My World of Warcraft account expires next week. To celebrate I’ve ordered the Garageband Symphony Jam Pack. Expect sub-par Cardinal ripoffs shortly.
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When I boarded my tram to come to work this afternoon I noticed a bunch of new stickers plastered around it. Seems that Yarra Trams have taken a leaf out of Microsoft’s ‘Assume your customers are all criminals’ book, which certainly endears them to us. Anyhow, the sign opposite me said something along the lines of ‘Please reserve this seat for passengers who have actually paid for it’. Charming.

Five minutes later, a bunch of students get on the tram. They’re loud, so I look out the window and crank the iPod up so I can hear my podcast over their chatter. A few stops later they get off - and one of the boys has the sticker proudly plastered across his back.

It fair warmed the cockles ‘o me ol’ heart, donchaknow.

What a fun day we had yesterday. We celebrated Kym’s 30th by fulfilling her lifelong dream, to take part in a piefight. Giz and Kym have just moved into their new house in The Basin, more on that later. Here you can see Kym trying to prepare herself for her unexpected present (her parents are on the left, amused because they’ve known about this for weeks, just like the rest of us).

I was one of the photographers, because I really hate getting dirty. Here’s a pic of Kym and Crumpet just before the carnage began. Note the look of apprehension on Crumpet’s face!

I don’t think the fight lasted more than 30 seconds before all the pies were gone. Several minutes of flinging cream at each other followed.

I was using the digicam on full-auto, and the focus wasn’t the best while everybody was running about.

I just found knitting and crafting podcasts on the iTMS to tempt Crumpet with. She is sad now. She farts in misery.

Besides producing superior porn, Europe evidently has excellent politicians. They’ve voted against software patents in a landslide decision, 648 votes to 14. That means that programs like VLC and MPlayer (as well as thousands of other open source projects) remain legal, and the big boys (read: Microsoft, Adobe, Apple) are forced to compete on features and quality rather than by patenting their applications. Great stuff for competition, and I’m delighted at how overwhelming the rejection turned out to be.

My server crashed yesterday… looks like some script kiddie in Korea was hitting my SSH server for over 30 minutes looking for a weak password. I have no idea why the machine kernel panicked, but at least no harm was done. It’s kinda hard to compromise a server that’s just locked up.

Logs don’t show anything conclusive, so I’ve closed down external SSH access and I’ll be working on a script that firewalls remote IPs after 3 failed login attempts.