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Happy (Chinese lunar calendar) new year everyone! ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
severina_242 and I celebrated the arrival last night with dinner at our favourite Chinese restaurant, Wong's on Glenhuntly road. He appreciated our wishing him "happy new year" - I think we were the only customers that mentioned this. He does great food and it's damn cheap too. Also amazing how many women on my friends list have been making comments along the lines "Year of the Cock - I wish!" already... Hmmmm...
The call for players and gaming announcement in my last post has come up with positive results. Ten Thousand Islands is now up to scene four, and I reckon I've pretty well figured out what basic stats I'm going to use for the Mimesis roleplaying system. There has been a lively discussion on the mailing list as well about game design, which is exactly what I want. Also, onstrangedave's suggestion, I've joined in the forums at The Forge and have been stirring the possum there. Finally, caseopaya as a novice gamer has fallen into the clutches of a single-person face-to-face Call of Cthulhu/Nephilim game. I mean, train 'em on the tough circuit, right?
IT life has been very busy of late. At Borderlands, I've been rebuilding their library database from a piece of crap called PrimaSoft to something useful, like MySQL. At Web Prophets I've been building test BSD servers (mail, web and admin), and most recently I've volunteered my services at the Unitarians to be second-on-call if the radio presenter goes awol - which has meant learning Adobe Audition. In addition I have a small mountain of web development that clients have heaped upon me, and to top it off, tomorrow morning I meet with an indigenous landscape manager for a database administrator role. All very interesting.
Other notable events of the past several days include convening the quarterly meeting for Labor for Refugees and setting up (finally) the national email list for said organisation. I've had no luck getting the person who runs the website to update it or pass on management, so setting up a new one seems to be the only alternative.
Last Saturday evecaseopaya and I went to the Astor, Melbourne's most beautiful cinema, to watch the double of Shark Tale and Team America: World Police. The former is NYC as a reef with intelligent fish, with a theme of "it doesn't matter if your really poor as long as someone loves you". Deep, eh? The latter film however was just a brilliant piece of work. A stylistic satire on the Thunderbirds, a thematic satire on US foreign policy and with clever censor-challenging scenes. Parents who are stupid enough to take their kids to this film without checking (a) the ratings and (b) what it includes deserve to be shocked.
The rats went to the Lort Smith Animal Hospital on Saturday. Poor ol' Harlequin, already suffering loss of movement in his back legs, is developing an ulcer or similar on his stomach. Tonight they both go to a vet. I've always considered it metaphysically unfair that intelligent social animals have short lifespans. The greatest thing that anyone can do is increase the lifespan and quality of life of living creatures.
Brain breaker of the week goes todaoistraver. What happens when a Professor of History at the University of Michigan whose specialisation is middle-east affairs decides to take on a hired idiot, like Jonah Goldberg on CNN/NPR over US foreign policy in Iraq? The
results are truthful, insightful and amusing - both times.
severina_242 and I celebrated the arrival last night with dinner at our favourite Chinese restaurant, Wong's on Glenhuntly road. He appreciated our wishing him "happy new year" - I think we were the only customers that mentioned this. He does great food and it's damn cheap too. Also amazing how many women on my friends list have been making comments along the lines "Year of the Cock - I wish!" already... Hmmmm... The call for players and gaming announcement in my last post has come up with positive results. Ten Thousand Islands is now up to scene four, and I reckon I've pretty well figured out what basic stats I'm going to use for the Mimesis roleplaying system. There has been a lively discussion on the mailing list as well about game design, which is exactly what I want. Also, on
strangedave's suggestion, I've joined in the forums at The Forge and have been stirring the possum there. Finally, caseopaya as a novice gamer has fallen into the clutches of a single-person face-to-face Call of Cthulhu/Nephilim game. I mean, train 'em on the tough circuit, right?IT life has been very busy of late. At Borderlands, I've been rebuilding their library database from a piece of crap called PrimaSoft to something useful, like MySQL. At Web Prophets I've been building test BSD servers (mail, web and admin), and most recently I've volunteered my services at the Unitarians to be second-on-call if the radio presenter goes awol - which has meant learning Adobe Audition. In addition I have a small mountain of web development that clients have heaped upon me, and to top it off, tomorrow morning I meet with an indigenous landscape manager for a database administrator role. All very interesting.
Other notable events of the past several days include convening the quarterly meeting for Labor for Refugees and setting up (finally) the national email list for said organisation. I've had no luck getting the person who runs the website to update it or pass on management, so setting up a new one seems to be the only alternative.
Last Saturday eve
caseopaya and I went to the Astor, Melbourne's most beautiful cinema, to watch the double of Shark Tale and Team America: World Police. The former is NYC as a reef with intelligent fish, with a theme of "it doesn't matter if your really poor as long as someone loves you". Deep, eh? The latter film however was just a brilliant piece of work. A stylistic satire on the Thunderbirds, a thematic satire on US foreign policy and with clever censor-challenging scenes. Parents who are stupid enough to take their kids to this film without checking (a) the ratings and (b) what it includes deserve to be shocked.The rats went to the Lort Smith Animal Hospital on Saturday. Poor ol' Harlequin, already suffering loss of movement in his back legs, is developing an ulcer or similar on his stomach. Tonight they both go to a vet. I've always considered it metaphysically unfair that intelligent social animals have short lifespans. The greatest thing that anyone can do is increase the lifespan and quality of life of living creatures.
Brain breaker of the week goes to
daoistraver. What happens when a Professor of History at the University of Michigan whose specialisation is middle-east affairs decides to take on a hired idiot, like Jonah Goldberg on CNN/NPR over US foreign policy in Iraq? The results are truthful, insightful and amusing - both times.