Weather Situation Unclear For Weekend’s Parachuting

As you may know, I’ll be doing a crash course in parachuting – hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall – next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don’t look too favourable, though – potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We’ll see. It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop me from throwing myself out of an aeroplane.

In other news, Claire‘s been using the student loan repayment calculator on The Guardian’s Education site, looking at different career paths and calculating how long it would take her to repay her student loans (at £18,000 + inflation only, it would take her about 40 years). She clicked on “Web Site Designer”, just out of curiosity, and the resulting page caused her browser to crash. Somehow, this is very funny.

Windows Security

Just recieved the following error message from Windows, while trying to connect to a shared directory elsewhere on the network… have never seen one like it before, so I thought I’d share it with you:

Windows Error Message: The System Detected A Possible Attempt To Compromise Security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you.

Oh, so now I’m a hacker? Thanks, Windows.

Dan Breaks The Internet… Again

Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).

In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actully doing my degree, and listened to the ocassional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.

I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”

Right; off to work…