After granddad died in October last year, I said I'd get around to writing something about him. One thing I wanted to include in that post was an older photo of him, but I never got around to looking through our old photo book, so I never got it scanned, so I never got that post written.

A couple of days ago my mum rung me up while I wasn't doing anything particularly productive with my annual leave - just playing video games while water fell from the sky and pelted people who ventured outside with liquid bullets. I was sort of dreading it'd be another call from this international telecommunications company asking if I wanted cheaper international calling rates to the Philippines (I received 3 of those calls from that company’s call centre that day), but it was my mum, sounding a bit stuffy, like she would when she'd been sick a couple of days.

She wasn't sick though - she had called me to tell me that grandma had died.

I've only ever had 1 set of grandparents. Those on my dad's side of the family I either never met or couldn't remember meeting because I was too young, so when I think of my extended family – cousins, aunties, uncles, grandparents – I think of those on my mum's side. My mum was one of 11 children, so barring my auntie and her family that live in NZ, I have some trouble keeping-up with the size and names of my entire family. Every time we'd go to the Philippines to visit grandma and granddad and co, there'd be new cousins to meet, and old cousins with new faces to get used to.

After my family moved to New Zealand, we didn't go to the Philippines a lot. I can also remember granddad and grandma coming to New Zealand once. All up, I could count on 1 hand the number of times I had actually spent with my grandparents. It wasn't a helluva lot.

So when I got the call from my mum this year about grandma, I didn't have any real reaction: I pretty much went 'oh', talked a bit more on the phone, hung-up, then went back to whatever I was doing.

It was like that for a few hours afterwards in that I didn't give the matter much thought. Then, I started to give the news of grandma's death more room in my head. What did I do? I didn't cry, I didn't even feel sick. I just Tweeted the news for the world to read, then I started to wonder why I wasn't feeling as terrible about the whole thing as I thought I should feel, or the way I thought others thought I should feel.

The same sort of thing happened last year when granddad died: I posted the news, but got on with things quickly, maybe too quickly, as if it never really phased me. I was offered bereavement leave but didn't take it because it didn't feel right to. Bereavement leave, as I see it, is for people who are grieving, which is defined as:

To feel grief (keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss) or great sorrow.

What I felt after both granddad's and grandma's deaths wasn't as strong as the grief described above, or a great sorrow.

I just felt sorrow.

The last time I saw them was Christmas / New Year's 2007/2008, which was the last time our family went to the Philippines together. In the Philippines, that period is like a week-long holiday - we'd have relatives come to our grandparents' (which is where we were staying) during all times of the day. When it came to Christmas Day and New Year's Eve/Day though, everyone was there. I remember seeing those who came to visit grandma and granddad, and saw what really close ties my extended family had: my cousins loved coming over to see grandma and granddad, and my aunties and uncles really enjoyed talking and eating and laughing with them.

I remember feeling a bit envious of the really tight relationship my Philippines-based extended family had, but mostly I felt very happy to see that what I had with my immediate family and NZ-based extended family was being duplicated there as well. Maybe it's just Filipino families (and other family-centric cultures) that are really close-knit and together - I keep hearing stories from many of my New Zealand friends about family dramas or families just not getting along, which only serve to remind me how good/lucky I and my whole family seem to have it.

So when I think of no longer having any grandparents, as well as feeling bad for my mum who has now lost her parents, I feel quite bad for all my cousins, aunties, and uncles, who are now missing those vital pieces of that close family puzzle that I saw all those years ago under a sunny Christmas Day sky.

I may not have spent as much time with my grandparents as I could have, but I have some very good memories of them both.

For grandma, my favourite memory was when my family went to spend Christmas / New Year's of 1992/1993 with them. It was the first time we had come back to the Philippines as a family since we moved to New Zealand, and during that visit, grandma made hot dogs for breakfast one day, and my brother and I really really liked it. From that day on, grandma would cook us hot dogs for breakfast, every day, for the rest of the days that we were there visiting. It quickly became the part of the day I anticipated the most.

For granddad, it wasn't really anything we did together that really stuck out, but something he said, or I was told he said. I was the first of my generation to have graduated from university, and I was told by my mum when she relayed the news to the Philippines that granddad was really happy and proud of what I had done. During our last family visit in Christmas / New Year's 2007/2008, a few years after my graduation, granddad came up to me one time and tried to say as much. Unfortunately by that time something had happened to granddad and apart from being sick and hospitalized every so often, he also became difficult to understand. I only got some words of what he said then, but I think I got the gist of it, because it was the only thing I really felt I understood from him during that entire visit without grandma nearby to translate.

I was afraid that I might have become some kind of emotionless robot given my lack of strong reaction from the loss of my grandparents, but maybe I'm feeling just the appropriate amount given my distance: I'm thinking of the rest of my family, particularly in the Philippines, how close they were to grandma and granddad, and feeling how much more it must hurt them over there; I'm thinking of the few times I did have with grandma and granddad, and how I felt with them then; and I'm thinking of how, with both of them gone, what it will mean to my family as a whole - my grandparents were the reason I went 'home' to the Philippines in the first place and are the link in the family tree that connected me to the extended family that I really like being a part of.

I'm gonna miss that. I'm gonna miss them. And that makes me sad.

Anyway, I still don't have those older photos that I wanted, but I went through the ones from my last visit and managed to find this one of my grandparents, surrounded by a very small fraction of the entire family.

Goodbye grandma, granddad,
'Scanner'

I'm starting to think that my mood is a little too easy to influence.

My last post mentioned how, even in a happy mood, I can be brought back down if I get caught in a smoker's puff of smoke, so when I thought about it some more I started to recall a few more examples where my mood might have been nudged in a certain direction, whether I wanted it to go that way or not.

The best examples, or the examples with the most witnesses, were whenever I watched some movies that really stuck with me. The first one I could think of was The Sixth Sense. When I got hit with that bomb of a plot-twist at the end, my mind was blown. I watched that one with my family and I remember being quiet the whole ride back home from the cinema, mouth agape at what I had just seen. Even when we got home, I lay on the floor of my room, staring at the ceiling and still thinking 'whoa' for the remainder of the evening.

More recently, watching movies with then-current-and-former workmates, I remember coming out of the theatre after The Dark Knight and wanting to impart some vigilante justice. When the group of us gathered outside the theatre afterwards, and one of the guys was being a little bit more of a jerk than usual, the urge to punch him was just so much more intense than usual.

And with the same group of people, we saw WALL-E, which made me stupid happy. I was grinning from ear-to-ear after that movie and felt the need to plant a tree and hug everything.

It's not just movies, but also books. A few years ago I was reading what would become my book, The Wreck of the River of Stars, by Michael Flynn. It's a very melancholy, character-driven story that plays out like a Greek tragedy; misfortunes and misunderstandings at every turn, and things falling apart simply because every character is human: biased, selfish, flawed.

From Amazon.com:

When a bizarre failure disables the Farnsworth engines driving The River of Stars, the crew has a problem no Earthly sailor ever faced: their ports don't stay put. If The River of Stars doesn't arrive on schedule, Jupiter will be somewhere else in its enormous orbit. That means the damaged ship will speed out of the solar system and drift forever among the stars. The crew's only hope appears to be the magnetic sail. But recreating a long-gone high-tech sail isn't the worst problem this motley crew faces. To survive, they must achieve something even more herculean: they must overcome their own intricately entangled fears, hatreds, power struggles, and romantic disasters.

Hope in that story keeps fluttering in and out of reach and for the month it took me to read that book, I found myself in a sombre mood at work, at lunch, at social occasions... I couldn't get myself out of the rut that the characters in that story were experiencing - I shared the roller-coaster ride with the crew of that ship as they struggled to save the ship and, more importantly, themselves.

Given the above, maybe that's why it was so easy for me to blend into the crowd at the Rugby World Cup games, even though I'm not really a big rugby fan or supporter. Hell I could hardly name the members of the All Blacks, but throwing me into the stadium crowd as the games were played, I think it was my emotionally susceptible nature that let me fit in so well there.

I probably should have learned by now that I'm like this, because after the high and euphoria the entire country was in following our rugby victory, I made the mistake of cutting-short that feeling for me by reading a book that was so disturbing that all the love I had for the world, accumulated over the weekend of the Rugby World Cup final, the Simply Ceroc ball, and a part of my birthday month, I lost in an instant.

Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl is a story about "Alice", a 15-year-old girl who was abducted 5 years ago and has endured physical and sexual abuse every day since then at the hands of her kidnapper, Ray.

From one of the reviews on Amazon.com:

He starves her because he doesn't want her to physically mature, he terrorizes her and tells her that he'll kill her parents and burn their house down if she tries to escape. I'm putting "Alice" in parentheses because that is not her real name. It's the name Ray gave her, the same name he gave the girl he kidnapped and killed before he kidnapped the second Alice.

Alice calls herself a "living dead girl." She's numb inside, she's hungry, she's been tortured so much that she wishes for death. She's waiting for it, hoping for it, expecting it any day; but Ray has something different in mind that is even more terrifying to the reader, and he needs Alice's help.

I started reading that book on the first working day after the Rugby World Cup final, borrowing it from the Young Adult section of the library on recommendation of my previous reading history. When I finally put it down, I discovered that I had lost almost 2 hours of work reading this book.

I intentionally didn't pick the book up again for a week. The country is happy, I told myself, everybody is smiling, I have a victory parade to go to tomorrow, I CANNOT put myself into this sort of mood! Not now!

I struggled to keep that book at the back of my mind, but that in itself was the problem: it was at the back of my mind. I eventually got around to finishing the book, and when I did I wanted to call my nieces, meet-up with my friends, and just make sure that everyone I held dear was OK.

Damn my mood swings.

(continued from October is the best month - part 3)

That's pretty much the end of all my birthday stuff. Everything else that made my October so special for me was just all the events and gatherings that kept me busy pretty much every weekend in that month.

One thing was having 2 friends who had gone overseas, to pursue lives and careers, come back to New Zealand for a short visit, and the opportunities I had to see them again after all the time between then and when I saw them last (months for one, years for the other).

Another was that I managed to create a lot more baking successes in October than previously: a chocolate mousse cake to finish the last of the dark chocolate I had accumulated, a coffee cake, parfaits for the family, and a practice sponge cake for my guitar buddy whose birthday is this month.

I also managed to go to the temporary ice skating rink that the city had brought in for October. I hadn't been before and was hoping that my skiing ability would translate into making me somewhat competent. I did manage to fall over once towards the end when I wanted to see how fast I could go. I was just grateful my fall wasn't anything like my brother's, who, last time the city had an ice skating rink, broke his face open across one of his eyebrows and now wears a scar from the experience.

And of course, there was the Simply Ceroc ball and showcase over the long weekend, as well as all the Rugby World Cup games, both of which I've blogged about already. One thing I didn't mention was that one of those games where I watched and then went out with a couple of friends, ended-up with a video of me singing loudly and drunkenly somewhere on Facebook.

All of the above, and all I've written in the previous instalments of this blog post, (and maybe a few other things which have completely slipped my mind,) combined to create a memorable October for me. So when I see the ticker tape still draped about on the overhead power lines throughout the city, a reminder of this country's biggest sporting achievement in a long time, I let it remind me of the month that was, and smile a little more than I used to. Hell I even skip through a bunch of the more melancholy songs on my MP3 player (favourites of mine just months and years before) when I'm listening to it now.

I've found I can easily be broken from happy little trance though, like when I find myself walking behind a smoker and one of their puffs of smoke makes its way to my face, I instantly become annoyed, silently mouth the word 'motherfucker' behind their back (man or woman, I don't care: I am an equal-opportunity hater), and wish that their lungs would explode then and there.

Some things never change :)

(continued from October is the best month - part 2)

Further into October, my birthday a few days behind me now, I was spending the weekend with my family. Well, just my dad and brother - my mum had flown to the Philippines to visit grandma a week and a bit before since grandma wasn't feeling all too good then. It's been almost a year since granddad died and everyone's a bit worried for grandma, so away my mum went to check-up on her side of the family.

So it was just my dad and brother left in the family house in the suburbs, and my mum and I always joke about leaving the house in their care. Sure they can take care of themselves, but they're not the most proactively responsible members of the family when it comes to chores and general maintenance: meals are always eaten later because they start cooking when they get hungry, the washing/laundry never seems to be done as well when it gets done at all, and the fridge/freezer/pantry always runs dangerously close to being empty. I also doubt that they vacuum the house, or even clean the bathrooms in my mum's absence.

In the times I've visited when my mum's away, the house has never really been that bad, but there's always something missing about the way the house is held together when it's just my dad and brother, like the shiny veneer put in place by my mum's cleaning schedule is dulled without her care and that cracks start to show when the house is no longer receiving the same level of care. I jump to a worst-case scenario in my head, in that after an extended absence, my mum would come home to a broken home: the front door not closing properly, a large puddle of water not cleaned-up from a recent heavy rain, a corner of the rumpus room perpetually on fire, a family of wild animals making a nest in one of the rooms, and shit all over the place with the words 'there is no toilet paper' scribbled on the walls with faecal matter...

During this latest visit, I got the following text message from an unknown number:

Happy cake day. Look in your letterbox

Intrigued by the anonymous sender and their message, I went outside to the letterbox, and inside was a cake! It was in the shape of a meatloaf, but it was a cake! (some kind of lemon cake I would later discover) I sent my thanks back to the unknown number, and as I did, all sorts of questions came to mind:

1. Who sent the cake?
2. Who knew I was in the suburbs that weekend so as to deliver it to my parents' house?
3. Who knows where I live?
4. Is the cake poisoned?

A lot of my long-time friends would actually know the answer to question 3 - I had lived in that house with my family for almost 15 years before I moved out - and anybody with access to the internet knows the answer to question 2 since I publicized my location on Twitter the previous day. Suddenly the suspect pool got a bit too large for me to investigate, and thankfully the cake was not poisoned, otherwise I would have gone through my list of suspects much more earnestly.

So my birthday extended to the weekend that followed it with the mystery cake, and when my mum came back from the Philippines several weeks later she brought back a bunch of presents for me from a few of my cousins as well. We even had a belated family birthday dinner at the place we dubbed 'the new Maria Pia's' (Maria Pia's was the Italian restaurant I kept going to for my birthday, and the restaurant that had taken its place is also Italian).

Birthday day became birthday week, and birthday week became birthday month :) I was really liking where this month was going.

(to be continued...)

(continued from October is the best month - part 1)

I hadn't seen Katrina in a while. The last time I had was at her place when I tried to help her out by cooking dinner (one of my pizzas) since she was still just out of hospital and couldn't cook herself, and her family weren't yet home to help her out. That was at the start of August, while I was still in some sort of deal with my work that I could spend my Monday afternoons visiting her in the hospital.

Katrina has just been discharged then. She put out a plea for help, and a tonne of her friends answered the call. I thought to do my bit too, so used my last Monday afternoon off to visit her at home and make her dinner.

It's always weird cooking in someone else's kitchen: nothing is where you expect it to be, the microwave seems to operate on some completely foreign logic, and the knives are always too sharp or too blunt. I planned to make one of my pizzas there, and brought a tonne of my own stuff along since I was warned beforehand that Katrina's family's kitchen isn't the best stocked kitchen on the planet. So with some help from Andrea, long-time friend of Katrina and someone who I had talked to a bunch but never really hung-out with a lot before that day, she brought over some extra things: rolling pin, oven tray, baking paper because the oven tray had been severely 'seasoned', like a wok from a lifetime of use.

I had never used baking paper with my pizzas before, and the pizza base I rolled was a bit thinner than I'd normally make, so I think it was those 2 things that combined to create my stuff-up of the day: cooking the pizza and having it stick so hard to the baking paper that the 3 of us spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away from the pizza base rather than eating it, and because the base was so thin you actually ended-up losing a lot of it in the tearing process. Actually, Andrea and I spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away, Katrina had only 1 fully functioning limb (a left arm) so Andrea spent even more time tearing paper away from Katrina's pizza, and I eventually gave up and just ate the damn paper. Hey if red pandas can eat bamboo, then I can stomach a re-purposed tree.

I felt pretty bad about what I'd done afterwards. I went out there with the intention of helping out, only to add some unneeded plant fibre to a cripple friend's diet. It didn't help that Katrina spent the next couple of days telling everybody about it, and Andrea made it a point to rub it in my face the next time she saw me.

So that's how my last encounter with Katrina went. I'd been meaning to visit again, but the fresh guilt from that last incident kept me away. With over 2 months since then, what better time to try make amends than with my day off?

I met both Katrina and Andrea for lunch at a bakery not far from the hospital where Katrina would be finishing one of her physio sessions - just one of many she was undergoing those days to help put weight back onto her legs. When we went to order lunch, the girls surprised me by paying for my meal :D

As I was eating my free lunch, they surprised me again by giving me a birthday card and presents - a cookbook written by Pete Evans, one of the hosts of My Kitchen Rules (which is a show I watched very closely this year and mentioned a couple of times), and a book about chocolate which is part recipe book and part history/background of chocolate. I was actually reading through the chocolate book last night and it made me so hungry for some sort of dessert that I went out of my way to make a chocolate cake at 9:30 in the evening!

And just as I finished my lunch and thought all the surprises were over, one of the bakery folk came over with a slice of chocolate cake that had a birthday candle in it, and the girls started singing Happy Birthday.

I went home happy that day: a bag of presents in one hand and a birthday-boy grin on my face. The feeling followed me all the way back home. Once I got back home however, the sickness I had been pushing away and ignoring all lunch time pounced back on me. Suddenly I had only enough energy to make it to close the door and collapse on my bed, bag of birthday presents still in hand, and sleep for the second time that day.

I woke up maybe an hour later, still feeling tired, the stuffy nose really sticking this time around, and with a new symptom: a sore throat. I went to my computer, answered all the birthday messages / e-mails / text messages left for me, and that pretty much concluded the day of my birthday.

(to be continued...)

The Rugby World Cup was over a week ago, but remnants of it still remain throughout the city: the World Cup logo still flies prominently beside street lamps, country flags are still visible in shop windows, cars still carry the All Blacks flag proudly attached to passenger-side windows, and the aftermath of the parade - ticker tape and streamers all the colours of the visible light spectrum - occupy cracks in the footpath or are still tangled in the power lines that give life to our fleet of electric buses.

I've been walking through the city a tad happier than I normally do, a small smile making its way onto my face if I allow my mind to wander and think about everything that happened in October.

The biggest thing for me was of course my birthday.

Yes, I'm one of those October-born people, throwing all our birthdays into one month of the year to make peoples' calendars look super busy and to annoy gift-buyers. I passed my last birthday milestone a long time ago, which I reckon is the 21st. After that, card-makers stop being specific about your age and you find yourself receiving a lot of non-numbered birthday cards until your age starts resembling a new decade.

I didn't really know what to do this year for my birthday. I've already written that my normal birthday traditions have gone out the window, so I thought to do the only other thing I could still continue to do - take a day-off from work - and see what happens after that.

Melissa was in the country on the day of my birthday for the first time since... 2003? She took me out for breakfast, meaning that on my day off, I had to get up early. On any other day I might have complained, but I thought I better get as many waking hours as I can out of my birthday. That, and I'm not one to turn down free food.

Free breakfast on my birthday; a good start to the day :)

After I walked Melissa to her work so she could start her day of working and I could continue my day of not working, I went to my favourite place in the city to kill time: the library.

When I sat down to read through my current book, I found myself unable to stay awake. Sure waking-up at my normal time on a day when I would have normally slept-in might have taken away some valuable sleeping hours, but I didn't just feel sleepy: I was sniffling a bit more than usual, and I felt really tired already. Oh no, I thought to myself, don't be sick, don't be sick, not now, not today...

The only other thing I had planned for the day was to meet-up with Katrina, who I hadn't seen since she was discharged from hospital, at which time I tried (and failed) to make her dinner since she was unable to cook herself and needed help until her family were able to come home (they were all away at the time). I needed to be well enough to travel some 20km to visit her at the hospital after one of her physio sessions, and my stuffy nose was looking to ruin that.

I didn't catch-up on my sleep at the library (I didn't want to look like the homeless guy sleeping in the library since there was already one there in the far corner), and I didn't want to catch-up on my sleep on the train to the hospital either (I didn't want to miss my stop, which I had done several times before when I'd slept on the train), so with a few hours to go until I had to meet Katrina, I went back to my place, collapsed on my bed, and fell asleep.

I woke up with time to spare before the train I planned to catch, without that nagging fatigue I had at the library, but I still had that damn stuffy nose. So this is how it's going to be huh? Fine then. I told myself, and off I went to the train station with an extra handkerchief, just in case.

(to be continued...)

Last night was 2 things for me: the 'All Black Tie Ball' for the Simply Ceroc weekend (the year's major event for the dance classes I attend), and the Rugby World Cup 2011 final between New Zealand and France.

When I signed-up to the ball, I wasn't thinking that much about the Rugby World Cup. In-fact, the Rugby World Cup didn't really enter my mind until the weekend it started, so when I learned earlier this year that the final and the ball were on the same night, the thought that went through my head was, 'meh'. Regardless, the advertising for the event said that they'd have the auditorium next to the dance floor open for us to go watch the game on their giant screen. That didn't really factor into my decision of going to the ball, but as the world cup final drew nearer, I'm glad they did it.

I signed up to the ball because my friend Melissa - the one who actually got myself and another mate of ours, Alexey, into dancing in the first place some 3 years ago - wanted to go. Despite being our progenitor, Melissa had never been to the ball, whereas Alexey and I and had been to 2 each in our time, so when Melissa got me to sign up to accompany her, this ball became the main motivation for going to dance class at all this year - I had dropped-off the ceroc radar for a good 6 months last year (when work started to eliminate any semblance I had of a social life) and so I felt I needed to get back into classes so that I wasn't totally useless come this weekend.

One nice thing about the ball is that I get to wear a suit. I don't really get many occasions to don suit, so when I do I usually end-up wearing a bit of a "I'm wearing a suit!" smile from the simple idea that this is probably the nicest-looking I will ever get. The location for the ball isn't far from my place, so I walked through the city towards it, wearing a suit and my silly little grin.

Now that Melissa and I had 2 events to balance, we went to the ball with one eye always on the clock: doors to the ball opened at 7:30, dinner starts getting served at 8:00, kick-off for the game was at 9:00. We arrived on time, got a dance in, and it was during that dance we could smell the mains meal being lined-up at the buffet table not far from the dance floor. Melissa was particularly hungry, so mid-dance we manoeuvred ourselves across the dance floor between other dancing couples and right up to the edge closest to the buffet (I had actually failed to lead myself and my partner between a moving crowd several times earlier this week, so was very happy to have not stuffed this up here). When the song ended, we promptly let go of one another, ducked under the barrier at the edge of the dance floor, and were practically the front of the line at the buffet.

We got back to our table, ate away, and were almost done by the time everybody else managed to grab something to eat. A decent line stretched away from the buffet, and we were wiping the food from our mouths ready to go to the auditorium to watch the All Blacks play France.

Things were looking up: we got to the ball on time, we secured a nicely-placed table, we managed to weave our way through several dancing couples towards the buffet, we beat the crowds to mains, I was wearing a suit, everything was going right for us.

We made it to the auditorium, everyone really got into the mood by standing and singing the national anthem and cheering with the haka, but then we sat down and everything started to fall apart.

The game was a nail-biter: we had the lead, but it was never convincing, and the French were putting-up one helluva fight. By half-time, I was resigning myself to the fact that we could actually lose, and then riots would run through the streets and all the cars outside would be flipped-over and/or set alight by the ensuing mob - move over Vancouver, we'll show you how a real sporting-loss riot can be done.

When we all returned to the auditorium for the second half, the cheering had audibly died to make way for a collective nervousness. Someone behind me made the comment that you could feel the tension in the air, and that tension also had the ability to slow time to a crawl. At 8 points to 7, a 1 point lead to the All Blacks, that last 30 minutes to the second half became the longest 30 minutes of my life. I thought I was watching the clock too often before to make it on time to even get here, now I was watching every passing second of game time with both of my eyes, swearing at one point that I saw the clock go backwards.

We won, eventually, and the tension was replaced with cheers of relief more than anything. We were so very lucky, and we all knew it. We exited the auditorium and Melissa and I had to sit back down at our tables for a while to let it all sink in. I'm not one prone to nervous habits like nail-biting, but after that game Melissa had worn down 9 of her fingernails, and someone else I danced with later that night had chewed through all her fake fingernails, enjoying a healthy diet of acrylic to go with dessert.

Melissa and I left the ball soon afterwards to join friends who were partying in the streets. On the way to where they were, we saw people climbing trees, cars honking everywhere, impromptu chants, scrums, and one guy push himself down one of our main streets on an office chair. Oh and man hugs on every corner. Even in my suit I wasn't immune to the bromance, and was dishing-out a bit of man-love myself, in between the whoops of victory and photo-bombing peoples' shots in my hired finery.

It's 4:52am now. I got home and started writing this about 2 hours ago. I'm out of my suit, showered-off all that sweat from dancing which came from dancing away my nerves from the rugby, and now I'm just glad. Even though I wasn't biting my nails (or tightening my sphincters as some friends tweeted), I was staving-off epic disappointment and maybe some kind of heart attack with that 1 point lead.

I'm not sleepy, even though my normal bed time was over 5 hours ago. I've said before that I'm not the biggest sports fan, but thanks to my dad who got the family into those pool games and me really into the spirit of things, I've witnessed history and now I want to know what happens next.

Sleep can wait.

I made myself a birthday cake earlier this week (I did get other birthday cakes on my birthday - an anonymous cake in the letter box and a surprise cake on my birthday - so I don't feel like a total 'forever alone' sad sack by doing this), and one thing I've been doing with my more recent cooking endeavours is, once I have a product I'm actually proud of, I feed some to my guinea pig.

No, not an actual guinea pig, but a human test subject. A pregnant human test subject. If my food's good enough for a pregnant woman (a group who seem to be the fussiest eaters these days. I don't know what it was like in my mum's day, but I'm pretty sure the women of that age ate whatever the hell they wanted and babies turned out fine), then it's gotta be good enough for everybody else right? I didn't actually seek out my pregnant friend for this reason, it just happened that she works near where I work and I could get a hold of her for lunch to try the dessert I made that time.

When I made my birthday cake - a marbled coffee cake with a layer of chocolate frosting in the middle, inspired by that site and a chocolate history/recipe book I got for my birthday - I asked my guinea pig if she'd like to try some. Before I could even list the ingredients though, she had already made-up her mind:

coffee = ick
♥
don't hate me

I was actually quite sad to learn that she couldn't stand coffee and because of it she wouldn't be going anywhere near the cake :( I mean, I don't like coffee either, but in any form that isn't a drink, I can enjoy it. I sat at my computer with a sad face for a bit too, glad that the facade of Facebook chat was sitting between us so she couldn't see my disappointment.

I needed to find new test subjects, so in my disheartened state I overcompensated for the loss of 1 person by texting/messaging way too many others.

The cake ended-up being shared between 5 other people with who I was so eager to share it with (maybe because I was still all *sad face* over my guinea pig not wanting cake) that I ended-up with just 1 slice for myself.

For the last month and a half, our little country of New Zealand has been host to the Rugby World Cup - a tournament between the top 20 rugby nations of the world. About this time last year, my dad, seeing this as an opportunity to be a part of something big, asked the family if we wanted to attend the World Cup through a package deal which would get us tickets to every pool games being held at the local stadium. I remember how I felt at the time - rather reluctant and not as enthusiastic as I could've been. I thought about it and finally settled on saying 'yes' to the idea, forking over a large sum of money to my dad, large enough for the bank to wonder if the transfer was legit.

I'm not the biggest rugby, or even sports person in my family. If there was a game on you're very likely to find my mum and/or brother shouting obscenities at the television if things aren't going their way, or just shouting at the television if things are going their way, and me cleaning-up the table and washing the dishes all by myself if it happens to be that we've just had dinner. This happened a lot when I lived with my family, not it only happens if I'm over for the weekend.

The year passed, September came around and with it, a crapload of tourists descended on our little city. Now I don't mind the tourists, but there was just something a little different about this bunch - they were mostly wearing their country colours, proudly proclaiming from where they were and who they're supporting. I thought it was kinda neat seeing so many people supporting their country, but for my first Rugby World Cup game, it wasn't a New Zealand one, but South Africa vs Wales.

I have virtually no connection to either South Africa or Wales: I have a friend from South Africa, and a temp who worked in our building years ago during her OE is from Wales. That was pretty much it. But I liked what I was seeing happening on the streets of our city: people here flying their colours and who were actually here to watch the rugby, as opposed to all those other occasions where the main event has taken a back seat to just another reason to party, eg: The Melbourne Cup, The Rugby Sevens, and any event with the word 'tasting' in it.

So I thought I'd get into it, and crowd-sourced my allegiance to Facebook and Twitter:

RWC game this weekend: South Africa vs Wales. Who should I cheer for?

The response was overwhelmingly in favour of Wales, so in the days leading-up to the game, I bought a Welsh flag-cape and brought it with me to the game.

It wasn't the first time I'd been in the stadium, but it was the first time I'd been in the stadium when it was full, and the atmosphere was so much more electric than the smaller crowds I'd normally been a part of. I fell-in with the crowd so easily and within minutes I was shouting, chanting, standing, clapping, mexican-waving, and going all-out at the top of my lungs and whatever the equivalent is for arm-waving. I was louder than the rest of my family and I surprised myself at how quickly I got into the swing of things.

The game was great, and I really thought we (Wales) were gonna win; the score being so close and everything. I had a helluva time, and was sad to have to part from it and go back to my apartment, sleep, and then go to work the next day (it was a Sunday night game).

We had more games to go to, and this carried on for another 3 weeks: I picked a side to go for, I got a little souvenir for that side to take to the game, I went to the game and supported that team until my throat ran dry. I was a mercenary selling my support to whichever team I wanted (usually the underdog) and I had a blast every time I did it. The last game we had tickets for was a New Zealand game, so I did get the opportunity to cheer for my own country for once.

That last game was over 2 weeks ago, and even though I haven't attended a game since, I've been watching the games with friends or family, choosing a side (when it wasn't a New Zealand game) and trying to be the best fan I can. I'm still not the biggest sports person in the family, but I've really got into the swing of things with the Rugby World Cup.

I guess it also helps that New Zealand is in the final for this weekend, for the first time since... what, 1995?

After the South Africa vs Wales game all those weeks ago, I brought my Welsh flag cape to work and pinned it to the divider beside my desk. People pass by and wonder aloud who the Wales supporter is, obviously not drawing the link between myself and Wales because I extremely un-Welsh-looking :P When I hear those comments though, I just smile and think how glad I am to have chosen to go to the rugby after all.

My guitar buddy introduced me to this concept of 'love languages'. While the main Google hit is a page about 'the 5 love languages' what it basically comes down to is the idea that each of us has a certain way in which our affections can be won over and which we show affection ourselves. ie: some of us really like giving gifts as a way to show we care, and those same people might really respond to receiving gifts more than, say, complimenting them.

It's not a new idea - I'm sure we've all observed that some things will really get through to people and other things won't - and it goes a bit of a way to explain why some people can get along and others don't.

Personally, I'm a 'quality time' person (if you hit the Google link above and go to the first link which categorizes said languages) which I think a bit odd considering I have so much free time to myself (or maybe that actually explains why I look so forward to seeing my friends and going to whatever events they have). For another 'Octoberite' though, whose birthday was just last week, they seem to be especially fond of something that isn't really pigeonholed by any of the standard categories on that site: they really like receiving links to sites on the internet of cute animals doing cute things.

Coupled with my Spidey-sense like ability to know when someone's birthday is (my friend didn't have their birthday listed on Facebook), I sat down at lunch one day and came up with ideas for their birthday present. Mid-way through my open chicken sandwich w/ fries, I invented "Panda An hour".

Panda An Hour was the name I gave to the initial idea of posting to their Facebook wall a link to a photo/video of a red panda (I really like red pandas, as my About pic should leave no doubts about) every hour of their birthday, for as long as I was awake. The idea went to include other animals because I don't really have that much red panda material.

(Actually, yes I do have that much red panda material, but most of it comes from the red panda encounter I did last year.)

So I did my homework, and the day before her birthday I began compiling a list of photos and videos to use, starting with those in my own 'collection' of cute animal pics/videos, and slowly branched-out from there. I kept this up for several hours until I was up to my eyeballs (ie: 20+ tabs in Firefox) in cute animal material. I could feel my testosterone levels dropping as I brought up and bookmarked video after video, and picture after picture, compiling enough material to see me through the 16 or so hours I would be spamming her wall.

After finalizing the list of links, I went to sleep with doubts. Wall spamming isn't exactly the best thing you can do to someone, and with the internet just so full of stuff, we've even got videos and songs not-so-kindly asking people to lay-off the forwarding of stuff.

But when I get an idea in my head, I stubbornly follow it through, and this was one of those ideas. It's worked-out in the past... maybe 66% of the time. The other 33% have had me actually fall out of favour with people because of it because it can be read as very forthcoming, and in a very recent case I've somewhat frightened someone to the point of not talking with me for several months.

So I slept restlessly that night, only to be awoken by the alarm on both my cellphone and clock radio after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. After turning off both alarms, and even before eating breakfast, I turned on my computer and began the panda attack.

It was very likely to have been my least productive working day in a long time. I kept such a close eye on the lower-right corner of my computer screen, eyes glued to the minutes as they passed by, signalling the end of an hour and the beginning of a new one. When a new hour rolled-around, I double-checked my next choice of photo/video, even trawling for new ones if I second-guessed my initial choice. By the time I posted the next photo/video, I was maybe 30 minutes away until the next hour.

I also had a very brief lunch hour that day.

In short, it went down really well: I got a lot of good comments and I wasn't defriended before the day was over :) My own wall had the unfortunate side-effect of showing nothing but 'Emanuel Rabina posted a link on someone's wall...' activity, but I felt really good at the end of it.

Giving gifts has always made me feel good, and I've never really tried giving URLs as gifts before. In an age when we play-down the value of things like e-cards and generic e-mails, I wasn't really sure links would have a very high value, but it felt like I gave a little bit of me with every link I posted, much like how I'd feel when I give a real-life gift. Maybe it was the effort of spending my evening and half my working day tailoring those links for a specific person, and now that I wrote that, I feel like I've tread this ground before.

So maybe when that love languages site says 'quality time' is my love language, it doesn't just mean spending time is what speaks to me, but also that putting time into something can really grab my attention. It's certainly worked before :)

When I went shopping for all the ingredients for Black Forest Gateau 1.0, and knowing full well that I'd make the cake again right afterwards, I went and bought 3-times the ingredients needed to make the cake: 1 lot for the trial cake, 1 lot for the improved cake, and 1 lot for 'in-case-shit'. It worked well for the most part, and I was left with some extra cake ingredients that I could use in other baking. For the other part however... well let's just say that the recipe I was working off said it needed a block of dark chocolate, so I bought 3. I ended-up using about 5% of a block of dark chocolate after 2 cakes were done, leaving me with 2.95 blocks of dark chocolate and no clue on what the hell to do with it all.

Yes, there was the obvious idea of eating it all, but I'll confess right now that I don't really like dark chocolate that much - I'm more of a milk chocolate person. I can't really eat a square of dark chocolate by itself without having the bitterness of it trigger the neurons in my brain responsible for sending a signal my facial muscles to make a screwed-up face.

In an attempt to use the dark chocolate, the first thing that came to mind was to bake brownies. I did that, twice in the span of a week, each batch consuming half of the 0.95 block of dark chocolate. That left me with 2 more blocks to use.

Not wanting to make another 4 batches of brownies (if 2 batches in a row was making subsequent oven-cooked food smell of chocolate, I didn't want to know what doing that another 4 times would do), I asked around for ideas on what to make using the rest of the chocolate, and someone came back to me with some recipes that promised to use entire blocks at a time: a dark chocolate cheesecake, and a chocolate mousse cake.

These seemed like good ideas to me, so I looked-up recipes on the internet, set a time to attempt the cheesecake, and invited the idea-girl over to help me out (me not being all that great with baking, and she being a very experienced baker), promising a front-row seat to a surprising success... or an epic failure.

One thing I did try to plan was to have us try the cheesecake before we had to go (we both had a Rugby World Cup game to attend that night), but I never knew just how long a cheesecake had to spend cooking and cooling in the oven. Neither of us had a chance to try the cheesecake before we had to go, but all that waiting made my apartment smell almost like the brownies I made before.

Once home from the rugby game though, I went straight for the cheesecake, taking it out of the fridge and immediately not liking how it looked out of the cake tin: the top was tough, reminiscent of the edges of brownies (which in some recipes you have to cut off) and it kinda sunk in the centre. The inside looked better, but when I went to taste it, it was like eating a slightly soft piece of dark chocolate; bitter, and not at all sweet :(

I learned that night that substituting the white chocolate for the dark chocolate wasn't all that good of an idea since the original recipe relied on the white chocolate for it's sweetness and so had very little sugar in it which I didn't at all make up for when I switched chocolate.

I don't know what came over me, but after the dark chocolate cheesecake fail, I was determined to get it right; part of it being that I wanted to prove to the friend who came over that I can actually bake, and the rest of it just my usual stubbornness. So the next day during down-time at work, I collated cheesecake recipes and ideas to make my own cheesecake, no longer caring about using the dark chocolate, but just determined to not be beaten by a damn cheesecake!

I filled-up a page of one of my old drawing books with a recipe, some notes on lessons learned, and then made some mini-cheesecakes (I basically made miniature cheesecakes filling-up 2 or 3 spots in a large muffin tin instead of a full-on cake). When those didn't turn out according to plan, I took down more notes on what went wrong, what I can do next time to resolve it, and the next day I tried again.

This has been going on for every night this week since the weekend. I come home from work with a detour to the grocery if I need more ingredients, and then start on the next iteration of mini cheesecake.

Unfortunately, success is still out of reach.

Feeling a bit defeated, but still wanting something to show for my efforts, I put together a dessert from the leftover cheesecake ingredients and whatever the hell else I felt like using. What results was a sort of parfait: biscuit crumbs in the bottom, middle, and top layers, the cheesecake filling making up for most of the middle, and various leftover canned fruits throughout. Hell I even added sprinklings of the dark chocolate of which I still have roughly 0.8 blocks worth.

There are a few glasses of this hybrid dessert cooling in the fridge right now and, for something that's effectively the by-product of several failed cheesecake attempts, I'm feeling pretty good about it since without the failed cheesecake, all that's left in those glasses are the parts that I became good at in the last couple of days. It's basically everything that I didn't screw up.

I've asked another of my friends to be my guinea pig for tomorrow - we're meeting up after lunch to try this dessert. One thing that's worrying me about our meet is that my 'guinea pig' is pregnant - I'm praying very hard right now that what I've developed doesn't cause miscarriages.

My guitar buddy was making me dinner last Sunday - her reaction to an argument we had where I thought she had zero cooking ability and she was determined to prove me wrong - and some time during the making of the meal (potato gratin w/ chicken schnitzel and some steamed broccoli #NomNomNom (oh dear... I just hashtagged my own blog post)) she came to the following conclusion: that I'm very easy to please.

I was just off to one side, watching her cooking and thought: Man, this is awesome. I need to provoke more people into cooking for me. Smiling happily as I watched dinner being made before me with minimal effort on my part, I got to explaining that free food - dinners, lunches, paying for a dinner/lunch - was something of very high value in my family.

Going out to dinner is often the thing my family would do come any special occasion, usually for birthdays or commercial holidays like Father's/Mother's Day. We'd pick some restaurant that we hadn't been to before or, as in the case of my birthday, that we'd been to every year since my 21st, and have an enjoyable night poking fun at the others' most recent fails (which is on-par for Rabina-family dinner conversation. It's like those celebrity roasts where they take turns digging into someome).

Then when it comes to lunches during the working week, my parents and I would meet for lunch every-now-and-then and take turns paying. You could tell whose turn it was to pay because one of us would be wearing a dour expression, while the other 2 would be grinning from ear-to-ear.

When I was the one organizing lunch with one parent and I'm ringing the other to ask if they want to join, the question is always the same: "Are you paying? :D" (and yes, I can hear the :D over the phone line)

And my brother's no different either: in a text last week for when he was asking to come over to my place to watch the New Zealand vs Japan rugby game, he wrote a follow-up text which read: "And dinner too? lol"

The Food Channel might be the only thing my mum and dad can agree on when channel surfing on those random weekends I decide to visit them in the suburbs, and I may have confessed to watching My Kitchen Rules on more than one occasion, but as much as we enjoy watching the wonderful and extravagant things those shows present to us, not one of us spends an exorbitant amount of time or effort on creating our meals. It's like we put as little effort as possible into creating a meal so that it meets the minimum for whatever health guidelines we're following at the time, and where the consumption of it wouldn't knock too many years off the end of our lives.

I used to think we were just lazy and other families had epic dinners all the time. Turns out that when you have to make your own dinner every day, you try not to put too much effort into it - something I quickly learned when I moved out of home.

Maybe that's what makes those meals - the free ones or the ones where someone else is cooking - so damn special? Maybe it's not the food at all, but the idea that you don't have to do any cooking, or spend any of your own money, and yet food just magically appears. If that's the case, then anybody can appreciate the value in getting a meal for free; my family just happens to take it to the next level.

So there I was, watching my guitar buddy cook dinner for me and thinking that this might be the best day I've had in recent history. Then I thought about it some more and remembered back to last Tuesday when I had lunch with my friend the hug nazi and she paid for both of our meals with the aid of one of her vouchers - now my budget spreadsheet is in love with her.

It might not be the food at all, but rather the idea that someone else is taking a little tedium out of your own life by using a little time and effort from their own. It may not be the most spectacular thing in the world, but framed like that, it makes for a pretty powerful gift I reckon.

So whether it really be that the way to my heart is through my stomach, or that I'm just easy to please; if you're buying or making me my next meal and I start to beam like I've just won the Lotto, know that I'm just really appreciative of the gift you're giving me, even if you haven't realized it yet.

FINALLY! >:|

Now it seems as if every piece of software on my PC wants to update itself or download something over the internet (my calendar suddenly has all the appointments I loaded at work, iTunes wants to download all my podcast subscriptions 10 times over, and my firewall/antivirus is already getting a tonne of updates), so I'll let them all fight for bandwidth while I catch-up on my 'watch later' YouTube backlog.

15 days though... FFS! Last night when it all got resolved, it's as if Orcon finally got my message: I got a Tweet from them saying they think the problem is fixed now and could I please check (I was at work at the time, so couldn't check), I got a call on my mobile soon afterwards asking the same thing, and then a few hours later I got the same guy ringing up to make sure that it's OK now I was at home (it was, although it did cut out for about 10 minutes until I restarted the router), before another call from someone who was ringing to credit my account for the days I was without internet + extra for the inconvenience.

Where were all these people 10-15 days ago? :(

I'm glad it's over, but I think it'll take a while until the suppressed anger subsides. I'm still wary of the internet connection falling apart and find myself checking the internet light on the router whenever I pass it by. You know, just in case.

Day 15 without the internet... Blatant company-bashing: Orcon Genius sucks / blows / is not fit for human use.

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Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.

So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.

I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.

It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...

So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:

It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.

The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.

The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.

Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.

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* harsh for a cake anyway

Continuing from my last post, I'm still without internet :( 14 days without internet, bringing the total number of days I've been with internet in this last month since switching to Orcon to 9. That's right: 9 out of 28 days. So a warning to people thinking of switching to the Orcon Genius plan: don't. Not yet anyway - give them a few months to sort out all the initial problems, and then decide.

(The first time I join the 'early-adopter' boat, and it sinks the moment I set foot in it. *sigh* Just my luck eh?)

Anyway, I've been keeping myself relatively busy without the internet, and to survive the last weekend without it I went to my parents' house to leech their bandwidth :P

That's wasn't the only reason though: Sunday was Father's Day for New Zealand, and for Father's Day I thought I'd cook him (and the rest of the family) a pork roast that I saw on My Kitchen Rules.

As well as distracting me from my internet-less life for 1 hour a day, 3 nights a week, My Kitchen Rules is just another in a series of TV cooking competitions that I've been watching for no real reason except that I find myself channel surfing on a quiet night, and then come across the cooking show such that I keep coming back to it the next time it's on until the season/competition is done. Much like with the last Masterchef Australia - I just happened to see an episode half-way through the competition, and before I know it I'm watching the final and rooting for some guy who I didn't know just a few weeks before.

When I was starting on the pork roast, a voice started replaying in my head: it was Dylan Moran from his comedy show I saw just 2 weeks before when he was saying that we've all been "Masterchef'd to death", and it's unfortunate I can't even remember the context in which that line was used.

But he was right: the original pork roast recipe when taken straight from the My Kitchen Rules website was so 'chef-y'/restaurant-ish that I had to dumb it down for my mediocre cooking skills and middle-class tastes:

• Duck fat? WTF, I don't even know where I can buy that! Replaced with butter and oil.
• Fennel seeds? Couldn't find it at the local supermarket. Removed from the recipe.
• Jerusalem artichokes? Out of season, so not currently on store shelves. Removed.
• Prosciutto? Whoa, I'm not on that kind of salary. Replaced with bacon (which we didn't use in the end).

So what started as "Pork Cutlets With Caramelised Apple Sauce, Peas, Jerusalem Artichoke & Apple Puree" became "Pork shoulder roast with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, baby carrots, and crackling". Regardless, the family was impressed, dad included. Although he was probably happier about not having to have to cook for the first time in... forever.

In the last couple of weeks I initiated a switch in ISP from a landline + DSL plan, to a naked DSL + VOIP plan from Orcon to remove the cost of having a landline that I barely ever use. Let's just say that it hasn't been the smoothest transition I've ever experienced; in the 3 weeks since I was switched, I've been without internet for 2 of them.

The first time, the new router (supplied by the Orcon - you can't use your own) simply broke and started emitting a clicking noise that reminded me of an electronic heartbeat, a dying one at that, which in turn evoked imagery from The Tell-Tale Heart. I was sent a replacement router soon afterwards, and that incident left me without internet for 4 days.

The second time, which is happening right now, the router is fine, but the problem I think lies at Orcon's end in that I can't get an internet connection because I believe I actually don't exist in their system anymore (my account information has all gone missing from their customer account pages). This incident so far has left me without internet for 8 days.

In the interim, I've been doing most of my browsing at work (hell I'm blogging from work right now) and just adding videos to my 'Watch Later' playlist which is backing-up pretty significantly - I'll need a good afternoon to myself just to get through them all. When I'm not at work, Facebook and Gmail are done through apps designed for my dumbphone.

8 days so far without internet, and I'm not actually missing it as much as I thought I would.

For one, I've had some sort of activity on every day/night - work (obviously), birthday dinners, comedy shows, out-of-town-friend lunches, watching My Kitchen Rules, and catching-up on all my TV shows. So I've been keeping pretty busy.

Secondly, I've noticed a beneficial side-effect: my vivid dreams have returned.

Looking through my site, I've only mentioned my dreams in one post, and in one story e-mail. To summarize, my dreams consist of several of the things I've come across in previous days, and are very heavily influenced by visual media like TV, movies, and video games. For example, I remember telling someone about a dream I had where I had to track-down some intergalactic criminal in a spaceship shaped like a pyramid (Stargate). And just last night, I had a dream involving dragons (Game of Thrones) and large-scale battles viewed from a top-down/isometric angle (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer 4).

No matter what the setting, there is a recurring theme in my dreams in that they're always as action-packed as a Transformers movie (with a plot that's probably on-par with Transformers) and involve me trying to save the day or save the world for reasons I don't question except that there are bad people out there screwing things over for people who don't deserve it.

When I was younger, I remember trying to get some interpretations, any interpretations, about my dreams. There were so many "answers" from sources about falling dreams, drowning dreams, being-chased dreams, and so on, but never anything about performing ridiculous heroics. I've tried formulating my own ideas, but what the heck am I supposed to make out of fighting vampires/gargoyles with my friends while the village they attack is being evacuated, or rescuing another friend from a mist-filled ghost dimension with the help of 50-cent and the G-Unit?

I would like the internet back though - I feel very disconnected from the world right now and the narrow view of it that my phone provides just isn't enough. But can I keep my dreams too? Pretty please?

It's not very often that I bake, particularly after learning that it'd be near-impossible for me to blaze my own baking trail when I'm surrounded by so many other spectacular bakers. But a friend created a cooking event, which he dubbed 'the non-charred cook-off', after we all lost faith in his cooking abilities - he burned sausage rolls - and I was under the impression us invitees were to bring something to help teach the guy some cooking tricks. With so many others bringing mains, I asked if I could make a dessert instead.

My request was two-fold in its purpose: to participate in the cook-off with something different, and for the dessert, a cake, to act as a birthday cake for someone whose birthday it would be. So yesterday I went shopping for enough ingredients to make the cake 2-times over: one for the real cake, and another for a trial run (like I said, I don't bake often, so I could do with all the practice I could get) which I did today.

The cake was a black forest gateau, which was one of the coolest looking cakes in one of the two cookbooks that I actually own, and I made it once before, a couple of years ago... and it took me 6 hours to make. It's not a cake that should take 6 hours, but I made so many stuff-ups that I had to redo things. At one point I was so fed-up with trying to whip cream with my arm and a fork that I went to the local homeware store and bought a mechanical egg-beater. Earlier that day I had to buy more eggs...

Anyway, this time I had the ingredients, but my technique was as rusty as an oil tanker, so today was more about trying to get the steps right for when I'd make the birthday cake proper next week.

To assist, I invited my friend the hug nazi who, as well as being named for making tonnes of hugs, has made several cakes in her lifetime, and has a camera infinitely better than what came with my mobile phone.

I started off with what I did the last time I made the cake, and came away with 1 very flat looking cake base that wouldn't have looked out of place at the bottom of a cheesecake. With my friend's help, she reasoned that the egg whites weren't fluffy enough, hence the cake wasn't fluffy enough either. With that, I let her beat the egg whites for the second layer of the cake to what she thought would be much better. It worked, and we ended-up with a layer almost twice as thick as the first one. I'll remember that for Black Forest Gateau 1.1.

When she wasn't helping though, my friend was licking chocolate off mixing bowls and cream off the egg beater. I was glad she had to go do some volunteer work this afternoon, otherwise she'd also have dug into the dark chocolate block and eaten half the cherries/strawberries when I was decorating the cake.

When she left, the cake looked like a gigantic oreo. When she returned, it looked like this:

(Edit: Thanks mum, but the spelling mistake is intentional. Google 'caek', and it won't try to suggest or correct you)

So lessons-learned, or things I'd like to improve upon for next time?

Firstly, beat the egg whites very thoroughly for a fluffier layer of cake.

Secondly, the cake lacked a bit of the 'black forest' part that I would associate with a cake of such a name, and so what I ended-up with felt more like a 'creamy milk chocolate' gateau. So maybe a lot more dark chocolate, a lot more cherries between layers, and a little less cream between layers too.

But for all its shortcomings, it didn't at all stop my friend and I from having an early dessert.

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Edit: Bah, forgot to mention that the 'non-charred cook off' got cancelled the other night, but I went ahead and did this anyway. Maybe I'll still be able to get Black Forest Gateau 1.1 to the birthday girl anyway, we'll see.

Further to part 1, I've updated another wallpaper for my screen and other 16:10 resolutions:

Looking back at the other pictures, this may be the last one I update - I'm a bit out of ideas of what to do for the others, and it feels like my creative flair (for digital images) has been exhausted just by working on this and the other 3 images.

It's just a bit like that with me though - I go through phases where I end-up concentrating on one of my hobbies at the detriment to all the others. At the beginning of the year, I was spending all of my spare time working on a novel-length story. I got maybe half-way with that before I switched to something else.

Right now the main-focus hobby is the piano playing, and I would've had another piano video up on YouTube by now, but I lent my camera to my brother to help him with some actual paid work (which I think trumps doing a YouTube video anyway, so I'm cool with that). So I hope to get some videos (2, maybe 3) out in the next few weeks.

We all have our traditions: visiting the family on a major holiday, going to the midnight mass on Christmas Eve/Day, having eggs for breakfast on Saturday morning, etc. They can be something to look forward to, or something to dread, and you put it in your mental calendar regardless of the effect. One of my own traditions was something started on my 21st birthday, when I had dinner with my family at a little (yet quite popular given the size of the place) restaurant known as Maria Pia's.

I never intended it to become a tradition - I just wanted to eat at an Italian place for dinner on my birthday - but the staff and food made such a good impression on us that when my next birthday came around, I thought, Yeah what the hell let's go there again. So we did, and again the next yet, and... you can see where this is going. I even took my friends to that place one year, and another time I had a friend take me as a belated birthday present.

Another unintentional tradition that started around my 21st was that a friend of mine, the same friend who took me to Maria Pia's, and the one who I've often referred to as 'hug nazi' throughout this blog, would always be out of the country on my birthday. She does love to travel, and I never really thought much of it until I started noticing that it always happened around my birthday: OE, someone's wedding, a job, whatever the excuse, something would take her out of the country or she would make sure she was out of the country.

When she started to realize the pattern herself, she actually started to feel guilty, and it was that guilt that had her take me to Maria Pia's as a belated birthday present for after she got back from her latest overseas adventure.

With my birthday now within my range of foresight (which doesn't really look that far ahead), it's looking like 2011 will be the end of both of these traditions.

For the last year, hug nazi was overseas for work (the cause of her missing last year's birthday) and has recently returned, with no plans to go away for the foreseeable future. I brought this up in a Skype call between us a few months back, and while she was happy to be around for my birthday for the first time in... forever, I was feeling a bit odd about it, simply because it felt like we were breaking tradition. I even considered taking myself out of the country for my birthday, just so we'd be in different timezones so technically it would still count, but I'm already booked to be here because I've got tickets to the Rugby World Cup around then.

And earlier in the week I found out that Maria Pia's has closed. I went so far as to tweet that "...a part of me has just died", and then went to the site of Maria Pia's earlier today just to see what happened to it. Sure enough there were signs saying that it was gone and a new restaurant would be opening in it's place.

I brought this up with my guitar buddy over dinner a few nights ago, and she and some others at the table suggested that I could invent my own Maria Pia's atmosphere come this year's birthday (and kick hug nazi out :P ), or simply start some new traditions.

New traditions. Starting something new. Both exciting and slightly frightening prospects. Repetition makes us good at things, makes things easier, and tradition is really just repetition with a predictable time period - it's easy, you know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, you have some idea of what to expect, and it's safe.

I'll admit: I'm pretty risk-averse - years of getting figuratively stabbed in the face after putting yourself out there will do that to you - so to have these 2 things suddenly vanish has made me a little uneasy. I tried listing the number of other traditions or little rituals I have, and either my memory is really crappy right now, or I only need the one hand to count them on. After all this time of trying to be the one my friends could rely on, to be the rock to help others through their own transitions, it turns out I have very little to rely on myself.

Is that irony? Or is that just some kind of imbalance that I need to sort out? Either way, I predict I'm going to have one of those thinking moments in my immediate future.

Update: As requested, I've added 1440x900 versions. I really shouldn't have forgotten about that resolution - it's what my work laptop runs at.

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I got a new 16:10 widescreen monitor over the weekend, and wow at all the extra pixels! :D

I used to have a 17" LCD monitor that dates back to early 2005 and stuck with through all these years and other computer upgrades, until just a few days ago. The thing came with 1 stuck pixel which was easy enough to ignore since it was on the side, and in the last year it had been showing signs of aging. I mean, LCD technology isn't supposed to suffer from burn-in right? Well, this monitor started to, and thankfully a temporary version of it. To see it in action I just had to leave a maximized Firefox window open for too long, and bam! My bookmarks toolbar is now a part of the screen when I close Firefox. (The burn-in would go away after a few minutes of displaying something, anything, else.)

So at 1680x1050, the extra screen real estate is great when working with pretty much any software, particularly the creative stuff: Adobe Audition for sound editing, Adobe Premiere for video editing, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro for image editing, etc. Hell, even using my programming IDE, Eclipse, is better now that I can put those extra views/panels to the side of the code instead of obscuring it.

The only annoyance is that all those wallpapers I'd collected over the years, made for the 1280x1024 resolution, suck at 1680x1050. So once I was done admiring how games and other programs looked on the new monitor, I went through my wallpaper collection and did a massive cull - either going back to the original artist hoping for a widescreen version, or just deleting them.

My own space wallpapers (from 2005-2008... I really need to get back into those), looked pretty bad too, so I took some time to update them for my new screen. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

Apart from including extra elements from the original images to make use of the extra width, I've also done away with prominent titles or other obtrusive screen elements (eg: the HUD-like parts that were present in older versions of the last one). The title has now been relegated to the lower-right corner along with my name and website (it used to show my e-mail address, which has changed since these wallpapers first came out).

I'll have to update the actual pages in the Artwork section, and may have to update the originals as well. Hmm... I think I'll just work on getting more up-to-date 16:10 versions of these wallpapers first. Just the ones I like the best anyway - some of them have since fallen out of favour with me.

If you go to the dentist on a regular basis (yearly for me, mainly because I've never been able to say 'no' to them scheduling me again after another visit. That, and they take much better care of my teeth than I do) then you're familiar with a routine that they follow. Mine goes something like this:

1. Sit in the chair.
2. Update my contact details.
3. Ask me if I've been taking care of my teeth (regular brushing, flossing).
4. Take x-rays (every second year).
5. Remove tartar from in-between teeth with a vengeance.
6. Gargle/rinse with toothpaste-tasking liquid.
7. Reschedule to do this again next year.

I've never had that fear of dentists - knowing that they're doing and how they go about it helps (if they have to remove tartar from between my teeth with a metal pointy thing because the only thing tartar will respond to is a metal pointy thing, then so be it) - and actually enjoy getting my teeth cleaned-up. It's like that feeling after a new haircut where you put your hand to the short hair at the back of your neck and push up against the grain of your hair - a feeling you only get after a new haircut. The dental equivalent is that when the gunk from between my bottom front teeth gets removed, I suddenly have a small gap between my teeth that I can feel with my tongue and spend the rest of the day just trying to see how little of my tongue I can actually squeeze between that gap.

Anyway: the clean-up I like; the asking me if I floss daily and then me having to be honest and telling them that no I haven't been flossing regularly and have been neglecting their advice for over 20 years: I don't like, mainly because it then makes me feel guilty for not listening to them and that I'm now making their job harder than it should be and that it's attitudes like mine that make up all those terrible dental hygiene statistics and blah blah blah...

(Seriously, my conscience reacts to the smallest things and has way too much say in how I live.)

I'm just glad that I only have to do this once a year, because any more often and I might just have to start avoiding my dentist. My teeth would not be happy about that.

Now, on a completely related tangent (bear with me), I go to Subway on a regular basis; much more often than my dentist, like every week. There's a routine there too, and it goes something like this:

1. Ask what bread/meal you're putting together.
2. Ask which cheese you want in it.
3. Ask if you like your sub fresh or toasted.
4. Ask what salads you'd like in your sub.
5. Sauces?
6. Salt and pepper?
7. Any other things? (turn it into a meal, buy cookies, etc)
8. And if you swipe a SUBCARD®, ask if you've registered it online.

It's that last one that gets to me. Why? Because I haven't registered my Subcard.

The last 3 times I've been to Subway, I've been asked if I've registered my Subcard and each time I've had to say 'no' and each time I've felt slightly worse about not registering that I actually avoided Subway for a bit just so they wouldn't ask me to register.

It reminds me of the dentist, when the nurses ask if I've been flossing my teeth, because it's advice I should be taking (keeps my teeth cleaner / is really the only way to check what's on your card), and takes virtually no time at all to do (5 minutes each night? / 5 minutes once and that's it!). I can't get angry at the nurse/cashier either because it's their job to make sure I'm flossing/registering and I can't just hate someone for doing their job (unless their job is evil, of which dental nurse / Subway cashier is not).

So today, sensing I needed to eat something relatively healthy because all I've got waiting for me at home are meat and potatoes, I decided to go to Subway for lunch, but first, went online to register my Subcard. Then I went to Subway, worked my way through the sandwich-making queue, got to the end to pay for my sub, swiped my registered-only-20-minutes-ago Subcard, prepared myself to say "YES OH YES THIS CARD IS REGISTERED MWUAHAHAHAHAHA" (or something like that), and...

...didn't even get asked if I registered my Subcard.

What do you do when visiting someone at the hospital?

I've never had to visit someone in the hospital before. Sure, I've been in hospitals but never as a visitor. So what was I supposed to do in this situation?

Most of the time when going into a situation in which I have no actual grounding in, I turn to what I know of it from the movies or TV. In this situation, the scenes that came to mind were of white halls crowded with anxious visitors stuffed into a waiting room: someone cradling an injury with their own blood caked on their hands, a family all seated sombrely with at least one of them pacing back and forth in the space they occupied, some teenage girl who looked healthy if not for the dark sunken eyes and vacant stare masking the reasons for her being here. All of them ready to tell you their story if you just sat with them and gave them a moment.

And all in slow motion, while the protagonist walked calmly and unhindered down the hall to their destination.

None of that happened here of course: the walls weren't technically or even arguably white, there were no mysterious-looking characters in the waiting area, none of them looked at all eager to give me the time of day, and it all happened in real-time as I strode hesitantly between them to the enquires desk. Sometimes in the movies the people would bring in balloons or cards or cuddly toys with get well messages scrolled on them. I had none of those either. I was obviously ill-prepared.

2 hours before...

Lunch buddy: "So what are you up to this afternoon?"
Me: "I'm gonna visit a friend of mine in the hospital. I asked work for the afternoon off so I could go, but I don't know what to do. I mean, don't people always bring get well cards or balloons or something like that? I'd do the same, but I think she'll have tonnes of those already."
Lunch buddy: "Food or baking is always a good idea."
Me: "What about Subway cookies? Do you like Subway cookies."
Lunch buddy: "Yeah, yes I looove Subway cookies."

The receptionist gave me instructions worthy of a GPS unit for finding Katrina's room. I repeated what I was told, and the receptionist nodded her approval of my understanding. I followed the instructions, but not quite to the letter, otherwise I would've ended-up in what looked like a wheelchair closet.

I eventually found the room, counting-off room numbers in the labels above the doors like I would when counting mailboxes on a street, searching for an address. Some of the rooms looked unoccupied, while another of the rooms contained a family reunion.

Standing before Katrina's room, I took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold.

Nobody was there.

What would a movie protagonist do? I wondered. So I went to the window of her room and looked through the gifts that sat on the windowsill: cuddly toys, Get Well Soon balloons and cards, flowers, blocks/boxes of chocolates, and a radio set to static? I considered leaving my Subway cookies in amongst them, maybe leaving a note to say I had been here, but Katrina had to be around here somewhere - the description I was given of her injuries would prevent her from really going anywhere.

4 days ago...

Facebook chat buddy: "hey, you been in to see Katrina in hospital yet?"
Me: "Wait, WHAT?"
Facebook chat buddy: "yeah Katrina is in hospital, where have you been Em?"
Me: "Under a rock it seems. Why's she in hospital - what happened?"
Facebook chat buddy: "she was in a car accident 3 weeks ago. shes pretty banged up, she cant remember the accident or the few first days after it. the car is a write off. she has 2 broken legs [...] broken arm [...] and a fractured pelvis, plus multiple bruises and stitches."
Me: "3 weeks?!"
Facebook chat buddy: "yes three weeks, where have you been man, in your own lil world"

I asked around and was pointed in the direction of another room in which Katrina was known to spend some time in - to get away from having to spend all day confined to her bed she'd later tell me. She spotted me before I could recognize her - I was walking down the hall to this 'Day Room', which let in a lot of light from the outside, and there was a figure in a wheelchair, obscured by the contrasting glow of daylight to the inner gloom of the hospital. She looked towards me and held her gaze, and from that I could tell it was Katrina.

I sat in a chair opposite her, taking in the room, Katrina, her injuries, and her mood. I didn't need stage directions or movie cues anymore; I know what to do when I'm around friends.

So we talked, joked, laughed, and I teased. I surprised myself at how 'normal' I acted around her: I held-back no wisecracks, nor any snarky comments. Wheelchair-bound or not, my wit made no distinction and didn't bother to spare her at all. I was glad I had all of that to say and do, because on some other level, her situation made me feel sad.

Here's someone who, last I remember, was worried about adjusting to her new job that she had to move city for. Now she's worried about standing on her own legs again. In an instant, in a car crash that she can't even remember, her world was suddenly reduced from a city and its surrounding suburbs, to a hospital room and its surrounding hallways.

A lot of movies/tv/books have used the word 'unfair' when describing similar things, but I don't think that's the right word, just because so many things are unfair on general principle. (It's like describing water as 'wet' - it's true, but it's unnecessary.) It just sucks. It's shit. Shit happens.

Shit happens, then you move on. But somewhere between those two steps, when shit happens to someone I know, there's me feigning a sad face and posting sad panda photos to make the other person laugh, while I hide an actual sad face underneath it all.

*sigh* Week 2 of annual leave is over. What did I get up to this week?

I've already blogged about the piano and recorded myself playing it yesterday. The piano, although very minimalist-looking in size, still takes up a large chunk of the wall of my bedroom where most of my random crap used to sit: bags, books, papers, my heater... pretty much anything that didn't fit in a cupboard or sit on a desk lived in that spot. Now the piano is in that spot, and everything else is on my bed. I had to brush that all aside to make enough room to sleep last night, then this morning I had to put it all back on my bed so I could safely navigate my own room.

So the piano probably isn't going to live where you saw it in that video. I only put it here so I could do the recording since I don't actually have a proper camera; just a webcam and a stereo cable. It's going to have to go in the lounge where there's lots of room. Although most of that room is now taken up by packaging material and the gigantic box in which the piano came in. The box is large enough to work as my coffin - I might have to bend my knees a little, but when I looked down into the box yesterday, empty of the piano and full of space, it was like looking into an Emanuel-sized hole in the ground...

Apart from that, the only other thing worth really mentioning was the Wellington Open Day today, which I just came back from, where a bunch of places throughout the city were available for tours/visits for the price of a gold coin ($1/$2). There was one place in the list of attractions which I had never been to before, the City Gallery, so made that one place to visit, and with the help of a friend who came along with me, turned today into the visiting of places I haven't been to before.

We started at Downstage Theatre (I've only been in the theatre part once when I watched a show there last year), where they told us a bit about that theatre and its history, and took us on a tour of the backstage (haven't been there) including the lighting grid above (definitely haven't been there).

Next was a bar called Motel (been there once before) where there was the option of trying to create the cocktail they showed us, the Red Snapper. The drink is like a Bloody Mary (tomato juice), but with tobasco sauce, amongst other things. Now I would've thought that years of Indian curry lunches with workmates would have prepared me for tobasco sauce (I can now eat the hottest curries without wishing to cut my tongue from my mouth to separate me from the pain). I thought wrong. After the first sip, I kept opening my mouth and breathing out in a futile attempt to get the heat of tobasco sauce away from my throat. The bartender saw my reaction, watered-down my drink for me with more tomato juice, and my friend was kind enough to take a photo of me when I wasn't imitating a fire-breathing dragon.

After that we had lunch at a restaurant called Sweet Mother's Kitchen, a restaurant I had been trying to get to eat at several times in the past couple of years, but each time without success - it's just way too busy and way too popular a place to eat. The furthest I'd ever got in the past was to the counter to ask if they had seating for the number of people in the group I was currently with, only to be told that they might have a spot if we came back in an hour. This time however, they said yes, and were able to seat us. I guess it helped that there were only 2 of us this time, but with each step I kept voicing my excitement: "Yes! They have room at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!", "Yes! I'm sitting down at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!", "Yes! I'm eating food at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!"

I didn't eat as much as I normally would for lunch (Motel also had tiny sandwiches which I ate plenty of when I was trying to dampen the tobasco sauce) but settled on pumpkin pie, which had to be the sweetest pie I have ever eaten (not being familiar with American sweet pies).

Lastly, we went to the City Gallery where we were taken for a tour through one of their current major exhibits, and where our tour group included a couple wearing bear costumes. (Did I mention that the weather is a bit crap today: cold and rainy? No? Well, the weather is a bit crap today, so dressing-up for warmth was a good idea.)

So that's my 2 weeks of leave done. I did a bunch of stuff, but did I actually get done what I planned to get done?

Nope.

Then again, when my plans included items like 'Watch all of the Harry Potter Musical on YouTube', maybe it's better things ended-up this way.

In my last blog post I mentioned the piano shopping I was doing during my annual leave that, unfortunately for me, will have ended by the time you read this. Back to work on Monday like everybody else... *sigh*

From the major music stores in the city, I was able to quickly cut it down to 2 digital pianos that, for my price range, had pretty much everything I was after: a full range of keys, weighted, with a good grand piano sound, and some options for a sort-of beginner piano player like myself. If you're interested in model numbers, they were the Yamaha Arius YDP-S31, and the Korg LP-350

The Yamaha grand piano sound is what I grew up on, and because of that the Yamaha had a head-start over every other keyboard I came across. The weighted keys though felt a bit tough and kinda bouncy, which weirded me out.

The Korg was the opposite: great feel, but the sound from the built-in speakers felt like they missed the grand piano sound in some notes, particularly the higher ones.

So I spent a lot of time going back-and-forth between the 2 music stores that had these models, and soon enough the staff there were able to recognize me by sight. I brought my headphones to each store, tried to remember the way the pianos felt and sounded as I went between one store to the other, trawled the internet for reviews and opinions from others, and generally spent a crapload of time getting nowhere.

Then, last Sunday, I went indoor rock climbing for a friend's birthday which turned my arms into jelly. It was the best thing to happen to me in my hunt for a digital piano.

With my arms now useless, struggling to lift a glass of coke to my lips in the lunch that followed (well it wasn't that bad, but avid readers of this blog will have learned that hyperbole is my friend), it made a difference when I next went to play those 2 pianos. First, I went to the Yamaha, and the tougher resistance in the keys made it an effort to play. I actually got tired on that piano and thought, Screw this. I'm going home.

The path home from there went passed the other music store with the Korg, so I decided to give the Korg a play anyway, thinking I wouldn't get a whole song finished before my fatigued arms would fail me and droop to my sides in defeat. I sat before the Korg, played and... made it all the way through the song. Huh, I thought, let's try another. So I did, and I got through that too.

I never noticed how much I was struggling with the Yamaha's keys until I had virtually no energy left. I don't know whether that speaks volumes about my lack of upper-body strength or that my purchase decisions tend towards the things that need the least energy out of me, but that was the tie-breaker: I went with the Korg.

I bought it on Tuesday, then waited for the delivery of it every night since then (the colour of the model I was after had to be sourced from another store, but they said they should be able to get it overnight). Like a child on the night of Christmas Eve, I couldn't go to sleep because I kept anticipating the delivery of the piano the next day. In the day that followed, no call from the music store. So I waited the next day, lacked sleep once again, and it still didn't come. This went on for a while - while enough for me to lose sleep over several days in a row such that this morning, even after the full 8 hours of sleep that I normally need to function, I woke up feeling exhausted.

After getting some breakfast in me to provide the energy I needed that sleep wouldn't provide, I got a call from the music store that they would be around with the piano in the next half an hour :D

I was very glad that I could get it before I had to go back to work on the Monday. I even went so far as to record me playing (badly) on it:

So, 2 weeks of leave, and this is what I have to show for it.

And so my first week of two weeks annual leave has just finished (and to start it off I began this sentence with a conjunction to piss certain people off with whom I had a discussion/argument about it earlier this week). There's nothing particularly special about the leave; I'm not doing any travelling or visiting any distant relatives, I'm just taking some time off now that the project I've been working on for nearly 2 years has finally been released to the customer. That transition took place over Queen's Birthday Weekend (a long weekend 3 weekends ago now, for which I was also working), and I seriously feel like I need a break.

I was supposed to have written this blog post yesterday, but as part of a ceroc friend's birthday celebrations I went (indoor) rock climbing with them and then lost all function in my arms. Heck, once I got home I couldn't even pull my socks up my legs without getting my fingers locked into some tight grip/claw shape because I didn't have the strength to straighten my fingers into their normal position.

So in this first week of leave I've managed to go rock climbing, discover I have very little upper-body endurance, and return to dance classes. I've also cleaned almost every corner of my apartment (there used to exist a thin film of dust and Farmbake cookies that settled over the carpet like geological strata - not any more!) and do a little more work on this website to make it more responsive. Mainly though, I've been shopping around for a new digital piano to upgrade from my existing keyboard: an old 5-octave Yamaha keyboard my parents bought me for my 15th(?) birthday to help me with the whole self-taught piano thing I was going through at that age.

It was the first instrument I learned to play (if you discount the ones that the numerous primary schools I attended taught all their kids) and really stuck with, even if it was an on-and-off sort of thing. I'd learn the occasional tune, practice and play it to death until I could play it blind-folded and annoy my family who had to put up with hearing the same songs over and over again, then move on. When university came around the piano-playing took a back seat to my studies and I picked-up the guitar which I thought of as an easier way to take music with me. I stuck with the guitar for several years until my guitar buddy and I stopped our practice sessions. Then, without much motivation to continue the guitar, I returned to the piano.

Compared to the musicians I listen to or those I pay to see at the occasional concert/orchestra, I'm not very good, and being self-taught means I lack all the theoretical background any normal music student would have received during their life. For example: I only learned what constitutes a chord, and how to make a triad, last year in an after-school beginners keyboard/piano course that I signed-up to because I was accused of having too much free time. What I thought of as a chord or triad, I saw as a pattern on the keys of a piano; what I knew in my head for a chord progression, I saw once again as numbers and a series of patterns that followed some sort of hidden formula or rule that to me just sounded nice.

Music for me was a series of patterns, numbers, and shapes. Without the theoretical/educational background, I didn't have any other way to express what I saw.

It was only once I started hanging-out with musicians or other musically-inclined people that I gained names for these things - I no longer had to refer to things as 'that pattern' or 'that hand shape' and I could use the names given to them by other musicians and feel a bit smarter for speaking the proper lingo.

I learned to play songs that went beyond the old Yamaha's 5-octave range a long time ago, but couldn't afford the next step up. If I couldn't get away with transposing the entire keyboard down/up an octave to compensate for the lack of keys, I would imagine myself playing those notes and the sounds they'd make during the song as I played it. I'd also grab some time on a proper piano whenever I could: sneaking a go on the super-expensive grands that sat on the floor of a local music shop during my lunch hour, or shooting out after dance classes to play the terrible-sounding upright that lived in the room next to where lessons were held.

Now that I'm on a break, have some money, and am back into playing the piano now that work has calmed down significantly, I've been digital piano shopping. Hopefully I'll have something before my second week of leave is up :)

I was going to start this post by saying something like 'I often complain about the number of hobbies I've accumulated', but to try back that up I did a Google site search for the words 'complain' or 'hobbies', and it turns out I really haven't complained about that at all. I guess I just thought about it a lot, or complained about it in my own head, which surprises me that I haven't made a blog post about it because the things I think about or complain about are quite often what I blog about - sometimes it feels like this blog is just one big online whine-fest punctuated by brain farts.

So I've got a bunch of hobbies. There. And as well as complaining about the number of them (in my head), I often feel bad that I can't dedicate the amount of time I would like to each of them, mainly because I have other hobbies that take up my time. (Seriously, I should just cut the number of interests I have in half and then I won't have anything to complain or feel bad about!)

One of those hobbies I've managed to find some time for recently is an old programming project, that 2D game engine for the classic Command & Conquer game, Red Alert, that I started back in 2006 which I entitled 'Red Horizon' (it even has a tab in the navigation bar of my site). That project hasn't seen any real activity since mid-2008.

For the coders out there: have you ever taken some time to look at the old work you did - the code you wrote from a couple of years back - and then eyed it with mild curiosity as you read it back and wondered, What the hell was I thinking? Yeah, I had that sort of moment when I went back to my Red Horizon code last month and tried to figure-out how to continue it.

It's only been 3 years since I last worked on it, yet in that time I've learned so much more about programming that re-reading my Red Horizon code causes me to scratch my head and occasionally brings some bile to my mouth. I mean, it's not terrible code, but over the course of the work project I've been assigned for almost 2 years now (went live this weekend, so yay that's over) I've been trying to hold a high standard to my own work. That standard clearly isn't present in Red Horizon.

I remember having this sort of talk with my university classmates in our final year. When we weren't studying or playing networked games of Tetris on the Unix machines, we once talked about taking a look at all the code we wrote in first-year and disbelieving that stuff was actually our own. What the hell was I thinking? would often come up, because what we put together as first-years just looked so crude, so 'beginner-ish', so the work of a newbie.

Of course, being work from our first year of university, that code was the work of newbies, but now, more than 5 years out of university, which itself was 4 years worth of programming, I can still look back at code I wrote 3 years ago and have a good old WTF moment.

I'm not really sure if that's a testament to how much I've learned or improved over the years, or how little I actually knew back then. If anything it's reminded me of another conversation I had with my friends at university - not the coders - where we discovered a pattern amongst ourselves in the attitudes we had towards our own fields of study: that as first-years we didn't know anything, as second-years we thought we knew everything, but in our final year (fourth for most of us) we realized that we knew very little.

6am waking-up in the morning...

No, it's not Friday. It's Sunday, very early in the morning by my standards, and I'm at work.

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The room was still covered in darkness when I awoke, the alarm from my cell phone at the lowest volume setting, yet creating what felt like a loud plea for me to wake in the relative quiet of the early morning. My hand reached out from its warm spot under my duvet and protested what it was doing when it met the cold of the morning air. My arm continued to reach however, not needing input from my sleep-addled brain as it had performed this manoeuvre many times before - locating my cellphone on the bedside table, flipping it open (I've still got one of those clamshell-type phones), and pressing the button that would silence it's pleas to rouse me from my sleep. I would have normally gone straight back to sleep after that, returning to whatever dreams I had momentarily left by the time my arm returned to its place under the warm duvet, but something in my head kept prodding me and preventing me from sleeping:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It was just as annoying as my cellphone alarm, but I didn't have a routine to turn this kind of buzzing off; I couldn't reach a metaphysical arm into my brain and press the button to turn off subconscious thought. So I just lay there, listening to its pleas:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Why? I wondered back. Why must I wake up? It's too early, it's a Sunday, it's the LONG WEEKEND! WHY? But my questions were useless; the subconscious never answers questions, it only makes requests.

And it almost always wins.

I opened my eyes. Then I wondered if I did that right, because all I could see was the same blackness that stared back at me through closed lids. My eyes wouldn't open any further, so I tried turning to find something I could train them on, and there, on my ceiling, was a single streak of light from a lamp on the street outside.

I came to several conclusions then: that it was cold, that it was early, and that the sun had not yet risen. I also remembered something else: I had to go to work.

So I got out of bed, faced the frigid daggers of single-digit temperatures that were waiting for me the moment I shrugged off my duvet, and started my usual morning routine at the pace of a shambling zombie. My eyes never opened fully, despite my repeated attempts, and I managed to make my way through getting changed, eating breakfast, and brushing my teeth, amongst other things. I remember looking into the mirror through the slits in my eyes and looking upon the 6am version of myself: sunken eyes, frazzled hair, no will to carry on, and only the wish to sleep. That last one however, was normally the subconscious' job, but it was still intent on getting me to work instead.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It seems I wasn't awake enough by my subconscious' standards and it could see through the charade that I placed before it to try to get it to shut up; the zombie-Emanuel marionette on display wasn't enough to appease its simple request and high standards. I didn't think my state of mind would have met the medical definition of awake or conscious either, but it was all I could muster at such an early hour. Like Superman, I draw-upon the sun for my powers, but the sun was still a while away from shining its grace on my little corner of the world.

By the time I left my apartment to begin the walk to work, the sky was still the same shade of black as the shadows of a dark alley where unwitnessed murders would take place. There is no colour to be found in an early morning city: only the glare of artificial lights and a million shades of black. I looked down at my pants and couldn't tell what colour they were, couldn't even remember what colour I put on when I got changed this morning. Zombies apparently don't have a short-term memory. Funny, I thought, considering their insatiable appetite for brains.

I haven't had to wake up this early in a long time. The streets, normally packed with other people making their way towards their own work, were empty of humanity. I was reminded me of those old spaghetti western movies that I used to watch with my dad, and I half expected to see a tumbleweed float by - incongruous in a city setting, but not out-of-place for the current context.

A dark shape skittered across the road - a plastic bag.

Hmph, appropriate. I thought.

---
So yeah, I'm at work, at an unusual time and day. This weekend, the system that I've been working on for almost 2 years is being released and I'm here to help oversee the transition. Although there's actually one of the more senior and knowledgeable guys here to cover that, I'm sort of the backup, the 'throw-ideas-at-me' guy. So with nothing to really do until we get a phone call from the few people on-site to report something odd going on with the transition, I decided to do some blogging.

The light at the end of the tunnel that I've been chasing after for so long is finally here, and it feels like all the weight and stress of the previous months is finally leaving me. I should really be more stressed, considering that now I'll be moving-on to doing live support and production fixes, but it just feels so much better to see the end of something that's acted like a vacuum to my spare time and social life - sucking it all away from me until I only had work and the next working-day left to look forward to.

So fingers crossed that nothing catastrophic happens; catastrophic to the system we're deploying, not catastrophic to the planet. Hell, I'm more worried right now of our phones ringing than I am of a meteor striking the Earth. That saying about how silence is golden? For me, at this very moment: totally true.

After having learned about the sport some 4 years ago, I've finally got around to reading-up on Handball. My friend Claire, the same person who was the subject of the previously-linked story e-mail and who was the one who brought the sport to my attention, has a game this weekend and has invited pretty much everyone under the sun to watch and support her team, which just happens to be the NZ women's team.

Knowing Wikipedia and my browsing habits, I'm trying not to learn too much about it, or get caught in some sort of link-following tangent and end-up reading about some completely unlrelated subjects like the Catholic Church (3 clicks from Handball) or triskaidekaphobia (4 clicks from Handball). I'm trying to learn just enough so I can understand what the hell is going on so that come this weekend, when I'm watching the game, it doesn't just look like a game of basketball being played with a smaller ball and a soccer net.

I seem to be learning a lot this past week. Not only is there the handball, but over the weekend I also learned that for over 20 years, I have been trying my shoe laces wrong. Well, not really 'wrong' per se, but using a 'weak knot' as Terry says in the video below (I'm sure someone else can post the link to the proper term for these different knots).

When I came across that video I showed it to the rest of my family (I was staying with them last weekend) and within minutes all 4 of us were scrutinizing our shoe-tying techniques and discovering that each of us has a different method for achieving the same result. I mean, if you think of tying your shoes as 2 parts - the initial over-under knot, and then the bow - here's how each of us gets this done:

• Me: right lace over left, right bow over left
• Mum: left lace over right, right bow over left
• Dad: left lace over right, left bow over right
• Brother: right lace over left, left bow over right

Between the 4 of us we cover every permutation, and because both my dad and I tie in the same direction twice, we both come out as having the weak knot. We thought this was a bit odd because we all agreed that it was my mum who taught my brother and I how to tie our shoes, so we don't know how both of us could have deviated from whatever it was she was trying to teach. Then again: my brother is left-handed, and I avoided laces for as long as I could, opting for good-old valcro shoes well into my primary school years, until I had the courage to face the intimidating snakes that lived to cling to my feet.

So from yesterday, whenever I had to tie my shoes, I opted to tie the stronger knot, and I'm having some difficulty in doing so. I mean, tying my laces is an automatic operation which requires virtually zero participation from my conscious mind - I just put on a shoe, send my hands towards the shoes, and presto: instant knot. Now, I have to actually think about what I'm doing, and the change in movements is really awkward, like trying to write with my left hand awkward; the movements feel unnatural, slow, hesitant, and by the time I'm done I've got a really loose version of the stronger knot because I couldn't keep the proper pressure down on the initial knot to prevent it from getting undone.

But I stuck at it because I have 2 pairs of shoes, work ones especially, which keep getting undone around half-way through the work day (so I'm walking around the city for lunch with my laces untied quite a lot more often than I'd prefer). This morning I put on one of those shoes, took maybe 5 attempts to get the stronger knot done, and went to work to put the knot through its paces. Every now and then I'd steal a glance at my feet to see how the knot was holding up, and it stayed tied for the entire day. I was impressed.

I think it'll be worth the additional and conscious effort - it'll just take a really long time to get it feeling all natural and automatic.

It reminded me of another book I recently returned to the library (the one that cost me $5 to borrow, and only then I was limited to 7 days. It took me 8 to read it, incurring a late fee, so at $6 total that book was easily the most money I have ever spent at the library). In it, the main character has a side of her brain damaged in an accident, and so after some surgery suffers from 'left neglect' (or a hemispatial neglect of the left side) in which she no longer becomes aware of the left side of her body, or anything to her left. What's strange is that at first she doesn't even know that she has this left neglect - the other half of her brain is filling-in all the gaps in her awareness, and so the story is about how she has to consciously retrain herself to remember that there is a left side, to look left, to think about and command that left leg to move while she's walking, and a whole bunch of other things that many of us just do without having to think about it.

Sure my shoelace-tying doesn't compare to those with actual neglect, but if at my age I'm finding it difficult to break something my mind and body have done for over 20 years and 'unlearn what I have learned', how do you even start retraining yourself to make use of a side of your body that your mind doesn't believe exists?

I normally Like or Favourite at least 1 YouTube video a day, sometimes even promote some comments that stick out, and it all ends up on my Facebook wall for people to peruse at their leisure or totally ignore. The stuff I usually like are music videos, particularly versions/covers done by others, and the occasional red panda video.

One time I came across this video of a guy singing "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, with his 6-year-old daughter (it was Jorge and Alexa, who you may have seen or heard of since this particular video has over 10 million views and it got them on Ellen). That video promptly ended-up on my wall. Around the same time an overseas friend of mine, bored at work and with nothing in particular to do for that week, found a video of a little girl named Rowan singing "Own Side" by Caitlin Rose. That video promptly ended-up on her wall.

When I spotted my friend with her own 'little cute girl singing some song' video on her wall, I thought, Bitch stole my idea! I then directed an evil stare at my computer screen and imagined the photons of hatred emitting from my eyes, entering the screen and travelling along the series of tubes that make up the internet to where it would meet her electronically-condensed evil stare and our combined malice would meet and duke it out on some virtual plain (likely some stretch of fibre-optic cable in the territory of Indonesia). Our little battle also played-out over some e-mails during work hours, each of us trying to convince the other that our own little cute girl was waaay better than their little cute girl.

Then maybe a week later, when the dust from our first virtual scuffle had settled in the waters of the Pacific, Jorge and Alexa made another video of equal or greater cuteness, and I thought, Yes! Time to tip this battle in my favour! So I posted it on my friend's wall and gloated: "My chosen cute girl continues to beat your chosen cute girl:"

In the time between me posting that to her wall and her inevitable reply, I felt smug for the remainder of the day, letting the timezone difference between us create this 4-hour barrier where I basked in victory because she was probably still at work and couldn't fight back. When the little notification e-mail came that she had replied, I was preparing myself to accept her words of defeat. Overconfidently, I opened the e-mail.

And she cheated.

She went and found some other girl, also singing the Caitlin Rose song, but unlike little Rowan or Alexa, this was some much older girl who can play guitar, play piano, plays Diablo, makes pizzas, and has an accent that managed to grab my attention from the other side of the world.

The e-mail conversation between us flared-up:

Me: The reason you’ve resorted to posting videos of guitar-playing pizza-making Scottish-sounding Norwegian girls is because I won the cute girl battle amirite? Admit it! Admit defeat and stop trying to distract me with the girl of my dreams!
Her: You're welcome :P

Sensing my resolve crumble, my friend then followed-up with this video from the same girl, entitled "Carpet, Cookie and Coeliac" (she was participating in some Alphabet Vlog challenge, and this video was for the letter C) in which she describes a condition she has: Coeliac disease.

---
I had known about gluten allergies for a long time, but never knew that it was called coeliac disease until very recently. I learned about that name when I was eating lunch with my parents at a local burger joint called Burger Fuel. At the tables, Burger Fuel was promoting their new gluten free buns using this little piece of advertising:

The ad made no sense to me. All I saw was a black-and-white picture of 2 guys with what looked like some weird song lyrics over the top. WTF? But you know who did get it? My mum. So she broke it down for my dad and I, using that teacher's voice normally reserve for preschoolers, or for those moments of smugness when you're feeling intellectually superior:

• the 2 guys are Simon and Garfunkel
• one of their songs is called "Cecelia", so the lyrics are to the tune of Cecilia, replacing 'Cecelia' with 'CeCoeliac'
• and a coeliac is someone who is allergic to gluten; the extra 'ce' was just there to fit it with the song

O_o

"Ohhh!" my dad I and I said as the five-thousand-piece puzzle that was Burger Fuel's flyer suddenly came together in our minds. I complained that this had to be the least effective advertising campaign in the history of advertising campaigns because of the background knowledge and prerequisite age one needed to even begin to understand what the hell it was all about.

Way to go Burger Fuel; an ad targeted at smart 50+ year olds.

And that my friends, is how I learned the word coeliac.

---
Anyway, after watching Ena's video as she goes through the grocery to buy things for herself because there's not a whole lot of selection for those allergic to gluten, I kinda started to feel a bit bad for her and for coeliacs in general. She also makes some pizzas in the video using gluten-free flour, and later that week I made a pizza using standard flour. As I put the final toppings on my pizza and admired my creation, Ena came to mind and I thought, Oh man, this pizza would probably kill her... I then put the pizza in the oven with a lot less enthusiasm than I had just moments before.

And the last few times I went to the supermarket and passed by the bakery section or the cookies/chips isle, all I hear is Ena's voice from the video when she says, "...all the lovely cakes I cannot have... all the cookies I can't have..." I then I step off the rear axle of the trolley that I was riding and continue to push the trolley like a normal person instead.

My friend and I seem to have come to some unspoken cease fire in our little war, probably because she's now found something else to occupy her time at work (I hope it's actual work) and probably because with one of the guys at my work on leave as my current project at work nears the finish line, my own workload has amazingly tripled. For some reason when there's a task to be assigned that isn't really anybody's forte, they randomly pick someone to give it to, and that random person is always me.

*sigh*

Oh yeah, I got the comments going over the Easter weekend and have been testing them ever since; finding little problems with there here and there and fixing them when they arise. I'll be relying on you guys to tell me what you like/dislike about how I've implemented the comments here, and you can leave a comment to do just that :) But, if comments are still broken, tell me on Facebook, Twitter, or hell send me an e-mail.

For a long time now - ever since this site went up in its original form over 11 years ago - I've gotten by without comments to my news updates / blog posts.

Well, for the first few years in this decade the most popular form of 'commenting' was writing into a site's guestbook (man that's old school, remember those things?). But then once blogging became more popular and the ability for a visitor to leave their mark on a person's rantings became the norm, I continued to stay away from having comments on this site because I've managed to convince myself that not enough people come here to read the rantings of someone who has way too many hobbies and simultaneously way too much spare time to write about those hobbies.

The 'Email Me' link at the top of this site has been good enough for some people: my mail archives include plenty of e-mails from people over the years who have asked me for help regarding that Red Alert campaign I put together a long time ago, and even one time last year I got an e-mail from the author of one of the books mentioned in my tirade against the blossoming literary genre that is Zombie Fiction (rant against zombies here, author response here).

(My inbox has also had the occasional e-mail from online casinos wanting to put their ads on my site, or from people wanting to game the Google search results system by including me and my site in part of some link exchange program. I don't really know why anybody would want my site involved in that, but after the discoveries in my previous post, maybe it's because my site does so well in searches for chocolate chip cookies?)

There have been some pushes and shoves from people over the years to put comments on my site: sometimes a faraway relative just wants to say hello, other times my brother just wants to troll the crap out of this place and post links to irrelevant pictures or videos in an attempt to make you laugh or get you Rick Roll'd. But recently, after all these years of getting by without comments, I've finally decided to do something about it.

And in doing so, I've rediscovered one of the other reasons why I didn't add comments to this site in the first place: it's a lot of extra work.

As a stubborn programmer, I wrote the little 'engine' that runs this site several years ago. I never programmed comments into it; all it really is is a content-serving machine: you give it a URL, it puts together the page you asked for.

Then 2 years ago, part-way through Blog Every Day April, I added a chunk to it so I could write blog posts to it from anywhere I could get an internet connection to make my task of participating in BEDA a helluva lot easier. That was quite a time-consuming undertaking for me then, mainly because I kept designing and redesigning how it all worked because I never had a proper model or idea for how writing posts should be done.

Now I'm doing that again, this time for allowing people to add comments, and I discover that what works for me and writing new posts doesn't necessarily work well for general users and writing comments. That, and now that I'm going to open up an avenue for the internet in general to add content to this site, I have to think about security and things like preventing scripting attacks, spambots, and other malicious users...

I'm not a whizz programmer. Hopefully I at least fall above whatever mark constitutes an average level of programming skill. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just install something like WordPress so I can leave all the coding trouble to someone else. But as I was trudging my way through all the work needed to get comments going, I was reminded why I put myself through all this trouble: I'm learning, and it's this constant learning that keeps me above the 'average programmer' line.

So I'm persevering, and hope to have something working shortly after Easter. I was talking to a friend over Skype about this, telling her about all the troubles I was going through:

Me: But right now, trying to see if I can get comments working on my site.
Her: he he he
Me: What a mission. Just so my brother can make his words public, and so Laura can tell me she rulez teh intarwebs
Her: oh the things we do for the people we love eh ;P
Me: *sigh*

The things I do.

It's been well over a month since I complained that this site had the stability of a house on stilts, because it's been well over a month since this site has imploded of its own accord, ie: it's fixed! :D

Well, it's been fixed for well over a month, meaning that for a while now my logs are no longer artificially inflated by program exceptions caused by annoying errors, and my visitor counts are no longer artificially inflated by my own make-sure-it's-all-OK visits either.

It's that latter one that I was particularly interested in getting some clean numbers about, because when I ran this site using web hosting provided by other companies, they gave me a whole bunch of tools to track visitor numbers and stats. They were OK for what they did, but they didn't really paint a very good picture of the sorts of things I was interested in, like how they got to my site in the first place. So when I moved to DIY web hosting earlier this year, I went looking for a visitor tracking package that would do what I wanted.

Cue Google Analytics.

Like many other visitor tracking tools out there, Google Analytics can tell me about the browser you're using to read this, the resolution of your monitor, even what city you're in (provided you haven't done sneaky things to your connection to mask that information). That last one in particular helps me gauge what percentage of my visitors are my friends, family, and combined with other tell-tale signs can let me know if that last visitor was my mother. (Hi mom!)

One thing that I really like which previous visitor tracking tools I've used hadn't offered, was the ability to let me know what search terms are used to bring people to my site. It makes me visit my Google Analytics dashboard quite often as I watch with interest the search terms used to bring people here. And the results... well they had me scratching my head.

The #3 search term used to bring people to my site is campaignultraq20b which is related to the Red Alert campaign I put together and released years ago as a bit of fun in modifying a game.

That one makes sense I thought, and so did search term #2: emanuel rabina My name. A search for that in Google gives you this site as the second result (the first being my Facebook page). It made me wonder though, who the hell is putting my name into Google? It's not me, even though I've blogged about doing just that in the past.

The answer was revealed to me when I visited my dad at work one day and, standing at his desk, I told him about something I posted. I watched as he opened his browser to look for that something I wrote, but to my surprise he didn't open a bookmark or type my site URL into the address bar. Instead, he typed my name into Google and clicked the link in the search results.

It's not the first I've heard of such behaviour though - I've read many articles about your ordinary citizen using Google as the gateway to everything; putting site names, even site URLs, into Google search and clicking on the results. So while I had heard of it, I never expected it of my tech-savvy family: me a Java programmer and web developer, my dad a computer programmer of a language whose acronym I now associate with Rocket Propelled Grenade or Role-Playing Game (What? RPG is a programming language? Get outta here!), my brother who has an iPhone and is more connected to the internet than a cloud service, and my mum who is the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle e-Reader and often sends the rest of the family e-mails about what's hot in tech (or YouTube).

That was the day I introduced my dad to bookmarks. I'll get around to telling him about RSS feeds (like mine) as a method of keeping-up with news from his favourite sites instead of having to do the rounds of visiting them every day and hoping there's an update, but I'm afraid that too much tech all at once might just make his head asplode.

Now brace yourselves, because the #1 search term used to bring people to my site is: chocolate chip cookies

I kid you not - the most visited page on my website is my blog post, Giving-up on giving-up on baking, which I wrote about how I back-tracked on a previous post where I was so frustrated that I was surrounded by so many skilled bakers that I just gave-up on baking altogether!

I don't even know how that could have happened. I've tried putting "chocolate chip cookies" into Google, and I'm not even in the first 10 pages of results! How desperate for a cookie recipe must one be to end-up here!??!

So if you found my site by accident because you were looking for actual content about baking but instead landed here and had to put up with me whining about baking, could you please send me an e-mail (link in the 'Email Me' part of the top navigation bar). I'd really like to know how you got here.

Living in the city has made me weak.

I spent the last week-and-a-bit living in the family home out in the suburbs to make sure the place didn't fall into disrepair while my parents were away on holiday in Australia. That included doing things like: watering the plants so they maintained the colour of chlorophyll rather than the colour of the sun, and keeping my brother company so he wouldn't do things like scroll large prophetic and doom-impending messages on the walls with his own faeces.

So 2 weekends ago I brought a bunch of my stuff over there so I wouldn't die of boredom, and in that first day I was subject to the first of several things that I have not missed since moving into the city: hay fever.

I've had hay fever since I was 8 (may have been 7 at the time, you know how all those long-ago memories start to merge and mingle), and I remember the visit to the doctor then and being told that there wasn't anything I could take for it. That itself was a shock to me because every other time I went to the doctor a visit to the pharmacist always came afterwards. The doctor's advice: I might grow out of it.

Almost 20 years later, I can say with absolute certainty that I didn't grow out of it.

There was a time when I thought the hay fever would leave me, and that was during my late teens when I was getting used to, of all things, cigarette smoke.

No I don't smoke, but around the same time I was diagnosed with hay fever, I also learned that if I spent too long around smokers (my parents did have some friends who smoked, and of course they'd take my brother and I over with them and then get all of us kids to mingle, ie: leave them alone, while they hang-out, and over the years some of my friends did pick up the habit), I would spend the next 48 hours vomiting. This was proved time and time again, and followed me well into high school. Towards the final days of secondary education, I remember being at a party and talking with people outside, some of whom smoked. I was dreading the thought of having to find that vomit bucket and get it ready for when I woke up the next day after inhaling all this cigarette smoke, but when the next day came and my urge to throw-up was well below my urge to punch a kitten in the face, I had genuine hopes for losing other long-lasting afflictions, like my hay fever.

I find it odd that I got more used to cigarette smoke, which will likely kill me, than I did to pollen, which won't kill me but just make me miserable for a few weeks in a year. I often took antihistamines to combat the symptoms (and have a certain former-pharmacy friend to thank for telling me about the cheaper-yet-just-as-good-as-the-brand-stuff antihistamines), but since living in the city I haven't really needed to take them since the ratio of things that produce pollen versus things that don't is very much in the favour of hay fever sufferers like myself.

So when I got back to the family home and went out into the backyard to look over my dad's garden (he's got a few of my basil plants growing there now and I wanted to see how they were doing), I triggered the hay fever bomb and spent the rest of the day blowing my nose into tissue paper that was 1-ply too thin to contain the force of snot as it sped out of my head.

Thus began my week of house sitting.

I woke-up last Saturday morning with a very sore throat, which could only mean one of 2 things: I tried and failed to sing Katy Perry's Firework again, or I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself. I could have easily been doing both (that second one often increases the chances of the first one happening), but after letting my mind rack-up enough waking minutes to start thinking proper thoughts and not dream-addled fairy tales, I remembered: I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself.

The night before I was at a friend's little birthday drinks get-together, and the only person I really knew who was going to be there was the birthday girl herself. This seems to be happening a bit more recently - where I go to social gatherings where I will know only 1 person (at least, 2 if it's a good day) and that person will be the one who invited me in the first place. This would usually make me a tad nervous, but I think somewhere in doing all those ceroc dance classes, I've become a lot more comfortable talking to people who I didn't know an hour ago.

One of those things I've become accustomed to doing is to just let whatever thought is occupying my mind, based on the current topic of conversation, to come out. OK, so it's not as clear-cut as that (I still had to learn what to filter and what to let through), but it's like the internal censorship board within my own head takes a break for a couple of hours and lets through a lot more MA15+ material than normal.

I already do this to some extent in my day-to-day and work life, so I've had a bit of practice. If anything, it's taught me that once you start with your own thoughts on something, the other person/people can take that as a sign to say what they're thinking. If you ever worried that your own thoughts might be a little strange or borderline incriminating, just wait until the other person/people say what's on their minds and then be surprised at how much more ridiculous the things they're thinking can be than yours.

Case-in-point: that night I made a 'your mum' joke (it's a staple in my conversational repertoire), and after a few more different takes on the joke from others poking fun at other members of one's immediate family, eventually reaching to extended family, someone chimed in with words that amounted to: "Hold on, can you legally marry your cousin?"

I may have opened the floodgates, but it wasn't me that provided the water.

So it was a conversation killer... in any other setting. Instead, people got out their smartphones and started looking up the information on the internet while the rest of us who had phones that can barely connect dots, let alone connect to the internet, argued very loudly about it until someone could provide a comprehensive answer. Once someone did - quoting the New Zealand Marriage Act like they had at least 1 law paper under their belt - it became a bit of a recurring theme for the night. We were guys were all over the topic, whereas the birthday girl looked a bit ashamed at the company she managed to put together.

That wasn't the only time many of us got out our phones though. Maybe half-way through the night, a late-comer brought us the news that Japan had just suffered an epic earthquake. Our initial reaction was that he was talking about the one from a few days before, but no it was one that hit just moments before and that so much shit was hitting the fan: tsunami warnings across the Pacific, oil rigs in Japan on fire, towns being destroyed by multi-metre waves, and so-on. At that news, many of us got out our phones for more information or, like in my case, to find-out if our friends in Japan were OK.

Odd, that I had more friends affected by that earthquake all the way in Japan than I did by the earthquake just a few hops south in Christchurch.

I went straight to Facebook, and after maybe my 5th login attempt (my login e-mail is a .com, not a .cow) I found that my friends were alive and, while not as 100% as they would normally be, they were alive. So with my mind at relative ease, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, disconnected my phone from the internet, and carried-on with the night at hand.

So I may have over-done it with the 'say everything that comes to mind' thing, because the friends of the birthday girl were already quite open and very engaging, strangers or otherwise. Not every situation requires that I dial my sarcasm levels up to 11 (an 8 will often do, or even a mild 5) and not every situation needs me making loud or potentially inappropriate comment about someone's mother.

I didn't really need to overdo it and give myself a sore throat the following morning. I could've saved my voice the extra hurt and instead used it for another attempt at Firework.

If the .nz part of the domain of this site hasn't already given away my location, I am in New Zealand. I'm not, however, in Christchurch where much of this country's and some of the world's attentions are focused due to the destructive earthquake that took place there earlier this week.

Also, I don't really know anybody in Christchurch. I have been there before, several years ago, but the 2 degrees rule (where anybody living in NZ is only 2 degrees of separation away from anybody else in NZ thanks in part to the size of our country) is the only way I can make any connection to the city:

• My landlord told me last night that his daughter was just driving away from her house when the quake struck. That was lucky for her because her house is now in ruins.
• And several friends have brothers/sisters or other friends there who for the most part have been confirmed as alive and well.

Despite my lack of connections, I find myself drawn to the latest news coming out of there: when I get home from work I start watching the 6 o'clock news (even though both our major news channels have been doing nearly-all-day coverage), eating dinner through it and the extended coverage that follows. I eventually manage to pull myself away and do something else, only to grab a bit of the late night news before I go to sleep, whereupon I bid Christchurch goodnight. Then, in the morning, instead of my usual ritual of turning on my Xbox to play some music while I get ready for work, I tune in to the breakfast shows for an update on events that happened through the night.

It's all that I hear about, and understandably so: with the death toll now over 100 and the number of missing still at 200+, it's easily the country's worst disaster.

I wasn't like this in the beginning. When the news first reached me via Twitter and other work mates after returning from my lunch break, I said, "What happened to Christchurch? Another earthquake?" I'm not a person who rolls their eyes (it's something I actually have to think about doing to accomplish), but when I think back on my reaction I always imagine me doing so.

Now, I've been using my Twitter and Facebook accounts to retweet/forward information (particularly to friends overseas), I'm dressed in as much #redandblack as I can muster (which isn't really a lot), and I'm 2 clicks away from forwarding a large chunk of my last paycheck to the national Red Cross.

Yet I still feel particularly useless from where I sit: here I watch and read about people doing all they can to save lives and all I'm doing is absorbing information and writing about it on this blog during work hours. I'm too far away to help with the various volunteer efforts, I'm hesitant to donate blood because the news is saying they need it while the blood service is saying they don't (I also stopped donating some years ago when, despite my very high iron levels (180+ on some scale I can't seem to locate right now), I discovered that every time I donate I fall to the ground and can't get up for the next couple of minutes. But hey, if they need it, I can suffer being on the ground for a few).

It's restlessness, I know. Even if I did manage to find my way into Christchurch, I have no appreciable skills to contribute to the effort, and will likely be more of a hindrance than a help. I mean, what good is a computer programmer when you don't have electricity?

On that note, with all the support and 'we're behind you' efforts/messages being largely organized through the internet, I hope that the people of Christchurch know how worried about them the rest of New Zealand really is.

If anything, this whole ordeal has made me want to fast-track those First Aid training courses I've been trying to get work to sponsor me for since I came up to them with the idea last year. I'm a little useless where I am now, but it'll help should I ever find myself in a bad situation. When that happens, at least I'll be ready.

There's something special to be said about receiving mail from a friend. That is, old-school snail mail. Why? Well for one it happens so rarely that it's a surprise all on its own: my mailbox is visited more frequently by bank statements, bills (for that 1 company that has no facility whatsoever to e-mail me my bills), and a constant stream of parking infringement reminder notices for someone who didn't even used to live here before (when I kept sending those ones back, I eventually got a letter asking 'if you know the whereabouts of [the guy who keeps racking-up parking fines] please contact us').

So when my guitar buddy asked several of us for our addresses so she could send us Christmas cards, I got pretty excited. Then when nothing arrived some 3 weeks after Christmas, I became pretty disappointed.

I asked her about it, and she did send me one to the right address. It just never arrived. She managed to have more luck with everybody else - even one guy in Europe received one of her cards - so we thought, Oh, just a one-off postal service fail.

Before this, I've had very good experiences when it came to sending/receiving letters/packages. Whenever I've imported something from overseas, it has always arrived before the sender's estimate, and with virtually no damage from the shipping/handling process. And whenever I've sent something overseas, the person on the other end has always received it at most within the ETA (eg: Christmas cards to Germany, England, letters to Belgium, Japan). Hell I have even sent actual money in an envelope overseas, then had it sent back and it was all still there!

I've generally had more faith in the postal service to ensure that things reach their intended recipient than I have with my cellphone provider to ensure that my text messages arrive within 24 hours of me sending them.

So, still feeling pleased about the postal service, and with that one-off Christmas card fail behind me, I packaged-up a book and a short letter to another of my friends who is feeling a little under-loved in Japan.

I sent that package on the 25th of January, with an ETA of 6-10 working days. She received it yesterday, the 20th of February, with a stamp on it that read:

Missent to Vancouver, Canada.

Ugh, got another e-mail about my site suddenly dying again, and at the beginning of my work day too! That meant I couldn't do anything about it for hours until I got home since access to non-HTTP ports (like those used to control my server) is restricted by a proxy with an iron grip choke-hold over the pieces of cable between my work and the general internet. I've been trying a bunch of things to fix these intermittent crashes, but none of them so far seem to stick.

I know what the general problem is now thanks to finally having access to all the logs and other process information I couldn’t get with my old hosting plan. (For the technical minded amongst you, the issue is the timeout between this site and the database: old connections need to die, but the connection pool isn’t killing-off those connection, it’s just trying again and again when it should be discarding the old connection from the pool and making a new one instead) I've done the research (read: Googled it) and I've come up with at least a dozen ways to solve it, but knowing my luck I've listed the potential fixes in the wrong order such that the solution I need is right at the end. Knowing that, I should jump right to the end of the list and work my way up from there, but if my luck stays constant, then the solution would've been the next one to try had I not gone and jumped to the end.

So yeah, just a rant that I am aware this place is still as flimsy as a straw house, and that I am trying to reinforce it.

Other things going on with me include joining the 'write a novel' bandwagon. Based on the ideas that came out of a brainstorming session my guitar buddy and I had last year when trying to come up with a song, I found myself wanting to develop the ideas we had for that song a lot further since the 5-minute finished product I ended-up with then left me with more questions than answers. The character central to the song also started developing a mind of their own and wanted out of my head.

So, I started writing; letting said character leave the small empty spaces of my mind through the fingertips on my keyboard, and into the largely free disk drive of my computer. Now they have gigabytes of space to roam free and grow in.

(What bothers me is that what I've written so far condenses to roughly 68KB of Microsoft Word document, which leaves me wondering: if they were bursting to get out of my head, and now they’re happy at just 68KB, does that mean, if brain space could be measured, that I only had 68KB worth of brain cells left? (That actually might explain a few other things...))

I've been at the writing thing the past few weeks, helped by the fact that some recent real-life happenings have put me into a really melancholy mood. I remember reading an article about how angst and melancholy works as a motivator for creativity, so I tried to find it to link to it here. I didn't find the exact article, but I found a better one which pretty much every other article on the subject seemed to link to:

• Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative, by Jonah Lehrer

I'm on the side that believes this idea because my own past is littered with examples, the most prominent being that I picked-up guitar to get over a girl, and I created this space wallpaper (the first of many) because I was losing a friend. Pretty much any time someone has observed some sort of change in my direction, it's very likely I did that because I was trying to get passed something that put me in a rut.

Unfortunately for me and my mental health, I take to dwelling in these situations all too eagerly since I know I can use them to my advantage when I'm trying to get through the next song I'm learning, or the next paragraph I'm writing. I then feed the melancholy with a sad song or some extra misery, which in turn feeds the creative process, and then I'm stuck in this morbid loop until I play that last chord or type that last word.

But just like my stomach knows I can't keep eating McDonalds every day of the week, my mind seems to know that I can't stay in these grey rooms forever. All of a sudden I'll find myself at the end of these tethers of gloom, and I'll wake-up the following morning in one of the best moods I have ever been in, and with another product of the creative process up my sleeve.

It's like I can't manage to stay that way forever, because like anything in excess, it can't be good for you.

In the past I've talked about how I show my age by sticking to buying CDs instead of buying digitally via iTunes or Amazon. I've even fallen out of grace with some friends by admitting what I've bought. The more egotistical side of me even goes on to think I'm one of the reasons the brick-and-mortar CD retail store is still around.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, that all changed. I installed iTunes.

This isn't the first time I've tried to install iTunes. I've tried maybe 2 other times in the past year, but each time, for unknown reasons, the iTunes installer would just die on me. The instant I OK'ed the install location (which was just the default), the installer would give me its equivalent of the fail whale, before giving me 1 choice: Quit. (It's not really a choice if there are no other options now is it?)

I didn't really want to delve any deeper: there was likely something screwed-up with my Win7 64-bit install, but I didn't care; I didn't really need iTunes to help me with any part of my life that wasn't already covered by some other program or process on my computer. I was installing iTunes to pique my curiosity and trial a different media player.

But this all changed where, in the last few months, I started following a lot more independent or lesser-known musicians on YouTube. Now I love YouTube, but every rose has it's thorns. I've already ranted about how crude YouTube comments have been. I mean, where else can you find an abundance of lines like:

Uhhh...? no one forced you watch it. Please murder yourself.
- (source)

Anyway, one of those musicians posted a cover of Avril Lavigne's new single, What the Hell, that was so different from the original and gave it so much meaning that I probably added another 100 to the video's view count. Eventually, I was compelled to buy it to show my appreciation towards the artist, so I downloaded the iTunes installer again, ran it, prepared myself for it to fall over and... whoa, it installed properly.

I told my brother about it installing successfully, and he asked me, "You didn't install iTunes 10 did you?" Turns out I did, which is the version he hates with every fiber of his being for a whole lot of what he considers "UI fails". This being my first ever iTunes installation (and probably the only reason it installed properly on my computer), I kept it. When a new version comes out, I'll just be impressed by it a whole lot more (or unimpressed by it a whole lot less) since what is the 'norm' for me is already a lot lower than those who were able to have previous versions of iTunes to remember.

So I bought the song, tweeted about it, and now I'm hooked. A whole new world of music is now available to me and they just make it so damn easy to lose my money in it. Even though I keep a budget spreadsheet to track my own expenditures, there are just some things that I don't track, namely small ticket items like gum or the coins that I give to some charities on their street collection day. iTunes songs are less than what I give those charities, hell they're even less than a pack of gum! So they never really make it into there and I don't feel I've spent anything until Apple e-mails me a receipt for my past week's worth of purchases and I look at them all and think, Oh damn...

Ah, I had a lovely break last week. There wasn't any particular occasion; the city had its anniversary day so we got Monday off (yay 3-day weekend), but I took the rest of the week off as well. I called it my own Christmas / New Year's holiday since I was unfortunate enough to be the guy working over the actual Christmas / New Year's break, drawing the short straw because of my lack of plans and lack of dependants.

So what did I do? Well, constructive stuff surprisingly: I worked on improving this website's stability (5 days without an error page! Fingers still crossed.) and other features for myself, I started writing this idea I had for a story based on a song my guitar buddy and I came up with last year, and because of said story I did a bit of extra subject matter reading which unfortunately had me read some pretty bad books. I also trimmed and replanted what used to be my 2-feet-tall basil plant into 2 much smaller / more manageable plants (gave a lot of leaf cuttings to my family, had basil in almost every meal the weekend that I spent with them).

As for things that fall into the unconstructive basket: I bought Castlevania: Lords of Shadow :D

Towards the end of the break, I spent the weekend with family, and upon returning to my place, found the living-room window smashed from the outside and a helluva lot of glass on the floor.

While the possibility existed, I didn't really think my place had been broken into; there were signs that wasn't the case. Instead, my mind, and everybody else's who I mentioned it to (landlord and property management company included), got to wondering: what the hell caused that hole?

Without CSI-like knowledge or a CSI-like flashback of events, it was a difficult question to answer. The blinds were down at the time, so whatever smashed the window was likely bounced back out after it did its job. Everyone had their theories: bricks, epic strong winds, a water balloon which defied physics and obtained the mass of a brick (that tiny red thing on the window sill in the right shot was a deflated balloon), etc. The most common theory though, was that it was a bird.

On hearing the bird theory, my mind made the following logic leaps: bird > bird hurling itself towards my window > bird breaking shit > bird must've had a temper > Angry Birds.

For the 5 of you out there who don't know what Angry Birds is, it is quite possibly the most popular iPad/iPhone game ever (with ports for various other devices being made) in which limbless birds, controlled by you, hurl themselves at terribly-constructed structures to kill the limbless animals that live inside for the satisfaction of watching large numbers appear on screen proportional to the damage your bird has done.

Thinking about that game, things started making an odd sort of sense in my head. I didn't imagine that someone had been hurling birds at my apartment building in hopes of knocking it down, but thought that the birds of the world, having had enough of being portrayed as projectiles for destruction thanks to the game, decided to get their revenge, ironically, by acting as destructive projectiles.

Why the hell they picked me, I'm not sure. I don't even own an iPad/iPhone. Hell, I imagined myself sticking my head out the broken window, turning my head towards the birds above and shouting: "WHY ARE YOU TARGETING ME!? I DON'T EVEN LIKE APPLE PRODUCTS!" Unfortunately for my imagined self, there were Apple fanboys crowding the streets and alleys outside, so instead of birds throwing themselves again at my other windows for my remarks, there were Apple fanboys throwing their iPods, white earbuds and all, at my face.

The window isn't fixed yet - living several stories above ground makes proper repairs a bit difficult. My dad and I, with the help of a lot of spare tape from a friend who lives up the road, covered the hole with thick plastic and backed by wooden shelving from the kitchen. We kinda went overboard on the tape as well, the visible surface of the window covered with more tape than plastic.

A glazier came over the next day, remarked on the good job of the tape and shelving overkill, and replaced it with a temporary pane which was simply glued to what was left of the window, and sealed with 4 bits of tape. Suddenly the job my dad and I did to cover the window lacked both practicality and elegance.

At least I have a sort of window now. I just owe my friend a helluva lot of tape.

If you're reading this then you're now seeing the recently-migrated-to-OpenHost version of this site - with the old site scheduled to come down at the beginning of February. I'm pretty sure the worlds' DNS' would have updated by then and ensure that all traffic points to here instead of the old place. (I wonder what would happen though if you still try to go to the old site location when it's not there anymore... your browser shooting packets of data into the ether...)

So like I said in a previous post, if this site starts to mess-up on me, at least now I'll have the ability to properly diagnose and correct any problems.

Oh, and first post of 2011 :D

---
A few weeks ago, still thinking about the year that was, I watched a mashup of songs that made Billboard Magazine's Top 25 for 2010. Not as good as the 2009 one I reckoned, but it got me wondering: what were my favourite songs of 2010?

So I fired-up my music player and created a playlist with some very simple criteria*:

• all songs released in 2010
• sort by play count from most to least

(It's not a very fair test, I know: songs from earlier in the year would have an advantage over later ones, but I don't know how the hell I'm going to create that kind of criteria filter.)

Excluding the top result (which had a ridiculously high play count because it was a song I was learning to play on guitar - repeated stops and starts and all that), it was a 3-way tie:

1. Barenaked Ladies - You Run Away

I was very surprised to see this song amongst the results. Sure it's a nice song, but not one that would come to mind if you asked me to name my favourites from 2010. This is the only Barenaked Ladies song in my entire music collection - I don't even have their ever popular 'chickity China the Chinese chicken' song, One Week, which was released all the way back in 1998 and is the only other song I know of by these guys.

2. Ke$ha - Tik Tok

Oh now this is just shameful. I'll admit to enjoying the occasional pop tune, but how the hell this got into my collection AND make my 'top 3', I'll never know. I can't even blame magical faeries or something like that for having commandeered my computer and over-playing this song, although I did have lots of ants in my apartment once; caught them chowing-down on some banana choc chip muffins I made and left out on the kitchen counter. It's not totally impossible for them to find my computer and put Kesha on infinite loop... right?

Meh, I'm not even going to bother embedding the video. Just go an enjoy this collegehumor.com parody instead: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1935457

3. Brooke Fraser - Who Are We Fooling?

Finally, a result I can approve of.

I only became a Brooke Fraser fan towards the end of 2010. Sure, she's a local artist and has been around for several years, so everybody in the country has heard of her and heard her songs - even my friend's walking-down-the-isle wedding song was a Brooke Fraser song - but I wasn't a fan. Then one boring day I was just following YouTube suggestions, letting the links take me where they may, and after hearing someone's rendition of one of her songs that I hadn't heard before, thought, "Wow, that sounded really nice." So I went to find the original, listened to that, liked it even more, then remembered that she had been on the news just a few days before for an interview about her recently-released album.

"Isn't she touring the country for the album release?" I wondered, so I hit her site, looked at the tour dates and immediately saw the one that effectively said: playing in Wellington TOMORROW NIGHT YOU IDIOT!

I made a gamble that moment: I quickly texted a few friends who might have liked going to her concert with me (1 didn't want to come, 1 said "Brooke who?"), then tried to buy tickets the following day.

My friend Claire got back to me, said she would like to come on the proviso that it was a sit-down concert (she was on crutches at the time), which it was, and that I could get tickets at ridiculously short notice, which I managed. Everything was falling into place so easily, like - taking a spiritual sort of tack here - the universe was making the path to the Brooke Fraser concert as smooth as possible as if to tell me, "Hey man, you'll enjoy this concert."

Which I did.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Most of the country of New Zealand has been lucky enough to not be working today or for the next 2 weeks, unfortunately 'most of NZ' does not include me.

It felt like I was the only person going to work this morning: the streets were empty of people and there were only a handful of cars driving around what are normally packed-to-the-breaking-point / we-should-fire-our-city-planner roads.

Now I'm at work and I'm the only one on this floor. Every time I hear somebody's desk phone going off, I say to myself 'They're not here, stop trying...', and at one point I even said that out loud. I'm playing music from my work laptop without headphones so it's coming out of the disgustingly tinny built-in speakers, and there isn't a single soul around to tell me to turn it off :D

Oh it's great: the only ambient noise is the howling wind outside and the whole emptiness of the city makes me feel selfishly like the entire place, all the bricks and steel and glass, were put together just for me.

It'll be like this for the next week or 2 as my work has a mandatory closure period between now and early Jan, and most people have decided to add their own leave on top of it to extend their holidays. 'Why aren't I away with them?' I hear myself wondering. Well, without any Christmas / New Year's plans this time, the chances of me drawing the short straw to watch over one of our systems during the break shot through the roof, ie: I was the only choice.

But it's Christmas, and in a few hours my own relatively short Christmas break will begin.

I spent much of December trying to find or come up with things that would work well as presents for some friends and family that I actually forgot about what I'd like for myself until earlier this week. When I did start to give that some thought, one idea quickly came to mind: to fix my malfunctioning website.

I don't know if you've seen it, but ever since I had this site migrated to a more up-to-date plan with my current host (interAdvantage) in October, the stability of the site has been... a bit shit. Every couple of days I would get a message from someone that my site is throwing them the error page: e-mails from parents, Facebook comments from friends, and at one time a browser screenshot from my brother. I tried various things to fix it, but all I've managed to do is delay the problem from happening.

With my current web hosting plan, I don't have access to the logs or anything to really find-out what's going on, so I can't effectively diagnose why my site enjoys puking its internals out every couple of days. I mean, I never have had access to the logs, even with the older plan; I've just been flicking switches here and there in my site code to see what works within the constraints of the web hosting package.

So, finally fed-up with this situation, I decided to buy my own slice of cloud/internet real estate and got a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from OpenHost (these are the guys who I actually register and maintain this domain with, but I didn't do hosting with them because it was expensive at the time). That all got sorted yesterday, and I created a temporary sub-domain to start work on the migration: http://new.ultraq.net.nz/ (UPDATE: site is now migrated - you're looking at it - and the temp URL is gone)

So a big thanks to interAdvantage for the last several years - you guys have been nothing but good to me and I picked you out from all the other hosts because you had a good price on basic Java web hosting. But now that I've started doing some more complicated things with this site (which is probably why it's breaking in the first place), it's time for me to move on and to be in full control for the first time since... forever.

VPS = all of the power, but all of the responsibility. If this place continues to break when the migration is completed, then I'll only have myself to blame, but at least I'll have the things I need to be able to figure it out.