Aquarionics

One of the channels on which I am an op is having a bad week. Nice little Script Kiddies with massively parallel spam-bots are attacking the small network it lives on, and the ops are spending their time playing whack-a-mole, as are the server ops.

Anyway, if you find the channel is restricted, /msg an op or /join #afp-invite and someone will let you in. Sorry, it’s just until we can attack flamethrowers to the defences.

In the time I’ve been writing this, someone has come into #afp-invite and left again because I didn’t respond in five seconds. This is not an automatic service

In other news, I’ve done the first bit of Christmas Shopping. I’ve bought the gift for the office Secret Santa thing. I hate these things. Fortunately, it’s anonymous. Unfortunately, I’ve resisted the urge to attempt to be funny. Ah well, maybe next year…

Oh, yeah. Office Party season. Thursday is our office Christmas party. This would appear to be exactly as Entertaining and Enlightening as it suggests, though since we’re at Jongleurs for it, the whole “eating cheese on cocktail sticks by the photocopier” aspect will be reduced.

OTOH, we have been mandated to wear “Outrageous Hats” which is kinda the ‘enforced joviality’ that I desperately try to avoid the rest of the year.

So today I also looked at silly hats. Sadly none were sufficiently outrageous.

I was crushed.

I did return today with not only the office gift, but a set of panniers and other misc. bicycle things, various and sundry items, and nothing I hadn’t planned to buy, which was very good of me.

Then I walked into the second hand bookshop, and had to get a taxi home.

Ah well.

Another week, another five days of 05:00 starts and 20:00 returns.

Half-life 2 rocks. I mean this. I’ve just got out of (…we don’t go to…) Ravensholm, and the sawblades? Way cool. The physics engine rocks my world. (Also the worlds of the things I throw washing machines at). I just wish I had more time to play…

…and then again, maybe I do. I have the day off on Tuesday, so hey, you might get some actual updates.

Or I might spend the day playing HL² again. It’s all possible.

Forewarning: There will be a Gathering this Saturday in Cambridge. Anyone who reads this is invited and encouraged to attend. It’ll be fun.

More details when I decide them.

So, it appears that the partition with /home on it is fine, but the partition with /data on it has crashed, trashed and burnt. Won’t even mount. /data, as it happens, contains /data/music, /data/web and /data/aquarion/projectsVault.

So that’s a large pile of MP3s that have ceased to be, my backup of Aquarionics and all my archived projects, unless there’s some magic way of rescuing data from a JFS partition without actually reading it that I have yet to discover.

Suddenly, I have an overpowering urge to blow my next paypacket on a DVD writer and a raid system, and forget christmas. Most of the MP3s are also owned by other people, so I will be able to get most of it back, but the projects vault is something of a body-blow.

Grr.

Yeah, you wait a week for an entry and then two come along at once

I also bought Half-Life 2, because there never existed a universe where I didn’t.

The game is amazing, captivating, well constructed, well plotted and has a gun with which you can throw washing machines at your enemies.

This is Good. It means I need more memory, but hey.

Steam is less good. Steam is Valve’s media distribution technology thingy. It’s blisteringly fast, easy to use, and doesn’t get in the way.

Except, of course, when it does. You see, the technology I can live with, it’s a good example of what can be done. It’s the politics I object to. Because I object to being made to feel like a criminal, and since in order to play the game (which I bought for 32.99 in Game) I have to prove I bought the game every single time I play it by contacting the Valve Authentication servers. And what happens when the servers aren’t working? Or my net connection isn’t working? I’m SOL. Okay, Steam has an ‘offline’ mode, apparently. But without a net connection… I can’t play the game, because I don’t own my copy of the game, I’ve merely got a license for it with Valve, which they can revoke at any time they see fit with no compensation.

Oh, and I still need the CD in the drive to play it. As well as the Internet connection.

Of course, within 24 hours of Half-Life 2’s release, a version with no CD requirements and that didn’t ever talk to Valve was up on bittorrent, ed2k and Kazaa. The only reason for people who don’t care about the legalities to buy the game is because at 5 CDs it’s probably quicker to walk to your local games shop and buy it.

On the other hand, the download version doesn’t take 20 minutes “Unlocking” the files it spent the previous 20 minutes installing.

Yesterday, I went to see The Incredibles at the cinema. It is, as the name suggests, good. It is a Pixar film, and therefore would be.

Pixar’s next film, Cars, for which the sneak preview trailer was released quietly last fortnight also looks good, and will be Pixar’s last film for Disney, the once Gigantic Film-Making Empire which is now a Gigantic Empire which funds the occasional movie. Disney are founding their own 3D Feature workshop, and there are rumours that their first feature might be Toy Story 3, which Pixar refused to do. I really hope Pixar retained the rights to Incredibles sequels, because they could be fun in a way that – for example – a Disneyesque version would be over moralized and probably involve one of the parents vanishing. (It is a sad fact that in most Disney movies of the last 10 years children only ever get one parent, the other – usually the mother – is killed off either in the first moments of the film or before the story begins. I know several parents who refuse to let their children watch Disney movies due to this).

Incredibles is darker than previous films, but then again Bounder – the short that precedes it in classic Pixar style – is bright, sunshiny and saccharine. Also fantastic, but you knew that.