The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

You know things are sad when a serpent gets more satisfaction and fulfilment wiping windowsills and tabletops and mopping floors than pottering about and slinking in Cyberia
This has been the case for quite a while now but this week has gotten particularly crazy

Since last year now adopted a rather peculiar ritual to go along with the daily Scrooge routine
As well as writing down every single silver sickle spent during the day and on what and preferably in chronological order, I have also taken to using the appointment section of the old fashioned dead tree diary to list what I was doing at the assorted half hour intervals and adding a little grumpy or smily face to indicate how I felt at the time

( Mundane musings, rantings and ramblings )

Izzie's been so busy in the Muggle world that the magical domains of Cyberia have been seriously neglected. So much so that I had 3 days left on a Vodafone recharge and 8GB of a 10GB allowance unused. Once midnight of the 28 day expiry period arrives, all those juicy unused gigabytes just turn into pumpkin puree. So that was just the temptation needed to update to the latest Big Mac operating system.

Then there's online course homework. Presently only doing one course but it is so interesting that I actually want to watch all the videos rather than just game the system with the weekly quizzes.

Monday 2nd May saw a new addition to the evening agenda taking the serpent away from the world of online lurking.
Last year the vague wishful thinking that it would be nice to join the Bookbinders Guild was converted into reality and of course it would be a good idea to take advantage of this opportunity to sign up for one of their book binding courses. I had done such a course way back in 2011 but figured that it's time for a refresher. This mob are far more fun. Not just that their course is cheaper and there are only half as many participants but they also provide all the materials and tools and the course is at a serpent friendly time and location. No need to be up at 7am in rush hour traffic in order to be at the other side of the city by 9.30am.

Then there's also the announcement last Sunday of a Federal election for Saturday 2nd July. We all knew it was coming for ages but now it is official.

Last but not least is the latest goblin gossip. A giant bowl of very tasty Leak soup.

Panama Papers

More Goblin Porn

This is going to be Schadenfreude on steroids.

So another Camp Nano adventure is over and it is time to return to mundane reality. That includes choosing some new books to toss in the serpent sack for all those spare moments waiting or lurking when out and about. Extra attention is always reserved for certain special occasions. This usually include the obvious such as the new year and Halloween but Good Friday and Mayday are also on the list. Those times are saved for the spooky or spiritual sorts of stuff, Dan Brown included.
The most recent of these was James Herbert’s ‘Sepulchre”. Never heard of the man until he died recently. He was apparently a pretty famous writer of horror and spooky stuff and his most famous books were “The Rats” and “The Fog”. Just the titles alone is enough to make a serpent curious. Ever since reading Orwell’s “1984” at an impressionable age (and recommended by a religion teacher too along with “Animal Farm”) the Izzie has had a thing about rats. A creepy movie also added flies to the list.

( spooky books and stuff )

Izzie is one pissed off python indeed. The map is so so not the territory. Had made a little arrangement that Monday evening’s online slinking would be dedicated to completing a certain Coursera exam. The deadline is 3pm today local Oz time but with the weird weather over in the States, it would be reasonable to expect all sorts of power outages

Not to mention the ridiculous nonsense on this side of the fence. In order to avoid temptation of any kind had put the old Mac in sleep mode so the relevant page was displayed. Therefore there would be no need to go near the internet and time could be devoted to revising assorted slides and stuff.

The fact the computer got itself into such a state of slumber that it could only be awoken by touching the on button was the first omen. The pathetic wifi dongle then decided it would fart around and take a whole 30 minutes before letting the Izzie visit Cyberia.

There’s a strange sort of exhaustion induced by the frustration of a badly behaving portkey to Cyberia. It is much more draining than doing a decent day of physical work. Maybe it is a control freak thing. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.

But there was still the minor matter of that last minute cramming to do. Lucky these files were already on the computer downloaded at the super zippy speed of 13kbps. It was only after starting these courses when the serpent realized just how seriously sucky our ISP really is. Until then most online activities consisted of reading and sending email, visiting assorted blog and journal sites and of course the recent lurking in Nanoland.

The original intention was to do the first of the two attempts allowed that night so that if there was any more connectivity dramas at least the serpent score would be something slightly larger than a big fat zero. Had spent so much time on this stuff it would be silly to waste all the work within sight of the finish line.

Got a pissy little 6.75/13 on the first round. Then got to thinking that it was time to just bite the bullet and get the whole thing over and done with so we could get back to the scheduled bitching about the old toad and jellyfish and other assorted corporate zombies. After all, it’s time for a clean slate at the stroke of midnight tomorrow evening

Could not do the second attempt straight away as there is a ten minute delay. Not sure if it is a cooling off period or some geekish system requirement that gives rise to this rule. Waited patiently only to discover that the pissy little portkey had decided to play the game of leaving all the lights on and the signal on full strength but simply refusing to deliver the goodies. It was some twenty minutes later being turned on and off several times that it finally started to do its job. Just wanted to get the damned thing done and turn off the infernal computer and go to bed. It is possible to ‘game’ even the final exam but the opportunities are limited with only two attempts instead of the previous four allowed on all the other homework. So the Izzie had to choose very very carefully. Being able to peruse a printed copy earlier in the day made a big difference in eliminating possibilities and stacking the odds a little more in the Izzie's favour

At least the next day we could start with a clean slate and dedicate the morning to some serious catch up squiggling. But silly Izzie must be a glutton for punishment. Just one quick peek at the Nano forums and gmail and then it is time to write. Needless to say such a suggestion would be hosed down very quickly if today had been on the other side of Halloween. There’s something about a deadline that brings out the inner beast.

This time it was easy to get on. It just so happened that within five minutes it became impossible to actually go anywhere. The browsers were full of spinning wheels and those dreaded DNS messages. A normal creature would have got the message damned fast and got the hell out of there. But in some perverse way this just made the Izzie more determined to feast on all this ‘forbidden fruit’
In the end all we had to show for it was a lot of frustration and two hours of the morning totally wasted. Thirty mins of those was on a nano forum post only ten lines long. It took that long for Google to fetch and deliver the links needed

Will be at Petunia’s place this evening where their internet is nice and zippy. But it is a bit wasted on the old 2005 laptop with the infernal spinning beachballs and the zombie O key.
Apparently Halloween is huge this year in downtown Dursleyville. There’s all sorts of vampire and zombie stuff going on. Will be off to Zapata’s Mexican restaurant tomorrow evening to feast on Zombie Vegan Nachos (sounds as likely as vegetarian vampires) before going to a free evening of local ghost stories

By now a certain Halloween ‘care package’ will have arrived at Toad Hall. If it gets past the filthy fingers of dearest Dolores, there is going to be lots of amusement indeed. Professor Lupin would be very impressed

It's hard to believe that it is exactly two weeks since the Goblin Inquisition and still not gotten around to posting about it. That had been the intention this evening but the gods giggle when serpents make plans
It's sucky enough having a snailish internet provider with supersonic speeds of 13kbps but now the serpent has found an alternative source for downloading Coursera lecture videos, these miserable snails have found new ways of pissing off the Izzie. Last night it took a good ten minutes for the black wifi dongle to change its status from 'connecting' to 'connected'. Tonight it excelled itself and took a ridiculous 30 minutes. Was most murderous indeed. Already had a splitting headache induced by the bus ride from hell. This was just the last straw

Needless to say that little episode well and truly nuked any enthusiasm for serious squiggling. Just as well the serpent had no plans for doing the Crypto final exam this evening. But now there's the serious worry that this piss poor pathetic Portkey to Cyberia is going to get into such snailish habits all the time.
Pretty much given up on the Python programming course at this stage. Finally remembered to copy the files downloaded last week at Petunia's place. Not even looked at a single video yet and the course is already in its second week. Will just have to make do with downloading all the video lectures and looking at them some later time when the old skull is not in such a scrambled brain dead zombie state
Will be staying away from active involvement in any online courses now until the end of November. Having all that extra time is no use when the old grey cells are totally sizzled

Yet another item to add on the payback list for a certain old toad

Still cannot believe that the decision back in late August to wait one week to even look at the Coursera video lectures could have had such cumulative consequences. The littlest peek in that first week would have led this serpent to immediately snatch the stuff from a more user friendly location. Had not completely neglected the course and had been looking at the slides and pdf files during that time but they were completely incomprehensible without the video key to unlock the mathematical mumbo jumbo.

At least Nanowrimo does not require half decent internet connections. In fact the less time spent online the better. It's a low tech and very cheap form of amusement. This is all good news for the inner control freak.

Maybe Friday will finally be the day that all the assorted loose ends get tidied up.

The Izzie does not need to let some has been toxic old toad ruin her day. Just come back from seeing a very quirky play. Aside from now being possessed by spooky cowboy monsters lurking at night with very large butterfly nets looking to catch peoples memories or souls if they are feeling particularly malicious, got to thinking that it is wonderful to be able to go to a show in the city, just walk around the corner to the train station and then connect to a bus on the bridge with only a couple hundred metres walk from the bus stop.

Would have been most happy to just linger around the Lair snoozing and slinking and listening to all the tasty morsels on Radio National. Wednesday would have been the logical day to see this particular play being the start of the serpent weekend and all. But there was a method to the madness. The theatre website said that the Tuesday show would have a question and answer session with the artists afterwards. Izzie could not resist such a delicious Easter egg in spite of having to be up early the next day to endure another day at Toad Hall.

It is worth an awful lot of money and time to be able to live without wheels and Izzie intends to stay that way as long as possible. No need for the toad to know. It would be just the sort of excuse she needs to twist her dagger just that bit deeper as she knows being without wheels in Durlseyville makes it damned difficult to search for work

So looking forward to a lazy day in the Lair tomorrow doing bugger all and maybe even catching up online if this stupid useless new Portkey starts behaving itself.
They must have stolen it from the day job. It ticks all the boxes. It is connected to the internet. The wifi signal is five full bars but there is just this one minor problem. The only web pages we get to see is shit like “Cannot find the server” or “This web page is not available”
It worked perfectly for an hour this afternoon but this time today and yesterday was a total and complete dead zone disaster. Should have stuck to the little prepaid critter.

At this rate will never catch up with replying to all the recent comments. It will likely get to the stage like it used to be with DODO the ISP from hell that even just thinking about going online would be sufficient to induce a state of frustration and murderous rage. Certainly not conducive to creative thinking

Will just have to stick to squiggling over in Scrivener and simply not even bother trying to slink into Cyberia.

PS the bright slimy wifi gadget finally lets the Izzie lurk and post yesterday's entry a whole day later. Still not worked out if there is some peak and off peak access times but so far between 9pm and midnight is a complete dead zone

Izzie is a most pathetic procrastinating python. Many moons ago was getting most peeved indeed with the ridiculous price of the antiquated soap on a rope USB dongle that served as a life line to lurking in Cyberia.
While it is still a whole pile cheaper and faster than the dreadful days of paying $30 for 30 hours of dinosaur dial up, times have moved on and the serpent needs to move too. Not least because there's lots of silver sickles to be saved now that the going rate for 3gb is about half that price. Was getting annoyed about paying for 3 gigabytes per month but rarely going over two and not being able to roll over unused data

Did buy a Virgin usb stick at a half price sale back in December but it got stuck gathering dust. Had to bring it back to the shop as fumble fingered Izzie just could not work out how to get the cover off to put the SIM card in. They did in two seconds what Izzie could not do in two hours.
But before getting around to connecting it got our paws on the Vodafone version for only $19 on Wednesday and was determined to get the thing sorted out pronto. Once it is working can then go cancel the monthly plan before the next billing period starts.

This one was dead easy to open and to set up. There were no tedious piles of numbers to type on a stream of never ending screens and boxes to tick for configuration. It was all smooth sailing. In no time had gotten to the registration page. But it was too good to be true. It would not accept the original SIM pin number claiming that the card was invalid. Suddenly the whole thing became most annoying and frustrating indeed and more so when the old reliable USB dongle started having hissy fits. The little bugger must know that the serpent wants a divorce

It brought back memories of the long, arduous and complicated ritual involved in starting our previous internet relationship. Suspecting that fearing a repeat of this performance was the real reason for procrastinating
Figured that this is a Sim card problem and not a serpent problem and brought the thing into the store yesterday. The lady at the Vodafone store encountered the exact same problem when she tried setting it up on the store computer. But it was quickly fixed by using a new SIM card. This time we were able to get to the registration page with all the boring customer details and ID stuff. So was most happy indeed with the service there.

The true test was plugging it in with the new card this morning. It worked perfectly first time. Just as well since the old one has now taken to disconnecting for no apparent reason

The new little gadget is faster but has one big bright and shiny new feature. It actually tells you how much data has been used so there's no need to wait for the bill and worrying about outrageous excess fees. And it is prepaid. But it seems that Vodafone only has 30 day expiry periods on prepaid. At least they do let you roll over unused data when you top up.

The Virgin mob apparently have 180 day expiry options so their little gadget might turn up to be useful after all.

But the real trick will be dumping the dongle Goblins. No one likes to lose a regular income stream. The original two year plan is long over but that might not stop them finding some way to hang onto long time customers.

So here's hoping this little critter will behave itself and let Izzie lurk online as long as she wants to or at least until the 3 gigabyte ration runs out.

The evil goblins at the day job have been harassing the serpent who has not been ticking the boxes properly. The cheap critters have now introduced e-learning so they can get us to waste our own time doing their ridiculous quantities of mandatory training. Oh of course they said we would get paid for time logged in on their ridiculous site. In fact, they went one better than that. The new boss who started in March and is the spitting image of Shane Warne and with a Warnie ego to match even claimed that the first module only takes 15 minutes but we would get paid a full hour. That was the carrot - the stick was that not doing this online training would result in suspension from duties. All cleverly times for the week before Easter
Needless to say - not only did no one get paid the one hour as promised - they didn't even fork out for the fifteen minutes. And it's not like they didn't know. They even present you with a stupid certificate as proof of completion but apparently not proof enough for the cheap and nasty goblins in the pay office

They informed the serpent today that she is overdue on the stupid food handling unit and had very kindly printed out a paper version assuming that the serpent is a Luddite creature without access to computers or Cyberia.
Had a peek at this infernal waste of trees and figured it might be easier to do the damned thing online. Silly silly serpent
The elearning site belongs to a company owned by one of the most infernally evil bastards of this and the last century. They are literally getting the Fox to look after the hen house.

So surprise surprise - visited this infernal site run by News Corporation and had to endure a bunch of mission statements and a smiling smirking greeting from the big bad Megatherion Boss himself - smug little bastard that he is.
Got tossed out four times so it took ages to finish the infernal thing as Rupert Murdoch and his minions are obviously too cheap and nasty to have technology that lets you pick up from last time but forces you to run the gauntlet from the beginning each time.

But since then, God knows what sorts of Cyberian transmitted diseases the Big Mac or the ancient usb dongle have picked up. It keeps tossing us out and it took the best part of 30 minutes to get online this time. Could get tossed out again any minute
So it's basically a quick squiggle to let the serpent's associates know that any absences or exile is not due to being abducted by aliens or worse but simply an infestation of foxie monsters and other feral beasties doing mean and nasty things to the Portkey

It just might be time to start shopping around as $30 per month for 3gb is ridiculously expensive these days - especially as the last four months or so not even got much past 700mb per month

So time to slink off into the wilderness. Who knows when the critters will let the serpent through the pearly gates of Cyberia again

For the first time in three years the first week back to work after the serpent holidays has gone very well indeed
No Cheshire Rats telling us all 'to grow extra pairs of arms' when informed of being short staffed or evil stinking goblins letting us work the whole week short

But the best bit of the week was just before knock off time. Had finished all the duties for the day and went to read the memo book for a bit of entertainment and amusement.

Such a tasty morsel the serpent could not have imagined in her wildest dreams
The subject title was "Social Networking Policy"

First reaction - why did they take so long? For a bunch of image conscious litigacious bean counters it was most negligent indeed
Second reaction - we wants our own personal copy of this delicious and delightful morsel

So was ever so delighted to read on further to find that this matter is regarded with such urgency and importance that it will be raised at not just the next staff meeting but the one after that and everyone will get a copy with their next pay slip - which of course will be a day late due to the excuse of a public holiday over east in spite of the fact that we are located in the wildest west of Oz.

While this policy was mainly concerned with social networking - specifically Vicebook and Twitter - they did go on to mention blogging in general and an obsession with cyber bullying
It was all about protecting the reputation of the organization and protecting the interests of stake holders - making the very ridiculous assumption that their reputation is even worth protecting. Such wishful thinking
It was all about their image and its enhancement and threats of termination of employment. Nowhere was any consideration given to the veracity of the vindictive posts online

A bunch of us were having a giggle over this latest tasty morsel. The serpent sneered about the stupid losers on Vicebook one of whom was present in the room. She got all huffy and indignant to which the Izzie proclaimed that anyone dumb enough to post about work on a site using their real name deserves whatever they get. This particular princess had already gotten rapped over the knuckles for mentioning names and places but it was a bit rich coming from a boss bitch who posted photos of people at work without ever requesting permission. But that's one of the perks of being a boss well at least until this new policy came along


Izzie is so so looking forward to having a personal copy of this memo to peruse at leisure and wonders if we should request a copy in pdf form at the next staff meeting to save the bother of having to type some of the tastiest tidbits instead of being able to just cut and paste

Can't imagine what they'd think of a creature who not only blogs about goblins but has squiggled a whole 50,000 word nanowrimo novel taking the piss out of the bastards

Was hoping to find the policy online - no luck yet at the Oracle of Google but did find another one just as juicy
The Horrid Hufflepuff Bank says "Snitch and Spy or you're fired"

Most amused indeed to see a bunch of German websites are sharing the joy. As we say in Oz "Which bank? They're all bastards"

Of course - this serpent is so secretive that no one at Salazars' Sanatorium has any idea of her alternative Cyberian identity

But just one question to all geeks out there - needing to know if we need to tweek a bit - can a website that has been linked to find the sources of links if they are locked, protected or private entries?
This time last year the serpent attended the traveling kitchen cabinet starring Kevin 747. Who could have ever known that only two weeks later he would be knifed in the back and replaced by the Red Queen.
As well as gossiping about them, the goblins also got a mention under lock and key of course with linkies to the Buzzword bingo at the "Megatherion Money Management" website
So assuming these new rules are retrospective - we needs to know if linkies can be traced