Random blog-type inanities

How come blogs are always so aimless? It's always just random witterings, isn't it?

Aaaanyway, this post does actually, in a complete breach with tradition, have a point. Yup, I'm about to plug my fanfics. This is a full list, by the way; copied from below, with a few more recent ones added.

Dark Autumn: Combat Catalyst (http://www.hgnetwork.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=9060) - This was my entry in SIYE's Dark Autumn challenge. It had to fit certain requirements; three battles described, Neville taking charge, Harry using a spectacular new curse, and so on. I'm very pleased with this one - lots of non-fluffy fluff, action, comedy and cool-under-fire Luna.

"Have A Chocolate, Tom?" (http://www.riddikulus.org/cgi-bin/links/jump.cgi?ID=5661) - A very short 500-word fic that I wrote in about an hour after the idea popped into my head. I like to see loose ends tied up, y'see.

The Potter Monster (http://www.hgnetwork.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=8611) - A parody of that metaphorical monster that Rowling had crawling about inside Harry during HBP. Be warned, though, it's gory. Well, it's ripped off from Alien, so what can you expect?

Dementors And Crumpets (http://www.riddikulus.org/authors/torak/DC.html)
- A collection of little vignettes, the first of which was inspired by a discussion of the tea room at Azkaban, showing scenes that... well, they could have happened. There's nothing to conclusively say they didn't, at least. First up, the Dementors in their tea room discuss who finished the milk. After that, I've got partially-written chapters about the Death Eaters' Christmas party, and even a fic taking place entirely within the Malfoy family fridge.

The End Of The World (http://www.hgnetwork.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=8610) - Got the idea for this one from the last line, which just popped into my head one day. The rest of it kind of grew from there. Fairly grim - everybody (and I do mean everybody) dies, but I always think of it as a rather optimistic take on the apocalypse. And, of course, decidedly fluffy. I'm very chuffed with this one, in fact.

I've got a few more in the works, including a novel-length sequel to HBP (which I'm having a great deal of fun with - at the moment I'm writing a chapter unashamedly ripping off Raiders Of The Lost Ark).

Four magic letters for any IT department: R. T. F. M.

At my university we have possibly the most incompetent IT department in existence, though I realise it's up for some stiff competition.

Over the summer they installed a new campus management system; after connecting our computers to the network points in our dorm rooms (or anywhere on the university network, for that matter), we are directed to a page telling us that we have to download and run a small application to scan our system to ensure that it's up to the lofty standards of this wondrous network.

So I did. And I got a bunch of error messages.

First of all, it requires Windows XP Service Pack 2, the buggiest update known to man. Then it requires McAffee anti-virus (because that's the one the department could get free), Spybot Search And Destroy anti-spam (because that's the one the department could get free), and so on.

I eventually persuaded it to accept Norton (which I use, having grown royally sick of McAffee), but it said I needed to update my virus definitions - because, though I updated them the night before, a new set had appeared that morning. But without network access, I couldn't use LiveUpdate. "No problem," ITS say helpfully, "download the definition files from the problem fix screen."

So I did. But it didn't work - and suggested I use LiveUpdate instead.

Eventually I got everything working, and used the network without any trouble for all of a fortnight. And then... the whole thing went down.

Because the campus management system requires systems to be re-scanned every 30 days. And that isn't, I found, on a per-user basis - it's system-wide. And the IT department hadn't read the campus manager's readme file, so they didn't know that 5000 computers were coming up for re-scanning on the same day, so the whole network came crashing down.

I went down to complain. I wanted to tell them what was wrong and ask them to fix it. "No problem," they said. "Send us an email."

Then, just out of interest and for the sake of system security, I asked what the scanning app looked for and how.

"We don't know."

"All right," I said, "does it leave anything resident on my system?"

"We don't know."

So the program they demand that everyone use... could be installing spyware, keyloggers, just about anything on my system, and they don't have a clue.

Great, isn't it?