Tonight is the longest night of the year. For the nothern hemisphere at least. Solstice occurs at 06:08 to be exact. It only gettings lighter from here people (although to be clear that’s not indefinite :p).
On a morning I wake up and flip open the laptop screen. I VNC into my desktop and turn off the movie I had playing last night. To take myself up I turn on some rock music at a decent volume. I then proceed to check my email, check Facebook and get a few other jobs done.
The problem is, where do I go from here. If I’m getting up at a decent time it’s still gloomy outside and I need to turn a light on. But this requires getting out of bed before I really want to. I then need to get dressed too.
With all our advanced wireless technology I feel these are problems I shouldn’t have to deal with. How can I further automate mornings so I don’t have to deal with them by getting out of bed? USB desk light perhaps? Do they make ones you can control from your desktop? That would solve step one. Now I just need some kind of robot…
My server has been suffering quite a lot of downtime recently which on top of the less of revenue and amount of hours I have had to spend fixing it rather than doing uni work has had a far more important consequence – I have been unable to rant on my blog!
In order to solve this sites are getting moved around to new servers including my personal site which is now located on Jennifer.
Having read Kieran’s post which in turn leads on to Dan Zambonini’s post about which programming language gets you most sex it got me thinking. While it does, as Dan correctly points out, vary from situation to situation, you really don’t seem to be able to go wrong with Dot Net.
Think about it. People like myself and George we’re Python FTW. I generally use Python for my “real” programming projects (generally I just script so something that runs on my desktop is rare :p) because it’s fast. Just like me in the bedroom. While I doubt the same is true for George we both share the commonality of singledom. Admittedly George fairs much better than my own barron wasteland of a romantic life but bare with me.
How about say Kieran and Raby? Well Mr. O’Shea sold his soul to X-Lab for the summer writing in Dot Net (because secretly he’s just a big Microsoft fan boy :D) and is currently in a long term relationship with Heather that has gone as far as mystery weekends away so you know it’s serious. Meanwhile Raby is currently working for a year at CSC who code a lot in Dot Net after doing a summer intership of C#. The result? No shortage of ladies. Let’s just say, the girl in his profile pic isn’t his girlfriend ;).
Lessons learned? Getting laid starts with the Dot Net framework ;).
Is holding “ladies’ nights” at nightclubs descrimation? Apparently so. There is a lawsuit going on in the United States (ha, like I even needed to specify that) where someone has suited several New York nightclubs because he feels descriminated against by the discount entry and drinks offered to women.
It’s an interesting situation as when you look at it, it is descrimination. It’s hard to defend against that. But are their practical real-world limits to removing descrimination?
I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Brass Eye which just presents a brilliant picture of what a show it was.
The Capital Radio DJ “Doctor” Neil Fox, for example, informed viewers that “paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me”, before qualifying his remarks with “Now that is scientific fact – there’s no real evidence for it – but it is scientific fact”. Viewers were also told by the then Labour MP Syd Rapson that paedophiles were using “an area of Internet the size of Ireland”, and by Richard Blackwood that internet paedophiles can make computer keyboards emit noxious fumes in order to subdue children (Blackwood even sniffed a keyboard and claimed to be able to smell the fumes, which he said made him feel “suggestible”); Blackwood also warned watching parents that exposure to the fumes would make their children “smell like hammers”.
You just couldn’t make it up :D. Have a read for yourself. Although if you really want to experience the brilliance of Brass Eye you need to watch it. And remember – cake is a made up drug ;).
Apparently.
That’s the reason my blog, and indeed most of my sites, all my DNS, the list goes on have been down for the past 3 days.
My scripts are fine based on all the checks I have done so I don’t know where the security leak was. So much for managed hosting.
Thursday saw us head down to the Slug & Lettuce on Park Row for the Atheist Society Winter Solstice meal. Despite Jack’s pessimism when I told him I had booked for ten people and the fact that term had ended so a lot of people had gone home, we managed a turn out of eight which isn’t bad at all for an A-Soc social event.
While I was at first skeptical when we stepped into the Slug & Lettuce it turned out to be really good. They seated us quite fast once we had insisted that we actually had made a booking and it started to thin out so service wasn’t affected either. The one criticism that could be made was the music was pretty load but it is half a bar so I guess we can let that one slide.
The food was excellent, I was quite impressed and everyone else I discussed the issue with was also very impressed with their meal. Being two for one on desserts when you order main meals we made our way through quite a bit of food including some amazing chocolate-puddle puddings.
All in all it was a really good night and it was good to have an A-Soc social outside of the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pub visits but it was great to do something a little different and I like to think everyone else enjoyed it too.
Last night, at midnight, the Christmukkah WoW marathon ended. Out of the 72 hours of time in the period, 6 hours was a maintenance window resulting in a total playable hours of 66. I managed Just over 30 which is slightly less than half. Not amazing but given I had to get some sleep (this is the first time I’ve had more than one consecutive day off in months so I want some sleeping time :D) and given I attended events on both Wednesday and Thursday night I don’t think it was too bad.
Progress wasn’t quite as fast as expected, we ended up with myself and Norm on level 20, Michelle on level 18 and George on level 17. I was gutted we never managed to complete The Deadmines but it was fun none the less. We ended the night by getting blind drunk (literally) in the Blue Recluse and heading down to the canal between the Trade District and the Mage Quarter for some good old-fashioned drunken skinny dipping.
So guys, same against next year? 😀
