ASTROMOOSE

23 weeks since last update, oops!

Is anyone on here interested in the last 5 months of my life? They have been pretty cool, but if no-one's reading LJ anymore... then I won't! :D

Blimey, I've been working in Eastleigh for nigh on 18 months - and had no idea there was a public library inside the shopping centre. It's actually pretty good, too. Which is vaguely annoying as they have a rather well stocked SF/Fantasy section! Grr, etc.

Working through the last few days now, handing over to a contractor chap at the moment. Trying to make sure I dump the contents of my brain into my wiki, emails, IMs to people and just generally finishing up stuff I started has been a lot of stuff to balance. The next year is going to be pretty odd, not having a 'proper' job. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm equally full of trepidation! Moving out this coming weekend too, over into Heather's parents' place. So I guess that means I'll technically be living in Salisbury? WooOo.

As a result of our ongoing move-prep, we discovered a handful of stuff that we were gonna chuck out but people might want - so if you're coming to Minami or want to shout for postage - you could be the proud owner of one or more of the following:

• Bishi Bashi Special! (PSOne) - spearmint condition.
• Final Fantasy 6 (PSOne) - trebor extra strong mint condition
• Vagrant Story (PSOne) - fox's glacier mint condition
• Dancing Stage Fever (PS2) + 4Gamers dance mat - aquafresh toothpaste mint condition

All available to you, the NON-PAYING CUSTOMER for the princely sum of NOTHING AT ALL. Harvest Moon, FF9, Grandia and Suikoden would have been on that list too, if I hadn't have looked on eBay and seen the phenomenal prices they currently go for - will sell those when we are back. ;)

My WoW account subscription ran out today, which made me feel a twang of sads. I'll reactivate my account in August sometime to make sure my characters don't vanish forever. Got about halfway through the much lauded 'Wrathgate' questline in Dragonblight before having to hang up my shield late last night. Northrend will all be waiting for me when I get back!

I hope you're all well, who even reads their LJ friendslist anymore?

I'm listening to the new Metallica album. Thank god they're good again!

EDIT THE FIRST: I'm a proud supporter of the non-profit free-speech advocating UNIX public access guys, SilenceIsDefeat. They used to be at .org, but one of the co-founders of the organisation is being a massive twart and is attempting to hold the old domain hostage. Le sigh. I am blogging up the dotcom link as part of a larger attempt to bump it up the google search hierarchy. While aforementioned twart has 'gifted' the domain to SDF who are also a nonprofit UNIX-friendly bunch, this is buggering up one of my email accounts, and that makes me cross.

Well, back at work after a lovely Christmas and New Year break - all's still up in arms here and very busy. I'm not so bothered though, because we're off around the world on 2nd April! I think I'll be finding it increasingly difficult to both a) pay attention and b) care about work over the coming 11.5 weeks.

It's bloody cold here in Eastleigh! Zero degrees to the C.

I just read that LiveJournal have laid off 12 of their 28 technical staff. This could mean a mass exodus to Facebook or something. Ooer.

How is everyone on here?

...But nonetheless, I think it's nifty. If you're using a flavour of unix/linux that has bash and wget installed on it, feel free to use it.

#!/bin/bash
url=`echo ${1}`
charname=`echo ${url}|awk -F "=" '{print $3}'`
wget -q -e "header = Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5" -e "header = Keep-Alive: 300" -e "user_agent = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6" -e "referer = http://www.google.com" ${url} -O ${charname}.xml
baseurl=http://www.wowhead.com/?compare=
items=`cat ${charname}.xml |grep "id="|awk '{print $7}'|cut -d '"' -f2`
for item in ${items}
do
string=${string}:${item}
done
echo "Armory (ARMOURY, AMERICANS!) XML Saved to file ${charname}.xml."
firefox `echo ${baseurl}${string}`

Pass in a full WoW Armoury url and you'll get a browser window pop up with a wowhead item comparison already populated with that character's equipment. I use it to see what other people's outfits look like on the Dren female model.

For example, pass it:
"http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Argent%20Dawn&n=Jessalynn"
and you'll get:
"http://www.wowhead.com/?compare=:25977:31727:31436:3428:23489:23484:23488:23487:31421:23482:25485:25926:25937:28041:25618:25825:31415:25256:5976:28056"

Compliments of my Tuesday lunchbreak. :D

My friend and fellow WoW-geek-at-work Rich T was lucky enough to get picked in a recent FigurePrints raffle. He was also jammy enough to convince them to send it to the UK, despite them not officially 'doing Europe' yet!

It arrived today, and looks wicked - I am jealous!

I got my first purples last night, woooo~! Been saving up for my epic land mount for a while now, and got that as soon as I logged in. Went for a Frostsaber, after all my Darnassus rep grinding (plus the funky green groobly bits match my MasterChief-lookin' armour).

Guildies also randomly decided to go for a raid boss in Feralas, one of Ysera's most trusted lieutenants - Lethon. He's a bloody great big dragon who's been hanging out in the Emerald Dream for a while, but pops out every now and then to get his butt kicked. Some lucky loot rolls netted me my first 'proper' equippable epic item, woohoo! :D

I've just been browsing my livejournal archive, and thought I'd share some of my favourite entries past.

In vague anti-chronological order!

• Tokyo Dance Trooper
• My personal take on CyberGolf
• I DON'T CARE, INTERNET CATS ARE FUNNY
• 1UP CAEK
• I complain about WiPro contractors' abysmal english (I also talk about William Gibson)
  
• Team Ocelot 'do' Katamari, Amecon 06'
• I wax lyrical about agile software development as illustrated with CHEFS
• Kids these days and their PSPs
• Nintengirls never did come out!
  
• Identifying with ASDA staff in a way like no other
• She needs a man with a PHD
• We didn't know that Casshern would be a bit shit
• Tiny cats on the tram to work
  
• I AM 25 TODAY
• I am the Owl. I don't remember why!
• Burning animals as an offensive tactic in Call of Cthulhu
• We saw the Pixies and I didn't get served in Salisbury despite being 24
• Heather leaves Westminster Uni and I didn't think Fight Club was a family film
  
• Dogs do have to poop sometimes, and I totally appreciate that
• The day I met Heather (<3)
  
• I get a bit emo about not being 17 anymore
• I natter about Treasure games a bit
• Ian's wedding
• I used to write such nonsense when I was 23
  

And some of my favourite things that I've said:

• "Cypress Hill are kind of like the Agadoo of Hip-hop, but I don't care"
• "Feel my lists of POWER for they are full of BESTS"
• "Are chavvy tracksuits the first step towards our society accidentally conforming towards the  silver one piece jumpsuit popularised by modern science fiction? - discuss."
• "I am a Financial Services Enterprise Hobo!"
• "My favourite new term for drunkenness: 'Lazyfaced'. :)"
• "You Banbury cheese!"
• "Printer drivers as big as a fucking planet"
• "Warsitting on our Warsofa"
• "Gorblimeycroikeyguvnor"
• "I can't think of anything better than Ninjas"
• "It is worth noting that I am at work and it is cack so I might just be going a bit mad you know"
• "~JAY-YUMMS BRAAAAOWN!~"
• "Handheld gaming may take over my life"
• "Working in the public sector is ass. Utter, utter ass"
• "A funky German chap called Fred"
• "Slipknot Yaoi"
• "Word, chombatta"
• "After much umming, aaarring and indeed ooooo0o-ing"
• "Sam! Allen! Interpret nine llamas!"
• "Most of it is smut"
• "There'll be a finance-powerup down the line, sure as there will be meat and apples under phone booths in Streets of Rage"
• "It's Monday, I'm at work, and I already want to murder the Poison Dwarf with a Dictionary. A big, sharp one. With barbs."

Getting back to work after a lovely and very relaxing break at Center Parcs has been a mild shock to the system, but hasn't been too bad to be honest. Still riding along on a wave of un-stress, not really got much to worry about at the moment! Been in the black for ages, mounting quite a pile of savings in prep for our travels next year. I keep seeing things I'd love to buy (New Powerbook? Hmm? Hmmm? YOS PLZ) but know that they'll still be there, if not in a faster/shiner/better form when we get back. Vague plans to build an incredibly powerful desktop computer flit around my head quite often too - but that's something I'm really looking forward to taking my time over.
We're looking to head off shortly after Minamicon, so that'll be the last chance to see our staggeringly beautiful selves before we bugger off for 9 months ;)

Been loving my new (free!) iPod touch lately, the sound quality is over and above what I've been used to with my Shuffle. Plus it's cool and super shiny, and houses 16gb of my noise rather than a measly 1gb. The Genius playlist function is brilliant too, adding some much appreciated control over randomness.

Happy that the new WoW patch went live yesterday, I've only managed to get Jessa a haircut and her talents respecced so far, but will play a bit more tonight with the new abilities in the Protection tree. Finally people will not think me so wierd for playing prot all the time, it's been buffed up proper now so it's actually viable for solo PVE and PVP. Hello faces, meet shield - BOSH! :D

Not much to report other than that. Considering writing a big LJ post about my general <3 of QOTSA and Desert/Stoner rock in general though, having had something of an adventure through lots of music I wish I'd been listening to when I was 15 lately.

How are you?

GOOD MOANING INTERNET

It's another wonky day here, I'm smacking my head against some really stupid problems this week. I know that it's not my fault this stuff is going wrong - it just looks like it because they hired me to put the word 'build' in my job title to make it a) suitably difficult to work out exactly what it is they want me to do and b) make it easy to blame me for problems no-one else knows how to fix. Good here, innit? :D

I got to thinking this morning when I was eating my Weetabix, how much I miss some of the old servers I used to work with in my previous roles. Sad as it sounds, there's a lot to be said for a good naming convention when it comes to identifying big lumps of enterprise-grade IT stuff.

Back at South Holland District Council, the theme was vaguely planets and stuff that is in space™. This started out pretty small with Moon, Sun, Venus, Pluto, Saturn etc - but by the time I left we were clutching at interplanetary straws with bonkers stuff like Bootes and Jolie (which I'm well aware is not technically a thing that is in space™but actually an actress who my mate Tom really fancies). I don't think I really had a favourite, but spent a lot of time mucking around with Moon and Sun as they were Windoze Domain Controllers.

At Capital One, there were 2 very distinct themes present. The first was names of stuff from childrens' tv shows. There was Cholet, Bulgaria, Tomsk, Ivor, Will, Fizz, Yaffle, Monty and many more besides. I tried explaining the concept of the Wombles of Wimbledon common to a bunch of Indian Wipro contractors once, didn't seem to sit too well with them. They were pretty much against furry animals recycling stuff for them! It was a difficult moment. I was notorious for hating on the particularly rubbish box Will - it was such a pile of pants. I've used pocket calculators with more processing power. I had to work for 9 months on a project with it as my main box to run a new app on, and it made me pretty sads every day. I would sit down, and proclaim "Will's so shit it hurts" to my teammates, and they'd defend his sorry, sorry metal butt.
The second naming theme was the rather more boring but flawed in it's execution sensible test phase/application/number system. This yielded stuff like IMPAS01 (Implementation Test Environment/Application Layer/01) and BULDDV02 (Buildbox/Development/02) because nobody really properly wrote the idea down or actually understood it. It was all over the shop, and I can happily say I really don't miss it's stupidity on a daily basis.

There really isn't much to speak of here at Specsavers, everything is named very functionally or after something from Greek mythology. My favourite box is all mine though, and it's called panic. I didn't even give it that name!

Not much to report, other than having had a lovely time at my parents' place over the weekend. Would like some more sleeps please. How are you?