It just occured to me that it might me nice if I mentioned that I changed a few things in my dir listings with a small file in each dir, so to change the colors, make them look more like the rest of my site.

I have not written since Monday. Gosh. I suppose I was just a little busy. So, what are you, the reader, going to do about it? It has been an interesting week. I suppose I should start at the begining. On Tuesday, (I think it was Tuesday), I went in to the STA Travel Office at Vic, and found out that I would not be able to use Air Points on the SWAP Program, but then again, due to my status as a Canadian Citizen, I will not have to go on the SWAP program, which is basically a means for students (who, incidentally, would not stand a chance of getting a working VISA any otherway) to get working VISAs. As I don't need one, I can not only save myself the $216 that a VISA would cost, but also the $729 that the SWAP program costs. That was the story of Tuesday.
Tuesday evening is a whole new story. After coming home from Vic, I met up with Jono and Talia (I had a whole pile of Coke Auction Points for him), and then met Giancarlo in time to catch the bus to Porirua (we were meeting Jolene, and we were to go bowling). After our bowling we decided to go to Porirua for a feed. We were feeling lazy, so we caught the train. On the way to the train, we came across a wall to jump down. This wall was about a metre and a half high. I jumped down, and then Giancarlo followed suit. Jolene, was going to go her own little safe way, but decided that she didn't wanna look like a loner, so she jumped down also. She landed funny, and at the time, we thought that she had just spiked herself. Little did we know that she had done some damage to her ankle. Next day, she sent a text saying that she was in crutches, and that she would not be working. Well, that made my plans for the rest of the week - since it was partly my fault, its only fair that I do her shifts. That meant that I had to work on Wednesday night on my assignments. Well, there was some hell there, I was supposed to be cooking dinner. Well, no dinner for me, I had no time.
Come Thursday, Talia had called me the day before, she was bored. I managed to convince her to join us in out lectures at Vic, since she had no classes until Tuesday. Thursday night comes. I go to work. Hell breaks loose with Nat, its her 18th birthday, and she is getting a little emotional. She asks if she can leave early, arguing that she will not be any use in her "state". I really can't argue - I really don't want to keep her there if she don't want to be there, and I didn't want a fight, so I let her go.
Friday - last day of the week. Day assignments are due. Turn up to Vic early to get some work done before only lecture for the day. Do assignment, wrong. Steve goes off to managment lecture, I go off to Comp lab, to download notes off the net. See mistake, fix it, tell Steve, redo most of assignment, submit what I have completed, go to Science office, Steve is picking up STAT. Wander the heights of cotton, find STAT lecturer, listen to him rant as Steve gets in to the lift. Miss the lift, run down the stairs, catch Steve, giude him to the office he needs to go to, go to bus stop, fully intending to miss bus, prepared for half an hour of pool until the next bus. See but at traffic lights, decide to run to next stop to catch it. What follows is a description of a mad dash down Willis Street.
First, we run, and the way is largly clear. Further are some people - many people. As we weave and dodge, I see a gap, and I see it rapidly closing against a table with stuff on top. I decide to put a burst of pace on. It is not quite enough. I have to twist and make the gap sideways. I make it, and in the process scare the shit out of the people in the way. The gap is immediately opened for Steve, who also makes it. Next is Steve's turn to take the lead, after briefly spotting the bus not too far behind, and the red light ahead changing to green. After a little weaving, he is forced to go out wide, the way is blocked. I, however, stubbonly press on. I see the smallest of gaps between a man with a briefcase and another person. I put on the pace, and am about to collide with a briefcase. It is looking bad. I crouch down, down very low, all the while running just as fast as I can. It starts to look bad, I have made it through the small gap, by going under the man's briefcase - an incredibly small gap between the ground, and a smack on the head with a corner of a briefcase as speed. Making it past is not quite enough in this case, I have to maintain balance, and also speed, as the bus has caught up with us by now. It looking dim, and I was sure I was going to go flat on my face, but by some miracle, I manage to regain balance, and control, and I straighten up again, and put on more pace. More weaving, which by now is a trivial exercise, and the bus is at the stop. It is luck that someone who wanted to catch it was already there, and so it had stopped. We make it, with not a moment so spare - any later, and the doors would have been closed.
Friday night, work, not a lot is new. In bed at 3 am Saturday morning. Out of bed again at 8:45 am, time for work. Fun, 5.5 hours working with Jenny. Just what I really want. Not. End of the day, and my feet are killing me. Still, think of the money. Jolene has it easy - sick pay, and not having to work for it.
As for the cyber side of the week, not a lot really, else there would probably be more to show for it in the daily (?!?) rantings. The battle with the Chinese hacker is still happening, He is sending my server messages which cause it to reply with 50x error codes - his "request" is a dot and a square - its no surprise my server can't understand. After many attempts to get a page showing a message saying that my server is not a proxy server failed, I have resorted to blocking his IP address - thats 2 Chinese IP addresses that I have port 80 blocked for - both are from Chinese Telecom. The other thing that is happening is I am reorganizing my MP3s (again).

After getting through to Air Points finally, I am able to find out that I will not be able to use my Air Points to get to Canada, unless the Air Points can cover the entire cost. However, I can use Air Points for example to get to and from Auckland, from Wellington, I pay for the fare from Aucland to LA, and then use Air Points to get a flight on Air Canada to Vancouver from LA. The bonus is that it would give me a stop in LA as well as Canada, and on the way home, I can use the points I have earned on the way there to get an upgrade to first class. Schweet! Also, it appears that there are no flights from Auckland to Vancouver anyway. (Ofcourse, the Air Points website does not allow bookings to be made more than a year in advance, so I have no way of knowing for sure, without visiting a travel agent. I suppose I will have to contact STA and see what kind of things I can do to get there. Ofcourse, the STA website would be offline, would it not? Bloody typical! What ever happened to self help?

Good lord, the idiots at Air Points are a bunch of stupid shits! First after calling their online system, I press 0 to talk to someone, and it just transfers me to another online system! So again I press 0, and it tells me that I may speak to someone only after I press a few more numbers. So, having done this before, I press 2, then 0, and am placed in a queue that must be 50 miles long. After finally getting thru the queue, I get cut off (They hung up). So, now, I call with 2 fones, so that if one dies, then I dont have to wait as long.

What a joke! I decided to catch the bus up the hill this afternoon (bad move). I was on the 3:28pm train to Jville from Town, which got to Jville at about 3:40pm, about on time. I then boarded the waiting Jville West bus. 20 minutes later, we started out along the route. It is all the fault of one driver - Tip - one day, he defined the meaning of late - we froze our asses off waiting for the bus for about 10 minuntes. The next day, he defined the meaning of early - 5 minutes early, poor old Steve missed the bus, so was late, and now, today, he redefined late - 20 bloody minutes!
Forgetting the bus completely, I decided that since we seem to spend a little time at iCafe, I would become a member. Yay. Wow. All celebrate. More importantly, I am seriously considering dropping my ELCO major, and just carrying on with Comp. Sci., which means that I can drop PHYS, which really pisses me off. To make up the short fall of 100 level points, I will take a paper that will be gift marks - something like STAT, which means that I can spend more time working on MATH 114, which is the subject I need to put time into.

Traffic is sitting on 1014.39MB, and its traffic day tommorrow! It looks like I will make it. Yesterday, I enrolled in the 2nd trimester version of MATH 114, and I have learned that it is split up into two "sessions" - on Monday and Thursday deals with the 2nd trimester work, and Wednesday and Friday deals with the 1st trimester work. What this "splitting" means is this: I can attend the morning session for the days where the 2nd trimester material is taught, or I can attend the afternoon session. This all means that on Thursdays where I don't have anything on earlier, I can attend the afternoon session (which is straight after COMP), and I then don't have to wake up until 12:00pm for a 2:00pm class. Schweet! Also, if I don't need to go to the PHYS tut, I can do the same thing on Monday. Schweet! This rant about my timetable, well, it has taken its time to make it to the world - I searched the VUW and MCS websites for timetable information, and got distracted by the "Whats new" pages on the MCS website, and inside there, got distracted by a piece of software which analyses web and proxy logs, so I downloaded it. In the end, I have decided against using it, because it appears to want the log file to be split (I suppose thats not such a bad idea, in terms of the program's performance, but it would require me to split my file all the time, which would be a pain. Online stats would be a problem also, since it appears to analyse once a week, and upload the results. I suppose it could be a task for my 486 - The 486 could take a copy of the log file, split it, and analyse it, and do all that bollocks on it - that way, the web server would not be bogged down analysing a log file. I suppose I could get it to copy the file and that way the analysis program wouldn't have to split the file.

Traffic is sitting on 1008.27MB, and I don't get any more traffic until the 22nd. Its a little tight! I visited the Canadian embassey today, so I can hope they accept me. Actually, I cant be bothered writing much for this - today was not really that interesting - I didnlt need to wake up in any great rush.

I fixed a problem with my DNS server, for some reason, it was not answering queries, and not doing zone transfers. It appears that some TXT records were pissing it off a little. After removing those links, and reloading the server, everything works fine once more. I am wondering if perhaps I should write a web interface for the zone files - I could get it to modify the file, and once the changes were made, it could upload the file, and restart the server. Ofcourse, it relies on be being able to execute mandatory commands, which at present, I still am unsure how to do - the manuals say to use exec(command); or to use backticks, or any number of other alternatives, but I can't seem to get them to give me any joy. Actually, if I recall correctly, all my commands were ones that may have needed user input, so perhaps restarting the name server would work. I will have to give it a go, and, ofcourse, I may have to use sudo to allow the web server to run the commands (or, I could get the webserver to create a file, and then a cron job could test for the file, and then reload the name server, and remove the file, ofcourse, that would require me to learn some shell scripting - shouldn't be too hard.)
I have been given an excellent idea for a rainy day project - a links page which could be added to by members of the public, and could rank the links on the fly also, perhaps. Yes, this seems to be a good idea to me, provided there is going to be time.

Well, I have not written anything for this page for quite some time. Lame, I know. My excuse is that I was in Nelson. I had my computer with me, OK, but I was not going to maintain this site over FTP and a 56K modem - I prefer a 100 Megabit network and SMB connections. Besides - it is cheaper than dial-up access. I did attempt to put some on the page, and I put somthing there on Saturday the 7th, but it was such a hassle that I did not bother any more. Therefore, I must fill in in this entry. On Saturday, I started the fix at Rogers place. It involved removing software that was insistent on checking the intenet for updates - both pieces of software were Microsoft software, so all trust that Microsoft had built (yeah right) is gone, once more. One piece of software was so insistent that I could only thwart it by faking an entry for the domain name that it looked up, and making that fake address the address of the localhost (127.0.0.1). That fix took until Thursday to refine and impliment. In the mean time, I had been to Richmond, where there was Murrary's computer - an old all-in-one 486, wih Windows 95, as you could imagine, a right old tempermental machine. To top it all off, its hard disk was compressed, so that was part of the reason it was going so slow. Unfortunately, it was simply not sufficient to simply decompress the hard disk - it refused to do it. Networking it was not going to be easy either - with Windows 95, it was making even generic network cards hard to use. Out comes the USB->IDE box. Out with the CDRW, in with the hard disk. I now have a copy of his hard disk on my hard disk. Many hours were spent on this machine, and I thought I had it beaten. I retired to the internet to chat with some friends, and the screen saver turned on. OK so far, but after about 2 hours of screen saver, and no other input, it crashed. That destroyed all success I had, and I attempted to fix it up the next day. I finally admitted defeat, and now, I await the machine on the next courier, so I can spend a great deal of time fixing it up. After that little game, I was off to Joanne's for dinner, and then on to Grandpop's the next morning. Once at Grandpop's, I got set in to fixing the problems he was having. He had managed to close off the Winamp main window as well as the playlist, so even though Winamp was loading, it was not showing. After fixing Winamp (I also had to download a new version to fix a few other issues), I got on to checking a few emails which were causing a little concern. One such email contained an attachment, named as a GIF. This "image" refused to display in a web browser, so I took to it wih a text editor. Inspection showed that it was not an image (it lacked the version identifier present at the begining of any GIF), but rather, a piece of executable code, written by Microsoft. When the file was QuickViewed, it appeared to be a small Windows utility. Why, then, anyone would send this file, renamed as an image, is anyones guess. So I suspected a virus. I was wanting to find out what this code did, so I put it on a floppy disk, with the intention of reverse engineering it on my laptop. Well, I got as far as listing the contents of the disk, and my virus scanner immediately halted my machine, and did not allow me to do anything else until I decided to either ignore it (no way!! I was not leaving virus code on my computer!) or fix it. So, I fixed it. With that in mind, what the program would do became largley irrelevant, as its code was changed in the cleaning process. Next step, I installed my virus scanner on Grandpop's machine, and removed 2 instances of the virus (they had not been released, we, it appears, had succeeded in drilling in the message that any email with an attachment from someone you do not know is not to be opened, and that any message with an EXE attachment is not to be opened until it has been scanned). The virus concerned was W32.Magistr.24876@mm - at the time, it was (and still is at the time I am writing this) a level 4 virus, 3rd newest, high-threat virus. For more information on this virus, visit SARC, (http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.magistr.24876@mm.html). The next day, it was off to Roger's place again. They were out for most of the day, so at around lunch time, I took to the streets, and wandered around the town, looking for a place to eat. I decided in the end to visit the New World, and picked up 3 pieces of chicken, 3 Croissants, a drink, and a Dominion. Next day was flight day, and that was just yesterday. The flight was boring, there were clouds below, so there was no view, and there was only one interesting patch, which was over before it started. Today, I did a little for a cake, for my Aunt and Uncle's 50th birthday's, and tonight is the party. It is at this stage that I terminate this overly long entry, and prepare myself. Until then, entertain yourselves with the few photos that I have put up from the trip. Find them - I can't be bothered including a link.

All my plix pages do not work - they never got off anyway. The basic rundown of them was the following: Services included webhosting, email hosting, and domain name server hosting. Login to plix was just a telnet - that might still work, though it will go to mayor, not plix - your username and password will most probably work, but if it doesn't, feel free to send me an email, and I will fix it up. At some stage, I will actually get around to removing the bullshit from this front page.