[…]

> Welcome to the 2007 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are
> supposed to do with this email…
>
> Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then send this to the
> people you care about, including the person who sent it to you. blog it
> so it only annoys folks with too much time on their hands already ;)
>
> The theory is that you will learn a lot of little things about your
> friends, if you did not know them already.
>
> 1. What time did you get up this morning?

8.00 or so - i had an anatomy exam to fail

> 2. Diamonds or pearls?

diamonds

> 3. What was the last film you saw at the movies?

the prestige. david bowie was cool.

> 4. What is your favourite TV show?

heroes. to be honest, the poster campaign for this one made me finally get a TV.

> 5. What did you have for breakfast?

porridge with pears and raisins

> 6. What is your middle name(s)?

marcus

> 7. What is your favourite cuisine?

i recently embraced meat, so i’m enjoying a lot of stuff.

> 8. What foods do you dislike?

gosh, that’s hard. er. i’ll do what i did in the exam and skip on to an easier one.

> 9. What is your favourite crisp flavour?

i said an easier one

> 10. What is your favourite CD at the moment?

frostyboy, frostyboy

> 11 . What type of car do you drive?

one of those evil guzzling yuppy four-wheel drives

> 13. What characteristics do you despise?

probably the ones […]

i updated our map of directions for getting here

thanks to clive for his input on the misleading hairpin

thanks to zoomin.co.nz for the map […]

OK so the suggestions are rolling in for baby names. I will knock together a cheezy hot-or-not interface soon, and you can make your suggestions by commenting below too …

hank
benito
seven
jesus
max (or maximillian)
yuichi
gotmarried
pilot
jet
hiro
pepper
fox
luna
roo
ruru
celeste
alice
mickey
nikau
miro
beetle
sesame
tara
indigo
cricket
aeriel
[…]

opanuku road is very nice thankyou

zoomin.co.nz

maps.google.com

maps.live.com […]

vroom vroom!

CIMG0146.MOV […]

a lot harder than naming mice! […]

[…]

Oh dear. The spammers sound a bit sad today. Here’s one I just received … it’s not quite your usual viagra advert … kinda stream of consciousness though … hmm.
My own acquaintance with such a possibility began early in life andshocked me somewhat. You dont look as well as you didyesterday. The moral of the dramatic fable of The Simpleton is now clearenough. This situation, though new to our generation of Liberal plutocrats,is not new historically. You were quite disgusting when you tried to makeup to me in the taxi. Because life never came to me like it came toRhodes. Because life never came to me like it came toRhodes. The precedents established by the Inquisition furnish the materialfor a new legal code. A white persondoing such a thing in Capetown would be socially ruined. Itis for me now to object and to make personal remarks. I should say, if you ask me,that the boot is on the other leg. I had the gun ready in the drawer of thattable. Look here: I am an Englishman; and I shall commitsuicide where I please. The officer wearstropical clothes, neither too tidy nor too clean. I seemto spend my life making up other peoples minds for them. Everything what comes to youyou throw it back. Neither had the tramway horses nor the slaves, nor have thediscarded too old at forty. My own acquaintance with such a possibility began early in life andshocked me somewhat. Butnow theyre all educated they wont look at […]

Just spent half an hour trying to debug mysterious “mail server” problems on a customer’s MX server. The mail would download across the network, then mysteriously ‘disconnect’ when it finished. We tried lowering the load on the mailserver (it was quite busy, load average 1.8), various tricks. Webmail worked OK, but clearing the mailbox didn’t.

The specific error message in Outlook 2000 was something like, 51 messages couldn’t be retrieved from the server. This usually happens when the connection to the server is lost due to network problems. Contact your administrator. Download error 0×80040403.

Now, you’d think that meant there was - for example - a dropped connection, due to network problems, right?

Nope. When he finally read the incomprehensible 0×80040403 number at the end of that message, and it was duly googled, you know what? It’s nothing to do with a network issue. It’s 100% to do with the mailbox being too big.

I’m not even going to speculate on why they worded the error message so completely misleadingly. Thanks.

The punchline, I guess, is that despite some gentle suggestions that maybe Outlook 2000 isn’t the best email client in the world, the gentleman in question won’t budge: Outlook has a “nice calendar” which he uses to organise his life in. And I respect that.

And I hope that calendar is good […]