Happy Easter! And all that crap.

Personally, while I can appreciate the message of Easter (and Christmas, etc), I'm not overly fond of the event itself. This is mainly due to the lip service paid to the religious history of what has become a commercialised event. I'm sure that there are some people of there of the religious persuasion out there that celebrate and respect the meaning of the holidays, but from casual observation they seem few and far between. I'm not old enough to remember, but how long ago was it when holidays like Easter and Christmas were about religion, not commercialisation?

But I'm probably just reiterating the comments echoed in thousands of other blogs worldwide, so I'll keep quiet on that.

But still, the enforced holiday does give us a chance to do something different. Instead of our usual Friday Night On The Town, The Group gathered at Jono's for a congregation. Catholic Friendly food was served (ie: fish and chips, and some salad) and we spent the nightD playing the card game Spoons, of all things. It was really quite enjoyable, and it got more than a little silly.

I'll be catching up with Family tomorrow, which will be nice. Instead of doing the standard Easter eggs thing, Michele and I are doing the Chocolate Cake Of Doom, and idea which seems to be quite well received. I like it, because I don't like Easter eggs :P Go Shay!

In other news, I got the Powerbook back. It's nice and shiny, and as we're seeing more and more of them at work, I'm getting to know them a lot better. I'm still trying to convince them to buy me a better one, but when I think about what I actually do with it, a memory upgrade on this one would probably do me just fine. Quite honestly, I wouldn't mind using it as a desktop replacement at work. I'm already using it at home exclusively.

Daniel just got himself a new camera, and I'm insanely jealous. Jealous because it's the one that I've been drooling over for ages. I wanntssss it, my preciousss. He got the body and lens separately. The lens is the US version which has a better focal range, and a metal base instead of the plastic base that the Australian model comes with. He brought it over to my place to play with it, and we took some pictures and farted around with it for a while. Hopefully he'll put up a gallery one day, so we can all take a look at his photographical genius.

So Christmas has once again been and gone, leaving credit debt at an all new high, etc etc. This year we celebrated with dinner at Michele's sisters on Christmas eve, and then lunch on Christmas day at my mum's house. A quiet one, for a change.

I spent this afternoon setting up and beautifying Gallery to give me somewhere convenient to shove photos. I did have an old piece of code that I used to use, but there was a large effort factor in getting things to show in the desired order (due to the nature of where it was derived from). It's pretty neat. Check it out.

A while ago, Michele and I decided that in order to "pay back" or "compensate" or "just because", we'd feed both her family and mine. That finally came to pass this last Sunday, and it seems to have been a resounding success. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food (I certainly did), and had a good time. It's been three days since the dinner Michele and I put on, and I *still* have leftovers in the fridge.

We prepared 4 dishes: Gyoza dumplings, Otsu, Sauteed Ginger Beef and Cabbage, and Brochettes de Poulet, Ananas et Gingembre. We were going to make dumplings for desert, but we couldn't find all the ingredients easily, so we decided to substitute for shop bought dumplings. Which we also couldn't find on short notice. We ended up settling for Manju Mochi (I think that's right - it's basically mochi balls with a manju filling). Even though I normally don't like red bean paste, I enjoyed it immensely ^_^.

Michele is a genius at preparation. Although we both helped each other, Michele took the lead, scheduled everything, and basically made sure that I wasn't fucking it up. We did about 3 hours of cooking on Sunday, but we did a further 2 hours on Saturday, preparing and marinating the chicken.

It only just occurred to me that I should have taken photo's of our efforts, but as people started arriving as we were still cooking, it would have been a little weird. The above links have pretty good photo's anyway, so check them out. The sites themselves are worth a look.

Billy has done exceptionally well. His belated birthday present (or half of, so he tells me) is none other than the DVD of The work of Director Chris Cunningham. You may not know the name, but if you watch music videos or the tv, you'll know his work. Check out this brief bio of his work, which includes some links to detailed descriptions of his work, some of which you can even download. This guy, whether working in short clips, movies, or even adverts, produces some truly stunning and thought provoking work.

Way to go, Billy! Truly an awesome gift! Thanks dude!

Life is hardly worth interesting enough to post about, then it occurs to me that this is called a "blog". As in "web log". A log of what? Intersting anecdotes? Ammusing stories? No, generally it's a place for people to sit and tell their sorry tale about their life, which probably interests a total of maybe, I dunno, 3 people? And that's being generous! So shall I.

Work is fun again, after yet another reshuffle. It's only been 3 months since the last one. The upside of this is that I've been moved out of the Systems Administration role into my preferred Systems Developer. Huzzah! No longer do I have to get woken up at 3am when something decides that it doesn't want to play fair with the rest of the network. No, that's now the Network Operations team! I just get to design, implement, and deploy all the shiney toys on the network that decide they don't want to play with the rest of the network.

That reminds me: I must write that module that introduces random fuckups when Paul is on call.

So we get real projects, with real project managers, with real goals! I wonder when reality will set in.

On the personal front, today is my sisters birthday! ( Hi Fliss! ) I'm sure we all wish her a happy birthday.

Summer is almost upon us yet again, and in the spirit of fun, the usual Saturday shenanigans will start off with some form of physical entertainment! Originally our Saturday Shenanigans was an excuse to go play some badmington or something equally fun, however when the courts got booked out for an entire season of basketball, it turned into a regular weekend gatherring at my place to watch anime, play RPG's, etc. Now people are thinking of purchasing bikes or rollerblades and doing circuits of the river (always fun fun fun). I'm looking forward to it (once I replace some wheels and the bearings on my set of blades - they don't like doing 1000+ kms over 3 months).

I've recently broken out the good old BitchX again, and have started irc'ing on oz.org, hanging out in Michele's favorite irc hangout. It took me a while to remember how to drive irc, but I think I'm back in the saddle properly again. I'm even contributing on some forum, which might turn out to be mildly amusing. *shrug*

That's all from Project Chris this time. Stay tuned for another exciting episode of Days Of Somebody Else's Life