Whooo! It’s my 24th Birthday today! Whoo!
(I feel old!)
Month: June 2003
Congratulations Jay on recognising that Guess That Movie round 59 was from the 1992 movie “Universal Solider” amazoncom:B00005O6Y3 .
Have a guess at this picture and see if you can recognise it – we’ve just 3 more images after this one before the “prize awarding” stage, so get the points in now! You never know, if you get enough points and consequently an Amazon gift voucher (free to all people getting at least 500 points!), you could buy me a present from my Amazon wish list for my 24th birthday on Sunday…
The rules again for new contestants: Just leave a comment with your name/alias, email address (for the prize givings) and the name of the movie you think this screen shot is taken from. If you guess that movie correctly, I’ll award you some points. Points start at 100 per image and decline over time (after the first 12 hours it goes down by 10 points, then down a further 10 points every 24hours after posting) – oh and wrong guesses have a 5 point penalty. But what good are points? Well, get 500 points and you can claim a £5 Amazon gift voucher/certificate for the Amazon store of your choice (£5 will be converted into the appropriate currency at the exchange rates displayed on xe.net at the time of claim) – so you can get free books, movies and music just by playing a simple FREE guessing game!
A: Aliens. Correctly guessed by Niall
Despite our disaster recovery system operating correctly when a transformer next to our datacentre blew up (UPS kicked in straight away, followed by the generators and additional generators were on site whilst we waited nearly a week for a new transformer to be installed: all the time running on generator power), it seems that we’ve been “bitten on the a–” anyway.
Basically, servers hosted in our 3—-.net datacentre area (aka “Server farm 1”) have been suffering major problems recently ever since we upgraded to the new Ensim Pro control panel. We suspect the additional load Ensim Pro caused on the server resulted in the servers hitting unexpected high usage (Ensim Pro seems to take up around 10x as much resources: but don’t quote me on that figure), so the servers have been shutting down to preserve data integrity (a bit like the way a human body faints or falls into a coma if something is wrong) and the associated downtime this causes for customers and the amount of stress we get (if you’ve ever been woken up at 2am by your mobile phone dancing off the desk as another text message comes in to tell you “Datacentre down” you’ll know what I mean).
So we’ve rushed 2 more datacentres online and started moving customers off the affected datacentre to the new ones with the intention that once the datacentre has been massively reduced in load we’ll be able to do some proper investigation on it (small snippet of information: none of our data centres are even touching 1/20th of the available bandwidth to them!).
However…
Right, despite rumours to the contrary – I’m not dead yet (sorry Super Beastmaster), unless of course I was never alive and I’m just a figment of your imagination: but that’ll mean you’ve got a very deranged imagination… Oooh goody 😉
Anyway – I’ve been having some time off blogging not really out of choice, but due to time constraints: the servers at work have been playing up something rotten recently (here’s a word of advice: AVOID upgrading to Ensim Pro if you can: the several hours of overtime, weekend working and annoyance when the system crashes for “no apparent reason” is not fun), we’ve got a major redesign of our main search engine placement site about to “go live”, we’ve also got a “do it yourself online promotion” tool about to launch (with the associated fun in actually writing and debugging the bulk of it), I’ve also had a cat to care for, general house work, moving most of our customers to different datacentres (because of the Ensim Pro problems we’ve had to rush to bring 2 more datacentres online: and it was only a fortnight ago that a power transformer blew up at our main facility – luckily all generators and UPSes kicked in on time so customers never even noticed we were without utility power for nearly a week!), trying to burn DVDs (first ensure you have “DVD authoring” software available, then find out that the software shipping with your shiny new Dell PC doesn’t work so you have to buy a magazine with the software on the cover CD, then find out the DVD+Rs you brought, whilst compatible with the drive, just don’t work because of “power calibration” issues), and other little things….
Basically, as soon as I’ve got home (sometimes 3 hours after I was supposed to leave work), I’ve either worked from home to watch the servers or practically gone straight to bed! I’m still knackered (tired), hungry (most nights I’ve been too tired to eat: £80 worth of shopping has nearly lasted Smokey and I a whole month!) but I’ve got to change things: because I’ve been so stressed and busy at work I’ve made little mistakes which aren’t good (not checking a site in Google once it’s been re-optimised – even though Google had problems and had to roll back to an old backup), plus I’ve got my birthday coming up shortly.
Up – I’ll repeat that My 24th birthday is on June 15th: the same day as Father’s Day! I’ve got an Amazon.co.uk Wish List if you want to buy me a present. I’ve heard a rumour from my parents that I might be getting a dishwasher for my birthday (I tend to do washing up on the “I need a plate” basis: I’ve currently got 1 semi-clean plate and a washing up bowl full of dirty ones 🙁 ), going out for a meal and maybe a few other treats but we’ll see.
Anyway, that’s everything nearly summed up. Oh – there’s been a change of staff at work (BRCW has “left”, was replaced by someone else who didn’t work out and now we are getting someone else in, but could still be looking for a “Trainee Search Engine Optimiser” in the near future – especially if I keep making the mistakes I have been 🙁 ), I’ve been proposed to (well, call it an “arranged marriage” – if myself and GESF ‘s flatmate are still single when we are thirty we’re going to marry each other and GESF is going to be my mistress), and SSCW sort of asked me out this afternoon (in a kinda roundabout way: but I think we are both shy so it’s the only way for us) but I think it’s just going to be a “mates go to university and look at degree exhibits” type thing – and finally GESF is going to a singles night tomorrow night: but she’s not “going going”, she’s only helping out….
> And that, Doctor, sums up my life recently.
< Richy, I think we definitely need to get the men in white coats to see you!
> Nooo! Not the butchers!
Sorry for the long hiatus – this reason for this will be explained shortly – but here’s the long awaited “Guess That Movie” round 59…
Who won round 58 I hear you cry? Well, it wasn’t until over 2 weeks after I posted the image did Chthonius recognise it was from “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (the “Kenny goes to hell” scene: it’s one of Satan’s minions pictured) – ok, Brandon got in slightly earlier but he/she made many guesses so only the first counts.
Anyway, here’s the new picture and a refresher of the rules:
Just leave a comment with your name/alias, email address (for the prize givings) and the name of the movie you think this screen shot is taken from. If you guess that movie correctly, I’ll award you some points. Points start at 100 per image and decline over time (after the first 12 hours it goes down by 10 points, then down a further 10 points every 24hours after posting) – oh and wrong guesses have a 5 point penalty. But what good are points? Well, get 500 points and you can claim a £5 Amazon gift voucher/certificate for the Amazon store of your choice (£5 will be converted into the appropriate currency at the exchange rates displayed on xe.net at the time of claim) – so you can get free books, movies and music just by playing a simple FREE guessing game!
A: Universal Soldier. Correctly guessed by Jay.