Random raves

I've had a day of feeling somewhat "off", but put it down to having a few glasses of wine at a work celebration last night. However, as I was walking out the door to go home, I started feeling decidedly crook - everytime I moved, I felt exceedingly nauseated.

( Cut for moderate grossness )
 
Having sat rugged up at home for a few hours, I've not thrown up since, and I've had some soup and toast. I hope like fuck it doesn't happen again tomorrow. I was also feeling fairly angstful about having made a mess of my car, but on thinking of it, riding a jerky bus home would have been worse. Walking was out of the question.

The really irritating thing is that I was going out to dinner at the swanky Courgette restaurant this evening - we finished off a major project last week, and the project team were having an exclusive dinner celebration, and I was one of the select few invited (the general drinkies for everyone involved at all levels was last night). So, missing out on a free dinner there with fairly pleasant company (the project team are quite a nice bunch of people) really really sucks.

And while I'm grizzling, I've run out of soy milk. I really want nurturing cups of tea tonight, and I actively dislike normal black tea served without milk (teas like jasmine and green are of course fine without, but I don't actually call those nurturing). Fuckity fuck.

So I thought I'd save a bit of cash this time round, and I'm staying in a backpacker's in Ponsonby, which is a suburb that is nice and central and full of cafes.

This place is clean, queer-friendly and the room is decent (I got a private en-suite room - there is a limit). But this is the second bloody night in a row where people have played loud music for hours in the patio out the back, while talking drunkenly and loudly at the same time (also, what is it about upper-middle-class poms and their shrill braying? Some think antipodean accents are annoying).

Last night they kept going till after three. Now it's nearly 1, and they're still going. And ear-plugs are making no damn difference. Well, I'll ask the nice gay guy at reception if this is the normal thing for this place, and if it is, I won't be staying here again. I get quite narky when I'm not able to go to sleep when I want to, and right now I'm sitting on an almost irresistible urge to go out and smash their boombox to the ground, and jump on it a few times.

Still, I found that my favourite place to eat in Auckland is still there after 20 years, so I'll post about that another day. :-) And I have been squeezing babies and getting nice nurturing vibes from some of my nearest and dearest.

Oh, and for LULZ, a Dell representative decided to reply to me about the rant I posted up about their horrific customer support .... Nice going with trying to take me to task in my own journal!

Yet another problem with the Canberra mail server today, exactly the same as last time, and involving the same user's mailbox. However, since last time I had moved his mailbox to its own separate database, with its own set of transaction logs on a separate disk, I cannot for the life of me understand why transactions relating to his mailbox filled up everyone else's transaction log disk.

I suspect there was something going on with his EA's mailbox, since there were a few transactions relating to both her and his mailboxes just before everything went haywire. Her mailbox was still in one of the other databases. It isn't any longer, and neither is any other Blackberry user's.

It took me hours to move the 100 or so mailboxes, due to the ridiculous size some of them are. Also, no-one should have frigging 3000 Calendar items in Outlook, much less 5000 ...or 7000. A simple Calendar item is around 4KB - with copious notes and attachments, they can get much larger. 7000 x 4KB (let's be generous) is 27MB. A normal mailbox quota in our organisation is 80MB. No wonder these idiots keep whining for bigger mailboxes. (And yes, we send out advice urging users to clean out their Calendars regularly - we even sent  one out two weeks ago).

I'm very tempted to recommend a policy where Calendar items more than 13 months old get cleared out automatically. We'll still get some with 3000 items, but there aren't that many people having 10 meetings a day nearly every day of the year. I'm also going to implement a policy where Deleted Items more than 30 days old (or maybe 60) get cleared out. It's amazing how many people think it's an extra storage area... and who often labour under the misapprehension that Deleted Items somehow don't count as part of the mailbox quota.

I had a nice time at the CDL and the Bear's yesterday, building another garden patch, which we did mightly due to the CDL doing most of the heavy stuff since I managed to do something bizarre to my back last week. Thank god for osteopaths (since it's ok today). There was nommy smoked trout risotto and wine and conversation afterwards.

Today I just pootled around and hovered over some of the baby plants that are sprouting - there are broccoli, leeks, snow peas, onions and rhubarb just showing their new shoots.

And this evening was mainly occupied with an oldie-but-a-goodie Flash game, Zoo Keeper Quest. It's like Bejeweled, but with cute animals and a grumpy boss. JayIsGames also explains how to play the Quest mode, as opposed to the regular game.

And now I should really go to sleep. The osteopath was giving me 20 questions about my "depleted adrenals" (as they all do, for some reason) and asking me if my life is majorly stressful. Actually, it's not. I'm acquiring a bunch of new responsibilities at work, and it's a bit stressful working out how exactly we're going to deal with some inadequately-documented systems, but we'll figure it out one way or another. I've been avoiding writing a report for the last two weeks - I've done 4 pages, whoopee - but that's my usual level of procrastination. Home is ok, but there will be some changes coming up, and all my other personal matters and finances are chugging along fine. I go to work, come home at a decent hour and dink around, go to bed, see the CDL at intervals. The osteo also asked me if I feel tired all the time - I do, because I'm not very good at making myself go to bed by 11:30 (see!), especially when I know I need 8 1/2 hours' sleep - or if I'd ever had ME or something like. No, I haven't. Maybe I just have a low disruption threshold, or I get subliminally stressed by feeling ignorant about stuff I have to do (like write a business analysis for the first time without a specific model or maintain systems I know f-a about)... but I don't feel that consciously concerned. Or maybe I really am a delicate little flower. Feh.

I also had a gastroscopy a few weeks back due to the problem I've been having with gastric reflux, which manifests itself as violent nausea when I try to go to sleep (nothing so obvious as heartburn), and the procedure found nothing wrong with me. The specialist asked me how much I drank alcohol (lightly), smoked (not at all), drank coffee (one or two a week) and ate red meat (not at all). I do eat large portions. He mentioned three times that I should consider losing weight because it can "put pressure" on the gastric region. Since I consider myself to be mildly overweight at best (although I have stacked on a bit this winter), and my stomach is not actually fat, I was fairly peeved by this advice. I should be going back to the GP for a follow-up, and I should ask him if that was serious specific advice rather than pulling-it-out-of-his-arse default advice - but I've been too annoyed to do so, frankly. I hate not finding specific things wrong with me when something is wrong.

I have worked out that I should start eating smaller portions - I'm not a snacker, but maybe I'll have to learn, especially in the evening - and there's no way I can eat anything after about 8:30pm if I want to sleep at a decent hour. The proton-pump inhibitor the doc has prescribed certainly relieves the symptoms, but I hate taking medications continually. I think I'll revisit going to a homeopath, since it's evidently not a mechanical problem (ie. an ulcer), but I won't go to the one I last saw in Mittagong, since she reminds me too much of my last g/f (not to mention the fact that she insisted on asking me about three times in each session if I consider myself to be an "angry person". FWIW, I don't - I'm easily irritated, but when I actually get angry, it's fairly rare and extremely not nice. Evidently she didn't understand the distinction - or, even if she thought I was delusional and that I am "angry" all the time, as a homeopath you're supposed to treat the cognitive dissonance, not keep prodding at it verbally).

Bah, I'm not as grumpy as all this sounds. I don't like feeling that my body is less than 100%, but things are chugging along ok in general, and life is generally positive.

Jesus, it all happens at once, doesn't it? I had that lurgie last weekend, my period this week, and I've spent the last 36 hours contending with a fairly vile gastrointestinal something. I may have to thank homeopathy for the fact I didn't throw up or have unfortunate episodes in the loo, but the fever and chills, stinking headache, painful shoulders, back and hips, constant nausea, painful stomach (with xtra bonus cramps last night), and inability to eat anything other than 3 mouthfuls of porridge and 12 Japanese-style rice crackers since yesterday morning have been sufficiently bothersome all on their own. In fact, I have never felt so ill in my life as I did last night, except perhaps when I had hepatitis as a kidlet (I had the horrible thought that somehow I was having another dose, but I'm not jaundiced, or, indeed, vomiting, thank god).

Also - and this is a symptom of how my energy's been worn down - while I'm fine with living by myself almost all the time, things like that make realise how difficult it could be if I were ever seriously ill. I felt rotten enough last night that I was laying plans for how to get to the A&E clinic if I felt I was getting severely dehydrated or more feverish. Sure, I have a couple of people to call on if it gets that bad, but it's awkward. And embarrassing actually. I suppose I just need to suck up the fact I can't be capable all the time. Hah.

Come to think of it, though, if it was a norovirus-type something, it's better to not have anyone else around. I haven't done anything projectile-ish with my body fluids, but reducing the amount of potential exposure to the greeblies is a good thing. At least I'm clean in my personal habits.

Must get myself a thermometer, though. I didn't have a clue what my temperature was at its worst, and it might have helped some of my more paranoid thoughts if I knew it wasn't high enough to be something like meningitis.

You know, I had much more fun plans for my weekend. It sucks.

Both me and my afternoon, that is.

We have an antispam service running on our mail servers. It has been giving me gyp, one way or another for weeks, and it delayed certain components of our email migration. What was left were a few niggly problems with updating the virus/spam patterns automatically, and a reporting module. I finally got the vendor to do a remote session with me, which was worse than useless. After a couple of hours, he was ready to gather some system information and logs to forward to the US for developer assistance. The first thing he did was see that it was RedHat Linux, all well and good. However, it's a 64-bit version of RHEL. This, apparently, is not supported. End of support session, and the only suggestion was that we reinstall the antispam software from scratch (since it was working at an earlier point). That's it.

The reinstall was nightmarish, but I eventually got it working and processing spam. However, the web front-end isn't working, which means that if some messages are quarantined, I wouldn't have the faintest fucking idea how to get them out again. I hope there is a command-line utility that will release the messages. I emailed Mr Helpful Support Guy the fond news of the botched uninstall (since it thinks that the old web front-end is still there... despite numerous reinstalls, the deletion of the program directory AND a server reboot). We'll see what happens tomorrow.

This is one of the top-four antivirus vendors, and their product fucking sucks vacuum as it is (although it does the basic work of scanning messages ok). Not supporting 64-bit in this day and age? Give me a fucking break.

I was this close to not going to tai chi this evening, although I'm glad I did. Not that I absorbed much. I'm now just flattened and exhausted rather than majorly fucked off.

If our so-helpful support can't resolve the web front-end tomorrow, we might have to go back to the old way of forwarding all the messages to another (Windows) server to have them scanned (which would then forward them back for delivery). One of the attractions of doing it the way we were was that it would all be handled on the server itself, thus reducing network traffic and message delays. Bah, I think I'll just have a few whiskies. There certainly isn't anything else constructive I can do with this pile of poo.

or are all the posts on metaquotes disgustingly lame at the moment?

Stupid in-jokes and quotes of juvenile supposedly-pithy statements really aren't doing it for me at all. I'll give it another week, and then I'll consider ditching it.

Guess what the arsehole downstairs has just started playing???!!1!11!!!!

Arrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!

My stars this week:

Home sweet home is where there could be both an ending and a new beginning this week, TRIX. On Monday there is a Solar Eclipse in Libra, which is going to bring about changes. If you have been aware of a certain situation building up, it is going to reach a climax around this time. But it is also a chance to start fresh on some level. Perhaps you have been wondering whether to move or buy or sell a property - and if so, the events of the coming days should give you your answer. There may be some chaos before you discover the right course of action, but only do what you have to do and don't try to force the pace. You will have a better understanding of what you need to do once the dust has settled.

aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

(can I say now that I've had enough of myself, being sick, missing home, missing my g/f (who I saw today, but I miss her), this weekend, fucking stress and bloody miscommunications in general. Mine, that is.)