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

[tcpip]

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.

Comments

[drjon.livejournal.com]

AromaMeet is almost always on. Even if no-one but me shows up ;}P>

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Any good day for a non-Gamer to stroll along to GenCon? I notice that Wash is appearing, but are there any interesting Media launches?

The programme is confusing and irritating, and the website isn't much better...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The programme is confusing and irritating, and the website isn't much better...

God yeah. It's downright terrible! A contender for a world's worst website award

Non-gamer day? Hmm.. At Gencon? Honestly I have no idea. Maybe in the last days before the con they'll actually have a full programme including the seminars, media events, film festival, Significant Others programme etc.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

OK, let's see if can rustle up some usual suspects..

[cheshirenoir.livejournal.com]

A friend in the medical community mentioned a piece of anti-spam software that automatically removed any e-mail with Cialis in it.

Unfortunately it did so even when this was inside another word.

There were meny Specialists on the list. They were not happy.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

There are so many pitfalls that one can make with regular expressions :-)

Then there's the ten worst website names...

We occasionally joke about how rough it must be for genuine viagra researchers these days.

Maybe these situations are a good example for an academic only Internet2?

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

I hate having to reparbreastion my drives when the root file system has been oversized. When the only installers I can find around the place don't have any lvm or ext2resize tools:

http://www.plex86.org/linux2/List-HD-Parbreastions-7498.html

I also remember when swinburne were giving the proxy server message saying "your IP has been logged since it was involved in a request for porn", for bytesex.org. bytesex of course being the repository of the v4l linux drivers.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I forgot, an astronomical tool was deliberately called S Extractor.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The fact that it was deliberate is very silly :-)

Mind you, apparently Apple did engage in a campaign once to get SCSI re-pronounced as "sexy".

[angel80.livejournal.com]

OMG, a binge!!! ;)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

And we even managed to avoid the special tax on alco-pops :-)

I also realise that I missed your recent visit to Melbourne; given that your conference was about two minutes by tram away from me that's most unfortunate. Next time for sure!

[angel80.livejournal.com]

True that I didn't think of meeting too many people as I was incredibly busy, but yes, next time I'll email you in advance. Same if you happen to be in Sydney!

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

You don't have a law against GWI (geeking while intoxicated)??

Also that xkcd comic just about killed me, especially since we've had our own fun recently with unescaped characters in XML messages. Not nice to bring down a regional telco's outage notification service because you forgot to do a simple regex on a string.

[anthrorabbit.livejournal.com]

I was hoping that "BrisVegas" was something other than what it sounded like...

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

Apparently Brisbane is filled with gaudy themed hotels, casinos and cheap buffets? When's the next flight?!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I've done some of my best geeking whilst intoxicated.. Although, I will be quick to point out, never on a work machine. I also seem to recall nearly deleting my home directory and it's backup once as well..

Then there was the time when we tried to install an ancient version Linux on a 486 with three people and a crate of beer...

Not nice to bring down a regional telco's outage notification service because you forgot to do a simple regex on a string.

Unless that was the intention in the first place, in which case a carefully submitted cron job would have been in order...

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

Then there was the time when we tried to install an ancient version Linux on a 486 with three people and a crate of beer...

Heh, I've done that too, minus the extra people (they drink too much of the beer!).