Forum Down

Rather frustratingly, my forum has been down all day. I know that it's not me because when i go to www.ifastnet.com , the people who host the forum, their entire site is down too. Ugh how annoying, I guess I should look into moving it somewhere a little more securely up in the future.

I should back it up too. So yeah, if you're wondering why it won't load, it's not you, it's not me, it's just out of our hands. Which sucks. 

Forums
Now Playing: Lighthouse Family - High

In the last few days I have found myself with some renewed interest in writing about more random things happening in my life, having a bit more interest in doing a little more with the blog than simply keeping it up to date for the sake of keeping it up to date. Ironically that seems to have some at a time when I haven't actually updated for a few days (although my "Saturday" update was actually written a couple of days later, I just didn't want to leave last week too barren). Perhaps it was downloading a few more old-school songs that reminded me of times past and the need to keep track of my life so that I can easily refer to what's going on now in the future, or perhaps it was something else, but the idea of writing in here actually began to excite me once again, rather than just bug me like this chore that I need to do, but normally can't be bothered doing.

I do find myself generally caught up in other internet "things" such as trying to turn my forum into something more than just a weird rant between Leila and myself (although that aspect of it is pretty fun), catching up on the world of scambaiting, or my latest forum interest: skyscrapers. I think I have been just much more into the whole forums thing lately, rather than the whole blogging thing. Yet this blog can actually probably be quite complementary to those other interests, to commenting on those other things I do on the internet as well as my general life (because it's all really mixed together in the end isn't it?)

I had an interesting discussion with Leila yesterday about what makes a good forum. There are various bits of each forum that I visit which I find enjoyable, and the interesting thing is that the dynamic of each is so different. The original forum I spent time in, The Numbers had the dynamic of a fairly limited number of people posting on it, but posting pretty damn frequently. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago those few people who were relied upon for the majority of the posts in the forum all left, and now it's a pretty empty shell that is dominated by spam. I found myself ending up as a moderator on it, which would be really cool if it returned to how it used to be, but at the moment the job basically entails a lot of deleting spam threads, which isn't particularly exciting. In some ways, I guess at its peak that forum was probably my favourite of the lot: everyone got to know each other to a reasonable extent, it always felt friendly and free enough to not have to worry too much about what you were posting, and we were all talking about movies and box office data which meant that there was always something happening for us to comment on and discuss. Other movie forums that I've come across have ended up being absolutely enormous and popular, and therefore a bit scary to ever really get involved in.

The scambaiting forum I frequent is really different from The Numbers one in so many ways. The place doesn't rely upon a limited number of people posting, and in fact has hundreds of different regular posters. Normally there are at least 20 people online, and the place updates quick enough for there always to be something for you to comment on if you really want, but not at such a pace that makes it impossible to keep up with anything. Whereas the movie forum is people discussing, predicting and analysing something going on outside the forum, the scambaiting one is effectively a giant "help" forum, where people share tips on how to be better at scambaiting, and also share their great stories with each other. Of course there's a general chat area, but often the topics seem to relate back to baiting in one way or another. Because of the potentially dangerous nature of scambaiting if you don't know what you're doing properly (like making sure you're being all anonymous) the place is pretty heavily moderated, to make sure that people don't say something that could be dangerous, and also to make sure the whole thing doesn't end up with a racist undertone. It feels like a pretty big community, with most usernames becoming familiar after a while, but at the same time in a more strained sense than other forums, as people seem to be forever competing with each other to pull off the best baits ever, and have the prestige that comes with that. Sometimes it hasn't really seemed that friendly overall, even though a good number of people on there are friendly.

The skyscraper forum is my latest interest. This one is utterly huge, with sometimes a few thousand people being online. However, because of its size it's really broken down into different aspects of it, with there even being a small New Zealand community. This whole "forum in a forum" has meant that the part I actually look at on the skyscraper forum actually feels pretty small. It feels a lot more relaxed than the scambaiting forum, which is good, but often I find myself with little to reply to throughout a day as there aren't that many active users within the New Zealand section. I have briefly ventured into other more general areas, but it then leaps to the other extreme with pages of posts added impossibly quickly, and this whole feeling that everyone else has been there forever compared to me. All the threads are really long too in general, updates on how the progress of a skyscraper is going or discussion on a more general urban theme - which is interesting but enormously time-consuming for me to feel as though I'm up to date with what's been said on the forum.

So in the middle of that sits my own forum. I started it off really to just learn more about how php works and to discover what the admin options were. However, it's actually turned out to be something quite fun and interesting to have. Frustratingly, finding users who regularly post has been a bit of a mission, and I think that between Leila and myself we would have made about 95% of the posts on it. However, I guess that everything takes a bit of time, and as well as friends and family there have been a few random people who have joined up and got chatting. It doesn't really have much of a niche either, with a little bit of everything, but hopefully that eventually turns out to be a positive rather than a negative. I don't expect it to end up like other big forums, but it could be something really cool once a few people are regularly posting on it. The whole forum layout seems to be a really effective way to discuss a topic, midway between a long blog post about something and a short instant message - giving the person some time to think about what they say, but also the freedom to post again and again in a sort of conversation style.

So perhaps there's a future for my forum. I hope so. 

Waiheke Island
Now Playing: Sugar Ray - Answer The Phone

On Thursday I had a nicely different day at work. One of our recent new jobs involves a proposed house on Waiheke Island. Of course, to do an Assessment of Environmental Effects properly it's necessary to visit the site, and so I headed over to Waiheke Island to check it out. I haven't been to Waiheke for probably 10 years, but it holds a fair number of my earlier childhood memories, so I was quite excited to be travelling there again. It's funny for a part of Auckland such as Waiheke to be fairly well built-up and large, and yet so easy to never end up there. I was very fortunate that the day was turning into the best Auckland's had for a while, as I boarded the ferry to head over.

In some ways the ferry trip was probably as nice as the island itself. There is something particularly nice about heading out across Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, looking one way at the city, the other over to Devonport, then back to the various bays along Tamaki Drive, then to Musick Point near Howick, and eventually losing the city behind the various Gulf islands around you. I took a real nice photo of Auckland's CBD as well:

King Lear
Now Playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge

Well I went to see my first Theatre performance on Tuesday. It was a good one to start with, the Royal Shakespeare Company probably being some of the best actors in the world and being pretty damn amazingly good at what they do. It was quite odd actually going to the theatre, with all these well dressed up people looking all proper! 

At first the play was quite difficult to understand, trying to make sense out of all the Shakespearian language and follow the story. Eventually, with a bit of help from Leila who explained who everyone was to me, I managed to get enough of an idea of what was going on to eventually follow it on my own. Ian McKellen as King Lear was awesome, and so were all the actors really. The sounds and light effects were really amazing too. But the best part of it all were the sword fights, which were simply incredible, with everyone totally ripping into it in a way that was unbelievably impressive. Normally when I have seen theatre performances in the past any sword fight scenes have been done with wooden swords, or they've just looked really fake and tame. This was nothing like that, with metal swords and you could tell that although it was carefully choreographed, the actors were really ripping into it. In fact, it really felt like a fight scene from a movie rather than something that was actually happening in front of you. 

It ended in the typical tragedy-style ending, which was actually quite confusing because everyone seemed to die at once, before you could work out who killed who and why. That bit, and a few other times when it seemed to drag on a bit, were probably the only real areas where I thought it could be better. I'm still not entirely convinced that theatre is my mind of thing, but I could still appreciate how truly awesome these guys were.

Posting Motivation
Now Playing: U2 - One Tree Hill

My blog has been having a strange life as of late. While my posts have kept coming, in a bit more of a trickle rather than the torrent of old, they haven't dried up, which is surprising considering the general lack of motivation I've had for writing in here. I guess that at the moment I'm keeping things going largely because of the history this site has, all those previous six and a half years of blogging deserves for it not to be abandoned, and at the same time I do occasionally have times when I'm thinking "wow.... I really feel like writing a bit more about that". I guess the public nature of this blog has always been a bit of a restriction upon what I could write about, not so much because it's not a hidden blog (I mean what would really be the point unless you wanted to moan to yourself all the time), but because it's so clearly linked to who I am in real life, and so widely available for all the people who know me in real life to read. Obviously there are things that one would write about more openly in another situation, although oddly enough I think that if I did have a blog that was more anonymous I wouldn't necessarily write more entries - better ones perhaps I suppose though. In any case, I'm rather stuck with what I have here now, and it has worked out pretty well in the past. I am sure that eventually my internet habits will once again migrate back towards reading other people's blogs more often, and then eventually that will give me more and more motivation to write in mine. But for now, at least there aren't enormous gaps.

Work has become more interesting and busy again. We have a nice wide variety of jobs on the go - mixing between having meetings at Auckland City, site visits out to Waiheke Island later in the week, and more mundane bits of it such as the data entry I was doing for large chunks of last week. It is good to be getting back into the nitty gritty of planning though, preparing resource consent applications. I have also found myself somewhat surprised in the last couple of weeks by how much I really have learned about this whole process now. I don't have to really work off much of a template any more, I know what's missing where and what needs to be added in somewhere else. I can put together an email to our client asking for more information and feel confident about it, I can trust my judgement that something in particular will or won't cut it with the council when we get around to dealing with them.

I'm going to see a Shakespeare production tomorrow evening (I know... how cultured). Should be pretty interesting I suppose, and I can get see Ian McKellen in the flesh! Go Gandalf! 

Wet
Now Playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Scar Tissue

So I find myself lying in bed as the rain hammers away on the roof outside. I guess there's something peaceful in listening to that sound - realising the chaos of what's happening outside but knowing that you're sheltered from it quite nicely. Our house has got through a giant storm back in early July so I am not too worried about leaks or anything like that. The wind blows, the house rattles, but in a kinda of cool way - perhaps how an earthquake would feel if I finally noticed one of them. Up until today it had felt like Auckland's weather was getting better - there was even a few days in which it didn't rain earlier in the week (the first time since June I suspect). But today served as an annoying reminder that winter isn't done with us yet, that there will still be quite a few more cold, dark, wet and blustery days. Oh yay!

I spent quite a bit of time last night fiddling around with the layout for my forum (see link on left hand side of screen). I had changed around one of the images quite easily, and then figured out how to dig deeper into the HTML to really change around a few more things. It was pretty damn difficult actually, finding out what bit of HTML matched up with where on the published page, and then also how I could change it to what I wanted without messing everything up. Eventually I just about managed to achieve what I was after, and the one small thing that I couldn't get quite right, is not pretty adequate and was damn right impossible to change without to serious programming knowledge that I simply don't have.

Anyone is welcome to join the forum. In fact it's a bit silly at times in there at the moment with just Leila and I chatting away to each other, like a strange public msn conversation. It would be good to have a few more people joining in, sharing their insights into various things that generally making it an interesting place. My first aim of creating the forum was to learn about how phpBB works, and I think I now have a reasonable idea. Now the second aim is to get the forum into something that will sustain itself in the long-term. Now that's a slightly trickier ask. 

The Weekend
Now Playing: The Feelers - Supersystem

As well as building myself a forum over the weekend I actually had a pretty fun time. Leila, Amalia and I had gone over to my parents' place on Friday night, and as Leila had work and Amber was at her family's place throughout Saturday, it was just me and Amalia at home by ourselves for pretty much the whole day, which turned out to be really fun. It is awesome having all friends and family around when I have her, but at the same time some of the best times we have together are when it's just her and me by ourselves. I guess it's the main time that I manage to feel like a real parent, like I'm her proper Dad, instead of just some part-time thing. 

After dropping Leila at work we headed to Western Springs Park. We hadn't been organised enough to bring some stale bread, which was a little annoying, but we still had a great time wandering around the whole lake. We chatted away about all sorts of things, pointing out interesting birds and dogs along the way. Eventually we had made it the whole way around the lake, and found ourselves back at the playground. She played there for a while longer, making good friends with a little boy about her age. There are tandem slides at Western Springs Park, so her and this little boy took great delight in climbing up the ladder to the slides, and then timing it so they went down the slides at the same time. Well...... that was what was meant to happen, until Amalia thought that it would be simply hilarious to pretend to go down the slide, but instead just stay sitting at the top, and wait for the boy to climb back up the ladder.

After we got home she watched a movie while I did the dishes. We checked the mail to find out that we're due a property inspection (yay!) A bit more cleaning up, then we had lunch together in her room. It was really cool eating fish and nuggets in her room while reading all her library books. She just loves books at the moment, which is great, as the library is pretty close to home. Having so many picture books at Leila's work is so sorely tempting though, and I'm sure that our collection will build up immensely in the next few years. I'm looking forward to the times when I can share Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Peter Pan with her, two of my favourite ever books when I was younger. It's fun enough reading Where the Wild Things Are, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar - which I vaguely remember from my early childhood. Eventually we picked up Leila, then played a few more games before it was time to take Amalia home. I think I did feel a little more sad than usual taking her home, as we had had such a fun day together. 

Once we were back home, we started to get ready to go out. One of Amber's friends was having a 21st and we were all invited. I had remembered this girl from our flat-warming party as she had had a pretty strong accent, and apparently was from Glasgow. I don't think I've ever met someone from Glasgow before. Anyway, after a seeming age we finally made it there. I had been feeling rather "meh" regarding going to a party, and didn't have particularly high expectations. In a situation like that there's always a huge risk you're going to end up with a bunch of strangers you have very little in common with, and end up spending the night feeling awkward, or sitting in a corner with Leila both of us feeling out of place and awkward.

However, fortunately this was not one of those times, as the people at the party turned out to be exactly the kind of people who I would enjoy spending time with half-drunk. There were heaps of great conversations, all in a really interesting manner which I guess wasn't surprising as most people there were uni students. Everyone seemed to have the right level of nerdiness, where you could chat to them about intelligent topics without completely losing them, but at the same time didn't end up being stuck in the middle of a highly animated conversation about action figures or Star Trek. Before we knew it, it had passed 2am - so we headed back on a wander into town to catch the 3am Night-Rider home. It had been a very pleasant evening.

Sunday was a good relax day. I slept in reasonably well, created the upgrade to my forum that I mentioned yesterday, we cleaned up the house some more to the level where it now feels enjoyable and not stressful to live in it, and generally had the kind of day that Sundays are meant to be. 

Forum v2
I have spent quite a bit of time changing around the way the forum operates. Previously I had struggled to find a webhost that would allow free MySQL support, so therefore I couldn't construct a forum on a webspace of my own. As a result, the first forum was put together by instant-forum.com, which was fine as it let me learn how to use the administration control panel of phpBB at a basic level, and it meant my forum got up and running fairly quickly. However, being the annoyingly curious thing that I am, I didn't find that particularly satisfactory so I had bit of a deeper search for MySQL hosting sites (having finally realised what half the "features" of webhosts finally mean), so that I could create what would fully be my own forum on it. This also meant that I could use phpBB3 and not just the old version 2. I've used version two quite a bit - although only as a general user on the 419 eater forums and The Numbers movie forum. This made it quite exciting to see what version 3 would be like.

After a million (well OK... perhaps three or four) failed installations, because I kept on messing something up, I finally got the new forum installed properly. Then I had to relocate a lot of posts from the old forum, learn how to use the new administration controls (much much much more complex this time around) and so on. But anyway, it's up and it's working now. It has been quite educational for me to see how this all works. There still seem to be a couple of strange bugs in the system - like posts sometimes not working first time (select all and copy before you hit post for now!) But generally it's working out really well. Now I just need some people!

I'll do a proper weekend update tomorrow.

Forums

So the expansion of this site continues, with the addition of a new forum for this site. It really started out as a way for me to learn how phpBB operates, but I guess that I might as well give it a little plug and see if anything happens. Leila and I have done a bit of work on setting it up, with posting guidelines and the like, so it'll be interesting to see if it takes off. If I know you in real life just send me PM when you sign up to let me know who you are (you don't HAVE to sign up with your real name).

 Yay, Friday afternoon! 

Back to the Beginning
Now Playing: Eskimo Joe - Black Fingernails, Red Wine

The last few days at work I've, oddly enough, been doing exactly the stuff that I did when I first started working for my current company. Funny to think that's now over a year and a half ago - that I first started with the most simple entering of data into excel worksheets, matching up data from about 3 different places to provide a good snapshot of property information. It sounds like such a simple thing to do, which in some ways it is, but there is always that need to make sure that everything is done perfectly. One little mistake and the whole process is messed up, which adds in the challenge. 

Funnily enough that seems to be the case with a lot of aspects of planning, each little bit of it isn't particularly difficult. In fact, all of what we need to find out generally sits there on the internet, in the District Plan of one council or another, it's just the matter of sifting through all the unnecessary stuff, finding out what's important and what isn't, and then realising that is the thing which needs to be added in. After such a quiet few weeks it's good to actually get back into having a busy time, even if it is working on pretty simple things that may not be quite as interesting as some other aspects of being a planner. In fact it has seemed like a good way to get back into doing more things, as it's fairly simple, fairly straight-forward and I can tell when each aspect of it is finished. I guess there's something satisfying about completion of a task, no matter how simple it is, and it's that completion which is getting me back into things.

Another week passes by fairly non-eventufully....

One Year
Now Playing: Coldplay - Clocks

It's funny to think how much has happened in a year, or on the other hand how in some ways it really doesn't feel like that long ago I found myself, on a Saturday morning, having coffee with Leila. It was August 5th, 2006, and I now had a girlfriend once again. Those moments, the first day afterwards, felt so surreal at the time. I don't think the sleep-deprivation helped, it certainly didn't help my optometrist who started getting worried about my bloodshot eyes (I suppose I should have told him I'd got about 4 hours sleep max, and that I'd been freezing cold for about 90% of that time). In some ways it felt odd, like I still felt strange about everything that had happened - not because it didn't feel right, but simply because it had happened all so quickly, and had been so instigated by me. Yet it is that surreality that makes times like that stand out in memory, the funny conversations, with a mixture of tentative awkwardness as you realise that you don't actually know this person particularly much, but at the same time allowed closeness and openness because, after all, you're going out. Looking back on it now, those times are so exciting, the ability to have someone new to share so much with, to enter into someone else's life and discover them, just felt so exhilirating. Things had worked out, things had gone to plan, things just felt so right.

And here we are, a year later. As I said above, in some ways it feels like that time has flown past - the particular breakfast in Kingsland almost feels like a distant last week, the dinner and evening that proceeded it, like a fresh memory, not something that has been stored away inside me for over a year now. Yet it other ways it does feel like a long time, which obviously a year is. We had a nice dinner last night to mark the year, nothing outrageous but still nice - in some ways a good metaphor.

In terms of general life, it seems as though a lot of things are probably heading back towards the right direction for me. The weather is warmer, work is kicking back into action which means that my general "meh-ness" about a lot of things is likely to disappear as I get a better feeling that I am doing something worthwhile with a decent chunk of my life, that I am getting somewhere and being productive. Sure, it'll be tricky to kick the various internet addictions that I've created to help fill in the empty hours, but I don't mind doing that. Leila's sister Bernice comes back to New Zealand in a couple of weeks, which has seemed to take on a greater significance to me than what would be possibly expected. I think this is largely because a huge number of people I know well have all disappeared overseas this year, and finally having one come back seems like it's the end of the exodus and the beginning of the return.

I guess it just feels like a turning point at the moment, that a lot of things that had been getting me down will hopefully start heading in the other direction. To be honest I wasn't surprised to find myself feeling rather less than usual during the winter months, as this seemingly always happens to me no matter what. The inability to do any outside activity for more than a few minutes, because there's a damn good chance it'll pour down with rain, takes away so many things in my life that provide me with enjoyment. While August is hardly the end of winter, perhaps it can be seen as the beginning of the end.

Dreams Part 2
Now Playing: The Doves - Here It Comes

OK, I know that in yesterday's post I did write that I was going to talk about two different dreams, and then only ended up talking about that weird petrol one. In the end I ran out of time/energy/motivation to write much more, so I gave up.

 Now I can't really remember much of it. Something to do with playing cricket in my grandmother's backyard in Thames, back when she was still alive. Most of the dreams I have of backyard cricket end up there, which I guess isn't too surprising as a good chunk of my time spent in Thames as a childhood involved playing cricket in that backyard. I don't remember much about the dream, but I can have a good reminisce I suppose.

It was a really great backyard for cricket, a nice big lawn with a tall(ish) red fence behind it to act as a wicket-keeper, a semi-carport on the leg side as a good block for any hits to midwicket, the house generally straight behind the bowler, the awesome nextdoor neighbours around on the off-side, and finally the incinerator at a backward point. I think when I was really young there was an annoying peach tree about where we usually put the wicket, but that had disappeared by the time I was old enough to play cricket. There was a rather annoying (or useful, depending on whether you were batting or bowling) lump in the ground about where it was good to pitch the ball, while the wickets themselves seemed to sit atop a slight hump in the lawn. This always led to a bit of opportunity for the bowler, but apart from that it was generally easy pickings for the batsman.

Unless my cousins were around, it was generally just me and my dad playing. No running, just fours and sixes. The boundaries were pretty easily defined, except for a magical line that had to be drawn between the house and the carport at mid-on, and the potential to catch out the batsman from the top of some concrete planter boxes that annoying stood in the way of my perfect run up. Out of the property on the full was deemed to be six and out - a cruel but sometimes strangely satisfying way of getting dismissed. There was debate about whether this should apply to the off-side boundary as it really was a bit too easy to hit the ball out of the property that way, and after all it was only another lawn that we had to trek across to retrieve the ball. After all, a simple mis-timed cover-drive could quite easily balloon out for six, a bit unfair on the bowler but at the same time not really worthy of the batsman being given out. So we redefined that six-and-out boundary to be the next property boundary over, because to hit it that far you really had to be trying.

I could usually talk my dad into letting me bat first. We always used the same bat, a pretty simple cheap and cheerful pine one I think, that had Arbury written on it and had had its handle reglued back in place about 53 times. Inevitably, when jamming out another yorker at some stage the handle would snap out of place and we'd find ourselves going through the process again. But anyway, with temporarily glued bat in hand I would face up to my Dad. The first few balls were always the hardest - though I could generally once again talk my way out of things if he had somehow managed to get me out first ball (that was just practice!!!) Fresh with energy he'd run in from almost the front gate, right down the side of the house, before letting rip with a thunderbolt. If it was grapefruit season the ball might have magically been replaced by an over-ripe fruit, which on contact with the trusty (or not) old bat would immediately disintegrate into a million wet and sticky pieces, with a bit of luck some reaching back to where it came from. On the rare occasion it was the real ball my chances of hitting the first one were almost nil, it would rear up off a length, bounce a mile over the stumps, me, the fence, the next fence and so on. Sometimes I would have to climb over three fences to finally reach that snarly first ball. This was, of course, all part of the fun, until one year this enormous dog ended up living in the property two down. It was seriously the biggest dog I had ever seen, and not knowing its real name, my Dad and I alternated between calling it horse, for obvious reasons, and sir - because after all you didn't want to offend such a beast.

After the first few lightning bolts, my Dad would return to bowling a mixture of annoying leg-cutters, that randomly were actually either leg-cutters 50% of the time ("oh.... what a beauty" would be the cry) go straight through most of the rest of the time ("oh.... he throws in a straight one!!!") Or the elusive, impossible to produce naturally, off-cutter ("it went the other way... how cunning" was the cry). i would usually be hopeless for the first couple of games, getting stuck on 14 for about twenty balls in a row, before getting myself out, then having my Dad knock it around until he got to 78, before me getting trounced in another score of 16. But after a couple of games my touch would return, and depending on how dry the ground was, we'd either fight out tight low-scoring battles, or the game would go on all afternoon as we knocked up century after century. Often the result depended as much on the state of the tennis ball as it did on anything else. A hard ball would generally favour the bowlers, coming on to the bat quickly, bouncing more for the spinners and being more likely to bounce weirdly should it hit a crack, or a bump, or a random mandarin. A softer ball would be slower, so obviously allow the batsman more time to adjust his shot, cut down the bounciness and generally make life easier and easier. The clotheslines was a constant hazard, sometimes being the most useful fielder when a sweetly hit drive smacked directly into the pole, sometimes an annoyance as a skied shot would cause major panic as you judged whether you could go for the catch without decapitating yourself on the line, and sometimes an awesome piece of good (or bad if you were batting) luck, with a ball bouncing off the clothesline directly into the hands of the bowler.

As with any game of backyard cricket, there were always the lost-ball interruptions. The bizarrely overgrown property behind and to the left of the batsman sucked in many a skied pull-shot never to be seen again, while a generous number of skied straight drives landed on the roof of my grandmother's house (definitely out, although if you went and got it you had a good argument for staying in. The ultimate aim was to hit the ball over the house, landing it in the front garden, and as a result not breaking any of the "six and out" rules. Sadly, this achievement was incredibly rare, and usually ended up with a sever flinch as the ball cannoned into the laundry window.

In all those years my highest score ended up being 236 I think. I used to have a severe weakness on 88, which ended up being highly self-perpetuating as I'd fret whenever getting to that score. It's interesting to note that the one time I got to 88 in a proper game of cricket I was dropped twice by fielders, forever dispelling the argument that it was an unlucky number for me. Inevitably the game would be ended by a call for dinner, for pikelets or for going out somewhere. Occasionally, in summer, we'd play on until we could hardly see the ball. Famously, one time with quite a few cousins where we literally ended up playing by the sound of the bowler shuffling in, although in that case the hardest thing isn't hitting the ball, but finding the ball once it has been (very rarely) hit. They're all awesome memories for me, and perhaps why I associate any form of backyard cricket with that house so much. I guess it's my sub-conscious reminding me of what a big part of my childhood this was.

Some More Weird Dreams
Now Playing: U2 - Sweetest Thing

I seem to be totally into writing about dreams at the moment on here, so I suppose that I should continue that trend by writing about a couple more that I've had this week. One came from a few nights ago, and the other from last night - which I only have a few memories of.

The one from a few nights ago was particularly bizarre. I was going on a road-trip up north I think. I had been doing a lot of driving an therefore had to keep an eye on the petrol meter so that I didn't end up stranded. When I finally needed to stop for petrol, I got about halfway through filling my car up when the pump messed up. The screen showing the cost of the petrol blinked, and then came back on at about $500 or something stupid like that. I stopped it, and started explaining what had happened to the assistant who was there at the station. He said that it should be easily sorted out, but offered to fill the rest of the car up with lemonade (yeah... weird I know). I was obviously hesistant, but he said that it wouldn't make a difference as long as it was only one sixteenth of the amount of total fuel in the tank. There was then a little debate whether perhaps one eighteenth was a more appropriate figure, and he filled up the rest of the car with two lemonade bottles. 

I then went into the store to sort out the screwed up cost of my petrol (by the way there have been a few occasions where I've dreamed about the cost of petrol for my car going crazy, it must be some kind of weird sub-conscious fear). I figured that everything would be fine, as the assistant had assured me that would be the case. He was explaining everything to the manager, whose sign-off was obviously necessary to change what the pump said to something more reasonable. The amount had by now switched back to a more reasonable $90, but I explained to him that my car didn't take anywhere near that amount. I offered $60, but he wasn't interested. At this point I got really angry, and as often happens in dream seemed to take on a super-human strength. Just the way he was dismissing my quite legitimate points really really pissed me off, so I started punching him a couple of times, and then pushed him outside and threw him off me quite a significant distance down the road.

Ironically just at that moment a police-car pulled up right next to me, obviously having just witnessed what I'd just done. I freaked out, and started completely making up rubbish about the guy having attacked me first and that I was only acting in self-defence. At this point I noticed that it wasn't just a police-car but in fact it was a whole massive paddy-wagon. I was really freaking out, making up more and more rubbish about how this guy had been beating me up and I had to save myself. Amazingly they bought my argument and I got away sweet as. I still hadn't paid for the petrol, but by this point I really didn't care so just drove off. That'll teach them to mess with me.

 Later in the same night my dream switched to being back at my Auntie's old house in Herne Bay, where she and my cousin had lived from as early as I could remember until about 1996. It was a bit odd being back in this house, but even weirder when I realised it was because Natalie was now renting the place. I wandered from room to room going "wow I remember how I used to come in here when I was little... I used to play in here, in here, over here, I remember sleeping in this room" and so on. Being an enormous villa in Herne Bay, possibly Auckland's most expensive suburb I had to ask how on earth Natalie was affording the rent. But the rent was normal and low, $300 and something a week (even though realistically the place would have cost close to triple that). I was amazed at the deal she had got, as I explained this all.

After that the dream sort of drifted for a while, into more typical dreams that jump all over the place and don't really make sense. But it was interesting that I had had two quite separate dreams in the one night that actually made sense to me.

Monday Bloody Monday
Now Playing: Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philadelphia

As always the weekends disappear impossibly fast and I find myself back at work on a Monday. It's fairly quiet still, so in some ways a good chance to have that relaxation time that would normally take place on the weekend. A chance for me to have a bit of a think about this blog as well, and note that it seems to have gone off the radar for me in recent weeks/months. I guess there's always something that takes my internet focus, at times it is this blog (it probably was for a good 6-8 months starting midway through last year) but at times it's something else. Obviously at the moment my focus seems to be on scam-baiting, and on keeping up to date with the forum that is attached to scam-baiting (http://forum.419eater.com/forum/index.php). I have managed to keep the site going though, which is good, as last time I got fully into a forum it eventually led to me completely abandoning this blog for almost 9 months which was a great pity as that was a reasonably interesting part of my life.

Anyway, enough of the rambling. This is actually a particularly significant week, not so much for what happens during it, but for what happened this time last year. On Saturday it will be a year since Leila and I started going out, and I remember at this stage last year I had quite a lot of things running through my head. My last couple of months had been pretty damn crap, with one thing going wrong after the next, all coming to a head at the end of June when I did actually feel as though I was living in a soap opera due to the amount of insane things that had happened all at once. Then, fortunately, I managed to score some time off work and take a short holiday with my mum down to Mt Ruapehu - funny to think that's now over a year ago. After that holiday things seemed to turn themselves around for me, there was the party when I started chatting with Leila, then the following week (this week last year) of various text messages, and then finally everything coming together on the Friday night. 

It is odd to think that all that is now a year ago, although once again in some ways it feels like so much longer. All those thoughts running through my head a year ago, wondering if she was interested in me, wondering what I should do to make the next move, wondering whether things would turn out right, wondering whether my rotten luck of late would finally turn itself around. It's quite exciting thinking back to those times, seeing myself in some ways as a rather different person to the one I am now, although I suppose that was largely because my state-of-mind at the time was probably a whole heap more negative than usual because of the events that had recently taken place.

Clearly, things did turn out to be fantastic. Oddly, when I think about it now I can't say that I am that surprised to be honest. At the time it just felt like such a natural thing to happen, that I somehow knew it would work, that even though I kept on telling myself it might not go to plan (so my expectations wouldn't be unnecessarily raised) I didn't really doubt that things would work out. For once in my life I was definitely right. 

Another Week Goes By
Now Playing: Travis - Turn

It's difficult to say whether life seems to be passing quickly or slowly at the moment. It does seem rather monotonous though, work-times during the week, various venues after work, weekend comes around, then back to work, then repeat again and again. My laziness seems to be getting worse, probably as a result of work being so quiet lately but also perhaps because of my whole body and mind going into what seems to be a partial shut-down for winter at the moment. We don't hibernate as people, but sometimes it feels like I do something partially towards hibernation, that my energy and my motivation to simply do stuff disappears during the winter months. It's as though the incessant rain and coldness is slowly taking away all possible cool things to do, and leaving me with repetitious trips to shopping malls, watching Shrek 2 for the 803rd time with Amalia, sitting at home checking my made up scambaiting characters' emails, writing endless posts in forums, and generally doing stuff that just feels so un-achieving.

It has been a particularly frustrating last few days though, which hasn't helped everyone's general gloominess. Our new cat, Fluffy, which we brought from Natalie's on Wednesday decided to do a runner on Friday morning. After spending the whole of Friday looking for her, we finally located her underneath the neighbour's house, in a storeroom that had literally decades worth of "stuff" stored in it. We hunted around in the dark for her in there for a while, caught a couple of glimpses, and then nothing. I don't think that she would have gone too far, but it's just so enormously depressing to have only had this cat for a couple of days yet screwed things up to the point where it seems like she's run away. Hopefully she'll get hungry enough to come back soon, or at least show herself around the near neighbourhood in the next couple of days so that we can collect her again. She's just such an awesome cat as well, letting Amalia do basically anything to her and being so happy and purring whenever somebody picked her up and gave her a cuddle. It kind of gets you down that you couldn't even effectively look after a cat for more than a couple of days.

In saying that, I did end up having a pretty fun day yesterday. I took Amalia out to Sylvia Park with my parents, and had a good look around the Borders bookshop there. It was amazing to see the number of Harry Potter books in that shop - stacked immensely all over a table, and then every single possible type of the previous six books placed strategically all over the shop. There were version of the books I had never seen before, at least four different covers for Order of the Phoenix and many of the others. I felt a bit nervous talking about the plot too much, in that I didn't want other people around who might not have read it, to overhear what I was saying and have the whole book spoilt for them. On the drive there, and back, I had enhanced the Harry Potter theme by playing an audiobook of the Philosopher's Stone in the car stereo, which I have borrowed from my Nana. It was really interesting to hear the story read out, until I tried ejecting the tape, which got stuck, and now nothing can play in the tape player, which means no iPod music for me in the car until I take it somewhere to get fixed. Joy!

But anyway, last night we had a few people over for a sort-of house-warming party. Leila's friends were mainly going to another party, and as my friends are largely spread all over the world at the moment, it ended up being basically full of Amber's friends. This was OK though, as they were all pretty cool people. We lit a fire in the fireplace we have in the dining room, the first fire we've had in this house, and it was awesome. I dug around under the house for any firewood we could find, and it was useful having something to do (tending the fire) so I didn't feel too self-conscious around all these people I didn't know. A combination of my general mehness at the moment, alcohold which made me amazingly sleepy, and the fact that I felt a bit more comfortable to do not much, meant that I didn't feel like I needed to get too involved with the potentially uncomfortable talking to people I don't really know at all. The house amazingly ended up reasonably clean at the end of it (apart from the kitchen and dining room), and the whole evening was just the right level of pleasantness.

So it's back to work tomorrow, and my seemingly monotonous life returns once again. I am looking forward to the couple of large projects that will hopefully kick off in the coming week. A lot of my work time lately has been spent adding little bits here and there to projects that are pretty much finished, waiting for responses from people who need to make changes before passing those changes on to other people, and various other small jobs that have, by in large, felt incredibly unfulfilling. It will be good to get my teeth once again stuck into a few larger jobs, a few jobs where I can see what my time is achieving, where I can set myself a few questions that needs answerings and then actually go about completing these tasks, starting with something small and eventually ending up with completed documents - actually feeling resourceful again. I think that once work sorts itself out, and I feel more motivated about it, that will carry through to the rest of my life. Winter is theoretically more than half over now, so hopefully we'll be having more frequent sunny days in the near future and I will be able to do more fun outside things.

That'd be nice. 

Sydney Dream
Now Playing: Lifehouse - Cling and Clatter

So often my dreams appear to be confusing, all over the place, and therefore very difficult to remember. However, last night I managed something fairly unusual: a dream that made sense, one that followed a fairly simple course, and therefore one that I managed to remember in reasonable detail.

In it, I was in Sydney. With Leila, Amber and Amalia I think. The dream started off with us being somewhere around the city centre, perhaps near a train station as I have some recollection of explaining to everyone how big the train station was, and how we could catch trains from there to seemingly anywhere. However, after that we didn't end up catching a train, but for some reason I had hired a car. All of a sudden I was driving everyone on a motorway near the CBD, a twisty strange on-ramp that made the car go so fast I bumped onto the grassy kerb for a bit, before making it to the Harbour Bridge. I drove across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, fully expecting to have to pay a toll at the other side as I remembered (from real life) the toll gates on the northern side of the bridge. However, when we go to that side of the Harbour Bridge there wasn't a toll that needed to be paid, although strangely the wide motorway seemed to disappear into local streets almost immediately. I checked the map for instructions on how to keep to the main road, as we were heading towards North Sydney, but it was confusing trying to match up the map with what we were seeing in reality.

I drove for a bit longer, and then we all ended up getting out of the car. I figured that it was parked in an OK spot, and then we all walked up a bit of a hill until we had come to a rather dense high-rise part of the city that I figured must be the centre of North Sydney.  I was worried that the car might get towed away, or that I wouldn't be able to find our way back to the car, but we walked onwards a bit further, eventually making our way in to the shopping centre. I think we all bought a few trinkets from the centre, I worried more about how we would find the car again as we'd zig-zagged across so many roads and through so many unfamiliar places. 

And then I woke up. 

Harry Potter Book 7 - Update 2 (Definite Spoilers!)
Now Playing: Blackfield - 1,000 People

OK so I've finished it. A couple of days before I thought I would be able to actually. I spent just about all of yesterday evening reading, and eventually at close to midnight managed to read the final page, to discover the final word wasn't scar, and I was done. As JK Rowling has said, scar was in the final sentence, but not the final word. And although I suspected it might have been mentioned because it had disappeared, in the end the scar did remain there, even in the epilouge 19 years later.

 But hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. After my weekend reading I was up to about page 250. So far the book had been fairly interesting, although as I said it felt strange, almost fan fiction like. Trips to Malfoy Manor later in the book reinforced this, while the effects of carrying the locket once again made me think of Lord of the Rings. Slowly the plot really began to pick up, and by the time everyone was ready for the battle at Hogwarts I was ripping through the book. It felt so exciting to be so close to having everything resolved. Yet throughout most of this there were still questions that were unanswered until the final moments - was Snape really a good guy, would Harry have to die to kill Voldemort?

Along with Leila I had suspected Snape would eventually turn out to be a good guy, although it done cleverly for us to think that he wasn't until after he was dead. Lots of things made sense then, and it was exciting to relive Snape's childhood is little bits and pieces, finding out more about Harry's mother in particular. Then finally it seemed as though JK Rowling would do what I had suspected, but had hoped wouldn't be necessary, make it so that Harry was a Horcrux himself and would need to die in order for Voldemort to die. It made good sense though, to kill off the main character in a way that would also defeat his enemy, yet at the same time it was frustrating - and also a bit overly Christian. Harry dying to save everyone else. Then there was the odd scene with Harry and Dumbledore seemingly chatting away, Dumbledore finally filling in all the details that we'd been desperate to find out for ages, and gloriously telling Harry that he wasn't dead, and could continue with his life if he so pleased. We didn't quite know whether Harry was dreaming this, but once he returned we knew he couldn't be defeated by Voldemort, that he would succeed in his mission. In the end, quite amusingly, it was Voldemort's own killing spell which rebounded to kill himself, quite apt I suppose.

The epilouge, which a lot of people have been talking about, I found a bit strange really. Not bad in any way, just truly bizarre to be seeing all these characters so far in the future. I guess the JK Rowling did that so she could make sure it would be very difficult for a sequel or spin-off books to be written. It tells us where things are 19 years in the future - we know that Harry ends up marrying Ginny and that Hermione and Ron also get married (argh that's so wrong!!!) Everything seemed in a strange haze in my mind at that point, a mix of emotions I suppose. Happiness on behalf of these characters, to know that after all they've been through they managed to live happy lives eventually, that they stuck together, that there wasn't a Voldemort junior waiting in the wings. Yet at the same time it was obviously sad personally to realise that this was the end, the last Harry Potter book, that these characters which I had followed through seven books, through literally thousands of pages, were now to leave me, to leave my imagination. It felt strangely similar to the first time I read Lord of the Rings actually, when Frodo goes off to the Grey Havens at the end and you don't really know what's happened, just that it's most definitely finally over, finished. I had expected myself to be ecstatic to finish such a long book, but instead I felt almost mournful that it was over.

Although there were parts of the book that dragged on a little, somewhat typically I suppose of later Harry Potter books, I found myself very impressed by the way in which all these disparate threads of the story came together in a way that nobody could have really anticipated. A lot of my predictions did turn out to be at least partially correct, I suppose. It was a little sad that Neville Longbottom didn't get to take out Bellatrix Lestrange, but in the end Molly Weasley did a good enough job of that. There were also nice touches, such as Harry sharing a sweet moment with his parents, Sirius and Lupin - even though at that stage everyone thought he was headed off to his death; or the way in which Dobby's death was dealt with, and we realised how important and awesome a character he head been. I look forward to seeing how it will be turned into a movie, as there were some parts that will be truly fantastic as a film.

I find myself in a little bit of a "what now" though. I didn't get into Harry Potter books until about 2003, when I read the first five in fairly quick succession. After that it was up and down regarding how much I was into them, I read book 6, but not until a while after it had come out, and recently reread books 4,5 and 6. I suppose there will be a whole new generation of fan fiction out there to read in the near future, and I still have a lot of fan fiction that I've started, but never completed. And there are, of course, two more movies to look foward to. 

Harry Potter Book 7 - Update 1 ( spoiler alert!)
Now Playing: DJ Sammy - The Boys of Summer

At the moment I'm about halfway through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - the seventh and final Harry Potter book. I am going to mention stuff that's happened so far in the book so if you haven't read any of it, you might want to give this update a skip. Please don't send me comments giving away the end, or I'll be tempted to Arvada Kadavra you.

Anyway, the book came out at 11.01am Saturday morning New Zealand time. Leila was working at the bookshop this day, so she got us a copy easily enough. Apparently they had ordered what seemed to be a huge number of books, but due to overwhelming demand had very nearly sold them all by the end of the day. It must have been frustrating, working all day with the book just sitting there and not being able to read it yourself. When I arrived to pick her up the store was quieter, everyone was reading Harry Potter intently, and it was just pretty amazing to see this book was finally "there", rather than just a date in the future of when it would come out. Leila had managed to chew her way through a couple of chapters in the quieter times of the day, and had a bookmark for me so we would be able to read it in chunks ourselves when the opportunity arose.

Throughout the weekend we both had a few reasonable chances to read at it. Leila always ahead of me although I've also managed to get close to halfway through it by this stage. I had a bits and pieces weekend with Amalia, lots of little things like visits to playgrounds, out to see my Nana, catching up with Leila's parents who she hadn't seen since before they went to England, and a couple of brief trips to the shopping mall. I bought her a nice pair and jeans and a jacket from Pumpkin Patch, as they were having a really good special on, which was handy as she has been lacking in a few harder wearing winter clothes lately.

But anyway, back to the book. In the first couple of chapters it felt odd reading a new Harry Potter. With all the fan fiction that I've read in the past, I kept having to convince myself that this was indeed the real deal and not just another story made up by fans of the Harry Potter series. In the first chapter, when all the Death Eaters have congregated at the Malfoy manor I kept remembering the fan fiction story by Cassandra Claire, Draco Dormiens, where Harry and Hermione (along with a rather more friendly than usual Draco) had all ended up at the Malfoy manor for a good chunk of the story. Therefore it was quite tricky in a way to force myself to not think of that fan fiction as  actually having happened in a previous year of the character' existence. Some of the exposition in Chapter 2 seemed a little long-winded, but it was interesting to find out about Dumbledore's past a bit more, and I think the doubts that have been cast on Dumbledore (which will possibly turn out to be a red-herring) make an interesting twist for the story, particularly as the continued appearance of Snape as a bad guy (so far) makes us really wonder why Dumbledore ever trusted him, and perhaps makes us wonder a bit more about Dumbledore's long-term intentions.

So far it has felt like a very different Harry Potter to me. Obviously there have been quite a few usual bits missing - no Hogwarts so far and a reasonably seriously reduced character cast for most of the story. It had been good that Hermione has really begun to shine, as I could never understand why she could be considered as anything except for the best wizard/witch of all the younger characters, considering her vast magical knowledge. Parts of their journey have felt quite like "Lord of the Rings" in some ways, when they're always on the move, which is OK but at times a little bit repetitive.

At almost halfway through the book there is an enormous amount of things that remain unresolved. In fact just about all the questions I had at the start of the book haven't really been answered yet. Harry hasn't managed to destroy a single Horcrux, we haven't had final closure on Snape, we don't know who the two main characters who die will be (unless Mad-Eye Moody turns out to be one of them) and we definitely don't know if Harry kills Voldemore, vice-versa, or whether they both die.

It's going to be a pretty action-packed next 300 pages I can see. 

Update Gap
Now Playing: SJD - Superman, You're Crying

I seem to be getting worse at my updating habits at the moment, three or four day gaps everywhere, what's happening to me? Firstly, my attention seems to be overly focused on ( scam-baiting forums at the moment, oddly enough in the same way that my attention was focused on movie forums last time I had a bit long gap between updates on this site, back in 2004. I definitely will make sure that my page doesn't end up abandoned this time like it did then, although a few nudges to remind me might be helpful to keep me regular on my updates here. My life also seems to be rather quiet at the moment, work's annoyingly quiet really, which is quite fun in one sense that I get to spend quite a bit of time doing other things, but annoying in other ways as I feel guilty about not doing enough work and worried about what I'll put in my timesheet when the time comes for it.

The other main event that seems to be taking place at the moment is our anticipation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is now only a couple of days away. After seeing the Order of the Phoenix film last week, and then buying the Goblet of Fire DVD and watching that a couple of nights ago, I feel really in a "Harry Potter" frame of mind at the moment. There's been so much pontificating about what's going to happen in the book, how this particular thread of the story will be resolved and so on. Will Snape turn out to be a good guy or a bad guy after all? Will Harry manage to defeat Voldemort? Is Dumbledore really 100% dead and so on... Leila's working at the bookshop on Saturday so it'll be easy for us to get a copy of the book, however I'll be waiting for a day or so while she finishes the book before I get my chance. I can just see myself on Sunday pleading with her to hurry up and finish the book, and threatening her to not give away anything about the story at all!

So I guess life is fairly interesting in some ways at the moment. I don't feel particularly productive about anything though, which is slightly depressing when combined with the winter weather. However, I'm sure that won't last forever and when everything gets really busy again I'll really miss the quietness that's happening at the moment. 

Travelling
Now Playing: Silverchair - Insomnia

I always have mixed feelings when talking to people who've just been overseas, and have all these amazing stories to share. I'm interested to see what they got up to, what good places to see are and also to share in how interesting their trip is. But at the same time it's frustrating that they're the ones telling the stories and not me, and I find myself insanely jealous that they've just been someone in Europe enjoying these amazing cities and sites, and here I am stuck in New Zealand experiencing one of the wettest runs of weather I can remember in forever. Leila's parents came back from a 3 week holiday in England (and a couple of days in Rome) yesterday, and we met up today for lunch and to have a chat with them about their holiday. It was a typical mixture of emotions, although at least this time there was the hope the perhaps in the not too distant future it could be me heading to Europe, to explore this part of the world that seemingly so many other people I know have either been to or at in at the moment. Yet there's still a long way to go before this becomes a reality, enormous amounts of money to save and things such as leave to be organised.

At least I'm not as bad as I used to be. I didn't go anywhere overseas until I was almost 18, and I would find myself insanely jealous of anyone going overseas. I guess my geographic mind, that was so interested in "places" needed to be fed a bit of new material, and because it felt like I was starved of it, I ended up craving going overseas to an amazing extent. I had hundreds of dreams where I'd finally be going overseas - often amazingly detailed with trips to the airport and even the flight itself - and in each dream I would have the same sensation of "oh yes.... all those previous times I thought I was going overseas were only dreams, but this one is different, finally this one is real, it's finally really happening." Then I would wake up in the morning, bang my head against the pillow and go "ah crap not just another dream", or something particularly bizarre would happen in the middle of the dream to show me that it wasn't reality. 

It isn't as bad these days, as I have been to a reasonable number of overseas places, in the course of four overseas trips (though 3 of those have been to Australia). Perhaps next year things will fall into place and I might be able to travel to Europe for a few weeks, a nice quick tour of the best bits of UK, France, Italy and a bit of Spain. Here's hoping, now time to start saving.