Ian's blog

I am looking at my task list wondering if anything will jump out at me and look exciting enough to consider working on it. Most of the things are pending other people doing something first before I can close it off….

I just played around with a new tool from Microsoft for making IIS more secure. Pity it wouldn’t even complete on my machine since I had removed idq.dll at some point in the past. It would also be nice if there was a hint of a document explaining how it is doing things. Nice start but fairly useless in an environment of more than 1 machine.

Ok now my whole body is sore.

Yeah but I had a great days hiking. We started off about 9am this morning drove to Old rag near Shenandoah. Got to the car park about 10:30am. Hiked up to the summit then followed the circuit route back down the fire road then onto the car park back to the car by 5:30.
Here are a couple pictures

I can’t belive the week has been going so fast. Before I know it, it will be Christmas. I some times look back and wonder what have I done with the 4 years I have spent in the US. I think of Edinburgh, Scotland as my home, but I only spent 4 years at University there. Should I now consider D.C. as my home since soon I will have spent more time living in D.C. than I did in Edinburgh?

Dirty Sam Roberts
You’re the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean — not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Two things complete your pirate persona: style and swagger. Maybe a little too much swagger sometimes — but who really cares? Arr!

Thanks to for the link to What’s your Pirate Name

I am going to see Saturday Night Fever tonight at the NIH. I just checked the web site and it has this note at the top “The Saturday Night Fever print we received from the studio is Rated R. We have removed some scenes, however, there is strong graphic language in this movie, which may not be appropriate for children.”
All I can say is COOL!

I went home for lunch today so I could phone my granny and wish her happy birthday, but I left my address book at work so I had to phone my parents first. It turns out today is my sisters last day at work. She is planning on moving to Brazil at some point in the future.
While talking to my Granny we got talking about the movies I saw on the mall. It turns out she saw the Maltese Falcon in 1943 in London. She was working for a month in London during the war. I wish I could record these conversations because my memory is very bad about details. I might try and take notes next time I phone her.
This is a picture of my Granny, Sister and Mum from Christmas

Ok so I am not going to get any sleep for a little while. FLASH one thousand. two thousand, three thousand BANG.

I saw American Pie 2 tonight. It made me laugh but the story just sucked, way to many things going on, they should have just stuck to one or two things or I don’t know, had a start a middle and an ending?

I went to go look at a house today.

Cool the power just went out, I hear the file server going beep as it reboots….

I spent quite a long time looking for the house, how should I know that 29 crosses I66 twice. While hunting for the road where I needed to make a left turn I went passed the Manassas battle fields where some Confederate soldiers were reenacting battle maneuvers. I stopped and took some photos, but they are with real film so it will be a little time before I get them back. It was fun just stumbling onto something like that.

The thunder seems to have stopped, maybe I should go back to bed……

Ok, third time lucky