Cold Play – The Scientist

Well, I suppose I could celebrate – this is my 200th post since moving to WordPress. There’s been good times, bad times, mediocre times and of course the drunken shenanigan times.

But I’ve been feeling really bummed out today, and I don’t know why. It’s like I’ve been defeated, but I don’t know what by.

Uh oh, it’s rhyming… it could become an emo limerick if I’m not careful, maybe even an ode.

Well, I was hard-marking an exam with a big red pen and compelling our department’s PFY to do stupid things for my amusement, while listening to one my favourite songs – Underworld’s Jumbo, from Beaucoup Fish, and even that couldnt cheer me up. Furiously deleting the pleas of some clients to release their blocked emails, which were just chain mails from their idiot friends, didn’t make a lick of difference to my mood.

I even popped a couple of St John’s Wort pills… that’s the first time in maybe 10 months I’ve had to resort to those, and they didn’t make a dent in my woe.

Then Benny sent me this:

http://www.stupidvideos.com/video/international_ads/Sharpen_Up/

Suddenly things arent so bad, thanks to some good kiwi advertising. Hopefully the bike ride home will also unleash some seratonin and endorphins and stuff, I’m up to 100km’s for Bikewise now.

If not I might just scratch dark words into my flesh until I fall into a sleep I wish I wouldnt wake from

./emo

/UPDATE: I was reflecting on this post and remembered that I’ve often felt a little under the weather around this time of year, and I’ve only noticed that it has been the case for at least the last four or five years. So, remembering that XAMPP comes with a bio-rhythm generator, I went and found another one (couldn’t be bothered firing up XAMPP’s one on my dev webserver) If you believe in bio-rhythms, good for you, I’m still on the fence because I havent bothered to research if there’s any hard science to it – but it’s interesting nonetheless. You’ve also just found out my birthday.

1165. Kosheen – [The 2003 Annual #43] Catch [4:01]

My internet connections have been going slow for a while now, this afternoon after testing my Wellgo bike shoes, I finally got the motivation to check my router.

The big blue arrow points to where my local DNS caching server died. Guess I’ll have to steal one of the old compaq’s I’ve got sitting under my desk at work *sigh* And OpenDNS had a server outage or something, so that’s my primary and secondary DNS being extremely unhealthy. But the plot thickens…

My DSL connection has been down since Wednesday. It appears that xtra have thrown me into some other IP pool, so my load balancer’s monitor IP would no longer work. I’ve done a naughty thing and set the DSL router to be both the gateway and the monitor IP in my load balancer pool, it’s up and working now. Faster then before, but not as fast as it was. I’ve forgotten just how much difference a local DNS cache can make

So all in all, I think now I have to investigate WiMAX and maybe bridging with a cable connection somewhere. In the meantime, I have to replace my dead DNS caching server and while I’m at it I should update my router to get full failover working, and then start doing some QOS on DNS and ACK traffic. Especially seeing as I’ll be hosting a couple of Sun Sparcstations and a pair of O2′s…

*sigh* Girls are less effort

0354. Foo Fighters – [Skin And Bones #01] Razor [6:48]

You’re out there, you know who you are.

Happy Birthday. I remembered.

1436. Underworld – [Beaucoup Fish #03] Jumbo [6:57]

The GM cornered me downstairs earlier today and asked me a bunch of questions about the client I’m tasked with. This means he knows who I am, and hopefully how important I might be to this account. I’ve noticed lately that the layers of management have learnt to get off my back, because they need me more than I need them…

Alas, I applied for two other jobs today – one internal and one external. Here’s hoping.

My new Wellgo shoes arrived today too, so tonight I’ll be cleating them up and seeing if they’ll work with my Time Z pedals. If they engage I’ll go for a gentle cruise to Lower Hutt and back, along the Hutt River stop bank. My legs are still killing me from Touch on Friday night where I unleashed the fury a little bit

0838. Shapeshifter – [Soulstice #01] New Day Come [7:15]

Friday night was the last touch game of the season, so I got on the chop. CJ came over and we watched Beerfest, even though we were chatting through the movie it did get a few laughs – Broken Lizard appear to be back on form after the not so good Club Dread. I drank maybe a dozen and a half that night.

Initially averse to the first dance, Bjorn caved in.

Saturday I went to Bjorn and Ele’s wedding reception at the Silverstream Resort. A couple of my mates asked me if I was ok because I went silent a few times – I was appreciating the sheer beauty of the place, it’s easy to forget that just a couple of k’s away is the landfill. It was a shame though that I had to appreciate the beauty alone while surrounded by so many happy couples. So I decided that I had drinking to do, of course while dressed to the nines. A lot of Macs Gold, a lot of Tuborg and a lot of Carlton was consumed, as well as a few shooters of locally made Bourbon – Mighty Mouse was trying to punish me for being a wisearse, but I rose to his challenge

At the end of the night we all piled into taxi vans, and our driver was a gestapo anti-fun nazi – screaming at us to leave all the bottles there. Well, my warrior gene kicked in and I took that as a challenge. I managed to stuff four bottles of Tuborg into my pockets, and Sleaze and Karmen smuggled a bottle of bubbly in as well. On our random tiki tour around the Hutt – a ploy to crank up our fare to 50 bucks – Sleaze, Karmen and myself sneakily and defiantly continued chopping it up at the back.

Steve-o and his girlfriend Ky, it’d be cute if he’d just cover up his puku

So we went back to Benny and Sleaze’s and it just went downhill from there, I kept drinking till about 5am whereupon my autopilot engaged – I stumbled home, had a few big glasses of water and slept till about 1pm. I woke up wearing two pairs of underwear and my riding sunnies – I don’t know what I was thinking, but maybe I was preparing for the worst. The worst obviously being something to do with maybe pooping myself and waking up to a bright sunny day – I can only imagine that I was logically taking pre-emptive action at the high probability of this threat going through. All in all, over two dozen consumed by yours truely.

Sunday, my hangover was surprisingly small. I had a hairy lemon, went and had a steak at Murphy’s and saw this:

The owner rolled his eyes at my references to 88mph and the flux capacitor. He laughed when I asked if anything had fallen off. But to be honest, given the age of the Delorean, I think it’s still a damn sporty looking car – very low set, very much like a Lotus.

Anyway, my parents are going over to Aussie on Saint Patrick’s day and will be back on the 27th, so maybe it’s time… *tweaks imaginary moustache while chuckling to himself*

I have three more parties on my calendar and after that I’ll start my detox course
* Toga Party at the Massive
* Touch team end of season Court Session (3kegs, countless crates.. ugh)
* Saint Patrick’s Day

April can’t come soon enough, I’m probably pickling my liver something awful

I didn’t know that Bikewise was on, I’m a little shitted that I missed out on half of it.

Oh well, I’m signed up anyway: http://www.bikewise.co.nz/System2_0/Battle/members/deptList.aspx?deptID=274 I think this weekend if there’s nothing else on I’ll go for a ride to Upper Hutt and back to make up the lost distance.

EDIT: Since starting cycling and touch, I’ve lost about 3cm off my waist (damn, time for new pants), and this morning I put on a backpack that I havent worn in months, and I was a little surprised when I clicked on the waist strap – two inches off my puku. If this keeps up I might be carved out of marble again before you know it

At work we had some plants in our department for, oh, five years or so. But as recently blogged, our new owners have started taking away the last vestages of what was once Computerland. Our taxi provisioning was taken away from Corporate Cabs and replaced by the lowest common provider with the worst drivers possible. Our Water Cooler has been replaced by a putrid Water Filter. The communal newspaper that we all mayhemically (is that a word? It should be) shared on our lunch breaks has been banned, and I have a feeling that access to stuff.co.nz and nzherald.co.nz will be going bye bye pretty soon.

Recently they decreed that our plants would also go, but we’ve had these plants for so long, my personal favourite being Bruce. I never really cared for Henry or George, they were always so pompous and self-centred, whereas Bruce was keen to just hang out and do his thing.

Bruce the lanky yucca-esque plant. At least I think he’s a yucca-esque, you don’t really ask Bruce about his lineage – at first he goes silent, and then he gets MAD!

Well, I tried to hide Bruce in management issue corporate garb, to stress that he is basically a staff member

Bruce the lanky whatever he is in stealth mode.

But his garb was unceremoniously stripped and he was torn from the room. Only to be replaced by the very sterile and very slutty henceforth named Brucetta:

Apparently they’re going to auction off the plants to the staff, how pathetic – treating them like objects! Oh well, I’ve voiced dibs on Bruce, so hopefully he becomes available and I can take Bruce home. My flatmate has a lot of girly plants in the house, it’s about time some masculinity was restored.

I’m flat out today, honest. I have even procured the help of the all knowing, all wise Office Oracle – the Magic 8-Ball. It’s helping out well with my work

me: “Oh wise and wonderful magic 8-Ball, how can I resolve this Citrix fault?”
8-Ball: “It is certain”

The 8-Ball is also helping me to listen to Lily Allen’s “Alright Still”, I saw her kick some arse at the Big Day Out, and I’ve been listening to this album over the last couple of days. She’s hard to define, but imagine The Streets, except female, chirpy and above all varied. Whereas The Streets has a formulaic sound, Lily Allen can have one song reminiscent of a circus beat and then have seperate tracks with individual and combined hints at UB40, Mike Flowers Pops and Roni Size.

All in all, my workmate summed her up in one word: Groovy

Said workmate also introduced me to one of these, after two seconds I wanted one, badly. They go for about 45 bucks on Tardme

only when some bastard gets you in the ear when you’re walking to the neutral zone with your hands in the air, having been hit

I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Apart from that, it was a pretty sweet stag day for Bjorn, I arrived home reeking of The Stripper and Tequila. Great times

Backstory: when I was living in Brooklyn, boarding with the Sheppards, WINZ (studylink didn’t exist) overpaid me $1200. I thought it was just my usual loan and my course related costs, so I spent it on blackjack and hookers (computer equipment and text books). This was when I first discovered the swine that is WINZ – when you want to borrow money, they take their sweet time getting the forms to you – up to two weeks in some cases, but when you owe them money – no sir, all the stops are pulled. I woke up bleary eyed on my day off to the rattling of the door, an OVERNIGHT COURIER was at the door, and he was as grumpy as I was.

Within the envelope the courier driver handed to me on that sunny morn was not the $30,000 sweepstakes payout that I may have won, it was a very curt letter from WINZ demanding that I pay them back for their error IMMEDIATELY or they’d let Baycorp rape me.

$5/week was all they were going to get out of that poor bum student. And that’s all they got, until I was full time employed and started paying some lump sums to get that debt sorted out ASAP.

Recently, as part of my budgetary audit, I decided to get that debt sorted once and for all – I could do it in a couple of weeks if I chose to, but my automatic payment to them no longer existed, I was concerned that I might owe them more than expected. So I called up WINZ to find out how much I owed, no dice. So I sent Studylink an email, the next day a very vague email arrived saying nothing really but hinting that I should call their debt collections department. It was not boding well for Uncle Ra.

I got through to a very friendly woman named Thelma (heh) who listened to my story and abruptly offered “you know, you finished paying this off on the 20th of December last year, in fact you overpaid us fifteen dollars, so if you check your account, you should see a payment from us of about fifteen bucks sometime in January”

To say I’m rapt is to understate. One less hassle to deal with, and instead of sorting that out, I can now focus on getting rid of my student loan, saving up for my OE, the Powdered Toastmen trip to Raro in 2010, and a house deposit.