tales from an ordinary world
1999-02-02
I was at work until just after midnight last night, upgrading our webservers by adding some pretty blue disks in order to give everyone more space for their web pages. It took ages to copy all the files over, so I sat around and did a few other bits and pieces of work, and chatted to one of the operators - given the temperature outside, it was a good time to be in the nice cool machine room...
Since I've got air conditioning at home (and not in my office at work), I figured I'd work from home today - I could do with the sleep-in, and figured I could get a few things done. I got a little distracted and played with my housemate's new CD writer during what I could reasonably call my lunch break, but apart from that, I did actually get some useful work done - I'm sure this was mostly due to there not being a phone next to my desk, ringing all the time...
I turn 26 next Wednesday. I'll probably be too busy/preoccupied to get around to organizing anything for it, which wouldn't be the first time. It's probably time I started worrying (or just wondering) how I've "developed as a person" over the past year or so. It's hard to see any key turning points, such as the time, in 1996, I (mentally) put my foot down and said "right, I'm not going to sit around the house and geek out all weekend, every weekend, I'm going to go out, and read books and sit in cafés, since they're only 5-10 minutes walk from home." And I did (and still do). I'm sure that, if I just stayed home every weekend, I'd spend a lot less money, but bugger it - life's short, shop hard. Or something.
Hrm. The latest departmental newsletter just had photos from last year's Christmas party - there was a rather odd-looking shot of me and Ana...
1999-02-05
It's been hot all week. I don't deal too well with the heat - I sweat too much, for instance...I spent all day pretty much hard at it, setting up a test environment for a new major release of some server software I look after. I started off the upgrade, and got it to migrate a test copy of all the old data into the new format, and of course, it didn't fucking work. Without giving any useful information, it just randomly decided to say "nah, I'm not gonna do that bit." If I wasn't so hot and utterly shagged out after a week in a hot office (no air conditioning...), I would have thrown the monitor out the window. A friend decided to throw a bbq in the evening - organized (as much of my life is) at completely the last minute - just before I would have otherwise gone home, I got a message asking "doing anything tonight ? wanna come to a bbq ?". So I went along, chatted to some people, had a few nice cold beers, and sweat lots 'cause it was still hot. I tried standing in front of the fan and stuff, but I gave up and went home around 11:30, 'cause I was too tired to do anything but sleep.
1999-02-06
It's probably the residual disappointment from work on Friday, but I was feeling pretty low this afternoon. One of my ex-es was logged in, so I said hi, and we had a small chat. I ended up mentioning about how generally lost I was feeling - I guess I didn't really put myself across very well, and I got this as a response...
i don't mean to be hard or anything, but it's like i see people who are like trying to come to terms with things like death or losing a leg or two so often now...
but i *really* hope that things work out for you
...which I found pretty disappointing, in a way. I really ought to be more careful about dumping on people...I've always tried to be a good listener for all my friends, but unfortunately I'm not so good at talking...
1999-02-08
Somehow, Mondays always turn into...well...Mondays. I reran the test upgrade I'd tried on Friday, and for some reason, everything magically worked (it took ten hours, but at least it worked). Unfortunately, though, I'm under a fair bit of pressure to do something about this particular service, due to some performance problems that the vendor seems particularly uninterested in helping us with (apart from throwing us this new major release of the software, but only after much begging, whinging and gnashing of teeth). I've really gotta get out of the IT industry. I think I summed it up nicely at our bi-weekly meeting, when someone mentioned how they'd been asked what ITS* stood for, and I said "how about Irritable, Tired and Shitty ?".
* - Of course, it stands for "Information Technology Services".
1999-02-10
I might have to, like, swap hemispheres, just so I can cope with the weather on my birthday. Wandered down to St Kilda for a late breakfast/lunch, after staying up until 2:30am fixing stuff at work (at least I didn't have to go in to work to fix it all), and if the weather had been a bit cooler, I would have gone and sat on the pier for a while. As it was, I probably would have been sunburnt before I'd even thought about it (the beach often does that to me). I trammed, trained and bussed myself to Monash, avoided people who didn't know I'd taken the day off and might try and get me to do work for them, and had afternoon tea with a few friends. A few of us went out for dinner to this restaurant called Limor's, which is one of those "all you can meat" places. They have these barbeque platters that feed your average small suburb without costing overly much. It was good, apart from the Catholic GuiltTM I sometimes end up feeling from eating meat, especially when it was so much at once. I couldn't quite work out whether Ana enjoyed herself or not, but she wasn't telling, so...
26. Hrm. I guess I'd better start acting like an adult one of these days. Bummer. All those house buying, child-rearing, marriage-wrecking lifestyles that I can't imagine even beginning to cope with yet. Maybe later.
1999-02-12
Tips for young players - don't leave your packet of real, genu-whine McVities Chocolate Digestive Biscuits sitting out on the table next to your computer - It's summer, they're English, and it's all downhill from there. I desperately tried to revive them by sticking them in the fridge the other day, and this evening I felt brave enough to eat one. The whole packet had glued itself together, so I tried using a knife, only to have them turn into sawdust (with the odd bit of chocolate). I was forced to retreat into the safety of James Boag & Son, Tasmanian purveyors of fine beer...
A birthday card arrived today, from the ex I'd briefly chatted to last Saturday. I was pretty surprised that a) she remembered, and b) she actually sent me a card. She even apologized for last Saturday. Bizarro.
It's the Earthmen's last ever gig tonight, at the Evelyn. Augie March and the Steinbecks supporting, too. I really oughta go - they're a great band, and I haven't seen them live for about 6 years, although I've been keeping up with their CD releases.
I've had a few friends tell me they reckon they've learnt more from this than from things I told them in real life. I'm not sure what to say to that, which I guess is the problem. But it's definitely true that, barring a couple of days when I'm so hard to shut up I could probably bounce off the moon, I tend to fall into passive mode amongst people, even my best friends. It's the path of least resistance. I just sit there and take it all in. Some days I just don't have the energy for anything else, but I really need to make more of an effort.
1999-02-13
Another dinner thing - ages ago, some friends and I started doing this "A-Z" of restaurants (we were eating at the Afghan Gallery in Brunswick St when someone said "hey, let's go to a place starting with 'B' next time..."). We were up to 'Q', and someone (Nanda ?) found a place called Qizine (how quaint...) in South Melbourne, and we went there both to continue the trek and celebrate Mark's and my birthdays. The food was of the "less is more" variety, but pretty damn good, and I bought a bottle of red that cost more than $20 (no, really !) that went well with it all. Afterwards, we went and played pool for a while. I'm generally pretty crap at pool. Occasionally I have a lucky streak (and with this, myself and another similarly untalented guy once held a pool table in King's Cross for a good half-hour or so, once upon a time), but it seemed to desert me tonight - Christian and myself were absolutely no match for his housemate, Dave.
1999-02-14
Ana had wanted to go and see Breakfast at Tiffany's at the Moonlight Cinema, so along we went - I'd figured that, being Valentine's Day and all, that there'd be heaps of other punters wanting to do the same, so I pre-booked the tickets and all that sort of stuff. It was certainly more crowded than the other nights I went last month - we had to cue for ages (after picking up the tickets) so they could seat us individually, although we ended up pretty much were I was hoping to sit anyway. The couple behind us were arguing for the whole hour or so until the film started. I think they'd kissed and made up by the end, though. The film itself was okish - I hadn't realised it was directed by Blake Edwards. And it had a nice orange cat in it, called "cat".
1999-02-17
Dad got 2 tickets for the Airshow at Avalon. It was one of the trade days today, which basically just meant less people - a good thing IMHO - I can't cope with large crowds, especially for that long...I'll chuck a quick braindump about it here until I clean it up later (well, if I decide to, anyway) :
portafloor - the main exhibit rooms were temporary things on top of a whole lot of gravel, and so the ground was covered with this grey plastic lego-like "portafloor" stuff that made weird crunchy noises as you stepped on it.
aircraft geeks - the kind of people who whinge incessantly about how the RAAF should have bought F16's instead of F18's, and so on. When we walked out to have a look at the aircraft, we stood near some South African "redhawk" attack helicopter thing, and there were a few of these geeks next to us, drooling over it, and arguing its merits against the Apache AH64 Longbow ExtraSpecialEdititon something-or-other. I'd be more elitist about it, but I'm guilty of being the occasional (less than I used to be, mind you) geek about other things, like computers and music and stuff. Oh well.
size matters - we found a B-52 way up the end of the runway, past the huge C5 Galaxy transporter plane that had its nose and tail bent up, looking like it was waiting to devour a few smaller aircraft for hors d'oeuvres. Dad was a bit disappointed in the B-52's size. Perhaps 'cause it was next to the C5 thing, it really didn't look that big or scary.
dodgy goods ? - as soon as we went inside to experience the portafloor, some guy thrust these little brochures at us, advertising some Military Free Zone mob (they have a webpage even) that, uh, want your excess military stock. Thanks for the brochure, guys, and I'll be sure to let you know if I've got any spare laser-guided bombs I can't find room for next time I move house...
companies - All the usual companies that make aircraft guff were there - Boeing, British Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, etc. down to people you wouldn't have really expected, like Praxa (some Melbourne IT mob). And PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The UK's Ministry of Defence (I think it was them) had these cool holograms of random bits of machinery, too.
The Asian Defence Journal's stand looked pretty sad and lonely. Especially when you saw the Janes stand, with lots of pretty cutaway pictures of your favourite flying things.
The Bureau of Air Safety Investigation - These guys had all sorts of bits of wreckage in display cabinets, with helpful explanations telling you exactly what happened to the plane (and how you could tell by looking at the particular piece of wreckage). A TV showed footage of air crashes. I don't know how intentional this was, but the TV was facing the coffee lounge - I mean, it's just the thing people would want to be watching in the coffee lounge before they go outside to watch planes flying over their heads.
Advertising - Ok, aircraft have plenty of buzzwords and acronyms. But some of the ads mentioned things that sounded more like management-level wanking - "prefragmentation" and "area denial". Or as one ad said, that featured the shadow of an attack helicopter on a cliff-face, "when natural barriers may not be enough to stop intruders..."
The F-15 - It took off, did some nifty aerobatics, and made a lot of noise. Meanwhile, the hundred or so speakers, mounted just in front of the fences that stopped us from pouring out to certain doom on the runway, played crappy 80's guitar music (perhaps we can blame Top Gun for this ?), as well as the standard Oh Yeah by Yello. As the plane did one of many passes along the runway, one or two people even shouted "woohoo !" and threw their hands in the air. Just like in the movies. Still, I guess I enjoyed it more than I expected - you could have sworn the plane was being held by a giant kid's invisible hand, the way it turned and rolled and stuff.
The business market - A few "business" planes did a few manoeuvres as a guy did the hard sell over the speakers. Apparently Joh Bjelke-Petersen had owned one of them, which I'm not sure makes for much of a selling strategy...
F-16 - see F-15. But a little bit sexier. And louder, as it took off the first time. "Converting fuel into noise", as the announcer put it.
Bob Hoover - apparently this guy's 74 or something - been in WWII, been a test pilot for years, and all that sort of stuff. He did a whole lof of weird but cool stunts in a pretty ordinary-looking plane. Some of these involved turning one or both engines off while doing loops and stuff. It was pretty impressive, but I'm sure I would have been more impressed if I'd known how to fly a plane, and hence would have understood exactly how difficult all that stuff was...
F-18 - see above. The coolest thing this one did was, at the end, to do a vertical climb to something like 50,000 feet. In a few moments, it was just gone. You couldn't see it. Five minutes later, as we were leaving, it reappeared and buzzed the runway again. *shrug*.
1999-02-19
They're doing stuff to the power switching in the building with all the big important computers this weekend, which means most things had to be shutdown, etc. This evening, we were putting a temporary box in another building to act as a temporary webserver, so that anyone coming to our websites would get a nice little message saying "many of our services are down this weekend, please come back later..." - a bit more useful than a timed-out connection.
So anyway, while 3 of us were setting things up, I stood in the doorway so as to give my 2 co-workers more room. Just outside, there was a vending machine, a lift and some public phones. A girl was waiting for her friend to finish on the phone, and went to get something from the vending machine. I noticed some letters on her t-shirt which I took to be Hebrew. Suddenly she said "oh my god, I can't believe I did something so stupid !", and giggled and said something or other to her friend. Then she walks up to me and says "uhm, do you want these ?", handing me a packet of cheese & bacon "Cheetos" (I couldn't get her to let me pay for them). She bought something else from the vending machine, and disappeared into the lift with her friend. I guess I was right about her being Jewish :P
1999-02-20
I've just been cleaning the kitchen floor. You heard me. It's Saturday night, and I'm cleaning the fucking kitchen floor. Can you tell I'm bored ?
I was still in a bit of a shitty mood after some work crap on friday arvo, so I stomped around the city a bit and ended up visiting Peril Underground for the first time in a while. I had a listen to another Muslimgauze CD - In the band's usual political manner, this one's called Salaam Alekum, Bastard, and in the liner notes it says "Dedicated to the invisible hands of revenge". Hrm. If you get the opportunity to have a listen to anything by Muslimgauze, I can recommend it - even if you don't agree with the politics, it's still really good music - nice percussion, a lot of middle-eastern sounds, and interesting samples. Bryn Jones has put out more stuff than either The Fall or Ed Kuepper, which is no mean feat.
Mid-arvo, I called Ana to see what she was up to - we haven't been doing a hell of a lot lately (it doesn't seem like she's been all that interested, but I probably haven't been pushing or trying hard enough), so I thought I should say hi and see if she wanted to do anything. Nice idea, but she was in Sydney, having done one of those mystery flights with a friend. I'm pretty sure I'd mentioned to her a week or two back that I was thinking of doing one of these mystery flight things. Oh well. I called up one or two other random friends I hadn't seen or heard much from in a while, but they were all busy too. I'd got home a bit earlier than usual for a Saturday, so I wandered out to JB Hi-Fi to try and find a few more CDs. No luck, but on the way Raoul Records called me to say that the Style Council boxed set I'd ordered 2 months ago (as an extra christmas present for my sister) had finally arrived, so I went all the way over to St Kilda to pick it up. I poked my head into a bookshop, but found no joy.
So here I am. Saturday night, and in the absence of anything better to do, I figured it was about time I cleaned the kitchen floor. I feel better having done at least something useful today. In the middle of all this, my mobile rang. I was so psyched into the Domestic Thang that my brain had dribbled out my ears, and when the person asked for Ana, I went straight into answering machine mode, saying "I'm sorry, she's not here right now, can I take a message ?", rather than saying "um, like, she's not here at all." Oops. I called her phone, feeling a tad guilty about interrupting her a second time, but I got diverted to her MessageBank so I just left a message. If I can keep this up, I might be able to change careers and become a secretary. Dunno if I could cope with shaving my legs tho'.
Hmm. After poking about on the Muslimgauze web pages a bit more, I note that Bryn Jones died on January the 14th - the memorials page tells more. What with my grandfather passing away on January the 11th, and David McComb (of the Triffids et al) on February the 2nd (read his memorial page too), this isn't such a good year for the people I've looked up to...
1999-02-26
Went to a Greek restaurant in Richmond, 'cause an old friend is being relocated to Brisbane for work. The joys of being the "raw meat" of the IT industry...The food wasn't too bad, and we got to watch random greek people dancing and smashing plates on the floor, etc. Curiously, the sink in the toilet had pedal-operated taps...
