web pages can scroll smoothly? Yes, there were some minor difficulties getting the dual monitors working nicely ( Collapse ).

Watched The Matrix again this evening. Wah! Need sequels now! Not 4 weeks tomorrow!

Oh, and finally a spammish ( Collapse )

Right, off to play Halo.

Spent a very pleasurable weekend in Chicago with hermorrine who, owing to a somewhat shorter trip home than me, was able to post her summary hours ago. Since you can all go off and read that first, I'll restrict my self to the full gastronomic summary and other randomness.
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I should like to point out that the pictures below have not been in any way digitally enhanced. There is no forced perspective or other camera trickery involved. I feel no need to enhance my assets, what you see is exactly what you get.

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The only problem I can see with it being that large is this: How is anyone supposed to get their mouth around it?