The scripts are still done (it's been months and I still haven't changed/edited).

I don't know if I'm on track to be able to start animating by the end of the year.  Just thought about the amount of work involved, there's sound and voice actors and...I have a low level panic attack happening in the back of my brain somewhere which is making me think about hyperventilating but up here on the surface I'm calm and all is well and I just keep plugging and thinking about writing reviews for Lightwave 11 (I got a free upgrade because I bought 10 a couple of months ago which I thought was very awesome of NewTek) and gIMP.

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period.  Oops.  Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn't gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so.  So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don't clean up for anyone!

We chatted and she seems like a nice person.  I gave her enough information to write a happy report and get us approved for another year.  She also sent me the literacy outcomes to help with the learning program which I have only just worked out that I do actually have (I'm a bit slow, I seem to do a lot of things because they make sense or because I need to do them to do other things etc and never realise they are processes that have names or that I'm implementing a program).

So what's been happening around here, we've managed to cram a bit into the couple of weeks we've been back.

Everything that happened after the dangers of parking your ship next to a cliff, which I would have posted if my sites hadn't been playing silly buggers.  Everything is okay now, which means I'll be posting about as much as I was inclined to post before.

Weird looking spider

Have I scared off the arachnophobes yet? It's okay, this is the only spider photo this post.  I have no idea what kind of spider it is; I don't recall seeing it when I was growing up.  Sprat seems to think it's fairly recently common.

These are all more or less straight off the camera (aside from any incidental modifications that happen because I resized them down to 500px on the long side from over 4000) because I'm lazy and currently trying to make presentable some lion dance photos I took under bizarro lighting that a complete non-photographer like me has no idea how to deal with.

I am all over the joint! So what else is new.

Now according to the provider the backup malarky was caused by me having a duplicate account on another server, probably from when I got my ssl certificate and needed to be moved to a server that could handle that.  The duplicate has been removed and miscellaneous fallout resulting from that dealt with.  Unfortunately it means November posts and users from here, Red Planet and WANLN are now completely gone.  I can repair the blog thanks to the Artician feed, can't do anything about lost blog comments or the other two and that makes me very sad.

I have however been assured that the problem shouldn't occur again so that's something at least.

If a storm rolls in unexpectedly (or just unexpectedly fast), it could get battered quite severely.

This was taken a bit earlier today by Josh who raced down with his camera as soon as my parents came back from church and informed us that the waves at the Cove were knocking the cargo ship that was in about the place.  Rumour has it the storm rolled in quicker than they could move the ship or possibly one of the moorings snapped.  Either way there is/was concern for the cantilever (if it breaks, we can't load phosphate anymore til it's fixed, and that thing would take ages to rebuild plus has been there forever).

Yesterday, we went out for a drive.  Christmas Island isn't the biggest island in the world, if you point the car's nose down the road and drive without stopping along any major track you'll end up back where you started in about half an hour.

We went out in an exploratory mood and took many photos.  Of course all the photos Josh took while we were out and about were with Kerchunk and nothing on Snap so there's nothing I can post.  We'll just have to go out again and take more when the battery charger arrives.

I'm rather annoyed with myself that it didn't occur to me to take a photo of at least one of the egg laden robber crabs that we skirted around in our trek.  Not doing so had something to do with rain and being in the middle of the jungle and swarms of mosquitoes.  Yeh I know, excuses, excuses :)

stock photo from LindaMarieB

Happy new year everyone! gleki ninyna'anunsla if you speak lojban :)

Somehow, from somewhere, I have this 7 year old.

The Little Big Boy turned 7 a couple of days ago.  He requested and got a chocolate cake which my mum made.  It was very tasty.  The "oldies" were commenting on how fast he turned 7.  I'm trying to work out how he survived that long ;)

Cub made a new friend (and had people teasing about his "girlfriend" and them going under the tree to look at the lights was "romantic").  Their conversations were supercute.  The little girl had a Tigger doll which she put in a plastic toy wheelbarrow and Cub pushed it around after her for most of the night.

I'm home! And damn it feels good.

Christmas shenanigans

Christmas Eve: Sprat wanted me to help wrap the last of the presents.  I asked if she was sure she wanted MY help.  Apparently she was.  So we settled down to wrap.  First thing I did was accidentally tear the wrapping paper.  She then suggested I cut sticky tape as we had run out of tape dispenser tape.  I cut a few strips and then broke the sticky tape.

The presents eventually got wrapped :)

Christmas Day: Sprat and I were settled in her room (I'm set up in her room as I usually am when home) and I was about the hit the 3d.  I felt bad listening to the sounds of preparation going on for Christmas dinner, so I walked out and stood next to my mother who was chopping tiny chillies.  As I was asking her if she needed help with anything, I somehow managed to cop chilli juice in the eye while she was chopping.  Staggered to the bathroom to rinse it out.  Returned, stood on the other side of the kitchen and asked if help was needed.  It wasn't.  Then I got a huge blister sharpening Very Small Small Girl's new coloured pencils.  Josh suggested I probably shouldn't have gotten out of bed.

Everything else

I've already written about the backup malarky.  I'm getting a friend who knows what he's doing to try to merge my backups from the 28th of November with whatever the current state of the sites are after I've dumped the databases of the mostly afflicted sites.  Sometime after silly season maybe.  Not happy about having to fix my ssl certificate for Friendica again.  It was a pain in the system.  I'm starting to think there's a conspiracy theory afoot and someone wants some of my sites offline for some idiotic reason I can't begin to fathom (I know, I'm not that important, but this is the second backup malarky in a relatively short space of time :)).

Now, without further ado, the first of many photo posts (most of which will be unedited because I iz lazy).

If this post disappears, it's entirely my fault as I told the provider that this site could just be rolled back to the last backup (assuming the last backup he had was more recent than the one I had).

What happened with the backups? It's a long and sordid story.

Actually it's not that long, just slightly confusing.  See the provider does scheduled backups as all decent providers should.  But last month and earlier this month something very strange happened.  Three of my sites (this one, Red Planet and WANLN) lost a month's worth of posts.   It's entirely possible the other ones rolled back as well but these ones were the most noticable as they get updated constantly.

The backups were supposed to have been done about the time the rollbacks happened so my current hypothesis is that either the backup is happening and then it's restoring from a backup for some bizarre reason, or it's restoring from backup instead of backing up, or restoring from backup and then backing up.  Hopefully not either of the last two as if that's the case the stuff is gone for good and I'm hoping the lost posts can be merged back in from the backups into the current.  Will see how we go.  I'm really hoping it gets resolved sooner rather than later as my internet access is going to be sloooowwwwww from Christmas Island.