Zorac's LiveJournal

I'm off to Chicago for a long weekend with hermorrine, so I'll be offline for the next 5 days or so. Due to the restriction brought on by not actually paying for my flights, I'll be taking a less optimal route than usual. This involves me getting up in about six hours time to do a whistlestop tour of no less than four airports (LHR--JFK--LGA--ORD), but hey - I get to see New York, if only in passing (waves to the NYC t00bs). I should be crawling back online sometime on Wednesday.

So, I spent last week chez mes parents in the south of France.

Short version: Heat. Books. Pool. Wine. Food.

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Well, I'm back. I was going to post about my holiday tonight, but alas sleep is getting the better of me (that and skip=400), so I shall postpone that until tomorrow...

I'm going to be AFK for the next 10 days or so - I'm off to the south of France to visit my Parents. I plan on spending the week alternating between the pool and the hammock and avoiding the outside world (well, except for hermorrine :* ). Now I have to catch some sleep before heading off to Gatwick for a 6am flight...

Thought for the day: You're not entitled to your opinion, but you are entitled to your informed opinion - Harlan Ellison

Hi. I've received a large volume of complaints from yourself this morning mis-addressed to postmaster@[domain].com. Whilst an address at [domain].net is listed as registrant for the spamvertised domain, the .com and .net domains are unrelated.

A word of advice: it's unlikely that the spammers themselves will remove you from their lists or take any kind of action no matter what volume of complaints they receive. On the other hand, if your complaints do reach people who are willing and able to deal with spam problems, filling their mailboxes with megabytes of spammed or misdirected complaints is perhaps not the best way to get their assistance. A single, polite message would be much more effective.

And believe me, those of us who work in the technical departments of reputable internet companies want to get rid of the spam problem even more than our end users do - dealing with it costs us a vast amount of time, money and aggravation. For example, my spam filters only block out around 95% of the ten thousand or so junk messages I receive daily, and I had to drop everything else for the latter half of this week to deal with a series of spam attacks against our email servers.

Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life on the Internet at present, and the only thing that will stop it is a concerted world-wide technological and legal effort. If you really want to help in the fight, the best thing you can do is lobby your political representatives for tough restrictions on junk email, and harsher penalties for offenders.

Inventing cocktails can be fun, and it's hard to go wrong with lots of rum and citrus juice...

Three Colours Orange

1oz Navy Rum
1oz Morgan's Spiced
1oz Malibu
½oz Lemon Juice
½oz Lime Juice

Shake and pour into a long glass, top up with Orange Juice.

The second part of Saturday's exploits was going to see Bryan Ferry. There was some amount of concern as regards the weather, and also his recent troubles with laryngitis which lead to some earlier tour dates being cancelled. Certainly the rain was out in force mid-to-late afternoon, but it cleared up by the time I was heading out again. Having mis-judged public transport I arrived rather earlier than intended, so I had rather a long wait in line (naturally, the gates were opened about half an hour late), but this did mean that I was able to grab a spot about thirty feet from the stage and dead centre. I had about an hour or so to read my book and eat my picnic before the show started.

Before the man himself, we had a couple of warm-up acts. The first of these was Duel (a couple of prettyboys with violins), and the second was The Hot Club of Cowtown (the name says it all, really). They played for around 20-25 minutes each and were both really quite good. After half an hour to reset the stage, it was finally time for the main event. Alas, Bryan wasn't fully recovered, so we only got one set instead of two, but it was still very good - a good selection of old favourites, a few other familiar tunes and a couple of new ones. Suffice it to say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Oh, and there were some nifty fireworks to round the evening off.

As to what I was doing there - I'd say that the majority of the audience was at least 5-10 years older than me, and most of the younger ones were accompanying parents - it's all about nostalgia. Whilst I'm not really old enough to have been around when Roxy Music were hitting the charts, Mum had a greatest hits compilation which was a regular fixture on our camping holidays around France for a decade or more. Thus it was that "Our Bryan" became the soundtrack to our summers...

So, part one of yesterday's exploits was a trip to the cinema to see Farenheit 9/11. There wasn't quite the record audience the film has been getting in the States, but still a respectable number of viewers - and a standing ovation at the end (OK, the standing part was probably just people getting up to leave, but the applause alone is something I haven't seen after a movie for a long time). I was already anti-Bush and anti-war, so there really wasn't much persuasion needed there, but even ignoring the inevitable bias, the Facts as presented are more than a little damning. Go. See. Now.

Icon from today's User Friendly.

1. I've just reached a fair approximation of feature completeness for the all-new code for RS, Now comes the fun part - testing and debugging - and the really fun part - importing and verifying all the old data. Still, at least it's concrete progress and gives me hope that I'll be finished in the not-too-distant future.
2. Along the way I ended up re-reading my (largely unfinished) Big Giant Fic O'Doom and rather enjoying it. I really must get around to writing the other 80% at some point...
3. I was going to go and see Much Ado About Nothing yesterday, but as it's an outdoor performance, I decided to put off seeing my favourite Shakespeare play until the weather conditions were a little more favourable.
4. Instead, I went to see Shrek 2 again, in its slightly tweaked British incarnation (Jonathon Ross' voce in place of Larry King's, and someone other than Joan Rivers playing Joan Rivers). Still very, very funny.
5. In 13 days time, I'll be listening to my 'Current Music' in person. W00t!
6. Managed to drop one of my shopping bags coming up the stairs in my flat. There was an unpleasant breaking glass sound, and an iceberg lettuce made an impressive break for freedom. Thankfully, the broken bottle was a small one of juice, and not a litre of Bombay Sapphire.
7. In related news, my stairwell now has a fresh lime scent.
8. I've recently been re-reading James P Hogan's Giants novels (from whence my LJ name came). Am much with the loff for zorac (and also visar, but mostly zorac).
9. I'm also in the process of re-watching Babylon 5. Only the first season at the moment, but even so I remember why I love this show so much...
10. There is no item 10.

Random rant of the day: Supermarket checkouts

1. Why is it that whichever queue I choose, it's always the wrong one. I get the person with a duff credit card, or whose items won't scan, or who stops for a nice chat with the cashier, or who didn't buy enough to use a whole Retward voucher and disappears back into the store for a couple of minutes to find something else (I kid you not).
2. I'm entirely capable of packing my own bags. No, really. When did this go from "I'm just here to scan items." to "Can I help you pack, sir?" to "I'm going to pack whether you like it or not!"? I wouldn't mind so much if they weren't so completely hopeless at it - large multipacks of fruit juce which have their own carrying handles go into bags regardless, often accompanied by a couple of heavy bottles - while the few remaining (light) items half-fill a second bag.
3. The "Ten Items or Less" checkout:

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Here endeth the rant.