I normally fall asleep watching a DVD. Because I know I am planning to fall asleep, I am normally bright enough to sitck on something I have seen a billion times before, like, y’know, any given episode of the West Wing.

Tonight, I was stupid. Today, I bought Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on DVD, and as I was going to bed, I thought “Well, it’s not like it’s a loud explodey film. I’m sure I’ll fall asleep, and I’ll finish watching it in the morning.”

I was right on three counts. It is neither loud nor explodey, and I did, indeed, finish watching it in the morning. Just rather earlier than I’d planned. And it’s not the sort of film after which I find I can sleep, hence this livejournal entry. Just like last time, I am still trying to decide if the ending is either unbelievably depressing, or the most heart-rendingly accurate depiction of romance in the history of cinema.
Spoilers – if you haven’t seen the film, skip this, and go rent it.

Back home after a storming night out.  Happy birthday to lilitufire, who is, I assume, currently asleep in the lounge, because she decided to be sensible, and forgo the Slimelight experience.

I am just in.

And your reminder: I will be at the Big Chill Bar off Brick Lane from around 4 pm.  I cannot recommend attendance in strong enough terms – it’s a lovely place to sit and chill, with good tunes, nice food and astonishing cocktails.  You will like it.  Come along.

Well, as of about an hour ago.  I’m a sucker for a excuse to mark a year off – in the absence of any other days in the calendar to attatch importance to, Jan 1st and March 25th, as new year days (and indeed, until 1752, March 25th was New Year’s Day, in  England at least) are big days for me.

So, thanks to anw, alexdecampi, burge, childeric, diffrentcolours,greyeyedeve, lilitufire, stu_n, wehmuth and zoo_music_girl (and my parents, who worryingly, liked the lot of you) for a cracking night out, and I hope to see the rest of you over the next few days, even if the horrors of geography make that slightly unlikely in many cases.

Last December, talking of the previous 2004, I said: “I win.  At everything.  Ever.”

Oddly, I don’t feel the same about having been 27 as I do about 2004, despite the fact that the two were largely coincident.  I’m not sure why.  I’m really not sure how I feel about have got 27 out of the way.  It wasn’t a milestone, it wasn’t an age I’ll really remember, which is, I suppose, as it should be.  One’s age is less important than the times one lives in.  But that lack of memorability does rather cement the urge to do something with 28.  If only I could work out what…  A topic for another time, perhaps, when I’m less drunk and sentimental.

Anyway: cheers for the last year, kids.  It wasn’t terribly striking, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun, and I’m happy to blame my friends for that.

(Oh, and slightly belate happy birthday to tyrell, and a slightly premature (with timezone difference) happy birthday to gregmce.  All the best people are born at this time of year.)

So, having got Friday sorted, time for the rest of the weekend.

I’m going to be in The Phoenix on Cavendish Square from about 6 on Saturday night, prior to heading on to Slimelight. In the end, I’ve gone for somewhere that doesn’t do cocktails, although I seem to recall that it has a decent-ish spirits rack, because everywhere I looked at in town that did cocktails was either very pricey or very trendy, and often both, and to be honest, I think I’d rather just relax, and have some drinks, without worrying that I’ve dragged everyone out to somewhere that’s going to commit murder on their bank balances. (V types: yes, the same place where chrisisiddall had his birthday drinks.) Hope to see as many of you there as can make it.

On Sunday, I’ll be in The Big Chill Bar from around 3pm, just well, chilling. It does do cocktails, and very very good ones at that, so if you’re free pop down.

I’ll work out some kind of plan for Monday tomorrow.

Should anyone get lost or forget what’s going on, or something equally daft, my mobile number is available on request.

We’re looking to move webhosting at work at the moment.

Our requirements:

1 Windows database server. I’ve got the spec for it around somewhere, but approximately: fucking huge overkill beastie.
2 Windows web servers. Modern, because our old ones are creaking a bit, so decent spec (ie. not just high end desktop), but no need for overkill – they’re only going to be webserving.
1 Linux box, for a LAMP setup. Again, decent spec, but no overkill required.

The four of them need to be parked on the end of a 10 meg pipe, for our exclusive use, and obviously, we don’t want to be paying any data transfer charges, but with that size of pipe, I’d be alarmed to find a serious hosting environment giving that a go.

Will consider managed hosting, co-lo, or anything, really.

So, can anyone recommend me hosting places that can cope? Anyone got any “avoid like the plague” horror stories? How much would you expect to pay for a set up like that?

Anyone know of a comparison shopping site for serious commercial hosting?

So, after a stupid amoung of ringing around, I have wound up with something like my 7th choice of dining venue for Friday, on the basis that out of the other options, only two of the others were even open, and neither of them could deal with a party of more than eight.

So, we’re going to Aurora.  (Location map: here.)  Don’t panic about the review that stresses the couple-y bits – they’ve got a separate room, and we’re in that, and I am quite prepared to kill anyone caught being couple-y.  Frankly, I’m rather more worried about the “reviewer” who felt “the need” to drop quote marks around “everything”.  I suspect he needs “help”.

So, that’s sorted.  Announcements about the rest of the weekend to follow.

(Oh, and if anyone who said they were coming on Friday wishes to bow out, please let me know reasonably sharpish, as I need to give them at least 24 hours notice if I’m changing the booking.)

Edit: Of course, it’d help if I said when, wouldn’t it? 7:30pm, kids.

Anyone who knows me well enough to have heard me talk about the police/the law will know that, slightly unusually for the type of lefty hippy liberal type I am, I am generally disposed to support the police, because, well I grew up with them.

I think it’s extremely important to bear in mind that for every bad apple you hear about, there are plenty of the poor bastards doing a job that is a) completely essential, b) completely thankless, c) extremely hard, d) often dangerous, e) will naturally erode any faith you had in humanity, etc etc. I could go on.

Anyway, I’m generally disposed to look favourably on the police.

So I’m interested in people’s responses to these two posts:

One
Two

What do they contain that you didn’t already know? Might they influence your reactions if you were ever to find yourself unjustly nicked in these sort of circumstances?

I’m also quite interested in responses to that “If you don’t show up at an agreed time, I’ll come round and nick you at a really inconvenient time” bit. Is it the action of petty sod abusing his authority to make life hard for some all too probably innocent member of the public, or is it a more-or-less reasonable human response of a copper who started out trying to make things easy for the person, only to have it cast up in their face, and thus a load of extra work generated? (Especially since it happens on a pretty routine basis.)

(For the record: I don’t know. I think it’s a human response, and I’d probably do the same thing. Doesn’t make it OK, but I find it hard to condemn someone for doing the same sort of thing I’d probably do in their place. I don’t know if it’s reasonable/sensible to expect the police to behave to a higher standard 24/7.)

Lovely weekend.  Thanks to all, esp. miss_soap for sorting it out in the first place – hope the afflictions clear up soon… 

As for everyone else, well,  imagine a huge list of LJ tags here, many of which I don’t know, because outside the M25, people are still introduced my their real names, rather than their LJ usernames.  It’s a quaint little custom, and when in Rome, after all.  Lovely to see/meet/get to know everyone a bit better.

For the benefit of the rest of you who weren’t there: I have been stuffing my face and drinking the Good Booze in Norfolk.  You were probably not, and that’s sad for you, but I hope you had a good time doing whatever it was you were doing.  You will not understand if I wax lyrical about the ravioli, so I won’t, although I would like to mention the pig that gave its life so that we could have that fantastic bacon with breakfast.  It was obviously some kind of Hero Pig, to produce bacon that good.

Now I have ten bajillion emails to sort out.  And work tomorrow, which is a bit rubbish, but the men have to work, after all.  And I’ve got another four day week coming up, and then two days drinking even better booze than this weekend, so it’s a bit of a result all round.

I suspect that there’ll be all of about three people on my friends list that are going to get this one, but still:

The Few Men Manifesto.

I’m not enough of a barely-qualified, bloody-minded, muppet.

Specifically: I know enough about securing the average company network to not be overly paranoid, and within those parameters of security, I believe in letting people do more or less as they wish. I’m confident in my ability to remain a step ahead of anyone that isn’t in IT, basically.

Many of you will have heard/remember what happened to me in my first few weeks here, when I got slapped with the internet use policy. Broadly: because they thought I might not have been doing my job 24/7, they completely removed my ability to do any work whatsoever. That all got sorted out, in the end, but I thought it was a fantastic bit of muppetry.

They’ve topped it.

Doing some entirely legitimate, work related web browsing, I found a really useful website that will be a great help in keeping the company’s webserver safe and unhacked. Of course, when I tried to go to it, I got an “access denied” message – something about it was tripping the AUP. So I went around it, in the manner that my colleagues kindly showed me how to do. It’s not good for much besides scanning LJ and checking personal mail, though. Which is, to be fair, all I normally want it for.

But anyway: having seen that it will be really usful with the security-type bits of my job, and confident that it was completely work-related, I email my boss and IT to ask if I could please be allowed access to it, in order to do my job better.

They said no.

The site is basically a listing of the various hacking vulnerabilites a website may have that can be exposed by Google. Very, very handy. Go through them, check your site doesn’t have them, generally keep up to date.

But, because (and I think the standard of their English gives something away here) “there is various tools on the site that allow the proxy servers to be hacked and jumped so that its possible to access restricted websites”, I’m not allowed to do it.

Point a) No, there aren’t. There are ways to discover if a proxy is open to exploitation, but not, as far as I can see, anything that would actually allow me to do so. And frankly, I don’t give a shit about exploiting their poxy proxy.

Point b) though, is a doozy. The email from them goes on to say that if I want to access this site, I can do so via the ADSL line we have in the office, that isn’t on the company network. So, they’re OK with me being able to go there, and learn all I can from it, it turns out. Including, apparently, how to bypass their proxy. Just so long as I don’t do it through their proxy. Are they assuming that it’d be beyond me to get any of these (supposed) hacking tools I damn well pleased from the ADSL machine onto another machine sitting six feet away, or something?

So, they don’t want me to do my job easily and well, and to help keep the company’s machines secure, but they’re fine with me learning how to break their rules (and therefore make the company network less secure) so that I can do my job easily and well.

What do they teach PFYs these days on their IT courses?

Still, in the event that any of our webservers should get hacked, it just became IT’s fault, rather than mine. They wouldn’t let me keep up-to-date with how to stop it happening, after all…