Amber: Ramius' Discourse on principles of Sorcery. Part II.

Hmm, still reading? Well, I'll assume that my rather long winded introduction hasn't put you off entirely.

To begin then.

( Amber IC-ish stuff about Ramius' understanding of Sorcery )

IMPOTANT EMAIL

I've just had one of our admins send us an email, with the subject reading:

IMPOTANT: Mails from (bigbrother automated system) to (my email address).

Whinging about how this is going across the internet, is not from a valid email address, and is triggering their spam filter.

I find this rather ironic and and amusing, that an email about spam and mail going across the internet, would happen to be typoed as 'IMPOTANT'.

Amber: Ramius' Diary

(Incidentally, I was considering plonking this in a different journal, but ... well Ramius is already take. So I'll settle for memory-linking)

( Amber IC-ish stuff )

SINergy post

SINergy players, may I draw your attention to this.

We're optimistic and enthusiastic, but ... well can't sustain the kind of turnout we had last session. Now I'm going to be printing off mini-flyer thingies, but if there's any suggestions you've got about improving turnout they are greatly appreciated.

Personally I think SINergy is a pretty reasonable night out - even if you're just going for music and beer. But if you're thinking otherwise, then please, let us know, because we want to be running a really good show.

All DAY Car Brawl!

Reproduced here, for those of you who are unaware of the fogeynet yahoo group. Or who aren't from Warwick, but might be interested in a bit of heavy duty crawling.

Well now. That time of year rapidly approaches once more. The All Day Barcrawl. Not so much the Warwick Sci-Fi society crawl any more, but more of a re-union of ex-UWSF&F society members.

This will be occuring on the 18th of JUNE. A mere week-and-a-bit away.

Anyone vaguely interested in picking a route?
Otherwise I'll figure out what our assault course is this year, and chase people around it with a rubber sword...

So far, we've got:
10am Dyers Arms
11am Albany
12pm Not the firkin because it's called something else.
1pm Windmill
2pm Browns
3pm Courtyard
4pm Golden Cross
5pm Not the other firkin, because it isn't, but is quite near the police station
6pm TBA but the 'beer engine' on far gosforth street has been taken over by the old crew of the whitefriars...

Work and mayhem.

Well, every day there's someone else I need to add to my list of people who piss me off. It seems that people who spend more than 5 years working for a company fall into two categories.

Those that are laid back but know what they're doing.
Those that are incompetent wankers. (Incidentally, on a completely unrelated note, UK IT directors are unproductive workaholics)

The depths of these two traits are in direct proportion to contiguous employment.

I guess it's because one set can't be arsed to move, and the other set just can't.

Ok, ok, so I'm grumpy. Don't quite know why, but I suspect it's because I've had 'more contact that I'd like' with the wanker subset of my workplace recently.

Oh and a work queue that keeps increasing, because we're basically short staffed, a few people who seem to generate work rather than do it, and no inflation pay rise this year.

That'll be it. I'm feeling skint this week, because I've wiped out my money with various expenses, have had the rather unpleasant experience of a short turn out at SINergy, discovered that there's a bug in a script I wrote a few month ago, so we've been overcharging for stuff, and have to get a server installed (which is fine) rack mounted and cabled (which is a pain) and configured in a veritas cluster (which I've never done before, and really have only the vaguest idea how to do.). This will take days, of work, when what I really need to be doing is preparing for this weekend, when I'm doing a server migration on sunday (yes, it does suck).
Oh, yeah. And because of Alstom's pay freeze, there was no 'inflation' raise this year, and I'm noticing that my 'just stuff' expenses are gradually increasing.

I figure that the work overloading thing is just temporary - it always seems to work this way - budgets april, flurry of stuff, settles down again. But the pay thing I'm not amazingly happy with, and so I figure Alstom have until about September before I start considering my options again.

Fuckit, where's my beer.