Zorac's LiveJournal

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.

Have beaten RS server into submission and made it run my new code.

Muahahahaha!

So, on Friday night I decided to reinstall Windows on zorac, on the grounds of it having developed a tendency to lock up of late. ( Collapse ) Having done all that, you can imagine my delight to discover that XP is still subject to random lock-ups. *stabs*

Last night, the gale-force winds managed to give me a nice little power-outage. Initially, all seemed well, until later in the evening visar (and thus my Internet connection) died. A post-mortem this morning revealed a dead power-supply as the culprit, and given that it was the one thing not on a surge protector... This afternoon I popped into PC World to pick up a new case and another surge protector ( Collapse ) I had something that worked, in a Frankenstein's monster kind of way.

All that really got in the way of me getting anything much else done (other than shopping trips), so my evil plans to take over the_restricted appear to have been thwarted yet again. Wah.

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.

The weekend so far: Friday and Saturday evenings were taken up by mini!t00b (which I at one time dubbed the anti!t00b on the grounds of having to refer to malachan by his real name instead of calling him Cygnus) with kay_taylor and Cyg's non-fandom, non-LJ friend Peter. On Friday night we started at Hollywood Cocktails - very understated, very pleasant, and very nice drinks - followed by Thai food at Chiang Mai Kitchen, then back to Hollywood for more cocktails (the Cinnamon Daiquiri is highly recommended). Topics of conversation included a brief history of the fandom, including the complete Fall and Fall of Gryffindor Tower and all the associated wank, and a completely unrelated discussion of Crime and Punishment. Much Kudos to Peter for being unfazed by the fandom wankery. Saturday, we met up again, with the addition of olympia_m, to watch Kill Bill (and not for the first time, for some of us), before having dinner at Meltz. There was (naturally) more discussion of fandom wackiness, plus plenty of discussion of movies (including theories for the upcoming Revolutions).

Some time this morning, the clocks went back. The Evil Time clock lived up to its name by being the only one I had to change manually (alarm clock is radio controlled, video picks it up from teletext, computers adjust themselves automatically). Unfortunately, the theoretical extra hour in bed didn't seem to have any actual benefit as I've still managed to feel strangely tired all day. This seems to have contributed to my coder's block - I'm trying to finish off so perl work I've been doing for RS but have been making painfully slow progress. Meh. Time to go and cook steak, methinks.

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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Thursday: Memories of two years earlier.

Friday: Went to work. Came home. Started to learn PHP. Developed obsession (and the beginnings of a webapp).

Saturday: More PHP. Went into town and wandered round the shops. Picked up Billy Joel CDs for £2 in a charity shop - go me! Went to the Order of the Phoenix Picture House to see Spirited Away, which was cool, although subtitled rather than dubbed. Came home. Coded more.

Sunday: Slept late. Coded more PHP. Watched Gigi. Only just remembered in time to go to Sainsbury's. Did some more perl hacking on my new code for RS.

Today: Work again. Took delivery of two hefty tomes containing the Illiad and the Odyssey plus new toys. Managed to cook dinner despite having forgotten to get more olive oil yesterday.

Tomorrow: Tomorrow, I love you, Tomorrow, you're only a day away!

And finally: GIU!