Author: Grant

The next Platinum event will be a dinner/dance session held at Shamiana, a rather exclusive and erotic location. It’s due on the 23rd of July and promises to be quite a night :)

Meanwhile, it’s tweak the current website, try to get time to load the photos from Mayday and work on the new website. What time, we ask ourselves?

At last – my ADSL is connected again – much rejoicing, I can assure you. So much for hoping that ADSL would be there when my phone was reconnected – nope :(

Apparently Telstra had, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the disconnection was permanent and dropped the ADSL flags from the service. This is thanks to the fact that they provide the “last mile” connection (from exchange to venue) for all ADSL across Australia, regardless of who’s routing things once it gets to the DSLAM in the exchange. Word is that this is going to change soon – one can only hope…

Anyhow, I’m back again and it’s a good thing too – any longer without highspeed at home and I would have gone spare. For a while there I was using a 33k “emergency” connection we use to check the c2o server over at RUCC if our main links are down. Painfull, but it stopped me from having to go through too nasty a withdrawl stage :)

After a few weeks away due to travelling and family issues, I finally got a chance to come back to Strike and play the midnight to 3am set. Not sure how much longer this will be possible as the neighbours upstairs are calling in to complain if the music gets thumpy and it’s not even 2am.

Anyhow, I managed to have fun, even with the volume and base turned down towards the end. Played a sample line up that I’m thinking of doing for my next two mix CDs – a cruisy trance/house set and a fully tribal, hard set. See how we go :)

Wound up at Abode again on Sunday morning – went to hang out with friends and just relax. Once again the place was pretty packed and turned into an unofficial recovery party upstairs. I had my gear with me so, once again, I did a “last DJ standing” set, playing cruisy trance/house and working slowly into something a little more thumping and tribal, before winding it all down and going home for a much needed rest.

As part of an initiative across 10 APC members, we’ve produced a web page dedicated to Information Communication Technology (ICT) Rights. It provides information and resources shared across many organisations, individuals, researchers and advocates, all geared towards helping people understand what’s going on in the world of ICT and their rights to information access, privacy, etc.

A few hiccups with using the Zone Edit system for secondary mail services – the system I’d set up to block sites that send us lots of viruses was picking up the Zone Edit IPs and blocking them too – whoops. They’re now no longer being blocked and the mail is flowing again.

We’re still looking at an expensive month again though as there have been some spikes in our traffic. I’m still trying to get mrtg up and running so I can tell exactly where it’s all coming from…

Thanks to a stuff up with my home phone provider, I’ve been disconnected for a couple of days. Of course, this has taken out my ADSL as well. I’ve sorted things out with the provider and they’ve apologised and requested a reconnect. Of course, this takes a couple of days to do and they didn’t get it done on Friday, so now I’m offline until Tuesday (just my luck, Monday is a public holiday). So much for catching up on my backlog of work….

I went to the “Wrath” party at Abode on Saturday night (the second of the Deadly Sins events) to catch up with friends and have fun. Wound up staying most of the night and into the recovery party the next morning where I was offered the chance to take the “final DJ” set from about 9am to 11am. After a quick run home to get my gear (it’s only a few blocks away) I plugged in and kept everyone going with a dark tribal/speed-garage/doof set. Much fun and a good chance to try out a couple of new tracks.

Of course, after this and some work on Sunday helping a friend with his computer and plugging more RAM into the c2o.org server, I was exhausted and had to skip the chance to spin down at Strike. Given I’ll be up in Sydney next weekend it looks like I’m going to miss a couple of my Sunday sessions. C’est la vie.

I’ve been helping a friend with his computer woes – looks like either the hard drive or the controller on the motherboard has died. He’s got a couple of drives in there but it won’t boot and FDISK can’t find a fixed disk. Oops.

I picked up his machine on Friday night and took it down to my hardware supplier for examination on Saturday morning. While it’s away, I’ve loaned him an old laptop of mine so his partner can work on her assignments, do emails, etc. Went over to install it on Saturday night. All the time I’ve been over there, he’s keeping me going with drinks and dinner, etc – neat.

Later on Saturday night, I went into Club UK to help out with their computer woes. Caught up with a few people I hadn’t seen for a while which was great plus got a few beers for my troubles.

It’s all rather like “singing for my supper” and helps me get some socialising in without costing me anything – very handy at the moment when my pockets are empty.

We’ve now completed the transition to Zone Edit for our secondary DNS and mail services. There’s still a few minor issues to clear up but otherwise it’s done.

This should ensure that if our server is uncontactable for whatever reason, our domains don’t miss their emails, etc.