The Lair of the SlowFox

...that we haven't got any heating in the office. Again.

See, since I walk in, the building feels warmer than the outside world, and therefore it doesn't immediately register that it's cold. The drivers who've come aways, though (thus discounting the short-hop folk where the cars don't really warm up) definitely do notice.

The same thing happened yesterday; it's just that yesterday, we didn't have snow settled on the ground.

In other news, the tangential discussion on this week's Football Weekly was collective astonishment on the panel's part that Jimbo (the host) hadn't seen Pretty in Pink nor The Breakfast Club nor The Goonies (yeah, 'football' weekly :-) Also good for learning how to poach eggs). He had, somewhat redeemingly, seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Lost Boys. For my part, I've not seen Pretty in Pink, nor the Breakfast Club and I'll also volunteer the cultural disadvantage that is not having seen St Elmo's Fire, nor even Heathers.

Any other 80s classics that I should've seen?

's been a quiet Saturday, all told; I took advantage of being dog-less to have a lie-in, until 7.15am.

It was pouring when I went to fetch the hound, but has since eased off a bit. Nonetheless, given the recently thawed snow will have saturated the ground, it's no surprise that the roads were starting to do the Venetian impression...

I was actually wondering if I was going to be able to get online today at all - the router dropped the net connection this afternoon, and I've been flicking it on every hour or so since to see if the situation had corrected itself. Assuming that this post does, y'know, post, then that should be evidence that a resolution of sorts was found, but it's a bit disappointing to lose access across the weekend - especially when KC have an effective monopoly as the ISP for this fair city.

At the desk three days this week, and then for Thursday and Friday I'm on a training course off-site. This in turn means that Mali gets checked into his Happy Holiday Home on Thursday morning, picked up on Saturday morning, because I can't get back to him at lunchtimes.

It was a very static weekend on my part - it wasn't the snow so much as the ice: the ice was lethal. Put it this way; when Mali, with four-paw-drive, is falling over, you know conditions are dicey. However, the rain started on Sunday and has made substantial inroads on the ice/slush, such that one can walk along with some fair degree of confidence, for the most part, that you'll manage to stay upright.

Finally, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte were talking on Security Now last week about ShadowServer, a site that tracks botnets across the interwebs. From the graphs, it looks like there was some massive cut-off on New Year's Eve...

*HUGE* pic alert, courtesy of NASA - Satellite photo of the UK, under snow.

Be warned, it's rather large.

After gingerly walking in through the Snap! Crackle! and Pop! of a thin layer of ice over yesterday's snow dusting, I'm back at the Office (II), and was very much looking forward to warming my gloveless (they went missing over the festive period - must replace. Seriously must) hands opn a mug of boiling water (for I am still coffee-free™), to discover that our 'instant' boiling water machine isn't producing forth vast torrents of instant boiling water... more what you might call lukewarm-ish.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly - the beast has been switched off over the Christmas break, and needs some time to get back up to operating temperature. Of course, since we have instant hot water on tap, we don't have a kettle...

I've got some background processes running on the PC which would've been much better run over the Christmas break, but that only occurred to me once I was home, and I'd powered down the work PC, so I couldn't remote desktop in to set things in motion. So that was a bit shortsighted of me, but nothing terminal.

DVD-wise, The Wire continues to prove rivetting viewing - the cinematography in the penultimate episode of S3 (the showdown in the empty house with Omar and Brother Mouzone) is awesome (Omar rocks), whilst in matters literary, Rachel Caine's Carpe Corpus, Morganville VI is looking set to be my first book of 2010 - I'm about half way through at the moment, but keep getting distracted by both The Wire and Assassin's Creed II.

Mali and I are in from the evening's second walk - he was having a bit of a rough time on the first circuit; I think he was getting ice caught between his paws every now and again, and we had to stop so that I could massage the stuff out every time he started acting all tripod. The more travelled routes are just wet. Offshoots from those are slush, and the quieter areas still are just sheets of ice.

Tomorrow's just a half-day at work, which is most welcome; we've got the whole week off next week, so don't return until 4 January 2010. Definite call for w00t, methinks.

Incidentally, I'm definitely saying 'twenty-ten' in my head, although lots of people are referring to the coming year as 'two thousand and ten'. My thinking is it's pretty inconceivable to me to refer to the year 2037 as 'two thousand and thirty seven', as opposed to 'twenty-thirty seven.' So, given that we're going to make the shift at some point, it might as well be sooner rather than later. Obviously, it's cumbersome to refer to the single digits in this fashion - hence why I'm predicting that this next year will represent the changing of the guard, numerically speaking.

It's 3pm and it's dark out there - and wet, too :-/

P & I have just returned from a mission to a deli in Beverley where I'd ordered a Christmas hamper for the parental units. Long-term readers may suspect that I'm singularly ill-equipped to judge the quality of a foodie's hamper as a present... and they'd be right, but I figure even if I have, by some stroke of misfortune, managed to duplicate existing beverages and/or consumables in the parental abode, they'll still get used eventually, right? And it looks impressive. Have also got some DVDs and books for them, so I think I'll be calling it a day/week/month/year on present buying on that front, at least.

Comradette K got me into the Morganville Vampires books by Rachel Caine by lending me the first two instalments. I, in turn, suggested to cynthia_black that aki_itsuki might enjoy them, given her prediliction for things vampish, and it so happens that she's now reading them faster than I am. Which means that book 3 has been borrowed from Grimmauld Place, rather than Comradette K's library shelves. 's all good, either way: actually, Book III is proving to be quite fun (it's notable that both Oliver and Monica have both commented to Claire that she's now a proper player in Morganville, as a consequence of her derrings do in tomes previous), and is more than compensating for the suspicion that Book 2 didn't quite have the same 'zing' about it as the opener).

I started a new gamer profile on the 360 - RedDogFever (you have to pick a unique gamer tag, and I chose that because, hey, what were the odds of it already having been claimed? Absolutely), and have thus set about building up my gamer score through the noble art of Achievement Hunting on Braid and Geometry Wars, principally. We've also picked up Defense Grid, a Tower Defen(c/s)e game that's rather addictive, although the achievements on offer in that look as though they're going to take a lot of playing hours. The 'proper' discs at Castle Fox (the aforementioned all being XBox Live Arcade titles downloaded to the hard disk) are Forza 3 and Assassin's Creed II. I've made a start on the former, but I think it's the latter that's going to be taking up my evenings when I'm not Wired.

Speaking of The Wire, the h264 rip of 1x01, courtesy of Badaboom player rather nicely (albeit with a 'watermark' bottom left that I'm hoping the full version dispenses with). What was more noticable, though, was that I was able to understand a little more of the witness speech when he was talking to McNulty in the opening scene...

And finally, I got my hair cut yesterday.

Work's busy and I'm not here tomorrow because I'm going to old school friend's funeral :-( So I haven't caught up with my flist/reading page, but hope to manage to do so somewhen.

We had our first rain for what feels like a while today, although it's cleared up somewhat now, and remains surprisingly warm. Our office move has been pushed back to 'the end of the month', or possibly November. Was over at The New Accommodation for a meeting just now, and saw that the desks were being built and cables were being routed, so it's looking like the logistics are being sorted.

However, we've still got to weed out the current office, which isn't a task that particularly fills any of us with glee. At least the drift towards online documentation means that some of the manuals can be junked without a second thought (the one I picked up this morning was dated 1991 - that's eighteen years ago).

I'm not normally a fan of Ginny, but sometimes she's good value (TTK: Ch 48):

---

"Percy! Percy!" Ginny's voice cut across the still air of the cold December morning.

Percy, in front, stopped and turned round, irritation etched across every feature of his face, "Yes? Miss... Weasley?" he asked, feigning only the barest of acquaintance with his sister.

Harry was desperate for his captors to turn around themselves, so that he could see Ginny (and Dean, Seamus... hell, everyone seemed to be there), but their hold remained resolute. He'd tried looking over his shoulder, but a not so gentle prod with the third hit-wizard's wand, stabbing him right at the top of his spine, told him that such aggressive moves were uncalled for.

"Don't you 'Miss Weasley' me, Percy, you miserable git," snarled Ginny, of whom Harry now felt insanely proud, "this is wrong and you know it!"

In his mind's eye, Harry had a distinct image of Dean physically restraining Ginny from leaping at Percy and clawing his eyes out with her bare hands.

Pity.

---

It was pouring in another of Hull's special summer cloudbursts this lunchtime. I'd let Mali out into the yard, where he'd taken up his lounging position on top of his kennel. Then the rain started falling, but rather than come back inside (the back door was open), he decided - shock! horror! - to actually use his kennel, and had curled up inside, out of the elements' reach. This is actually pretty unusual for the hound - the only use he generally makes of the kennel is to sunbathe on its roof.

One of the problems with the Shuffle, which I've mentioned before, is that it's possible to brush the control wheel and skip to the next track... this is a pain when you're listening to a 2hr podcast, for example, and have to fast forward through to the point you were at prior to the unplanned navigational jump. The player gives you snippets of audio to let you know where you are as it zips along the mp3, and it's quite a surreal experience, hearing these disconnected words from the studio discussion (This Week in Tech, a bit geeky, but a fun listen).

It's pouring.

So I walked in this morning, with Radio 4's Americana on the Shuffle.

This week's cast had three topics - Al Franken joining the US Senate, Mountain Top Removal Mining in West Virginia and how the CIA's morale's bearing up In These Times.

The Mountain Top Removal Mining thing is something I've read about on and off for a while, now. It stuns me that people can think that there are two sides to the issue: permanent destruction of nature to mine a non-renewable^* resource to maintain unsustainable levels of consumption versus... erm, money.


* well, technically coal, gas and oil are renewable - just not on any kind of timescale that's of use to us humans...