“You always want something. You know if they want something in Tibet they give something away.”

“Do they? Do they? That must be why they are such a dominant global power.”

- Black Books

Had quite a number of people recommend Black Books to me. So I found the first three seasons on special at EzyDVD and went “What the hell. I may as well spend my advance on things to do now I have nothing to do now that I have finished the book.” It’s bloody brilliant. I have cried with laughter quite a few times now.

A new design too by the way. Was a little bored with the old one and with the book pretty much finished I started mucking around and the next thing you know I have a new design. Everyone likes it except the person who described it as “Angry fruit salad”. So I now declare the angry fruit salad design open for business.

I am very, very tired. Have had minimal sleep for 24 hour … shit now nearly 36 hours. Running a support incident for the new job. It’s been years since I’ve done that. Had forgotten about endless conference calls and living off the end of my mobile. Was briefly interesting then I remembered what a god-awful pain in the arse it is. Getting far too old to still be doing stuff like that. Though hopefully won’t happen too often. Sleep cycle will now be stuffed for about a week.

So last night Ruth sent me this link to an online collection of love letters. It’s a fascinating read. A lot of really sad and lonely people, interspersed with the odd psychotic stalker type. Interestingly though – these were all electronic. The snail mail love letter seems to have been replaced with the email love letter. Indeed only a very few people seem to actually send personal mail anymore. Almost all of them seemingly of my parent’s generation or older. I imagine a lot of people younger than me have never sent a personal snail mail.

Personally, I sent a lot of letters … and no not all love letters … as a teenager. I liked writing letters. Wrote pages and pages to some people… hmmmm (strangely) all women. Though I have sent a few love letters too over the years. Some requited and others not. I think they can be a powerful expression. Especially if you’re not exactly brimming over with ‘in touch with your emotions’ – say like me. I wonder if love emails have the same effect. Harder to handle I imagine, slightly easier to dispose of and probably a lot faster to reply to. Wonder if that has also changed the speed at which relationships progress?

Now the Chileans have the right idea about American security paranoia. Their approach is basically ‘if the Americans want to play silly buggers then they can fuck right off’. Now if someone can explain this approach, together with the concept of our sovereign territory, to the Liberal parties flakes and public service flunkies who were responsible for the debacle that was Bush’s visit to Parliament House here then we’d be right too.

So I went to the video store to get SuperSizeMe out. I was wandering around the store and watching the previews for the new movies on the TVs they have scattered around. They had a preview for a movie called ‘Mean Girls’ – which appears to be about teen high school politics and what’s wrong with teen superficiality – with a new girl getting her own back on a clique of shallow girls aptly called the ‘Plastics’. So guess what the marketing geniuses at Civic Video have chosen to have as the prize for their ‘Mean Girls’ competition? A $5000 dollar make-up and clothes spending spree from Sportsgirl. Some one needs to send them the dictionary definition of irony.

Oh this is just marvellous. I so gotta stop snorting that PHP – it’s really fucking up my life.

Submitted last chapter (installing and running BIND securely) to my publisher. Which – if I do say so myself – means I (modestly) rock. Now just remains edits and proofing and then it gets published.

No idea how it will do. Hopefully alright. Very nervous about reviews and the like. Not sure how I will take criticism – if any. A lot invested in this piece of work. A lot of my life and a lot of sweat and blood (though oddly no tears) went into finishing it. Ah well we can only see. Personally I think its better than a lot of the other material out there. Really hands on and practical. Very command line focused with lots of examples and simple explanations. Not a lot of theory and really heavy emphasis on the working examples of things. *bites nails* Never thought I’d be nervous about it this much. Guess the actual finishing the book part seemed so far off (scarily it wasn’t that far off ) that I hadn’t even considered its reception.

Lu wants to know if the publishers like invite me to a launch or something. Somehow I doubt it. I figure they wouldn’t fly me to San Fran for it even if they did. Which means she is most disappointed. I figure she thought a week or so of shopping and sight-seeing in San Francisco would have been very cool.

I, for my sins, work in IT Security. This involves a large portion of time discovering things that are vulnerable to attack, reading about other people discovering things that are vulnerable to attack and then fixing the vulnerabilities (or preferably getting someone else to fix the vulnerabilities). The estimable Marcus J. Ranum offers an opinion on why this wonderous process is a most hideous waste of time. Master Tzu on the gentle art of patching.