Geek Stuff

Saturday night was Jeremy’s board game party, and it was a smash hit. There were six of us, and we played a bunch of games from Cluedo to Guess Who. I didn’t drink because I’m still on antibiotics to clear up my long-running not-quite chest infection, but everyone else did and it was loads of fun owing I’m sure to the extravagant supply of party pies.

My new favourite games include Pictionary, Cluedo, and Taboo. We also played a terrible movie-trivia-knowledge game which I didn’t really enjoy that much because I know almost nothing about films, and I got the majority of the questions wrong.

I didn’t leave until 2 AM with old school friend Sarah, who kindly drove me to my door. This was lucky because my original plan involved a fifteen minute trudge home and in a depressing turn for the worse it had started raining.

Now it’s Sunday and I’ve got a hangover which  I’m coming to think must be an entirely psychological phenomenon. I spent most of the day in bed, only to get up at about two and do some minimal housework.

Now I’m setting up my spare computer with the intent of using it as my new desktop machine. I figure it’s high time I started relying less on my laptop considering it’s a Dell, the screen is fucked and prone to flickering and turning off at utterly random times, the CMOS battery and now the chassis are rusting, and it gets extremely hot whenever I try to do anything with it.

Despite all this it’s not as completely unusable as you might think, and in fact I’ve been using it in this state for the last six months or so. That said, there’s rust creeping up and out of one of the grilles and into my line of sight next to the keyboard, so there’s now a permanent reminder that I should really consider moving on to something a little more reliable.

Hopefully I will be able to buy some upgrades tomorrow to get my desktop up to speed. My Dell has served me well over the last couple of years, but I think it’s about time to relegate it to thinner duties.

It’s actually unbelievably tricky to set up a web site anonymously. From all accounts the “anonymous” registrars will roll over and divulge your details at the drop of a telephone, and the only truly anonymous dns service that everyone seems to recommend has possibly the worst interface in the entire history of terrible things.

I ended up registering myself a brand new and somewhat anonymous domain through Namecheap.com, as recommended by Micheil who is incidentally working on music journal OnTheTune.com. The domain was cheaper than Godaddy and came with the privacy service for free, so basically when the rest of my domains come up for renewal I’m quite possibly going to transfer them to Namecheap as well.

So while I have no doubt that the whois privacy feature is a flimsy facade, all I really want to do is obfuscate my details. It’s not like I’m going to be breaking the law or anything, I’m just paranoid and want to keep this my new site under wraps. A tantalising secret.

The week’s been good so far. I finally went to the doctor about my coughy phlegmy thing on Monday and he gave me antibiotics which I’m not sure have actually done anything. I’m feeling better, but I also haven’t been able to shake this thing for the last month so feeling better isn’t necessarily synonymous with being better. I’m musing over the possibility of riding to work tomorrow regardless, but considering how late it is now, I’m not sure I’ll even wake up in time.

Tate also clued me in on the Bike Week festivities held over the weekend, and I was kind of keen to head on the ride through the new tunnel. A culmination of factors got in my way though; the registration web site is ugly, it’s asking me for way too much information, I need to get out of bed to get my credit card to pay the $40 or so bike toll. Apparently there’s an arbitrary registration deadline of today, and right now I can’t be arsed moving so I’ll go to Jeremy’s evening of board games on Saturday instead.

I kid you not, board games. It’s going to be so rad grown men will weep.

I’ve been trying out a few new ISPs for my web hosting needs. I desperately want to get myself a VPS (or Virtual Private Server) because it will allow me to do all kinds of things I can’t do at the moment. The credit card’s the limit.

It’s a really geeky task, but I’ve spent the last couple of days getting myself acquainted with real system administration. Over the next few days I’m going to migrate my sites across and see whether the package I’ve chosen can handle the load.

So what I thought were mosquito bites are looking more like sandfly bites now. I don’t react to mosquitoes like this, and three days after my fateful trudge through the wetlands I’ve still got painfully itchy red welts all up and down my legs.

I’m pretty good with these sorts of things so I’ve decided to take care of the problem myself. I’ve put myself on a course of ibuprofen and something called methylprednisolone aceponate which sounds like a highly reputable and presumably effective drug, so I hope my skin doesn’t fall off.

I did another surprising thing tonight and took some initiative. That’s a slightly deceiving statement; I took some preliminary initiative with the intention of following through with a profound deed of self-betterment later on; but it’s a start and that’s what counts.

I went back over my details and worked out when my mobile phone contract expired, and that was the start of this month. So basically I’m now going to have to find out a way to transfer my number to a more reasonable service, because so far this month I’ve used one cent on top of my twenty-five dollar plan. That’s a really silly waste of money.

I remember quite well that I knew it was a bad idea at the time. I didn’t really have the need for the contract, but my old phone was dying and I really wanted the new toy. It was the most reasonable value in its class as well, but a year on it’s completely stuffed and my old phone (which was handed down to my father) is still fired up and producing reasonable thrust, even if it is driven by steam.

So now my contract is finally over I have the freedom to change things around a bit, and hopefully reduce my monthly telecom bill by some arbitrary figure that will make me happy.