Random raves

It must be said that working a 12 hour day - on the first day of your period ... when you inexplicably do not have any Neurofen in your bag ... when the shop you are able to duck out to at lunchtime only stocks poxy paracetomol, which barely takes the edge off ... when your dinner was a bag of potato chips, since there were no muesli bars in the snack machine ... when three projects underway today all had cock-ups of various dimensions - really sucks monkey balls.

Home now, finally, after taking 10 minutes to locate a taxi, since the pavement where the rank is usually situated was closed. The taxis, however, were queued over the road, with nary a light to be seen. How the hell are you supposed to tell if they're on duty - assuming you're lucky enough to spot them - with them lurking in the dark that way?

Still, home, finally, with ½ a gram of ibuprofen in me, which will undoubtedly be kicking in any time now.

I just watched the Star Trek movie, finally. Ok, I've never been a Trekkie, but I didn't mind the TV show as a kidlet (I liked it way better than Lost In Space). But am I the only person in the universe to think that the recent movie was essentially shite? Great cast, but the story sucked, the effects were trite and music was fucking annoying.

It was the story part that was the worst aspect - all the chicks in mini-skirts, James T Kirk driving sports cars (!) and futuristic motor bikes and being a Bad Boy™ until his True Worth™ is finally recognised and he is redeemed via the powah of finding his True Destiny™ as the Noble Captain™, because he Just Knows the Right Thing to Do At All Times™ (it's In His Blood™, don't you know). And he didn't even do the flirting with chicks thing well. Shatner at least managed to play the shagging-the-green-ladies bit with humour and actual panache, as opposed to the "How you doin'?'" style of this moron. And Shatner had better sideburns.

As for Spock and Uhura getting it on, WTF? And even more WTF without any backstory (or forwardstory) about their getting it on whatsoever (except for him getting a bit of a snog from her when Vulcan gets blown up - way to comfort someone) - so much for even bothering to try and sell that particular subplot. I've read fanfic from 17-year-olds that's more convincing in terms of character arc (and getting unlikely couples together).

Yeah, they threw in a couple of lines from the TV show and some visual gags (viz. green ladies), but it added up to a sticky half-melted mess of candy floss when you were hoping for nice buttery popcorn.

I'm even more amazed at the fact that this pile of crap was so highly rated. I think Roger Ebert's review was the only one that seemed near the mark, from my perspective. I would alter his final line: "If you want [shitty, bombastic, underdeveloped and unnuanced] space opera, you've got it." It's not even good sci-fi, even for the crappy standard of sci-fi in movies.

6/10, mainly for some good characterisation of everyone except Kirk (the Prodigal Bad Boy™ - there is a difference between pouty bad boy and proper mavericks) and Spock-the-younger (he's sooo emotional and conflicted and sad and girls want to kiss it better, gah!) and the baddie (let's get Eric Bana and waste him), and a couple of funny bits - Kirk running around an icy planet being chased by a giant bug seemed to be about the only scene that could have been seamlessly incorporated into the TV show.

Trix
     to ANZ_cc_cust_service.,  b0sslady@dell.com, AAA Techie. 19:19 (3 minutes ago)


Dear all:

I'm afraid I'm getting quite dissatisfied with what is going on here.

Here is the issue:

I purchased a laptop with the service tag 5XD???? on the 18th of August and got it at time specifically as I would be able to conveniently upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released. As part of the purchase, I upgraded from Windows Vista Business Edition to Windows Vista Premium Edition. I expected to be able to receive the Windows 7 Premium Edition upgrade.

1. Logged onto http://win7.dell.com to register for the upgrade. Found that my machine is registered with having Business Edition and is therefore only eligible for the Windows 7 Professional upgrade.

( ...moan, grizzle )

...not to mention my PMP. But at least I have backup sounds on my work PC if I forget to bring my tunes.

I have a colleague who sits right next to me, who eats like a pig. Well, he actually eats like someone of his nationality, and it involves much slurping, chewing with mouth open and licking fingers. It drives me insane, as well as grossing me out. And he's a small guy, and eats constantly. At least every hour on the hour.

But I can't put on my music to drown him out today. WOEZ. It's 10:10am, and he's been eating something since 9:15. I really don't need this kind of penance first thing on Monday morning!

Speaking of cultural differences with food, though, I admit that I am far from being perfect. I can't make myself slurp Japanese noodles, although I haven't eaten them in Japan (yet). Also, I had a Japanese flatmate who didn't slurp, and she said that she thought it was "lower-class" to do so noisily. When in Rome, though...

If someone is of European descent, it's one of those things that I find very diffcult to keep politely quiet about. Not everyone has the same upbringing as I did, but keeping one's mouth shut while chewing is one of those rules that is adhered to (and broken) at all levels of the class hierarchy. I also blame American TV for encouraging the notion that it's cool to engage in long periods of dialogue while masticating - is it something they teach in actors' school? "Hey, show those punters you're really eating! Do big chomps! Open that mouth really wide while you're chewing! Talking at full bore while you're doing that shows masterful actorly skills!"

I have to say that it's a dealbreaker for me, if I'm interested in someone romantically, and they eat excessively badly. I am not a stickler for table manners per se - since I'm pretty crap myself, unless I'm in a formal setting - but watching food revolving around someone's mouth and hearing the entire process at volume LOUD just makes me want to vomit. Blech.

PS. My colleague has finally stopped munching. Peace is restored!

I'd just like to have a wee bitch about the seemingly prevailing opinion that not being an early riser is somehow less morally virtuous than those who enjoy waking at sparrow's fart. It really irks me. It annoys me that the construction across the road starts at 7am... and finishes some time around 3 or 4pm. It annoys me that the courier company sends their drivers out on the road by 8am, but I don't get the stupid card that tells me how to redirect the parcel delivery until after I get home from work... after 6pm (and of course I can't leave a message with the company until that 8am start time - making coherent conversation before I've had my breakfast isn't really the best thing).

So, I am normally awake around 15 or 16 of the 24 hours. I don't have afternoon naps, unless I'm extremely debilitated (ie. I'm sick or jetlagged). I work 40 hours a week, and often a bit more than that. I just really fail to see why the fact I'd rather start work some time around 10am and let my day go forward on that basis is somehow less "good" than being the 8am starter.

Ironically, nearly all of my partners have been early risers (not even "average" risers - early). I've only had one actually come the sanctimonious attitude at me personally. This was fine, because she was perfect in nearly every other way, and sorting out the fact there wasn't one "baddie" in that particular relationship was a nice balancing experience for both of us. What I'm objecting to more is the prevailing societal attitude that "early is better".

I'm trying to think what the basis of it might be. Monks get up at disgusting hours to do Matins - maybe that's where early = good came from? But where did they get the idea? It's not an at-one-with-nature thing, either. While the sun rises earlier in summertime, it also goes down later. So too with the sun rising late in winter - I don't see any particular advantages in getting up early (ie. in the dark) at any time of the year.

Anyways, that's enough of that rant. Just one of those things that bugs me every time I come across it, such as when trying to intersect with couriers, and sleep through construction noise. What was particularly galling about the courier is that he phoned me at work when he was looking for my home address - he was at the wrong end of the street. I asked him to divert to my workplace instead, rather than leaving the stupid little card - no, apparently driving less than 5 minutes from my home to my workplace would have fucked up his schedule more than eventually finding where I actually lived and scribbling his stupid card. I assume he'll be doing the same run again when I actually manage to get it redirected, since my work is less than a kilometre from where I live. I fail to see how this arrangement actually saved him any time.

On a non-rant front, he is delivering the new water filter I ordered. I pretty much drink only sparkling water, since I don't much like the taste of normal water. I was annoying myself at how many plastic bottles I was going through (the 1.5 litre ones, but still). I bought a SodaStream (once they finally got back into the shops after Xmas), so I can sparkle as much water as I like, and reuse the same bottles. However, even carbonated, Canberra's tap water tastes vile, so I hope the nice filter will improve it! (Athough while I'm on the grumpy rant thing, it annoys me that the filter site makes the stupid assertion about us needing to drink 6 or 8 or however many gallons of water a day it is to "stay healthy" - complete bollocks).

So, I get the acting "Technology Services" manager coming up to me today, saying "Is there an issue with the mail?" He is not my manager, he's one up and one to the side. I pause a bit, to let the stupidity of his question sink in a while (since I was calmly browsing the net at the time, and not pulling my hair out going fuckfuckfuckfuck), and reply "No."

"Oh," sez he, "$EXECUTIVE_PA went to $CUST_SERVICES_MGR and said that she wasn't getting any email from her Optus account. He told her to print out all the errors she was getting, and then he gave them to me to investigate." While $TSM was telling me this, he was standing there clutching a sheaf of at least 20 pages, presumably the errors that $EXECUTIVE_PA had carefully printed out from her home account. In colour.

I grabbed the top printout, and sure enough, it says in words of one syllable that the sender domain is being blocked by the RBL. There is even a dinky little link that the user can click to see what that means. At present, Optus has a whole network of their servers being blocked by Trend Micro, and if they can't be bothered getting rid of their spammers, Trend can't be bothered removing them from their RBL (they're very proactive when they get a removal request - it's a paid service). Evidently the $EXECUTIVE_PA didn't bother contacting Optus with regard to their problem but buttonholed $CSM instead.

What gets me is that none of the parties in this little chain of events went to the Helpdesk, whose job it is to log ALL technology-related issues, who (in this instance) would have known what the issue is (this isn't the first time, duh), known the fact that they can request an exemption, logged a call to me, and the whole thing would have been fixed in 1/2 an hour, tops. No. We have button-holing. We have a CSM who is a third-level manager, with the Helpdesk in his purview. There is in fact a Helpdesk Manager (who could have dealt with the problem if there had been no satisfactory resolution to the original call... if there'd been one). If $CSM didn't have the balls to tell $EXECUTIVE_PA to walk the three steps past his office door to the Helpdesk counter to log a call, he could have done it himself. So, after his "help", she trots home like a good girl, and massacres a few trees to print out multiple copies of the same error msg. The following day (who knows how long?), CSM still can't be bothered walking three steps to the HD, or 15 metres to my desk, no, he fobs it off to $TSM. Who isn't normally based in Canberra anyway. And then we get to me, finally.

I told $TSM to log the call. I fixed it in 10 minutes. Fuckers.

...By the way, I don't have any problem with someone like $CSM cruising by or asking me while I'm making a cuppa if I know of any related issues. I just object to the waste of time, and the involvement of one third-level manager and one fourth-level manager in getting me to do a routine part of my job. Especially when the established procedure would have been at least a day faster.

Roll on Tuesday, when I don't have to listen to yet another bloody badly-rendered Christmas carol broadcast at 500 decibels. If they had nice choral versions of Here We Come A-wassailing and the like, I might be happier. Perhaps.

However, I just wanted to say something to the lovely woman who dressed her 6-year-old girl in a pink satin "princess" dress and then bought an ice cream for the child to eat while walking down the street... Get over yourself, bitch, because it ain't the kid's fault she dripped ice-cream over her dress. And lay off the heavy and martyred disapproval vibes after your injust chastisement of her. I won't blame the kid for resenting you like fuck when she hits her teens, as she undoubtedly will, if that's your usual parenting style.

Since your car is at least 34 years younger than mine, I'm sure that its superior roadhandling ability and torque makes it incredibly frustrating to have to knock 10 seconds off your transit time through the roundabout due to having to follow me through it in these wet and slippery conditions. I'm sure the fact you missed my front bumper by less than half a metre when you cut into my lane was a mark of your irritation at my going my normal speed out of the roundabout, which had thus required you to grind your gears for at least a minute in order to get past me. Yes, my brakes do work fine, thank you.

But why o why, after having expended all this effort and stress, did you have to immediately drop to less than 70km/h in an 80km/h zone? Although I was doing 80km/h at the time, it wasn't necessary to give my brakes another test right then, and it really freaked out the nice man in the truck behind me.

No love,

Trix

Pardon my French.

I'm back in Canberra, I wrote a big burble about home, complete with pics, and then Ubuntu did its interesting trick of locking up entirely with no warning when Firefox is running. And of course I wasn't using an off-line client with drafts saved locally, since I rebuilt Linux a couple of weeks back. And the Livejournal autosave is a joke.

I'll post up another burble when I'm not so grumpy.

I knew this was going to happen!!! Well, my car passed the inspection, although it apparently needed new pedal rubbers to pass. Who knew, eh? I thought it was traditional to drive an old Holden with bare metal under the feet.

However. I also asked them to do a full service and a tune-up. Ok, they changed the oil and put on new filters. Nice. Did they do a lube? No. Did they tune the car? Maybe. You know how I said it was running sweetly? When I got it back, I drove it for about 10 minutes, and thought, hm, it's idling a bit fast. On Saturday, I went for a longer drive, about half an hour, and it definitely was idling too fast, it chewed through $10 of gas. This wasn't good.

I couldn't wait to go to another mechanic, so I bought a car multimeter for about $250. Would you believe the largest car parts shop (Repco) in Canberra didn't have a timing light? Or, actually, one that is only suitable for electronic ignitions, which cost $600. Uh, no thanks. Hopefully another shop somewhere will have a plain jobbie.

So, the three base things for a tune are to have your idle speed and mixture (carburettor), dwell angle (distributor points' spark gap) and timing (distributor, when the spark fires to ignite the petrol), set correctly. These figures are kept in nice old fashioned car manuals. So I rigged up the multimeter and tested the idle speed. 900rpm! These cars are supposed to idle at 600. I tweaked it as best I could and have got it down to about 650, but I suspect the float level in the carb is too high (too much petrol coming in, so it's running a bit "rich"). But it's better. Then I checked the dwell angle. 50-something-random degrees! It should 30 degrees, +/- 2. Someone had installed the points and then tightened the cam screw so hard that the screw is somewhat stripped, and I can't undo it to fix it. I checked the invoice again, and sure enough, I got charged for a new set of breaker points, so they cocked that up too. And since the dwell angle is all wrong, they obviously got the figure for that out of the same place as the idle speed (their arse, by the looks of it). Even a small 4 cylinder car like a Morrie Minor or Mini idles at 800rpm. That is NOT how a 6 cyl engine runs. I can't check the timing without the timing light, alas.


So, don't go to the damn Braddon Service Centre if you have an old Holden. They may be fine if you have a nice late-model Japanese thingie, where they can just plug in the computer and tweak things that way. Not not for this kind of car. And you know, tuning these kinds of cars is about the only thing I can do mechanically (as well as oil filters and suchlike), because it's easy. And it just confirms my old theory: never go to a mechanic attached to a service station. They're always crap, in my experience. Unfortunately, I didn't know where they were before I booked the car. I should have followed my instinct on the day and gone elsewhere. Oh well, I have the roadworthiness thingie, I can now transfer the ownership...