The week my stack overflowed

LOCAL NEWS The met office confirmed what we already knew, it was a hot summer, they think the hottest on record. They aren’t sure because the records all melted. Gareth Morgan was in the news this week because he is about to qualify for superannuation, and he thinks it is stupid giving it to people that don’t need it. A man was shot in Pukekohe, it’s rough, it’s in South Auckland. Meanwhile policed seized a bunch of some drug called “Brown Sugar”, which I suppose will appeal to Maori, and cash and cars and also $200,000 of cryptocurrencies. Would be interested to know how they found that. Five people were arrested. Apparently we only collect tourist data from proper hotels, not through Airbnb, don’t see why the government can’t ask for info, it’s not like they don’t collect data on a computer somewhere. The country had two less idiots when they died failing to evade police near Nelson on Sunday. Sadly, they took an innocent motorist out with them. Anyone that says police should stop chasing these people are even bigger idiots. A cyclone was due to hit at 2am last night, it’s been in the news for days, Hola it’s called. Nothing’s really happened yet. The new National caretaker leader rearranged his deckchairs, the old school got demoted, mostly, and the new faces got promoted. How Judith Collins is still there I really don’t know. Another fleeing driver got in trouble, not fatally, his car caught fire as he continued to drive on no tyres, then he leapt from a bridge in to the river to escape the fire and possibly police, he didn’t escape police. WORLD NEWS Researchers have worked out a way to separate two liquids using lasers and magic. It will make public swimming pools pee-free by 2023. Apparently Rik Mayall would have been 60 this week, but he’s still dead. Someone reckons they’ve confirmed Amelia Earhart’s bones on a South Pacific Island. It wasn’t Waiheke. Someone else found an aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea, sunk during WWII. They’ve been busy, maybe they were all looking for ML370. It was the 40th anniversary of HHGTTG this week (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). I listened to some of the original radio play this week as I worked, it’s still on my iPod. Of course the more significant anniversary is in two years time (think about it). I haven’t really figured out all this Russian poisoning in Salisbury in the UK, but it seems nasty. Author John Le Carre didn’t die this week, but I learned that it was still possible (that is, he isn’t dead yet). MY SAD LIFE Tuesday night I had a planned outage and upgrade, nothing serious, oracle patches and things. It went fine. I seemed to have considerable difficulty with time this week. I got stuck in to some serious projecty work a couple of days, hit some walls, had Stack Overflow rescue me in six minutes with one thing. Had a new build deployed on Tuesday night so had to work on and off until about 10pm. Then Stack Overflow delivered again overnight. Thursday morning was the Bambi walk, wasn’t very exciting, we had to be fast because I had the GDP walk that day. It was International Women’s Day on Thursday, so Maddie and Lulu asserted their womanhood by going in to the creek. I am going to change her name to Muddie. I got a call from the anti-fraud people at Westpac this week, I was trying to unsubscribe from something and the only way to delete my credit card was use another, and my old expired card was on my desk so I tried that. The website declined it, turned out it tried to charge US$1 on it as a test. They didn’t tell me off, but dayum I was impressed with their speed. I did Big King again with Maddie on Saturday, and Diana tagged along to Onehunga on Sunday. The temperature has been pretty good, and both walks were quite pleasant. Maddie disappeared twice on Saturday at Big King, I was getting genuinely concerned the first time, and after the second time (both were in places where I thought there was limited scope for absconding) I minimised opportunity even further. Koos came over on Saturday, but I kept getting distracted with work. Someone had a planned outage on Friday night from 10pm to 7am and they finally were back up about 5:14pm Saturday afternoon. I got sick of hanging around about lunchtime. Allister visited our house four times on Saturday, we weren’t there for every one, he needed tools. The really cool thing was that he was working on the work bench in the bakery, meaning that I wasn’t. That, I like, a lot. Meanwhile, as an interesting counterpoint to Allister, we haven’t heard anything from Rory since he told Diana he was particularly busy the weekend before last. The dodgy car yard had signage go up, finally, but a couple of days later it was gone. Very, very weird. This morning I had yet another magical reply in my Stack Overflow inbox and yet another minor mystery was solved allowing me to push forward on my testing thing. Have you ever done one little thing that snowballed into a cascading series of ever growing changes? That was me this morning. My main monitor has been annoying me, it’s a television rather than a monitor, so it needed a remote for some silly things, like powering it on. I was stupid enough to purchase a replacement, slightly bigger than the previous, and higher resolution, because that’s how you do this. It arrived this morning and that’s when it all went horribly wrong. The precis version is that it didn’t fit on my desk between the other two, it was too high. This required some really serious bush engineering, I got there in the end but it wasn’t pretty, mistakes were made, swear words may have been uttered. Maddie got tangled in my phone headset and she was trying to pull monitor, laptop and phone off my desk to get away and finally I realised saying “wait” was the trick and she stopped and let me get her loose. It’s sort of done now and my desk is very clean (found an awful lot of Labrador fur on it), but the floor is covered in things to sort out. The whole process took me about two hours. That was until I gave up and went back to the old monitor. I am going to have to figure out how to make the new one work, the PC seems to struggle with it a little. I think this monitor can handle inputs from two computers and display them side by side which would be cool. This week a tried a slightly dubious was of entering a competition. Every purchase got you an entry in the draw, and I needed four units, and I don’t pay for delivery so I placed four separate orders, quadrupling my chances. Let’s see if it pays off. With Hannah still winning things I think it must be my turn. Hannah and Allister are off to Melbourne this Thursday for a TKD tournament, back Sunday night or maybe Monday. I continue with my Francais, 16 days continuously. I have downloaded some more ebooks and audio books to try to supplement the DuoLingo app. Apparently I am now 48% fluent, which I believe is utter bollocks. I could probably slowly get through many basic written things but writing in French is a long way off, as is understanding spoken French with any great success. A SHORT STORY I got a box this week, it was full of shorts. I decided to replace some tired magical pockety shorts, and found someone who had them on special, so I got five pairs. I couldn’t decide which ones to get two of so I got two of both my preferred colours. I have transitioned in to a couple of the new pairs, and actually thrown out one of the old ones. So more of “a shorts story” really. SPEAKING OF CLOTHING My socks keep wearing out, so much so that I now carry spares when I walk so if I blow a sock I can replace it and avoid blisters. They wear out on the heel. Blisters are serious. I have had some complaints about timing of this email. It’s still Monday morning somewhere. You can always apply for a refund.