Couple of days ago I realised that there was suspiciously little email reaching my desktop, while the server was properly logging things. Turns out that an dpkg -P clamav-milter had cleared the clamav cron file, which on my system was responsible to move the goodies from an inbound queue to the real mailqueue (post-clamav of course)....grrr. 700 mails, the input of two days...

The week, how was the week? not especially pleasant; work went along so-so, but the prep of the upcoming talk at the tas04 conference is to be done urgently and the usual xml and xslt kludges for james took up too much time already. I'm suffering from a bit of a cold (damn airconditioning) and am constantly tired. Also my car just came back from service but somehow that doesn't seem to have bettered the minor and major annoyances much.

At least, if nothing major happens, I'll get out a bit: tomorrow I'll drive up to Rainbow Beach for the weekend (couple of hundred km in the north), flying on the beach (hopefully). So let's hope for a nice refreshing weekend.

This past month has gone by way too fast, and the last three days were lousy.
click here for the rest of the story...

...at least not for sewing. Spent at least an hour and a bit yesterday sewing two curtains with a borrowed sewing machine, but in the end things worked out ok.

Weather was lousy today so I wasn't flying. In fact, I could have slept in and actually tried to, but - luck of the day - the complex manager chose this morning to mow the lawn outside my house. That's a wee bit too loud for enjoying sleeping in.

At work I got the cvs-to-topicmapdb plug working yesterday and a couple of minor fixes and things, too. TinyCA is nice, but as it wants libgnome-perl an bloated hog space- and requirement-wise.

sunday was ok; after mucho parawaiting i got the last thermal of the day and climbed straight out to 1000m (450m above launch) in otherwise not-so-flash conditions (for the others who didn't get in the air). that was the first time in two years that i didn't have to fear a tree landing at mt. tamborine, and the view over the gold coast was beautiful. i didn't take any photos, should have. did reset the harness, now it works better but i nevertheless committed to buying the new one.

there was a big thunderstorm in the evening, and as i had the new radio set up properly it was fun listening to BNE airspace control and airplanes talking about bad weather and diversions.

monday OTOH wasn't anything to write home about; while i deployed the ldap environment for the lab and started devising nasty tasks for the unix programming assignment, in the lecture in the evening i wasn't very lucid and couldn't capture the audience well. ah well another day...

Today I got a spam with this subject: Az, How I became Mr. King DongUcMbcVrw4oWy? Weird. Do they read this blog?

Spent friday morning working then fixing the radio. A bit of desolder braid, patience and stable hands and now the ham rig transmits mostly everywhere (which I don't care about or use) and in the UHF CB range (which I need). The Sparcstation5 at home got an extra fan as it's currently a bit hot (30° C) and the fans in the PSU had been screaming away.

Had a bit of flying in the afternoon, but got cramped up totally after 35 minutes of ridge soaring in rough conditions: my harness (Supair evo modular) doesn't work well for flying prone with a stirrup, but that's my favourite position (for flying. you fools.). Things are especially bad when I've got heavy junk in the back pocket, like the two liters of water on top. My stomach muscles ache.

Today we had a bit of an XC (cross-country) forum at Phil's shop and I tried on a new Gin Genie XO harness. I shouldn't have done that. Now I'll have to spend the $1200 or so on it, bummer. There's really a major difference in comfort and feel...ah well, could have gone for a top-of-the range harness two years ago, but then: what looks sillier than a novice barely being able to control his wing but adorned with a flashy XC harness? Right, nothing.

Apart from the forum a DNF day (did not fly) for me; I got lots of sun exposure but the wind situation didn't feel inviting enough and I was still tired from yesterday.

Too much work, as I'm being too perfectionist as usual. Spent quite some time fixing portal issues, writing labnotes and so on. Last couple of days never got to bed before 00:45, mostly doing last-minute shite. bummer, and the airconditioning at work has left me a nice cold once again - despite me wearing a sweater in all lectures and labs. Imaging that, it's just under 30° C outside but I need a sweater inside and still catch a damn cold...silly.

Yesterday I started thinking about a replacement for mozilla firebird: saving data handed out by scripts is borked to the max, see bugzilla bugs 160454, 84106 and 177329. Bloody piece of shit. I found out about the broken behaviour while tcpdumping when I couldn't save the output of a portal-related script that I needed in a lecture about 15 minutes later. (Then I resorted to ie within citrix in my desperation...apparently I suffer from bogon-emitters at work).

spamassassin wasn't cooperative recently, apparently it had entered a tightening spiral wrt. bayes ratings as my autolearn-as-spam threshold was set too low. fixed that by forcefeeding it the last couple hundred emails (about 5 days worth or so) as ham.

This morning the post person was here, got me my new radio (a multiband Yaesu VX-5r) and a CF-based mp3 player (a Nex IIe). The mp3 player does what it's supposed to, the radio not yet - while I did go to jaycar I forgot to buy the desolder braid I'll need to mod it for the UHF CB frequencies I actually need it for (me no ham). Yaesu must employ mostly Space Cadets, the keypad is a wee bit overloaded (3 modes for each of 20 buttons plus a rotator-selector)

i've had about 8 hours of work with openldap, ssl, libnss-ldap and libpam-ldap to build a fully-fledged, completely centralised auth environment for the linux lab at work, without having to upgrade the boxes to unstable or testing (that's the main rub, as stable's openldap does not have tls enabled... lots a minor and major niggling nasties) but i got it work eventually. the first system security lecture today did also work out well, but the lab tomorrow would benefit from me having another 48hrs to look for good things to show. bummer. dead-tired, so not looking forward to dealing with more administrative junk tomorrow.

went by fairly organised; the weather was lousy but work did progress reasonably. i got fai to DWIM without too much hassle (hmm, if i find the time i should make a simple real-world example demo setup; the docs that come with it are not good). the first lecture (unix programming) was also relatively fun; a bit small a class. i even almost managed to cover all i had planned/hoped for.

bought a couple of books yesterday, "adiamante" by modesitt, "nimbus" by jablokov and something by octavia butler. the modesitt i've already devoured, that was pretty cool. nimbus is also quite captivating but will take two or three more days, there's too much work on the stack.

...as this little bloggish diary begins.
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