Author: Grant

Last night while setting up a DVD for Nykolai, we heard a massive “crack” sound followed by silence then a series of creaks and a crashing boom like a load of building supplies being dropped. From our balcony, we could see that the enormous old tree next to our garage had dropped a massive branch over a neighbour’s car and blocked the driveway for our apartments (not to mention making it difficult to get out the door :)

I wound up calling the State Emergency Service and they sent a team over to carve it all up, extract the car and do a bit of a clean up. As of this morning, the car’s been driven away (the roof was badly dented, it had a few more scrapes on it and one of the windows had popped out, but otherwise … :) There’s also a load of lumber in one of the parking bays so we’ll have to get the body corporate to pull a finger out and get rid of it. This may also make them get motivated to finally have the damned tree pulled down. It’s very tall, very old and has all the apartments around us scared that it’ll come down and take out a building…

I managed to get a series of photos of it all as the team did their work. They’re loaded at Tree Branch Madness.

One funny note was that apparently one of the neighbours called in a noise complaint to the police about someone using a chainsaw at 11pm. Yup – too much like hard work to come and see what’s going on. Far easier to just log a complaint and avoid actually having to meet the people around you…

Just found this link to a Hamster Powered Night Light – hmmmmm – Nykolai just got a pair of rascally rodents and one of them loves to run in the wheel – hmmmmmm – this could be fun…. :)

In addition to the cat at his mom’s place, Nykolai now has a pair of grey mice at my house. He’s named them Kissy and Licky (no – I had nothing to do with their names – honest! :) There are some photos of Nykolai and the terrible two over on Nykolai’s history page.

I’ve been helping my son Nykolai with his spelling home work. It’s rather comical, if a little sad, to watch him come to grips with the perils of pronouncing the English language. You really have to wonder how English can become the defacto language of business and technology around the world….

The subject motivated me enough to create a new “g-rant” entry about it. It’s lurking along with a few other entries over in the Soap Box area :)

Excitement is building – the BBC is going to play a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series based on the remaining books from the “trilogy.” They’re getting the old cast together again.

There’s also a movie being made and the trailer has just been released. Not showing much – just text and stars. A number of us are rather nervous that it’s going to be stuffed up (much as we’re wondering just how bad the Thunderbirds movie will be :)

Meanwhile, I’m listening to the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. It can be found out there on the ‘net in MP3 format and downloaded. Seriously funny stuff :)

After the session at Shamiana a bunch of us went back to the Abode club where I wound up doing the “Last DJ Standing” set once again. Lots of fun although thanks to a combination of tired and beer, I was fading fast at the end and have dim memories of shutting down, walking home and collapsing in a chair near the heater :)

On Friday night I was playing at the Platinum Exclusive dinner party in Shamiana, a very stylish restaurant in the city. I wound up on the decks from about 9pm to 1am, playing from background dinner/cocktail sounds through to club beats and cruisy, groovy sounds as the night picked up. I handed over to Miss Rene at 1am, thinking that she would be spinning until 3am, but the night wound up finishing not long after 2am. Whoops. Major embarrassment and apologies to Miss Rene – if I’d known, I would have cleared the decks way earlier.

I’ve been working on a new module for the kids – there’s a whole new series of plots and machinations for them to figure out, all the while continuing in the shadow of their previous module. Did they really save the world, or have they just brought it some time?

So much to document – over two years of role playing needs to be written down, sorted out and edited. Then there’s all the supporting documentation. This one’s going to be a lot of fun to do – just hope I have time to do it :)

After a bit of to’ing and fro’ing with Zone Edit, plus the development of a script that triggers the “Send queued mail now” command for each of our domains, things seem to have settled down.

It took a few weeks after we started using the Zone Edit backup mail servers before the entries showed up in the Account Details page. During that time, we seemed to be having all sorts of problems with mails being blocked and/or disappearing. Since then, all seems fine. I’ve not been able to get an answer from Zone Edit as to whether the delay was due to their accounts system or whether it might have caused some of the problems we experienced.

There is still the issue of some mail occasionally taking a long time to get from a Zone Edit secondary to our primary mail server. Scott at APC has noted that they’ve had mails take a day. Our worst case was three days. To help avoid this, I’ve written a script that fires off every hour and triggers a “send queued mail” process on their web based mangement console.

So far, things seem to be stabilising and it looks like we’re going to be able to continue using Zone Edit as our secondary DNS and mail service. Still early days yet, but we’ll watch and see.

Despite the length of time between postings, I’m still here at the Union and working on their systems. Trying to get things documented, stabilised and so on despite deploying new workstations to replace old ones, correcting phone system issues and general “geek tech” work :)