Jim's Home Page

Merry Christmas to you all, especially Mum, Dad, and Jane. Missing you guys today.

I walked to the supermarket to get all the stuff for tomorrow. Even with the menu I wrote up, I only needed to get about 14 things, which even let me get out through the express checkout lane and avoid most of the madness.

The supermarket seemed to be far less insane that it was a couple of years ago. I remember standing in line at the checkouts for nearly 30 minutes then.

I called about the phone from work. As it was a half day holiday today, I asked them to look at it in the afternoon. Work was quiet and I was home by midday.

I got a phone call at about 3 PM, which surprised me :) It was the phone company telling me that the phone was fixed. That tells me that someone fat-fingered a computer at the telephone exchange.

I came home tonight to find my phone completely dead. No dialtone. No nothing. This is the second time this has happened to me, both times when someone close in the apartment complex has moved out.

Last time this happened, I was on call for work and actually had work scheduled for that night, so I returned to work and called Pac Hell from there. This time, I just can't be bothered. I'll call them from work tomorrow.

I went to Rudy's for dinner last night. It was a pretty cool walk through the fog that's hanging around at the moment. The best effect in the fog is the sodium street lamps. They are set so high above the road and so far apart that when you get any distance from them, they have no visible means of support, making the entire scene very theatrical. I was imagining lighting operators up there on catwalks ;)

Anyway, I got to the restaurant, and while the food was good as usual, I had a hard time enjoying myself, mostly due to a drunken obnoxious woman in the next booth who wouldn't shut up about how much she had had to eat and that her dinner partner was going to have to roll her out the door and presumably turn into her bed partner. I really didn't need to hear this conversation while eating dinner.

Oh well, at least the street lights in the fog were cool...

Christmas is fast approaching and again I won't be able to spend it with my family in Australia. My strike rate for Christmas spent in Sydney has been pitiful in the time I have been in the USA. The first year I was here, my sister was also living in the States, and our parents decided to come over and spend the holidays with us here. We all met up in San Francisco, and had a great time.

Since then however, I have only made it back once. And next year doesn't look the best either, particularly as I have to be in Sydney in September.

So this year I will again do a Christmas feast for one. I am partial to duck, and I had been doing a wonderful recipe of Sichuan spiced duck and scallops with asparagus and rocket salad by Christine Manfield, but due to this being so complex (it takes two days of prep and a bunch of cooking on the day) I switched to a spiced up roast beef last year. This was so good, I'm going to do it again this year.

So here is the menu as it stands (subject to change at a whim):

Nearly a month since writing something here. That's bad. Very bad.

On the weekend, my PC decided that it should up and die. The hard disk drive containing the operating system, the vast bulk of the program files, and my most important documents head crashed without warning. I got up on Saturday morning to a blue screen of death, and upon rebooting, got scandisk, and that was all she wrote.

As I was on call, it was rather important that I have a functioning PC, so I hopped on the bike and rode to the nearest computer store and got a new hard drive for a fairly reasonable price. I could have gone to Frys and saved maybe $20, but it would have been imposing on a friend, and that's not good.

I installed the disk, realised I had forgotten to set the jumpers, uninstalled it, set the jumpers and installed it again, and began reinstalling W2K from scratch. The first thing I wanted once I had a network connection to the internet was a firewall. I kid you not, by the time I had downloaded the firewall software, I was already infected.

So I moved the firewall install package to the other hard drive, formatted the new drive and reinstalled W2K again. I then attempted to install the firewall, but unfortunately, the braindead thing that is Windoze did not support the install package, so the install package attempted to download the latest version of the installer. Note to Windoze developers: use the oldest possible version of MSI that you can get away with.

I reconnected to the net and started downloading the new version of the installer, praying that a worm wouldn't find me. Somehow, I actually made it, clicked on "Disconnect", and let the firewall install.

It must be such a nightmare for non-technical people to do this. No wonder anti-virus companies can make money...

I made a list of software I needed. Over 30 packages. And there went my weekend. Downloading package after package.

Fortunately, I had all the important documents backed up on the other drive. So no drastic loss. Just a massive loss of time. And boredom and frustration...