So, I was sitting in the Daily Bagel today, waiting for them to build me, my toasted sun-dried tomato on poppy seed bagel, perusing through the fashion section of a more-than-year-old issue of Pavement Magazine, when I came across a heap of pictures of people with body art consisting of the phrase "Novus Ordo Seculum" and a pyramid-capped-with-an-eye logo [also known as the Eye of Providence].
Now, this struck me as being rather cool, primarily because I recognised it as the name of the crypto product1 from in Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, and I though it would be rather cool if a fashion designer was reading Stephenson.
Thus, after lunch I jumped on the web and googled it. To my surprise, it turns out that the phrase and logo is something that we don't-quite-see everyday. It is featured on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. Also, according to wikipedia, it features on their dollar note. Finally, the phrase, is a boon for conspiracy theorists, which often translate it as "New World Order".
I've spent most of this week at work running around fixing bugs. It always seems to take longer to fix 'em that you found first think. Unfortunately our software still has rather a number of them. Still I'm sure we'll get there eventually. I quite like finding bugs, it can sometimes be quite challenging to determine exactly what is causing the problem.
Today for a change I spent a few hours fixed some bugs in the code that I through together for syncing the databases on our webserver (hosted in the states) and our local server. It seems that our web host went and upgraded Python on the server (about time too, so I'm not really complaining) and in the process removed the old deprecated module that was the only way that I could talk to postgres under their old setup. Thus I had to rewrite the scripts to use the new way, which took longer than it should've. In the last week, the eRServer Postgres replication server has been re-released under a free license, so maybe I should look at using something like that instead of my hacked together scripts.
On Tuesday, I played bug polo as per usual. What was good about it was that in stead of two 12 minute games against two different teams, we had one game with two 14 minute halves. We played against Steve's team who'd beaten us in the last few games. However, this time we managed to get our revenge, and won by a hefty margin.
There's not much else to report really. I should get out and about more, now that there's some spring type weather around. Instead I've spent too much time playing computer games in the last couple of weeks. Oh well. Still I've managed to persuade myself to make it to a few social occaisions.
Well there, I managed a fair bit more than last time, and just so you don't feel like it's been a complete waste of time, here's a few places you can waste lots of time :)
The Baen Free Library
Buffy e-comics (hosted at the good old BBC)
many movie scripts. drafts and the like
Oh, and whatever you do, don't go here - it'll look like crap.
