Time Flies

[lnr]

We'd intended to go to a leaving-do, a housewarming and maybe a gig last weekend, but on Friday night Mike was still suffering from the dodgy innards he'd had all week, so we stayed in and watched Stand By Me on DVD and had a pleasant quiet night in.

The other plan for Saturday was to bake Christmas cakes: I promised one each for my mum and grandma. The cupboard had everything I needed except for glacé cherries, and enough eggs and butter, so we headed out to the shops. Not entirely surprising but the local mini-tesco didn't have the cherries, so we headed further afield to Budgens and discovered them selling steak and kidney together, and also shortcrust ready-rolled pastry, and hence the idea for Sunday lunch was born. After an afternoon of cake preparation and lazing around waiting for it we decided we were just too worn out to go anywhere, so ordered pizza and spent the evening in front of the telly, watching Strictly Come Dancing (sorry), the first bit of Robin Hood (it's still appalling) and then both Touching The Void and Underworld - which were quite a contrast.

And on Sunday we spent the morning preparing the next cake, making steak and kidney pie and apple crumble. The pie came out fabulous (with mashed spuds, mashed swede and carrot, and leeks, yum), and we were all stuffed afterwards, despite not getting lunch til 3:30. Mike left after lunch leaving me to a quiet afternoon and evening of reading, and by teatime I only had room for a bowl of crumble and custard - a bit disappointing after the success of the pie. I also put the second cake on, and forgetting to set a timer when I thought "just half an hour more" it got about 2 hours overdone. Thankfully at gas mark 1 this isn't a complete disaster, but it won't be quite as nice as the other one.

Monday night was the last bit of our anniversary, a year since Mike asked if he could call me his girlfriend and I agreed. So we went out for dinner to Charlie Chan's since Mike hadn't been before. To be honest I found the mixed hors d'oeuvres to start were a bit disappointing by usual standards, but the rest of the food was great and we had a lovely time. Then we retired to Mike's, where he was sweet enough to not mind me spending the rest of the evening playing Nethack. He's a darling.

Tuesday was a bit of an odd day. Staying at Mike's means I get to my desk at about 8:10am, and instead of getting straight to work I decided to carry on with my nethack game. I've been playing in the /dev/null annual tournament, which takes place over the whole of November, and I was desperately close to ascending (=winning). Despite some setbacks I made it (I've posted about it over on rec.games.roguelike nethack, Message-ID: <3xm*-wWwr@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> , Google Groups link). This left me feeling high as a kite and wobbly with excitement. It's a good game OK and I've only won it twice. Later though I got an email back from Microsoft explaining their side of the Hotmail problem I've been talking about in earlier posts, so I passed it on in the local newsgroup thread on the subject, expressing how disappointed I was that the problem couldn't be solved. Ian took this as a personal dig and rather shouted at me in his response, which left me feeling all weak and wobbly and upset really. Still, when I explained it wasn't meant to be a dig at him and pointed out I had in fact thanked him for his help he did apologising for snapping at me. Serious emotional swings and roundabouts, and on such silly subjects. I really do need to learn a thicker skin though, especially to stop feeling so awful when my friends disagree with me about something.

Still, the fact that nothing can be done has provided the impetus to change, and now all my outgoing communications have my new email address on, I've sent a change-of-address notice to all my hotmail correspondents, and I'll update my contact details post too. If you want to update address-books I'm now on eleanor@the-blairs.co.uk - though unless you're on hotmail all my other addresses should continue to work too. For the avoidance of doubt this address does not go to or via Gmail.

And yesterday was pretty ordinary, with a pleasant quiet evening at Mike's of veggie chilli and nachos, nethack (him), reading (me) and cuddles. Tonight is the regular university computer people gathering, and then we'll probably head over to the pub for a bit to help celebrate Mobbsy's birthday (Happy Birthday!). And tomorrow we're back to Friday again, and Dirty Pretty Things at the Corn Exchange supported by Larrikin Love.

Comments

[simont]

we'll probably head over to the pub for a bit

Ooh, cool. In that case I'll try to remember to bring your CD to give back. (And, of course, it'll be lovely to see you; my enthusiasm for being in the same place as you isn't solely logistical :-)

[simont]

Oh, and congrats on your second ascension!

I found myself wondering what would happen if an air E moved onto the portal while I was inside and Rodney had the amulet.

In keeping with Nethack's general principle of providing any number of ways to render the game very hard to complete but very few ways to render it actually impossible short of dying, the portals don't work ("You feel dizzy for a moment, but nothing happens") when you're not carrying the amulet. So that would have been fine.

Now I'm more intrigued to know what would have happened if an engulfing monster moves on to a portal while you're inside it and the portal does work: do you get transported without the containing monster, or with it, or not at all? That one might be hard to test in wizmode because it's difficult to steer monsters from the inside :-)

[cjwatson]

At the moment it's kludged (a comment in the source says "temporary? kludge") not to teleport you or the monster at all.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

Despite some setbacks I made it

Nice one! Damn, you're beating me now.

[lnr]

It was only another valk, I defo need to have a good crack at some of the other classes, but thought I'd stick with what I knew for the tournament.

[imc.livejournal.com]

So what did Microsoft say?

[lnr]

Roughly: That the odd response and connection drop to rset after rcpt to is deliberate, to stop data mining. And that chiark might get itself blacklisted if it's not careful.

[imc.livejournal.com]

the odd response and connection drop to rset after rcpt to is deliberate, to stop data mining

That's a strange thing for them to say given that (a) it doesn't do that if none of the addresses you tested was valid, and (b) it still lets you do lots of "rcpt to:" commands if you don't "rset" (though admittedly I only tried it with half a dozen addresses, not a few hundred).

And that chiark might get itself blacklisted if it's not careful.

I bet chiark's administrators are heartbroken. ;-)

[lnr]

Aye, I didn't say it works very well :-)

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