I’m just sitting here reflecting, on the weekend just past. I’ve had a great weekend. Dusty arrived on Friday night, and we had a quick chat and then went to bed at my usual time. We both were up early on Saturday morning, enjoying a light breakfast then after that making sure the chores were done. Subsequently we went for a walk around the neighbourhood for him to reminisce and then a drive around town so that he could enjoy some fresh air with slightly more insane traffic than he’s used to now. After that there was a quick jaunt in JB and Officeworks. We returned home to have a quiet afternoon sitting on the patio chatting and generally taking it easy. Our original intention was to spend Saturday playing Descent: Journeys in the dark (first edition) and possibly Sunday too. It seemed, that we needed Saturday to unwind, debrief from work / study as both of us confessed to feeling extremely relaxed after basically doing nothing Saturday afternoon and evening. Anyway, Sunday was spent playing Descent: Journeys in the dark (first edition). We managed to put in a good 13 hours solid dungeon crawling, With Dusty creating a huge pile of carcasses comprised of Skeletons, Dark Priests, Spiders, Kobolds, Ferox, Razorwings, Sorcerers and an Ogre. What can I say other than that it was as good a weekend as I had hoped it would be.
Archive for the ‘Humour’ Category
Cool Breeze under my armpits…
Things seem to be coming along well in my journey through the Straits of Depression. I’ve managed to keep my head above water for almost a month now, without a profound bout of Depression. That’s not to say the Depression isn’t lurking at every corner, but at the moment I feel a sense of being able to float above it, not completely out of the depths, but at least if I was in quicksand, I’d be able to feel the breeze under my armpits! So far, with the help of my Psychologist, a Team Leader & Manager at work willing to exercise a bit of flexibility, I’m feeling better about a few things, including work. That’s not to say I’m doing Great! However, my days are noticeably changing. I’m up and out of bed most mornings at 06:00 feeling at least like facing the day and trying to some things done. I’m not quite so settled with the being in bed at 22:00 in the evening, that’s a psychological challenge, but I’m making the effort and clearly there’s benefits.
No, there’s no extension on the house, no there’s no Garage, but at least I’m working towards getting a list of tasks done about the place. In addition I’m starting to enjoy other aspects of life again. My photography is providing me with considerable challenge and enjoyment, and I can honestly say I hope I can turn that into something to give me an income in my later years. There’s a bit of Creative Writing going on again, but I’m not ready to share that yet. I at least am starting to think about the future again, as I’m definitely over IT.
I’m Not Alone Out There…
Today I saw one of the people I most respect at work, lose it with his Manager. Not in a Machete, blood on the walls sort of thing, but he expressed to his Manager just how he saw it.
What was interesting about this for me was that I’ve always seen this person, whom I consider a friend in addition to a colleague as relatively cool about work. I’ve always had the impression, that he’s relatively “unflappable” at work. I’ve always had the impression that he leaves work at work and goes home to a family and thinks not of work unless he’s paged. I’ve found his advice and reflections very sound and useful. Clearly though by the way in which this all came to a head it was a matter of the straw that broke the Camel’s back. What ensued was approximately 90 minutes of back peddling by the Manager to calm and settle what quickly erupted into a major team dummy spit!
What this reaffirmed for me was that I’m not the only one believing I work for a Circus run by the Lunatics that have escaped from the Asylum! My day had been running a shabby second to anything else, but this did lift my spirits simply by indicating to me I’m not the only one…
Just one of those things…
There’s really only so many responses to the line “…sodomy by rubber eggplant!”
Old Bombadil has gone quiet, but Goldberry is now humming away…
Well finally finished the move of the servers from physical to virtual. The blogs & web were the last to be moved, having done the mail over the weekend. Let’s just say there was more involved in getting the blogs moved over. I hadn’t forgotron all the initial configuration that needed to be done, but let’s say my “MySQL” is rusty!
From an outward appearance, all looks smooth since it’s simply a matter of changing firewall ports forwarding after all is said and done on the back end. I doubt anyone would have noticed blogs or email offline for the few seconds it took to change ports / IP addresses; after spending the time doing the reconfiguring after moving data from the physical to the virtual. I’d originally considered keeping the SLES 10.1 and trying a physical to virtual migration. But after thinking about it for a while, and the SLES 11.1 seeming quite stable I opted to go the new install path and migrate data for mail, apache & what FTP there was available.
Anyway, Furbag doesn’t seem to have noticed any problems, so guessing all has gone smoothly…
So as the title says: “Old Bombadil has gone quiet, but Goldberry is now humming away…” 🙂
“Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind…”
Clearly the fact that I’ve bought both a rowing machine & an iPad 2 today indicates my current state of mind…
Death of a Salesman (if ONLY)…
There was a time not too long ago (1990’s & early 2000’s) when a TV series had a season to warm up. Not only that, a Season was a good 20+ episodes. A series had time to grow, find it’s feet and an audience had time to see the multi-dimensionality of characters, and the ideas the series was trying to explore.
There’s no doubt these days that’s not the case. It’s all about Lowest Common Denominator – LCD (and not the screen). Series with any real intellectual and creative stimulation are ruthlessly “euthanised” because audiences in general clearly can’t deal well with show’s that don’t spoon feed them every thought and emotion. Couple that with a medium rigidly unresponsive to the way a large number of viewer wish to absorb the media (i.e. WHEN AND WHERE they desire. Instead of embracing new opportunities to let viewers enjoy shows, studios continue to try to tie their viewers down to schedules that don’t mesh with their daily lives.
It seems we’re in the decade of no imagination or creativity at all. A significant number of movies are poor remakes of classics or cult favourites. Even series are beginning to follow suite. Is it that Studios believe that there is no one alive that remembers the originals? There are some that clearly attempt to ride the fame of their antecedents, and then make a mockery of them. Effects don’t make up for creativity and challenging your audience. Clearly the Electronic Games Industry is following in it’s cousin’s footsteps with many pretenders and few rebels.
My TV has been nothing but a “display for more than fifteen years. I don’t even think about what’s on TV, don’t use it for “news” or any other type of information. In fact I find a TV on and displaying a transmitted show invariably annoying to the extreme. Not only is the content utterly appalling for the most part, but insulting. Certainly I watch products generated by the industry, but for so long I’ve chosen a “removed” mode like many others. Pay TV went that 15 odd years ago when they started advertising. The only possible thing that could persuade me to engage that service is if I could literally pay for the 4 or 5 stations I might likely watch on a regular basis. I don’t want 20 channels of rubbish, just so I can have 3 or 4 reasonable ones to try and pick some content from that I can choose to watch at a time of my choosing.
Equally I’ve tired to a large degree of buying many PC games. Copy Protection has become so annoying that I can’t be bothered taking chances on many games I’ve not researched and clearly have a strong pedigree or some outstanding feature. And just because I’m not buying a lot of games doesn’t mean I’m pirating them. I honestly can’t even remember the last time I “evaluated” in any form other than a demo.
Moving back inside…
Most of the last 24 hours’ waking moments have been spent in rearranging the Study around a new desk (courteousy of Dusty) to replace the 2 old ones I’ve been carting about since 1990.
Study full view with bookcase moved to the left
At the moment it’s cost me the second PC in the Study but I’ve gained much desk space compared to the old arrangement. Not only does it look better, tidier and more organised, but the snake pit of cables has been vanquished!
View showing luxurious desk space to the left and lack of cables underneath compared to previous arrangement
And just to remind those who’ve not seen how it was for a while.
Old version complete with the ubiquitous snake pit... Admittedly this isn't the most recent of photos, but it hadn't changed all that much in the last two years.
30 Days & 30 Nights…
Well with a slight “blip”, I’ve made 30 days without a JB purchase, which is a significant landmark for me.
Not since the store first opened here have I gone a month without a purchase! Can’t say I’ve really saved any money yet, but have spent it on more “productive” things with regard to working on the house.
There will begin changes ever so slowly…
Inside the White Whale
Amusing anecdote from work for a change.
I needed to take the work van out on some rounds today. There was not much in the rear compartment, and without a “cargo net” to hold things in place things seemed to be sliding about too much. So I pulled up out the front of work, got out and climbed into the back of the van to shuffle things about to not roll about. In those few seconds, the back door shut and I realised that I was shut in the back. NO problem you would think, I had the key. Unfortunately you can’t open the rear doors from the inside. The Side door to the van was apparently jammed, and I remember it being so some time before. I’d thought that had been repaired on it’s last trip to fleet. Apparently not!
So although I had the keys, and could unlock the van I still couldn’t exit because of said issue. No problem, I’ll just ring someone to come and let me out you would think. Well, I’d left the Blackberry in the front console of the van, and we have a cage across the back of the cargo bay to prevent whatever’s in the rear from making it’s way to the front uninvited!@! No joy there.
Fortunately I had the iPhone in my pocket. First 2 people I rang didn’t answer (argh!), third person did…luckily (phew, getting warm in the back by now).
Escape realized, but obviously at my expense 🙂