See You Next Wednesday
Still ill.
It's not a forty-eight hour thing either. I went to work, did what I had to do and came home. Since then I have drunk soup and juice and slept. I haven't even watched telly. Around midday if you fill our kitchen sink with hot, soapy water and put your hands in it the sun will shine gently through the window in a very comforting way for those of us with a head full of rhinovirus. So I washed the dishes, slowly and carefully.
Now that I think of it, that might be the only redeeming feature of out kitchen. The fridge alcove is next to the back door so it can catch the afternoon sun. There is less than one metre of bench space. There are two power points, and two more behind the stove which would need extension cords strung across a doorway to be useful. There are cupboards under the sink and two wall cupboards (about seven metres of shelving in total). The wall cupboards are set about one and a half metres off the floor, one next to the sink and one next to the door, so you can catch your shoulder on them when you turn or knock yourself out if you bend at the waist. There is one other redeeming feature: television reception is excellent on all channels.
Ill
I am ill. I have a cold which has had it's twenty-four hours and is getting worse so it's not a twenty-four hour thing. Boo hoo, poor me. I didn't go to Jonathan's game today but I have to go to work tomorrow, at least in the morning. I have to set up a review meeting for my first Test Request, which I know is full of gaps. The review is supposed to get everyone involved to check the document before it is sent off to the Testing Services Centre to be executed. As I know the thing is significantly incomplete I am relying on this meeting to fix it. So I have to go to work in the morning. Also, we are relocating so I have to pack up my stuff, including my computer. I think I shall complete the draft Test Request, invite everyone to the meeting, put everything in a box and go home to wallow in headaches and tissues.
Linda also has to go to work on Monday. She is working in the basement of Parliament House (like Mulder). She will get paid twenty dollars per fortnight more than the dole to do a programming job for which she should be paid thirty dollars an hour. Lucky thing.
Yesterday I saw
Adaptation with Simon. It is extremely clever, perhaps a bit too clever because the cleverness unavoidably restricts the story. However it is such a clever story a little restriction is not a significant obstacle and just maybe it saves the whole production in the end (because the audience's brains don't explode with the cleverness of the whole thing).
Back to work, you. (I mean me.)
Bang ended my vacation in three days of roleplaying and Australia winning the World Cup of cricket (way past my bedtime). Excellent.
I went back to work this today. Ernie has been showing me the ropes of Test Co-ordination. The tasks I am being shown are more like lengths of material which have been combined to make a rather ragged rope to fasten testing services to the side of the business architecture. And me without my marlinspike. Fortunately my blank looks often elicit advice that when I have to do this on my own I will discover most of the people within ten feet are ropemakers who are only too keen to interrupt their basket weaving and repeat to me what I would have forgotten if it had managed to sink in at all
Not waiting, uploading.
Happy birthday for the seventeenth, Elizabeth.
This week I have mostly been on vacation. I watched some World Cup cricket semifinals, did a
web page for my
Dungeons & Dragons character's journal form Jonathan's game, read Dave's
Dungeons & Dragons third edition rule books, cleaned up the fluids which oozed from Linda's cat when his infected side burst on my duvet, unboxed the rest of my clothes and ironed everything, pruned and weeded and trimmed the garden and lawn, registered my car in the A.C.T. and discovered that for the privilege of living in our nations capital my insurance premium has gone up $471.28 (or 96%). Now my car has A.C.T. (instead of Queensland) number plates I will have to ignore lane markings instead of school zones, change lanes in intersections and on roundabouts, and no longer slow down when mergining.
Dave forgot to tell me when we were playing indoor cricket this week but he is totally forgiven because he's currently enthused about playing third edition
Dungeons & Dragons which I want to do too. I missed the original decrescendo into disrespect third edition went through when it was published, being still in Townsville after everyone I know who plays games had left, so Dave's reinterestification is probably my only chance to learn by doing. He is at home with a cold today and I am still on vacation so I shall call him and arrange fun just as soon as I have finished uploading stuff for Chris F to transfer from my hard drive to his now that I am in Canberra and he remains in Townsville... there. Now I will publish this and call Dave.
Is there no such thing as a good blurb?
I went to see
ie=msv: the obcell (or
ie=msv: the obcell a Human Experiment). I don't know what ie=msv means; obcell (or The Obcell) is an observation cell used in psychiatric or custodial institutions. The show was "a dance performance resulting from a Choreographic Fellowship awarded to Fiona Malone" presented by The Australian Choreographic Centre. It was created by Fiona Malone and something called C_flux (which was not explained). The programme and the speech made in the foyer before the show mentioned "the human test case... will develop an interdependency with technology". I don't think interdependency means what they think it means.
There was only one dancer, Ninian Donald. He was wearing a Diem Dance System which measures "the degree of flexion placed on... fourteen bend sensors that are placed on joints of the body". According to the speech in the foyer this meant almost every sound heard during the performance was triggered by the dancer. According to eye witnesses this meant that most of the sounds could have been triggered by a person at the back of the audience with a handheld sound sampler. As a dance the choreography was a good mime. As a mime Ninian was a good dancer.
On the other hand this was the result of a fellowship awarded for research and development and the use of the suit, the lighting and the design were remarkable. Images from cameras mounted in the set and on the suit were projected on screens at the back of the stage and low light cameras linked to monitors were used to include blackouts in the performance. The technological side of the production (which was half the show) was robust and effective. They did well for a company their size.
Happy birthday, Nola.
Too long.
We won the D grade indoor cricket grand final. I scored four runs with the bat and they scored four runs off my bowling, but we won by 118 runs so it wasn't an outstanding contribution.
At work they have stopped giving me jobs to do because I'm supposed to be learning how to co-ordinate testing. The testing co-ordinator has not been teaching me anything because I don't change teams until the end of March. (He says he's writing it all down for me.) However I have managed to get involved with enough review meetings and focus groups to keep me occupied without having to resort to getting paid for using government resources to practise my hobbies. I gave that up shortly after Christmas.
I saw David Williamson's play
The Conversation. It was an ordinary production. The structure was contrived and relied heavily on the drama inherent in the subject matter (the family of a recidivist rapist meet the parents of a young woman he murdered) and precipitous segues from the meeting facilitator character. The staging was awkward with eight people sitting in a line facing the audience but talking to each other. The individual performances were good and I enjoyed what the actors managed to do despite the material pigeonholing their characters. It would have preferred the individual's contributions to be more interconnected (and for the actors to move around a bit) but at least nobody lived happily ever after.
On the other hand I saw
The Hours in which nobody lived happily ever after but it was thoroughly engaging and had wonderfully interwoven stories. I haven't read the book but I think comparing the two would be futile because the film was such a beautiful piece of cinematic art such a comparison would be a silly exercise. It is a splendid film.
This morning I started two weeks vacation. At nine o'clock this morning I went with my mother to re-pack my sister's belongings to be sent to her in London. My sister had discovered the amount of V.A.T. to be charged was more than she could pay so we had been issued instructions on how to whittle down the contents of her packing boxes to an affordable quantity. When I got back home at a quarter past five this afternoon I decided that my plans to unpack my books, clean the laundry, finish the herb garden and empty the garage could go hang themselves because I could see the fortnight was already vanishing up my Protestant work ethic.
Then I updated my blog.
