Work Reviews, BrisVegas/Gencon/Gaming and A Day on the Sauce

Had reviews for the two organisations I work for over the past week (VPAC and ARCS). Both went much better than expected; this is probably because I give myself a pretty average rating on my own abilities in systems administration. Evidently this view is not entirely shared by my managers. As an immediate side-effect I'll be taking up evening classes next semester in Training and Assessment which, due to my pre-existing honours degree, can be upgraded to a Graduate Certificate with relative ease. Also in work issues we discovered the minor bug in our parallel submit functions for MATLAB - the submit filter, instead of stripping out newlines, was stripping out the letter 'n'. A bit rough when you have a cluster called 'tango', eh? Still, a colleague at a different shop was telling me of early morning 'phone calls as their messenger service was falling over because it couldn't handle the ampersand in the surname field which was being used by companies (such as "Smith & Sons"). I referred him to a highly appropriate xkcd comic (after giving him some useful XML references). All of this however pales into insignificance with the problems faced this week by tau_iota_mu_c; falling telescopes!

Looking forward to visiting Brisbane at the end of this week and weekend, the Gencon programme is pretty busy and will see if I can arrange a meeting with all and sundry Brisvegas people whilst I'm there (drjon? Aromameet on Friday perhaps?). Apropos such things my review of Swordbearer was published on rpg.net and well received and Dr. Dennis Sustare, the original author (along with classics like Bunnies & Burrows), has also joined the mailing list I set up. Today I finished a lengthy review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe which will put up soon. In actual play last Sunday saw the completion of the River of Cradles campaign, which went very well.

Saturday was a brilliant boozy lunch, afternoon and dinner with caseopaya, recumbenteer and Louise. We downed a three bottles of wine, a bottle of mead, a bottle of green ginger wine, a round of cosmopolitans, and a round of mulled wine. Somewhere in that process I patched the missing shared libraries and perl modules for recum's tablet computer, played a game of Chez Geek (easily won by Louise) and watched some of Michael Moore's "The Awful Truth" (including the brilliant Merry Christmas episode). Sufficiently stretched out over a twelve hour period, it was a pretty good way to spend a lazy Saturday.