Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in grist's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
2:19 pm	very metal managed to watch ehintz's metal dvd a couple of times before returning it today and i have to say, for an aging headbanger it's a great watch. if you are in line to borrow it, i highly recommend the extended interviews on the second disk. it's great to hear the thoughts and opinions of the people behind the music and it also proves that a lot of metallers do have brains and are capable of expressing coherent thought. alice cooper and ronny james dio were my personal favourites. thanks ed :) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 27th, 2006
5:43 pm	what is normal anyway so there i am at the supermarket surveying the multitude of hair conditioners available. there are ones for coloured hair, damaged hair, oily hair, limp hair, dry hair, every possible type of hair is catered for. unless there is nothing wrong with it. where is the conditioner for people who are happy with their hair? eventually i found it, tucked away, a single row of 'classic care' conditioner. i'm hoping this is a euphemism for normal. :) Current Mood: abnormal Current Music: Product of the Environment - Mad Frankie Fraser (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, March 6th, 2006
7:44 pm	divinity part 2 following up on my promise to myself i sampled divine pizza's manhatten and chilli chicken offerings on saturday night and i have to say i was impressed. the same quality and quantity i was expecting from the first attempt, but these 2 pizzas had taste in abundance. the chilli one was a little sweet, but the chillis more than made up for it. these could become regulars in my takeaway diet (well, when i'm feeling rich, anyway). in other news i tamed the fearsome tivoli custom resource model today and it felt good. :) Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: rolling stones - start me up (Comment on this)
Monday, February 27th, 2006
7:02 pm	divine? tired of the franchises and wanting to support a (presumably) local business i ordered 2 delivered pizzas from divine pizza in khandallah. my choices were a capri and a mexicana, being the closest i could see to my usual super supreme & hot n spicy order. this came to a grand total of $38 delivered. not cheap, but i've paid more (bogart's). i was pleasantly suprised when the pizzas arrived slightly early. my place isn't easy to find and i've had some delievery people give up and go back to base with my dinner. opening the boxes i was also impressed with the presentation. both pizzas had a good covering of ingredients that looked to be of good quality. unfortunately i was a little disappointed in the taste. it was a bit bland. with mostly the apricot sauce on the capri dominating its taste, and the mexicana was just generic spicy without any real highlights. oh, and speaking of the mexicana, what is it with corn chips on pizza. corn chips go with nachos, just because you put spicy meat and sour cream on the pizza it doesn't mean you have to put the corn chips on there too >.< so, in conclusion, the quality and quantity was good, but there was something missing. however, it could just be that i need to try some more of their range to find ones i like. the execution seems good. next time i think i'll have a manhatten and a chilli chicken. :) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
5:29 pm	wtf from Stuff "The accused couple both declined the court's invitation to plead guilty before trial. 'Not guilty at this stage,' said the father." I don't know about you, but to me that says "Guilty as sin, your Honour, but i'm not going to admit it until it looks like you might be able to prove it". Personally I think people who change their plea should be charged with perjury and wasting the court's time. Current Mood: aggravated Current Music: delerium - underwater (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 10th, 2005
5:57 pm	it's official bluebird sensations zesty lime and black pepper potato chips are my new favourite flavour. Current Mood: tasty Current Music: filta - abuse (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 5th, 2005
2:17 pm	weird for as long as i can remember (well, not quite, but close) i have had Credit Card Debt. i was the perfect credit card customer, always pushing them back out to the limit and paying the minimum balances. about 2 years ago i got sick of this and decided i wasn't going to live like this any more. since then i have been paying them off steadily until last month when i made the final payment. this felt really good. this month i went to make my usal payment and was disappointed that i couldn't. seriously. i had made the act of making a payment a reward in itself in my own mind (clearing the debt, working towards being financially better off) and now i can't make one it's a let down. odd. must be time to start a savings account. :) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 28th, 2005
7:36 pm	wtf i mean... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005
8:39 pm	a life decision today i ordered a formway life chair. i really like that it's a world class chair made right here in wellington. now begins 6 weeks of waiting. in other news the weather has breached my defences again. the $20 solution did pretty well, but i think something a bit more serious may be called for this time. and then the phone rings. a friend of my father's wanting advice on distilling alcohol. kinda surreal. i hope i gave him good enough advice to stop him poisioning anyone. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: pheonix foudation - damn the river (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 29th, 2005
9:21 pm	days of future passed i do like the way getting something to finally work properly can turn my whole attitude right around. coming home to a freshly cleaned house is the icing on the cake. Current Mood: much better, thanks (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005
11:27 pm	so long and thanks for all the fish i was looking at this and thinking "hey, cool, a live giant squid". then i read the caption and had a closer look at the picture. that big white line going up to the squid is almost certainly a fishing line. i don't trust the motives of japanse 'scientists' in this context either. i stongly suspect that is no longer a live squid. Current Mood: cynical (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
10:01 pm	still walking i played volleyball tonight for the first time since, well, the last time. and i didn't break my knee. :D we lost all 3 games, but everyone had fun and we were working together much better by the last game and even got them to 24-24. my knee twinged a couple of times, but they were the sort of twinges that made me think i will be fine once i build up the muscles around the knee again. ps. a request. when people modify their pages to be all pretty and customised and stuff, can they please leave the "view friends" link in so i can easily go back to browsing my friend's journals again. kthnx. :) Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: case fan hum and the tapping of keys (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 15th, 2005
6:48 pm	on workmates and frustration today i had to go for a little walk around the block in preference to smacking one of my workmates in the head. people who know me may be a little surprised by this. i'm generally pretty even tempered and not given to fits of anger. i can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times i've lost it like this. it's certainly not behaviour i'm proud of and i really don't like feeling that way. why the fit? something pretty simple really. we had a problem, some things were not behaving properly and evidence was pointing to a script that had recently been introduced into the system taking more resources that anticipated and having a nasty snowball effect. the exact details are unimportant. i found the problem, i was working with the guy who implemented it to work out how best to fix it. in order to stop the snowballing and give us time to think we decided to rename the script in question. naturally it was in use and refused to be renamed. james pipes up 'do you want me to rename it'. 'that's cool james, we're on it, thanks'. i start killing the processes that are holding the file open and racing them to get the file renamed before the system grabs it again. while i'm doing this james pipes up again 'i've renamed it'. i ask 'so you were trying to rename the file at the same time i was?'. 'no' he says, all evidence and his own admission to the contrary. i ask again. he denies. this goes on for a little while while i try to ascertain what position he is coming from that could possibly reconcile what he is saying with what he did. i can't, he starts yelling. i yell back (not proud), swear and decide that leaving is preferable to an assault charge. the two things that really annoyed me were his stark denial of what he had done and that he did it after specifically being asked not to. this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. a number of times we have discussed best methods for tackling a problem and he has simply gone ahead and done what he wanted to do. it also makes it really hard to do proper problem determination when someone else is changing things in the background. this doesn't make for good teamwork. after the above incident one of the middle managers asked my other workmate what had happened and they bumped into our boss in the lift so he now knows about it too. pete is a good guy and is well aware that james can be difficult to deal with at times. i am starting to have some real concerns about how our little team is going to work together with this guy in it. he is undoubtedly a smart guy and most of the time is a useful contributing member. unfortunately he is also one of those people who really needs a manager to tell him what and what not to do. i simply don't have the authority or the knowledge to do this, and neither do i want to. my other workmate indicated to me that if i were to leave (which i don't want to do anymore) he would leave too in preference to working with this guy. so, my question is, should i schedule a meeting with my boss to raise my concerns and risk possibly escalating the situation? i hate conflict. :( Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: some advertising jingle (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
5:51 pm	i don't know about you but if nasa rang me up and asked me if i wanted to go on the next space shuttle my reply would go something like 'call me back when pieces stop falling off it'. and, because someone just posted this on irc, does anyone remember Vyvyan's hampster SPG from The Young Ones?... Current Mood: glad i'm not an astronaut (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 7th, 2005
8:42 pm	the disabled are people too there are 2 designated disabled driver car parks ourside my local supermarket. i have challenged people as to their disabled status when i've seen them striding into the mall after parking there. i feel less inclined to do this when it turns out the genuinely disabled person is sitting in the passenger seat and their able bodied partner is going in to shop. i feel like not doing it at all when i see one hobble into the 'gaming lounge' of the pub next door. Current Mood: disillusioned Current Music: some shit on tv (Comment on this)
Monday, June 20th, 2005
2:48 pm	of toys and imagination my nephew turns 10 on wednesday so, being the loving uncle that i am, i decided a present of some value was warranted. you only hit double digits once and i remember what a big deal it was to me when i did it. fishing for suggestions, lego was mentioned. i also remember lego and the hours of enjoyment i got from thinking of things to make and then actually figuring out how to achieve it with the pieces i had. this to me was the main part of the fun. to the store i went with these happy memories swimming in my brain. imagine my disappointment when i discovered lego have sold out. there are so many branded lego sets now it is quite astounding. harry potter lego, starwars lego, ferrari lego, you name it. do you think i could find a bucket of the good old, generic lego? maybe it's just me, but i find the concept of themed lego to be very limiting. all the boxes had lovely glossy pictures of the really cool thing (singular) you could build with the enclosed set (and the ferrari did look pretty cool, i must admit), but where is the incentive to invent your own toys? the thing that made lego great was its flexibility. the fact that if you didn't want to play cars today, you could build a house, or a bulldozer, or a spaceship, or ... so i bought k-nex instead. 20 different model suggestions and for 1/4 the price of the ferrari (yeah, i still can't get over that. it was $200. what 10 year old can be trusted with a $200 toy?). Current Mood: nostalgic Current Music: whitesnake (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
9:57 pm	the guide well, despite lots of people saying it was crap and in the spirit of making up my own mind i went to see the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy movie. before we begin i will outline my fanboi status. i loved the books. read them and reread them until i could quote with the best(?) of them. i even based part of my personal philosophy on them for a while (and some bits still persist). i similarly enjoyed the tv series and videoed them for later redigestion. in short, it's all good. the movie. i had trepidation, i had doubts and fears. i have read some very scathing reviews and a few not bad ones. someone said i shouldn't waste my money or even bandwidth downloading it. i opened my mind and went along. they didn't use all the classic jokes, it's true. honestly there is so much material i knew they never could. there were a few opportunities i thought they could have slipped one or two in when there was just silence anyway, but on the whole i think they did a pretty good job. i enjoyed the movie and laughed quite a few times. there were a few jokes that weren't in the books or tv series. shocking for the purists, but i thought they fit in well. there was a certain slapstick element at times, but there was in the tv series as well. again, it fit. it was cool to see cameos from the original marvin from the tv series and also simon jones, who played arthur dent. so, if you don't know anything about guide, i think you will find this a fun and entertaining movie. if you are fanatical about the original works and wanted to see them reproduced to the letter, you may not. personally, i think you are missing out. Current Mood: entertained Current Music: a distant battle in the world of warcraft (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 1st, 2005
7:20 pm	sad for those who don't know, 'bro town' is an nz made contemporary cartoon. i watched it twice just to see if it was any good. i have to say it failed to impress. now there is a trailer on for the next episode to air that features the following dialogue (set in a school quiz style set) 'name two elements in the periodic table' 'poos and wees' (hahahahh haha hah) this seems pretty indicative of the level of humour in the show. i miss billy t james. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005
6:15 pm	new clothes so a lot of people i know have thinkgeek tshirts that i like, but they've already got them so i haven't ordered any for myself. while lounging around at the big day out i had an idea... as far as i know it's an original. :D having said that, several people have indicated they quite like it so i'm thinking about getting a few done at a screen printer with white writing on a black shirt. indications are that the first one will cost about $70 with subsequent ones costing $20 each. i would split the total cost between all people who want one so the more people the cheaper they will be. please email me afk_shirt^unh.co.nz if you are interested and if enough people respond i will look into it further. Current Mood: chuffed Current Music: some advertising jingle or other (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 31st, 2005
12:30 am	adventures in retail after 10 years of faithful service i have decided it is time to retire my bed. today i signed a piece of paper promising to start paying for it's replacement in june. the interesting thing for me was how little attention i recieved while wandering around in my leathers and how the attitude changed after the credit check was performed. mortgages make for happy creditors it seems. shame it doesn't impact on delivery time and i still have to wait at least a week for satisfaction. you see me shiver with anticip. Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: shihad - stranger (1 Comment |Comment on this)