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Ok, so I set my alarm for 11.45am, after going to bed at 3.40am, but I wake up, of my own accord around 9.40am! Go figure. But I'm not tired, so it's alright. I have my morning coffee, and make a start on the Java assignment that is due next weekend. It's been so long that some of my Java skills are a bit rusty. I still can't remember how to do a reference variable as in C++.

So after a quick shower and lunch I headed out to see Marissa. I backed up her data to my Zip drive, since I remember the disks this time, then tried to get her webcam working. It's a really nice Kodak DVC-325. I couldn't get it going, so I have brought it home to try it myself now. It takes really good quality pictures.

Anyway so I was testing the webcam, and I try it on my page, and I catch some interesting sights. Somebody was showing off in an interesting way on the webcam that they have. It was a side of the person that I had never seen before *grin*. You should actually try and control the audience that is watching you ;-).

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After spending time doing Ethernet wiring, I have now got my new desk in place in the spare bedroom, with my computer all set up. You can check it on a webcam during the daylight hours. I have set up Marissa's webcam aimed at my desk presently. Check it out on my webpage.

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I am still impressed with this song. I have had it for a few years now, and it is still a very nice song. It's a bit of piano and nice sound mixed with a little bit of decent rap (I don't think most rap is any good), plus some acoustic vocals.

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Weird dream again last night. About my cellphone, aparently I didn't lock it, and it dialed somebody in the UK, and kept a line open for 3 hours. I shut it off quickly when I see this, and then Fido sends me a an SMS stating that I was charaged $28.17 a minute for my phonecall.

I'm going in to TechBC today, to drop off my fees and check up something on the Onyx, and I'm leaving shortly. Cya.

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So I got in to TechBC this morning, dropped off my fees, and went in to work some. Grabbed a 4.3 Gb hard drive from Dave downstairs, pulled off the controller board to fix the one pin on the IDE connector, as we think that is what the problem is. Fixed it, stuck it on sloth. No Go. It doesn't work. I go back downstairs to find Dave to tell him about the hard drive, and the power goes out.

Laptops all around bleat loudly, complaining of their interuption in the recharging cycle. Only one emergency light comes on, and there should be a lot of them. We grab a small flashlight, and head in to the server room, shut down the LCD displays to conserve UPS power. The UPS says 142 minutes at first. We head upstairs, and I grab the big flashlight we have in the fakespace. We head off through the bowels of the mall to the other network cluster. It's getting quite warm in there already, so we leave some doors open to keep it cooler, and head back to the main server room.

In the 15 minutes we were away, the temp in the server room has gone up to 37 degrees, and temp alarms are going off. We shut down a load of non-essential servers (All of the admin set, plus the disk arrays and the tape backup library). It starts to cool off now, as those are the big heat producers there. UPS runtime is up to 190 minutes now. We leave there for a bit to go and find the ET&L people to ask which of their servers to shut down. We miss them upstairs, and go back downstairs to find them. We walk into the server room, and the power comes back.

Ah! Air conditioning! In future, there needs to be at least an exhaust fan on the UPS circuit, to stop the servers overheating totally.

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I bought a birthday gift and card for galaxychild on my way home today. I will see about delivering it this evening.

I have finally squashed some more bugs with my webpage! It now looks 100% identical in both Internet Explorer 5.5SP2 and Mozilla 0.97. Now I just need to get rid of the server bugs, then I will be all set.

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Band: MIC
Album: Superhuman
Track: 08
Title: Lollipop Man

---

I've got a dream, but I don't know where it's from
There's a monster under my bed
Got a needle stuck inside my vein
Feels like the living dead
BRIDGE 1
You came and messed it up, you came and brought this cup
You are the bug that grew, and who invited you?
CHORUS
I saw the lollipop man
The jellitot queen in a limousine
I say the wayward son with the loaded gun
But it was just a bad dream
I will not live like this and I will not die like this
I will not live like this and I will not die like this
Not gonna cry, not gonna cry, not gonna cry
Your mouth shouted promises
Your heart whispered lies
My tears fall like a waterfall
Only now do I realise
REPEAT BRIDGE AND CHORUS
RAP
Psychedelic dream Sunday afternoon
Like an irritating lyric from a loony tune
Does this somehow represent my fate
So immediately I blame it on something that I ate
And then it kicks in and stares at me still
But I see sunlight dripping from my windows sill
And I know, and I know that it was just a scare
But I will endeavour to never go there
BRIDGE2
I don't want your wings for my brain
I may be crazy but I'm not insane
CHORUS
It was just a bad dream

(no subject)

I'm good. *raises hands*. A little bit of good techno/rock/alternative music that encourages you can help you get a lot of hard tasks done.

What did I do you ask? On the TechBC conferences, I posted some of my daily answers to the wrong forum. I sent them to the forum for the entire TechOne, instead of my team forum. I had seen a delete button on the faculty's systems before when they had logged in, so I managed to figure out how to delete my own messages, which ET&L have gone to a lot of trouble to try and stop learners doing. But now I have got it figured out. I want to see about editing my own posts in the future too, as that would be really handy for some typos I tend to make despite the spellchecker, which I prefer not to use, because it destroys the HTML in my messages.

Hmm, maybe I will just end up creating my own documentation for the XML-RPC interface to the backend they are using, so that I can do what I want properly. I asked for the documentation about it once before, but they said I was not going to get it because of security concerns. It wouldn't surprise me if there is no real security on the backend, like there should be.

Reverse-engineering the CMS system will probably be a major PITA, as from what I found in glancing through some of the source, it has really been hacked up badly. But the advantages are that in the end, I can have a really decent client of my own to read the CMS, without having to put up with the existing one. Ideally I would implement my new one in something cross-platform, probably PHP+XUL with XBL. It would need some JavaScript on the client end too, to parse the XML into HTML via XSLT.

(no subject)

You are...


Click the sprite to take the Which Caffeine-Induced Freak Are You Most Like? test.

(no subject)

Ok, now that I have given Yvonne her gift, I can tell everybody else what it was:
Lady Cottington's Book of Pressed Fairies

I first saw the book last semester when Sarah stopped at a book store when a group of us at TechBC were going to have lunch. It intrigued me, the idea of squashed fairies.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book Yvonne.

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I need to finish my postings for HTTC now, they are due by midnight and I still have a long one to write, plus I want to get to bed early, since my class is 8.30am tommorow morning.