Invasion Day Thoughts and the Week in Review

For a long time I have disliked "Australia Day" and the 'celebration' of the the landing of British First Fleet in Port Jackson in 1788. At best it is nationalistic nonsense that is grossly insensitive to the past and continuing experience of the country's indigenous inhabitants. Stan Grant's short but brilliant speech is receiving some justified circulation that explains this from personal experience. There is a good petition by Avaaz to change the date (I think Mabo Day would be appropriate). For our own part, Ben Debney has an article on the Isocracy Network, On The Continuing Prevalence of Racism.

In the past several days I've had some enjoyable gaming experiences: last Thursday was a build-up session for our Laundry Files storygame, and on Sunday was the first session of a new Eclipse Phase story. Most importantly however was the first release of the RPG Review Cooperative's first newsletter. On Saturay we also had another awesome cheesequest day, a dual-birthday gathering for myself and ser_pounce where we played Anti-monopoly (amusingly subject to its own trademark law suit) and Set.

Work has been 'challenging' over the past few days, which is never an enjoyable thing to have to write in this profession. The old cluster, Edward, is really showing its age and limits. One of the storage arrays is currently out when the disk filled to a hundred percent over the weekend, causing NFS to fall over yet again. Five of the disks and a controller card are out over the two storage arrays which we've been screaming about, like foreever [insert Valley accent]. Fortunately I've managed to source replacement parts which we'll install tomorrow. Bringing up the downed array is a matter of some priority so user jobs don't die screaming in a heap.