A post I did on techsupport about a particularly egregious example of moronity that has come to light at work today.

In other news, I picked up my Irish passport today! Phew! No stinky long immigration queue at Heathrow for me - just the somewhat-less stinky long immigration queue. The fun part of it all was that the passport was sent registered post to my old address (I had provided a SASL for the embassy), despite the fact I have a 6-month redirection in place for mail from my old place. I rang the embassy on the off-chance today due to the huge delay, and it had been returned to them as it was "undeliverable".

I went to the PO once I picked up the passport packet (the embassy offered to put it in the post again - no effing way!), and the guy there was unable to give me an explanation as to why it hadn't been redirected. I asked whether he could input the tracking number on the registered post envelope into some system for, er, tracking information - apparently not. He was able to ascertain that it had been lodged at the GPO (which was actually the nearest PO to where I used to live) for a while - I'll go there tomorrow to find out what went on. Leaving aside the fact that my passport was going hither and yon all over Canberra for no good reason, what else that should have been redirected has been slipping through the cracks?

...from Alison Bechdel's blog. Her younger brother plays with Ministry, and there is a story going around that Al Jourgensen might be doing a gardening reality show called Gardening With Evil.

Two things: a) I would totally love watching that show; b) I think this means that us Gen Xers (I know Al's a bit older, but what's his fanbase?) are officially heading towards middle age.

*chortle*

While I don't think I'm particularly more grumpy at certain times of the month - frankly, who can tell? - the filters definitely wear a bit thinner, both incoming (in terms of being able to filter out stuff that isn't normally much of a big deal) and outgoing (while judging what and how to say something can be problematic at the best of times, let's just say that aspect is not enhanced).

I did a nice big rant to the CDL and the Bear the other day, about my dislike of the album Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf. There are a couple of reasons for that dislike. One is that, sad to say, it's a class thing. Over-dramatic white trash emoting-via-screaming doesn't really give me warm fuzzies at the best of times. It reminds me of dire parties in smoky drafty garages, shitty loud music playing (at least predominantly Maori parties had better food and decent music), with a bunch of boozed-up men trying to out-macho each other, while their women gossip viciously on the margins, or attempt to outdo each other in swapping turgid tales of their life fuckups. There is a reason I'm mainly attracted to middle-middle or upper-middle class more-rational-than-me (yet sufficiently sensitive) educated types (not that the middle classes are not capable of being dramatic, but they express it less, hm, "messily", and I do duck the more out-there type).

I actually don't mind the track Heaven Can Wait, or the music from the track Bat Out of Hell. Although how anyone can listen without rolling their eyes at such lines as "You're the only thing in this whole world that's pure and good and right" or "And the last thing I see/ Is my heart, still beating .../ Breaking out of my body and flying away/ Like a bat out of hell." Oh, I know every word of this album, believe me.

But, you know, I feel that way about much mid-late 70's macho (although what's so macho or "hard" about a bunch of men screaming in falsetto has always been beyond me) rock. No, I have a special animus for that album because it reminds me of my stepfather... and that's been stirred around a bit subconsciously, as it turns out, by events in the news this past week.

The song I particularly dislike from that album is Paradise by the Dashboard Light. It's apparently supposed to be hilarious, but the tale of a woman pressuring a man into marriage (that he will "love her till the end of time") before she'll let him fuck her is fairly low on my list of humorous topics. And the penultimate lines "So now I'm waiting for the end of time to hurry up and arrive" certainly sums up my view on my mother's first marriage (I'd come along before she married, alas).

( cut for long and personal blurge on child abuse )

Also, it'd be nice to learn to recognise what stirs up rant-prone behaviour before going into rant mode, or having to put up with several nights of horrible dreams before having a light-bulb moment. Heh. At least I get there eventually, at sufficiently frequent intervals.

And thank god that I can vent here when I figure it out... I might actually get some work done now I'm no longer quite so much in the Slough of Despond.

Now that I have real internets, I can catch up on browsing image-heavy sites. This pic from the 1st of April is the best lolcat evah (Monty Python FTW!) - funnier than the original segment, even. :-)

And the hotdog o'fashion. Heee! I won't post any more.

But I also have a new icon from that haul.


PS. I'm coming down with a cold, it seems. Meh. Out comes the echinacea, zinc and ACE supplement!

Firstly, yay real internets and reynardo's organisating of it. Yippee.

Since I haven't burbled about music in ages, I'm going to bore you now with the fact that, IMO, the difference between one song being ok and another being great is often in something as elementary as its beat.

ironed_orchid made a comment a while back about music that makes you feel sexy. Not all of my favourite music is "sexy music", but plenty of it has an enhancing (if you like) effect, or is reminiscent. The other thing about much of my favourite music is that the beat is interesting, and is undoubtedly why I prefer breakbeat genres.

It's no secret I enjoy a lot of electronica, but when you mention that, the first thing people think of is house or trance. Me, I can't stand 95%+ of either of those genres, because they have incredibly boring 4/4 beats. So too with much rock music. The basic backbeat is, when done in the usual way, as boring as hell when done to excess (for me, about three tracks). Also add to that the prosaic bassline that a lot of rock or pop has (dum... dum.... or sometimes dum... de dum...) and I want to expire from ennui.

Unsurprisingly, the rock I like has good beats. While people go on about Jimi Hendrix being a fantastic guitarist (and sure, he was innovative in many respects), the reason why he shot to the stratosphere was in no small part due to Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding's efforts. Their backing was interesting and dynamic, and totally amped up the overall sound.

( illustrative YouTubeness )

I'll go on a bit more about what I think sexy and/or enjoyable music is (for me) anon.

I can get the train from London to Cardiff to visit friends and their new pooch. Trains leave from Paddington every 1/2 hour during weekdays, and it takes the grand total of 2 hours and 8 minutes to get there. For 31 quid return. ::sigh::

All I have to do now is sort out my accommodation, which they apparently screwed up getting the money for when they should have done (and I didn't check to see that it had been taken when I thought it was). Bah.

Also, my new Irish passport hasn't arrived, which means I might have to join the shitty long queue for immigration at Heathrow. Double bah. Thank god I'm not flying BA and using the notorious Terminal 5.

I has internets now, of the temporary sort. I bethought myself that I should make the most of the mobility support officer at work being my Own Little Friend, so I scrounged a wireless internet card off him (of the type that is normally loaned out to the execs when they go roaming around). Since I'm on call this week, it's even legitimate. No per-site snooping, either. The card just provides 1GB of data a month, no auditing. Because execs never download porn, eh?

On the news front, I have nearly finished my Exchange server migration. It's going to be three weeks behind schedule when all is done, but the last two servers have been held up by a couple of weeks due to a) the thingummies that connect the server to the super-duper storage system were not ordered (duh! and this was after I said the server was exactly like the ones that currently exist and are attached to the SAN at present with their thingummies); b) half a week of one of those remaining two servers and the new one in Brisbane trying to throw a hissy-fit. No email for a couple of hours on Wed night and Thurs morning, and then another few hours without mail the next evening later while I tried to get the databases into a consistent state so backups would run.

On the somewhat-related-to-work front, the v. cute communications-coordinator chick at work has taken to calling me "T-Mac" (based on my name) and "dude" in our day-to-day dealings (in a gently-teasing kind of way). I am not officially out to her, but you know, not that I'd fool anyone with two eyes for more than two seconds either. I am finding these nicknames slightly cringe-making (do I start wearing fedoras and making outré hand gestures?) and yet endearing. Hmmmm. She's straight and is going to be getting married in six months. Then again, I had a cute straight colleague who had just gotten engaged in my last job... but she was a highly experimental young lady, as it turned out. Heh heh heh. Well, it makes the days pass a bit more pleasantly just as is. :-)

I have had my car modified to run on gas as well as petrol (liquid propane+butane mix, for you furriners). It cost $4000, and I'll be getting $2000 back on a government rebate. The conversion is worth about twice as much as the car is, but I'll feel much happier driving my monster on that basis. The particulate emissions are zero, the petrochemical smog-forming emissions are much less (substances like nitrous oxide and general hydrocarbons), and CO₂ emissions are below anything except pure ethanol (and electricity, of course). At the same time, I got a dual-bore carb fitted, so it goes bloody excellently now. Extremely smooth acceleration, and I took it up to 90 miles an hour (145 kph) on the flat with oomph to spare. I went for a wee burn around... which was quite a bit more distance than I thought I covered, with flat straights, hills, windy and dirt roads, and it went fabulously and burned a quarter of a tank.

Finally, a meme ganked from saluqi and micheinnz because it's been ages:

( another languagey meme )

I've moved house last week, eee, which went smoothly despite my nearly killing myself carrying boxes up and down stairs. This is after I paid professional movers, heh. They did a good job, but I wanted it done. I'm now sharing with reynardo (once she arrives) and lederhosen, so it should be groovy. Also, A View, and a back garden, OMG.

However, until we get such mystical things as phone lines installed, I have no access to the internet from home. I do not access L/J and suchlike from work. If anyone has anything they want me to be aware of, please email me at my Gmail address in my userinfo (not that it's hard to deduce from my username here). Accessing mail from work is no problem - it's just looking at the "fun" sites. :-(

(I'm posting this from the Python L/J client I have installed on my personal domain, which I can also access from work - I use it for testing. Really!)

...Or at least, not from Lubbock, Texas.

Woman Told To Remove Nipple Rings For SoCal Flight. Charming. Hm, if you can see the bloody things, and your metal-detector beeper only goes of in their proximity, it's probably reasonable to expect that that is all of the metal that is on the individual's person. And I haven't heard of any l33t ninja tactics for threatening airline pilots with nipple rings yet. Maybe you could sharpen up a barbell end? I think the plastic cutlery is more of a worry, personally.

I have been beeped by a metal detector - in San Francisco, ironically enough. I explained what it was, they waved the hand-held detector in the general area, and that was fine. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 (I would expect them to actually ask to see the area these days).

It makes me wonder how sensitive these metal detectors might be, though. Unless the woman concerned was wearing 0ga rings that weigh an appreciable amount, what else would trigger it? Watch out if you wear an underwire bra in Lubbock, Texas, eh?

So, I've been moving the mailboxes of four of my servers so far. The most common non-default mail folder name is "Stuff". So there you go. I have to confess to having a Misc folder, but perhaps that is just a little bit effete.

Also, if you use Outlook, please don't keep more than 1000 items in the core folders (Inbox, Calendar, Journal). It slows down copy operations like fuck. Also, it'd slow things down when you open Outlook. You can create lots of little subfolders and file things in there, ok?

In other news, I've packed all my books. 8 cartons - I estimated the number of book cartons I'd need precisely, go me. It's not too bad, really - 5 of those were what I shipped back from England (look, if a book is the same price as a pint, what are you going to buy more of? Keeping in mind the fact I start puking violently if I have more than three or so pints, that is. See above re "effete". Perhaps I should start a group for effete - not faggy - butches. The faggy butches already have their own groups.)

A good article in the Guardian today about the fact that "food miles" is overly simplistic as a method of calculating what environmental impacts a specific food has.

What's best to eat is organic, in season, and local, of course. That's fine at the moment, but I would not be happy to return to the traditional Irish diet of mutton, potatoes, cabbages and maybe the occasional leek in the depths of winter. If I ate mutton. If the cabbages didn't require irrigation here in Oz. Or the potatoes, for that matter. Not to mention the various agricultural machinery used to grow the food.

It'd be nice to have a list of what's in season around the world, how it's farmed (bio-dynamic, organic, natural fertilisers, grass-fed, all chemicals all da time?), whether the farm workers were paid appropriate wages for their location, and whether no forests were clear-felled to provide the growing area. Until that happens (and imagine how hard it would be to collate that information and verify it), we can only do the best we can. As wimpish and imperfect as that seems - nothing is ever going to be perfect in that respect (leaving aside apocalyptic scenarios involving the removal of most of the world's population).

Executives predict exodus from traditional workplace to more home-working

Funnily enough, they've been predicting this for at least the last decade, and it still hasn't happened. Maybe some executives get to work from home, but not the proles, so often. For example, I don't need to be physically at work at all, except to attend meetings. Maybe once in a blue moon, if I need to poke a server that's not online (I don't build the servers, so I don't need to be there for that either). So why do I have to go to work every day? There really isn't a reason. Well, other than air-conditioning, of course.

I can actually see businesses making us work from home when it becomes economically sensible for them to do so. And will we be compensated for the lighting, heating/cooling and so on we use when at home? Of course not. Unless the government starts implementing some strange tax rebate system, which would mean, yet again, a subsidy for businesses to carry out their functions.

This is all entirely apropos, because guess what I'm doing this long weekend? Yep. I still have 2 servers to install Exchange on, users to migrate to three other servers (I migrated 2 yesterday afternoon/evening and today), and, yes, packing to move house. Hey, at least I can do all these things simultaneously when I work from home and have sweet F-A of a holiday, and have to pay for the power I consume. And not have air-conditioning. (Actually, I could go into the office - still no air-conditioning after hours - but, you know, packing.)

Via sarudy

You are a dog

Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can't be human. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz

Find out which ultrasonic ringtones you can hear!

It's a strange sensation not hearing the very top note they play - not even the wee clicking noise at the beginning and end of the clip. I was using headphones as well. I'm slightly paranoid about my hearing - I'd rather go blind than deaf, if one has to make a stupid choice like that (yes, odd for someone who likes to read so much).

Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one to have doubts about the latest l/j malarkey, which is explained not-at-all in the latest news . Basic accounts have been disabled, with no warning. [EDIT: I should emphasise that it's new basic accounts that have been disabled.] This really shits me. The stupid censorship regime already shitted me, as did all the strikethrough crapola, but removing basic accounts - notice or not - really seems to get to the core of what L/J was about.

I joined here as an alternative to ongoing personal discussions on mailing lists, and the combination of a nice simple blogging platform (unlike MySpace et al, the emphasis here is still very much on the written word, which is a strength) with strong community functionality (unlike Blogger, for example) made it a great substitute for those longwinded personal threads that dragged a mailing list off topic. It's a great replacement for Usenet, IMO. I like being able to post my ranty rants, which people can track and respond to as they see fit. I think the communities, where we can hang out with like-minded people or consume everyone's creative endeavours, are most definitely the killer app on this site.

If there had been nothing but an "ad-supported" option to join L/J, I probably wouldn't have joined. I wouldn't have become a Paid member, nor subsequently a Permanent member. I'm far from being the only person to use the try-before-buy option. I would also deplore any attempt to make a Basic account time-limited (although it's too late to worry about that now). Leaving aside the obvious effect that I am now a lot less willing to say "come here and try it out", what about all those temporary accounts that people create to troll ask difficult questions, post on subject that their public persona doesn't, or play RPGs? I know RPGs are a big driver for people on this site.

Next we have the pettiness of L/J apparently censoring the Top Interests page - no more sex, hardcore, porn, yaoi or bondage (grar!). No more bisexuality, depression, or fucking faeries either. I'm not normally of the black helicopter brigade, but is the next step to start censoring our own interests? Who knows, given the amount of discussion about this stuff.

Getting back to the ad-driven revenue model, I seriously believe it's the wrong path to travel down. Revenue from advertising per Internet ad has been dropping appreciably in the last few years, which is the reason why there are more of them everywhere, and they are more intrusive (also the fact that traditional advertising vectors like newspapers are in serious decline, so Internet advertising has grown by a third in Australia in a year). You already have 15%+ of the Internet using browsers like Firefox and Opera, which have ad-blockers available in them (although Opera's sucks). IE7Pro has just entered the scene with a very effective ad-blocker, so let's see how long TPTB can rely on that 85% of people who haven't bothered moving to something more useful.

I haven't seen any serious examination by L/J directors for alternative revenue-raising missions, such as selling things like icon-bundles (an extra 50 for $10 a year?), voice-posting (10 posts for $10), snazzy polling mechanisms and the like. The all-or-nothing model of Basic and Paid/Permanent probably wasn't that sustainable, but there is a heck of a lot of opportunity for incremental charges, or a mix-and-match model for subscriptions (I doubt I'd use voice posts, for example - someone who likes them might want to pay $10 a year more for them). I also think they could charge a bit more for the "everything" Paid accounts. Then there are such measures as clearing out old unused and inactive accounts (inactive accounts could be retained if there are 5 votes from current users, or the original creator has a current account and doesn't wish for the old one to be deleted) - this would save some degree of server space and bandwidth, and increase the interval at which new storage/bandwidth needs to be purchased.

So, with these two things - no more Basic, and the stupid interests-censoring - the sheen is definitely starting to wear off. What alternatives to L/J are people considering? My must haves are a strong user community, active development of features on the site, and the mix of text-heavy blog posting and community facilities. There's Greatest/InsaneJournal, and things like Wordpress. What are the options once the last of the rats decide to make their move?

Actually, this isn't much of a music review, but I was talking somewhat incoherently to the CDL and the Bear today about the new NIN album - which I'm sure you've heard all the hype about. Fully downloadable FLAC or high-quality MP3s for $US5 - $AU5.50. And it's cool music. The major thing about it is that it's totally instrumental, and I'd call it "ambient industrial" (light on the "industrial"), for want of a better term. Some of it is bordering on musique concrète, but I like a bit of that as a musical flavr. The beginning and end pieces are nice quiet piano.

So if you want to totally rock out, this is not the album for that (there are a few short tracks of that kind, though). I find it all pretty meditative, actually. It's not my absolute NIN favourite, and not typical, by any means, but well worth it (and well worth the physical CD price if you choose to buy it that way).

This track is probably my favourite. And this one is my next favourite, and is an example of one of the rocky clips. It sounds that rough (the way it starts off) in the FLAC version, btw - my MP3 transcoding skillz aren't that bad!

Elliot Spitzer has been Urban Dictionary'd already.

[Do I care he frequented prostitutes? No. Is it any business of ours - other than wondering about his probity if he was lying to his wife - how his marriage is constructed? No. Could it happen to a better class of hypocrite, though? No, indeed.]

Well, my mission to replace all the Exchange mail server hardware in the organisation moves apace. I've built six servers, and there are only four to go. The tricky ones, of course.

None of our Exchange servers have any redundancy, and since any one of them could hold the entire organisation's mailboxes by itself without cracking a sweat, not clustering the ones in the main sites where most of the users are has struck me as idiotic since I've been there. Now I have some traction to get clustering done, despite the travails of our server team going OH WOEZ, THESE CLUSTERINGZ THINGIEZ ARE NEW TECHNOLOGEEZ, HALP! Man, if it hadn't been over 5 years since I built a Windows server cluster myself - a couple of times - I'd be going "Give it HERE! I'll do it MYSELF!" Of course, the server team have to actually support it at the OS level, so it's only reasonable they give it a go.

With this in mind, I said that our group would pay for HP do come in and do a consultancy for us on installing the Exchange cluster in our main site. Then we'd have another one to practise with ourselves. It really doesn't help when you say that it's possible to have an Exchange cluster built and operational in a few hours, and maybe another day of HP hand-holding for some "knowledge transfer" for the server team, when bloody HP send back their quotation for consultation services and say it'd require a WEEK. In your fucking dreams, matey. I mean, FFS, Exchange clustering over Windows server is mature, and these HP engineers could do it in their sleep. If we had a bit more lead time, I'd be bloody doing it myself, bugger the consequences. But the servers only arrived last week, so I am rather somewhat pressed for time.

So, anyway, hopefully the server team and their boss will stop with their hand-wringing soon - did I mention that they already have a support contract with HP, and of course the clustering is fully supported by HP anyway? - and we can get on with it. In the meantime, my other wee servers will be arriving at their new homes soon, and I can start moving the user mailboxes across. Yay! All 10 servers have to be in place, all around Australia, with all 3500 mailboxes sitting there happily, by the end of the month.

Here is a list of things I have done, and will be doing shortly, to reduce my load on the environment:

• I'm using my Sodastream and groovy water filter to make my own sparkling water. The filter has improved my drinking water amazingly, and it's so nice not to be chucking out one or two plastic bottles every week.
• I'm getting my old Kingswood converted to LPG shortly. I pretty much only drive on weekends or for jaunts to Sydney, but it will make a major difference. Not only does gas have extremely light emissions compared to petrol, and especially diesel, but it's like the fuel has an octane factor of 110, so you use slightly less to achieve the same travelling distance.
• All my lightbulbs are compact fluorescents. It took a little while to find the "warm" coloured ones that don't make the place look like the office, but I'm happy with the effect. It annoys me that there is no constructive way of getting rid of the three wasteful halogen lights in the kitchen area, but I leave those lights off as much as possible. I also need to find something like an LED that will fit into my reading lamp by my bed - that's a halogen too, at present.
  
• I only buy organic meats (I eat chicken and pork, but no red meat), and organic other thingies as much as possible. I don't care so much about purported health benefits - although ingesting fewer pesticides and so on is bound to be good - but the fact you're contaminating the earth less and farming in a more sustainable manner are the stand-out benefits to me. I don't think there is any reasonable way to get rid of intensive or even industrialised farming... but I think it can be done in such a way that it actually has fewer effects than traditional methods (which require a lot of land).
• I have a bokashi bucket to take all my food waste. I'm lucky that I can add it to the compost at the CDL's, because I have no way of disposing of it in my small flat. It's working well - there is a not-too-offensive smell if I have the lid open (it smells like silage rather than rot), but otherwise it's completely unnoticeable.
• Of course, I recycle whatever I can recycle.
  
• Finally, I'm trying to fill my kettle with only as much water as I need for each use. If any of you North Americans drink hot tea and don't have a jug, get one! It's certainly more efficient than heating water in the microwave, and tea made from microwaved water is, frankly, vile (god knows why it makes a difference, but it does. Perhaps boiling it in the kettle oxygenates the water more?)

Things I need to improve:

• Turning gadgets off at the wall. There's no need for me to have my stereo and wireless router on standby all the time.
• Buying the right gadget at the right time. I'm happy with my phone, so I won't be replacing it for the next couple of years. However, I bought a new music player - the iAudio I should have bought initially - because the iPod was giving me gyp. I'll be flogging the iPod off to a colleague at work, or on eBay, but still.
  
• I've gotten my plastic bag store down to less than a dozen, but I don't need that many in reserve for my rubbish bin.
• I should probably take shorter showers, but I won't.