Well, for the last week or so, some kind of misconfiguration between my ISP (Telstra) and my hosting provider (AVS) has made accessing my weblog from Telstra (and thus updating it) almost impossible.

I suppose instead I should have written my posts offline, to be waiting when I regained access to my weblog. But part of the fun of blogging is instant-gratification publication. Without that, I really couldn't be bothered to write at all. I wrote this post in a short period where it seemed to be working reliably... and of course by the time I'd finished writing the first draft, that access had been lost again. But since I've actually written it this time, I'm going to persevere with the posting thing.

I've been on holiday most of this week anyway, hence the remarkable lack of updates. I just haven't engaged my brain sufficiently for the past five days to write a coherent post. Which is amusing because one of my plans for my week off work was to write a series of really interesting articles about secure coding. You can guess how quickly that idea went away when I started relaxing.

Thus far, this week, I have:

• Watched Fellowship of the Ring on DVD
• Watched The Two Towers on DVD
• Written bits of an IRC bot in Ruby
• Played with Ruby's SOAP4R module, which is pretty cool
• Learned that the Google SOAP API is really quite easy and clear
• Learned that the Amazon SOAP API is really confusingly documented
• Helped Lonita learn how MT works
• Tried to read Return of the King but the Tolkien's "I'm writing a legend, not a story" prose style really doesn't work for me at all. I don't think I've ever read all of this book. Valiantly slogged through 175 pages of it anyway
• Re-read Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor instead
• Played pool and got drunk
• Messed around with Reason, rather quickly ending up with with an embarrassingly bad pastiche/blatant rip-off of a NIN instrumental number
• Ordered Keith Hillebrandt's Useful Noise, so that I can get even more pastiche-y, but probably no less embarrassingly bad
• Wandered through three or four music shops in town, wishing I had a spare $10k or so to waste on synths and software that I wouldn't do anything worthwhile with (Mmmmm... Korg Mmmm... Logic)
• Watched the Belvoir St Theatre production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, which was really good
• Deliberately avoided Java, and all discussions of it
• Compiled this list