Anotherblog

Only three weeks to go!

I got a job
It’s a small job, at mates rates, but it’s mine. I’m doing some casual work for my old supervisor at Baltimore, Greg C. Simple stuff, writing an API for ASN.1 handling using existing libraries. It’s all protected by non-disclosure agreements, but I can say that it’s for a payment system using mobile phones. Very speculative, tiny company, fun.

Real Tennis
Played another game yesterday, which will be the last for a while – John D. and I want to go on and play golf, then basketball, then badminton, then perhaps back to real tennis again.

radwm
The other thing I’ve been working on is getting the moderation software for rec.arts.drwho.moderated going. This is the technical unix admin stuff I was talking about before, but now most of the issues are resolved and we’re less than a week from going live, given that the moderators don’t bring up further problems. I posted a very silly message to the newsgroup a week or so ago, and got a fairly atypical response – one flame, and one compliment. I feel like I have participated in usenet, and now I don’t have to any more.

Otherwise
Anna and I went out to the blue mountains with Chris, Amanda, kids, Andrea and her sister Sonya last weekend, even though Anna had hurt her knee again last week. It were good, we saw the Three sisters, marvelled at the useless roller-coaster, played various car games, and basically had a day away from it all.

Phone

We got connected to Telstra finally, this morning. It still took two working days less than Optus – who already had a working phone line – said that it would take them, even if I passed the credit check, which I didn’t. Telstra had no problem with the credit check. What they did have a problem with, was that Optus had mucked around with the cables in our house, meaning that the Telstra technician had to drill a hole in our wall and run a new cable from the street. Still, they did it cheerily, so hooray for Telstra for once. Pity that I changed to Optus in the first place because Telstra pissed me off. I wish I could remember why. The switching backward and forward between phone companies every time one of them pisses me off lacks a certain… well… effectiveness.

Work
Anna finally got notice to vacate at the Hilton – she has to move out in early December. She’s tempted to move out now, but doesn’t want to give the bastard competitor the satisfaction. The competitor, however, has his own problems if I’m not mistaken. He only set up two months ago, and I think he’ll be kicked out by the renovations too. I doubt he’s making money yet – you need a year or so to build up business – so my suspicion is that he’ll suffer worse than Anna. Such is the futility of total war.

Real tennis
Yes, it’s fun, but if we want to play regularly we’ll have to pay an annual fee, plus a weekly fee. And I don’t think John or I are keen enough to do so. Oh well… we had a game today and enjoyed it a bunch, but it doesn’t really do a lot for fitness. I came off the court without having raised a sweat, which is something that I can usually do walking up stairs. John and I shall move on. Next stop, golf. Then, basketball and badminton. By then, I suspect we’ll both have jobs and opportunities will be fewer.

Admin
I’m trying to help out with some technical unix admin stuff at the moment, and it’s the usual combination of interesting and frustrating. Progress is slow. I’ll give more explicit details when the whole thing is done, thus adding a trivially mysterious note to a currently rather mundane weblog.

Oh boy

Where to begin. Firstly, Anna’s business has been going poorly. An evil competitor has opened up recently – they pretended to be after a job with Anna, got a lot of her business details, then opened up in direct competition nearby by offering specials, especially targetting United Airlines staff (who are Anna’s best customers – indeed, her trip to the US was to visit UA staff friends). So Anna’s just a bit pissed off with that, and has dropped prices to match. Still, they are stealing a lot of the Hilton business by virtue of being basec physically inside the Hilton.

Recently, Anna found out that they’ve been playing hardball – they called the Hilton complaining about Anna’s sign board being out the front, and Anna was forced to remove it for a while. Then she called the Hilton and asked why, and they said for public liability insurance purposes, and she organised a deal with them that would cover any additional cost.

She finally managed to gently fire the unreliable receptionist. This was a bit of an epic saga, as the receptionist is a known emotional manipulator and is certainly capable of doing very unpleasant things in the name of a grudge, but I think Anna’s managed to pull it off OK.

Her new business in Rushcutter’s Bay Hotel isn’t doing very well either. Anna found out through independant contacts that it was doing rather better than she thought, but one of the therapists wasn’t seeing fit to report some of their massages. She can’t fire them either, for reasons too complicated to go into.

The paperwork has overwhelmed her recently, and just when she got on top of it, our home phone was cut off for non-payment of bills. Oops. This is normally one of her bills, but in a fashion rather more typical of me, had gotten a bit disorganised. No big deal, you might think. The phone got cut off on Monday and we paid the bills on Tuesday and asked Optus when they could reconnect us, and how much was it going to cost?

Never, said Optus. Go elsewhere please. We’re sick of you.

Huh?

Get lost, said Optus. You don’t pay your bills.

But… but this is the only time we’ve not-paid the bills. This is the only time we’ve been cut off. Sure, there have been times when the cable TV has also been cut off, but our cable modem bills have always been paid on time. Are you serious? You don’t want our business?

That’s right, said Optus. Bugger off. We can’t tolerate slackers.

Oh, we said, rather shocked. OK. How about Andrew takes over the account? He’s never been late for bills. Would that be OK?

Sure, said Optus. We can connect you up in five working days. Just give us a couple of details so that we can run a credit check.

Here you go. Visa card details. No worries there, I’ve always paid those bills on time. Previous address, should be fine. Driver’s licence, does it matter that I haven’t updated the address on it yet? Good, no worries. Employer? I’m unemployed.

Credit check declined. You also, can bugger off.

I’m sorry? Credit check declined? Why?

Well you’ll have to ask them that. We outsource our credit checking. They’ll call you tomorrow. What number can they call you on?

And today was the day they were supposed to call to explain why my credit check was declined, but they didn’t bother. So at about 3:00pm we called up Telstra and got them to come in. They can connect everything up in two working days. As far as I know, my credit check is fine. So we’ll be back and with a working phone again next Wednesday, though with a new phone number – 9558 8198 (same last four digits as before).

Star Wars

It was the first day of Baltimore being turned into SecureNet on Monday, and as a treat they offered a free viewing of “Attack of the Clones” to all staff members & spouses, and also to ex-staff members like me. I declined, but the Clone movie is so much fun to criticise that I agreed to meet up with Jon & Kate after the film for a good round of bitching. We went to one of the local vegetarian restaurants and commenced to have much fun at its expense. Jon rather enjoyed it, from the point-of-view of a ten year old, while Kate was enraged and in a good mood for dissection. Fun. I’m not sure if we came up with any new insights, but everyone agreed that the creepiest bit was the falling-in-love scene after Annie kills off all the tuscan raiders.

Real Tennis
What an amazing game. It is as if a bunch of monks started playing Calvinball, and after a month or so, suddenly decided to freeze the rules. I can almost hear the thinking behind some of the rules, particularly the “chase” rule: “Well, the ball bounces pretty low. It’s almost no challenge at all to win points by making the ball bounce twice on the opponents side of the court. How about rather than two-bounces meaning a won point, we swap sides and see if the other player can do better? It’s harder to have the second bounce at the back of the court, so we’ll put a bunch of scoring lines there. Watch where the second bounce hits, call that the chase point. Then you swap sides and the other player wins if they can beat the chase.”

John D. and I played three sets and had much fun. The game is like a somewhat slower-paced game of squash: if the ball goes onto the roof, you have plenty of time to get into place. It’s not so bad if you miss the ball, as it usually just sets up a chase. There are some times when it’s better to deliberately miss the ball, if the opponent isn’t going to beat your chase, and other times when it’s better to deliberately duff the ball rather than let the ball bounce a second time for a particularly difficult chase. Lots of thinking involved, I can tell.

Squash
I played squash against Sam-the-smiler last night, and it was also fun. We went to four games each, probably the best I’ve done against him. I’m starting to remember where to stand in the court at any given time, so I’m hardly getting tired at all – in my first game some two-odd months ago, I was exhausted after a single game. Now I can go for a full hour with no worries. Yay! Fitness is returning! Time to catch a cold.

Cat
There’s a very friendly cat that hangs around our place. I think it belongs to the next-door neighbours who own Mr. Starey Cat. It’s a fairly typical tabby, except that it is quite fat, has no tail, and has very lush fur. Nice to pat.

Spiderman
I’ve booked three tickets for Spidey at midnight at La Premiere tonight. Can Ted make it? If not, who will be the third man/woman? Stay tuned…

Sad and unpleasant

Sometimes it’s better not to know. I noticed that Eric Raymond, open-source legend/guru had started a blog, called “Armed and Dangerous”. It’s rather depressing reading, because until then I’d rather admired him. Now I’ll have to stick with admiring the subset of his efforts that directly relate to open-source and gnu software, and try to ignore his unpleasant ramblings on the subject of gun control. For example, his most recent blog entry talks about how much better the world would be if we just allowed all passengers in aircraft to be armed. You see, that way, the terrorists would be shot down by the other passengers and there would be no crashing into buildings.
The logic is odd. I think this would make it far easier for terrorists to take over an aeroplane. As far as I can tell, the best and simplest way to make aeroplanes safer is to have a solid barrier between the pilots and the passengers, and a button on the passenger side that, when pressed, lights up a light saying “land ASAP”, which is the only way of communicating with the pilots.

Anyway. Not impressed. I was similarly unimpressed with James Morrow’s Blog until I realised that it wasn’t the same James Morrow who writes those wonderful satires, “Only Begotten Daughter”, “City of Truth”, “Towing Jehovah”, and some of my favorite SF stories, “Daughter Earth” and “Continent of Lies”.