What an excellent title for a bad art-house horror flick!

Actually this is entirely documentary: A couple of weeks ago Erin and I stayed the night at Erin’s Mum’s place in Ballarat. In the morning we discovered the Mutant Lemons!

Aparrently there is a virus or something afoot in Ballarat which makes them grow like this, and it’s happening all over town. We thought about bringing it back home to show people, but eventually decided that the responsible thing to do was probably to leave the offending lemon with its potential virii in Ballarat where we found it.

Feel free to comment if you know anything else about this.

I have been called a ‘hardware slut’ on more than one occasion. I can’t really deny it. Today finds me drooling over a new case which is currently hanging in that murky space between official release and actually hitting the shelves, in which it is mysteriously ‘out of stock’ in all stores. It looks like this:

and it’s called the Asus Vento 3600. I swear the door on the front was designed by someone who has read-access to my dreams…

We wants one, precious.

This seems like a suitable topic to follow yesterdays post:

I just wrote a backup script to periodically tar up the entire linuxish contents of my laptop and put them on the server.

The hard part (in terms of time consumed) was finding a suitable algorithm for scheduling it. I don’t want it to run in the middle of the night, because I’m concerned that it will be frantically pumping large slabs of data into the server at the same time that the server is trying to back itself up, severely impacting backup performance.

I don’t really want it to run during the day (although I am running one right now) because it will slow things down and chew resources which I might otherwise be using for my own ends.

In the end, I decided that the optimal scheduling algorithm was to run it when I feel like it. 🙂 It means that I forfeit reliable regular backups, but all the other schemes I examined would have been so careful about not being inconvenient that they could hardly have been called ‘reliable’ anyway.

Along with its trusty swiss-army-chainsaw PERL!

BWA-ha-ha-haaa!

I’m not sure if these are the chortlings of hysteria or victory: I eventually resorted to a perl script with scrapes the wiki page every fifteen minutes and munges it into my static homepage. The carnage is quite astonishing, but it seems to work!

Work this week is somewhat tense since Andrew and Steve left, but mercifully quiet in other ways. everyone seems to be adapting to the one-big-office environment with a little time. Even Beck!

I should *really* go home now. Even if it’s not my night to cook, I am expected to actually be there to eat at some point.

*marches off chortling inanely*

Today is, on the whole, going better than yesterday. The debris really is finally settling, and I can focus on cleaning up and moving on.
I have felt like maybe I am having a better day than has marked the norm for the past few weeks: this is supported by the fact that I beat Erin’s high-score on Bejeweledthis morning.
The noise in here is much loader than yesterday. So many people have come back from overseas assignments or leave, and arguments are afoot everywhere. I would go mad, but I seem not to be.
Generally, not the most newsworthy of days.

The office-move is now theoretically ‘complete’. It is to laugh…

The phones are at least mostly functiuonal now. I am expecting the PABX-programming person to arrive at about the same time that I want to leave. :-/
Vast masses of furniture which no-one will accept responsibility for lie heaped in the old DCI area which our lease says we vacated on friday and someone else moved into today… D’oh.

…and I still crave sleep. Erin was awake half the night with nightmares. This is not what kept me awake, but sleep largely eluded me nonetheless. Our whole office seems to be at about a million degrees too for some reason… Urgh. Maybe I’m just sick.