Catsidhe

The Eustachian tube on the right side of my head has become irritated.

I can feel it; I can feel it inside my head. It feels like a toothache from the back of my sinus to the back of my throat, and an ache in my neck.

It hurts, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Because my childrens' friends like to share, and my children like to share, and I have decided to be selfish.

It has been a long time between drinks.

We went down the road, and Miss S was fascinated by water running in the gutter.

“It's a river!”

“No, it's a gutter.”

“Oh. What's a gutter for?”



As an Oklahoman is supposed to have said: “I wish it would rain. Not for me, I've seen it, but for my ten-year-old son...”

Sipping mead in a warm house, listening to pleasant music skilfully played, doing illumination with creamy smooth paint and a fine small brush under strong light.

And the knowledge that tomorrow is a day at home.



*happy sigh*

I'm going to see friends tonight, no matter that there'll be an amway/tupperware style sales pitch party thing on.

I'm going to see friends I don't see nearly often enough. I'm looking forward to it. Why in seven hells am I shaking?

Fuck off, adrenal system. I'm a grown-up. I'm looking forward to it.

I just need to stop shaking.





I can do this.

Let's see...

Saturday morning we rose early to get the kids ready so we could go to Kerry Greenwood's book launch for her latest Corinna Chapman tale. We were stressing a bit about this, as we had been hearing dire warnings that the Westgate and Kings Way would be blocked solid due to interminable roadworks on the M1. I tried to allow as much time as possible, and checked the traffic on the web, and didn't quite believe it when the route showed as green the whole way. Mim wanted to get back in time to go to her bellydancing class at 1:00, and decided at the last moment that she would forgo the launch so that she could get to one class in three weeks (last week we were at my Grandmothers, next week we will be at my uncle's farm past Alexandra). As it turns out, the way in was clear.

I was worried that the girls would behave themselves (given the mentions in the book of obnoxious kids and their obnoxious parents), but I think they did quite well. Miss S wanted to see the goings-on, and demanded to be held up (at which point she would shove her tiger in my face and ask “can you see a tiger?”), and she could smell popcorn, and wanted it, and generally was bored out of her skull and just wanted to explore. But she is four, and she didn't run too far, and came back when asked. Abi was probably bored too, but was quieter about it. And they've had an experience that not many kids have. But still. They started showing signs of low blood sugar, and flat blank refused to try the rose-water muffins (and I didn't get a chance to try any myself...) or christmas cake, so I went to the cafe next door and got them some cake there. That fixed the blood sugar, but they were still antsy after the signing, so we vanished. (Sorry, bar_barra... without mimdancer there, I didn't feel competent enough to risk my luck, even to find people to give goodbyes to.)

And Mim hadn't needed bother miss it after all. Not only did we get back in time for her to leave, there was a Sooper Special event on at her bellydance studios, and normal classes were cancelled. Notification? Why would you need that? Surely everyone is excited enough to be going to the weekend-long series of classes as to not even bother going to the classes, and not need to be told, no? No?

Needless to say, when Mim returned, she was very calmly spitting blood in blank-faced fury. If she had known this beforehand, she could have gone to the launch, met our friends, we could have had a chance to talk, but no.


That night we went to dinner with Mim's father, as he was celebrating his ‘anniversary’ with his girlfriend. We arrived at the restaurant right about the time the girls are usually going to bed. Mim's father suggested we sit over in the corner. We sat near him. Not that it mattered, because when his friends turned up they just sat in the kids' chairs, and we were shunted off to the corner anyway. Mim's father's friends, by the way, are some of the ugliest people I've met. Selfish, crude, cold, arrogant, pushy, ugh. I would be perfectly happy to never meet them again.The kids, when we got them out of there at 9pm, were exhausted, but had been well behaved considering. Mim's father's response was to inform us that ‘it's good for them’, and seemed perplexed at why Mim is so angry with him.


Sunday morning, Mim and the girls were going to go to a craft market in Mornington with MiL, but they decided instead to go to Mim's sister's place, to help look after her, as she was unwell. I went to the Kindergarten working bee, were I worked, and thence to the Scribes' Guild meeting. Where I handed over a GoA scroll, and Þorfinn told me he would recommend to the provost of scribes that I am ready to take on a Peerage scroll.

And then I went home, and we had pizza delivered, and we sat and stared into space, and then we went to bed.

Next weekend looks almost as full. And the weekend after that. And after that, and...


Um, yeah.

On Saturday evening I went to a fundraising trivia night held for Miss S' kindergarten. Even before the evening started, as I was still introducing myself to the others on my table, the host came around asking ‘is there an IT person here?’

So amidst everything else, I got to discover that there was nothing wrong with the sound after all, but it helps if you turn the volume up on the amp, showed the presenters how to change the video presentation mode on a laptop, and diagnosed that the CD they were playing from was badly scratched.

And my table came second. Yay us.


Sunday, Miss A had a school friend over for a playdate. This is part of an ongoing project to help Miss A get over the biggest hurdle of being an introvert, and provide her opportunities to play with and get to know some of her peers, in a setting where she doesn't feel crowded out and ignored. We thought it went well enough: they decorated mini-muffins, they watched Loony Tunes and the Disney Robin Hood movie, they played in the park when the weather cleared up a bit.

Late last night, though... Mim and I had only been asleep for a short while when we were woken by sobbing and sniffling. Mim had given A some panadol before bed for a complaint of a sore ear and some decongestant for a runny nose, but this time she had a blocked nose, and was just plain miserable. To the point that rubbing vicks on her chest and letting her nose clear (and I could hear it clear) did nothing to lessen her gloom. And then the real reason for her distress. “K,” (the girl who had visited earlier), “doesn't like me, she won't play with me at school, she's always busy playing with other people... no-one ever plays with me...”

A is like her parents: she's an introvert. S is an extrovert; she'll happily make friends with anyone. A, on the other hand, is shyer, more reserved, more reticent. She doesn't like to put herself forward, and so can be easily left behind. Her teacher has said that she doesn't think there is a problem, as she works well with people in organised environments, such as class, or playdates, but in the playground is another question again. And it turns out that in the playground, A feels isolated and neglected and alone. We tried to convince her to try putting herself forward more, to ask people if she could play with them, but it's a hard slog. She's already in the mindset that they'll just say no anyway so there's no point asking, and I don't know that she could bear any rejections before success. She's so socially fragile that the first rejection would be confirmation that no-one wants to play with her, and be a reason to scupper any further attempts.

It's heart-breakingly hard. And it's a battle we can't fight for her, we can't even really help her with. We can give her all the advice we have to give, all the love we have, all the support in the world, but it all comes down to her self-confidence, versus the casual callousness of the schoolyard.


But besides that, her ear kept hurting. And she kept waking and crying. And we kept waking and trying to calm her. And eventually she ended up in our bed, taking over the entire middle, and keeping us awake with sniffling and elbows in the back.

She went to the doctor this morning, and it looks like she has an external ear infection. Antibiotics and painkillers, a day home from school, an afternoon nap, and I hope she is doing better tonight and tomorrow. Tomorrow especially, as after school she is rushing off to her second Girl Guides session, and after that rushing back to go to her school concert (where she and the rest of her class are to be munchkins, singing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead).

Ye gods, I hope I have enough energy.

But for someone who loves school and learning as much as A does, it was disturbing and sad that when she was informed that she would be staying home, her reaction was “Yay!”

She really is like her parents. Alas.

I now, thanks to omnot, have a Dreamwidth account.

Crossposting to both, reading comments on both, next step to come up with some decent æsthetics. In my copious free time.

The thing with having a Remedy queue hovering at 45 jobs, with new jobs being pushed at least as fast as you can pop them, is that the thing becomes like a stagnant pool of sewerage, with a clear layer on top. The first layer is cool, clear fresh water, where the client is happy if you get to them quickly, and just as often easy enough to fix. But. The ones you can't get in time sink, far too quickly, until they enter the Dead Zone, that great swathe of jobs just off screen, after the first 8 which is all Remedy will show you in one screen. Rapidly aging, the clients behind them getting more and more angry, the jobs usually put off in the first place because they are badly described, or the client is uncontactable, or the job, you know, will be long and difficult and painful and thankless. This is past the thermocline. Now you're not in clear water any more, it's scalding hot, murky sewerage. Even looking at it makes you ill. And looking at it does nothing but make it fester more — there is nothing for it but to hold your breath and stick your arm in up to the shoulder. Knowing that by doing this that you're leaving the fresh jobs to fester themselves. Knowing that the more you grope around down there, that you might pull up a blockage, or you might slash your hand open on a jagged, rusty, tetanus-laden, diseased piece of metal: almost impossible to move, let alone remove, and only getting worse by the day. You promise yourself, every day, that tomorrow, tomorrow, you'll make the time to gird your loins, hold your breath, and get to that thing, and every time you watch the clock tick over to five PM again, and think back over your day, and can account for every minute, and not a one spare enough for this. And when you do just reach in and grab it, it turns out to have been a bear trap smeared in shit the whole time, and it's just been fermenting, ready to take your hand off at the wrist. And you still get the impression, somehow, that it's your own fault for letting it get that bad, even though you have no idea what more you could have done, from which black hole you could have pulled the requisite extra four-hour blocks of time.

Can you tell how much I'm loving my work right now?

The only saving graces are when I can manage to solve a problem, quickly and easily. When I figure out what was wrong at the root, and a swathe of issues all go away at once. When a client actually is grateful for what I've done, and impressed at my skill at doing it, and it's not some n00b expressing wonderment and my knowing how to bring up and use the command line in XP.

But mostly it seems like dredging through foetid shit with my bare hands.

Mother-in-law/Landlord got her Land Tax bill today. Last year it was $8500 or so. This year it is over $20,000. She is, somewhat understandably, a little freaked. And as our low rent is dependant on her ability to subsidise us, so are we.

There are several varieties of virus/trojan/worm going around which have in common that they use the autorun.inf file as vector. The first time I ran into this, once I figured out what was going on, I was a little impressed. Now I just want to find 1. everyone responsible for making this possible, and 2. everyone who takes advantage of (2)'s culpable stupidity, and beat them all to a fine paste. Like Microsoft, I will put forward a reward to my finding these people. The reward is that you get to help me in the aforementioned beatings. There was one yesterday for which the user was continually in my face (“it's still not working. It's still not working. It's still not...”), until I re-ghosted his machine: completely nuked it fresh. This morning, he comes in saying that it's infected again. His USB key, the one I had scanned and thought was OK, had reinfected him. It had the autorun.inf on the key, and the infection itself was hidden as a boot-time system file, one set in \WINDOWS\ini (this directory should not exist), and the other in \WINDOWS\Fonts (there should be no executables in there, no *.exe, no *.dll. And the usual hidden dlls in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ and \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. I really have better things to do with my life.

Why, in the name of all that's holy, does the autorun.inf have the power to insert arbitrary dlls into Windows Explorer (and thus effectively the kernel) just by sticking a disk into a drive? Why the fuck are you able to change the very way the file browser, and by extension, the OS operates simply by inserting a disk, before you've had a chance to agree to anything? Autorun.inf is useful for 1. autostarting a program (if you have decided to allow it to, otherwise either ask every time or simply don't and make people click on a link like they had to in the old days, and 2. changing the favicon for the device. That's it. Whoever decided to make it able to arbitrarily insert dlls into explorer should be strung up by their genitals and beaten like a piñata. Fuck!

And I read today that someone has pointed out that the .desktop files in KDE and Gnome have similar power (although not the all-encompassing power as in Windows, but its bad enough).



Creating the image for the labs continues apace. After an email pointing out that I didn't know where to even find half the things I had to install, and that I could find, I had no idea which bits to install, and what license servers to use, and, and, and... I had people replying that they were putting it in the file store as they were typing, or the precise path in the tangled mess which is the ECR repository where I could find the exact version with the proper hacks needed to work... Each major package adds another 1-2GB to the image. And in the interest of students from anywhere in Engineering being able to work in any lab in Engineering, they all have to be installed everywhere. There are about 10 of them. Give you an idea: one of them is MatLab. And it's not one of the biggest. This is going to be a monster image. Then we (I) have to start figuring out the Default profile, and setting up two of them so that the image can be used if the machine has to be used as a standalone instead of on the AD, and then seeing if all this crap still works when you log on as a user, and, oh christ can I get drunk yet?



On a complete tangent: LUST!



And completely unconnected, “... But that hasn’t stopped neoclassical economists from touting how great their theory is, nor from making pronouncements that indicate they still really don’t get it.” Shorter Steve Keen: NeoClassical Economists don't only not know what they're talking about, they either don't realise that they don't know, or else they're wilfully ignoring anyone who tries to point out that their assumptions are just as often completely insane.



What was once BoltWatch, and then became the Blair/Bolt Watch Project, has expanded its mandate and is now based at Crikey! as Pure Poison. “And you know what? It’s not just a duty - taking these guys on is actually a pleasure. The columnists we’ve been watching - and the ones we’ll be adding to the roll at Pure Poison, from both the left and right - produce volumes of the stuff each week. A lot of it is so disingenuous, misleading, nasty or simply nonsensical that it’s extremely satisfying to send up. All that’s needed is a space in which to do it, and an audience that’s been looking for an antidote to this sort of malevolent intellectual dishonesty.”