Oedipus

So, when my parents on my mother’s side came up on Sunday, they brought with them a belated birthday present: a big box of tools! Now, that was pretty cool of them, I must admit. My stepfather has access to a lot of tools in his line of work but still, he loves tools like his babies, so for him to give me some is quite a gift really, very heartfelt.

I now have lots of spanners, sockets, baby screwdrivers, insulated screwdrivers (for electric work), a multimeter, a little laser thingy for measuring distances, all manner of allen keys, a hammer, chisels, side cutters, a wire stripper, stuff for mending drains, the list goes on. This is something that’s surprisingly close to my heart: my father was always taking things apart, tinkering with his shit old car, fixing his shit old house and Freud would say I’m keen to be able to do all that sort of “manly” stuff too.

Anyway, I called my parents on my father’s side tonight since it was Jane’s birthday (she turned 10 I think). I woke her up (serves me right for calling so late but I was working late). My father, upon hearing that I got a box full of tools for my birthday said: “That’s funny, it’s kind of like giving a blind man binoculars, isn’t it?”

🙁

Ok, ok, he meant it as a joke and I can see how it could be really funny. The idea of me drilling holes into walls, taking apart the engine of a car or doing anything that might require any sort of mechanical prowess is probably quite hilarious. But still, ouch, Dad.

Nostalgia

Ok, I have an eclectic taste in music. At work the sounds pumping through my good headphones cycles through Billy Joel, Gorillaz, REM, Coldplay, Motzart, Meatloaf, all on shuffle, which can make for an interesting play list. There’s more music I like but I am too lazy to rip it.

Anyway, I recently rediscovered some old techno: Robert Miles, Darude, Sash. Oooh, this brings back memories of programming in Turbo Pascal and belting this stuff out till your ears bleed. 🙂

Why do we hate?

I came across this website: http://www.godhatesfags.com and I laughed. What delightful satire! I mean, it’s so black, so cutting, so realistic, you could almost be forgiven for believing…

Hang on…
Oh, I see…

Why can’t God speak for himself? Why would he choose to speak through people like this?

Beginning WMI

Ok, I have just recently discovered the inherent coolness that is the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). I whipped up this example to show some of the random stuff you can retrieve with it (be sure to “allow” the activeX to run, you trust me don’t you?).

Here be the sample

Isn’t that cool? Imagine what a hacker could get up to if they could just execute whatever old ActiveX they wanted on your local machine, hmmm?

Anyway, I hope to write a few more interesting examples in the near future. Hmmm, Imagine being able to turn on / off services or kill processes using nothing but scripts in a web page?

Update:

Ok, I couldn’t help myself, I whipped up this web based service manager (requires admin access of course): Service Manager.

Susan’s wedding

At long last I have managed to get my hands on some copies of my sister’s wedding photos. I am resisting the urge to post a picture of the cake first.

So first, here is a picture of the happy couple: David & Susan Simpkin. I find it difficult to disagree with my father on this one: this is definitely the most beautiful bride I have ever seen or will ever see.

And at last, the picture you’ve all been waiting for, here is a picture of the cake on the left. I made it myself. It’s three layers of chocolate mudcake, covered in white fondant. The little blue shells and seahorses are white chocolate which I have coloured.

Oh and the top layer is gluten free (Buckwheat flour) it worked out reasonably well 🙂

69er

You know how it is. As software developers we all know how dodgy software can be. There’s always the registry setting containing the admin password (yes, I’ve see this, but not at Beca), the hard-coded string required to get a particular component to work (seen that too), the thing that Allen does every morning to keep the web servers going (he used to run a batch file, bless his heart). I discovered another one of these today when diagnosing a problem in one of our vital systems.
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