red, mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City

[freckles_and_doubt]

General joy, as the geeks in the IT department have apparently managed to wrestle to the ground the malware Godzilla which slowed our bandwidth to a dodgy and intermittent crawl over the last week. (500 zombie spambot computers infected. Darned student unsafe data transfer muttermutter. And this the country of AIDs awareness). The posing of geeks with one foot on the recumbent trojan corpse does mean I can post photos. Herewith the one I wanted to post on Monday, yet another in the series of Unreasonably Beautiful Dawns. Now with added lowering clouds, fiery skies and, what was it? "portentuous effulgence".

.

Disclaimer: probably not as good as the one you obligingly imagined.

Comments

[origamitiger.livejournal.com]

nope, just as good, I think I will have to do some dawn photos when I am there next.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

You need to bear in mind the extremely serious drawback to dawn photos, viz. the need to actually be up at dawn. This is not something I would contemplate doing on my holidays. Dusk is also pretty :>.

[starmadeshadow.livejournal.com]

Darn. Seriously missing Cape Town now. That's a lovely, lovely photo.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you, although sorry it should induce homesickness. You need to look on this sort of thing as a promissory note on your next trip.

any news on the dread phid? w-n and I are contemplating black cat burglar suits, masks and an abseil in to the faculty office to sneak a look at the reports.

[starmadeshadow.livejournal.com]

'Sometime next week' is the latest update, which is better than 'one day', to be fair. But some hot ninja cat burglar action wouldn't go amiss if you're bored this weekend =)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

"Sometime next week" is all fine and well, and obviously better than "sometime next year", but in my experience it tends to leave one jittery and useless for all practical purposes. Strength! also, confidence, and poised champagne.

[rumint.livejournal.com]

Are your sunrises & sunsets being improved by the Chilean volcano?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

There's a volcano erupting in Chile? Gawsh, so there is (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7381652.stm). And another one in January (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7167639.stm). Busy little volcanic wossnames.

No idea if it's affecting our skies. Quite probably, but the locked-in overcast and drizzle for the last couple of days has made it difficult to judge.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

That is a very pretty sky.

Next time I am in Cape Town I shall have to pitch a tent on your lawn so that I can go out and take early dawn photos across the Common. Though I fear your moles, cats and/or Evil Landlord may attack in the night.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't risk the moles, myself, have you seen the teeth on those things? Come and camp in the guest room instead, it only takes about fifteen tries to eject Todal from the bed...

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

That sounds considerably more comfortable! Though it is faintly terrifying that you've suggested those moles are worse than a creature called Todal. Your readers who aren't sufficiently familiar with the fine works of James Thurber may have forgotten that the original Todal:
looks like a blob of glup
makes a sound like rabbits screaming and smells of old unopened rooms
is made of lip and moves about like monkeys and like shadows
can't be killed
and is an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

ah, that's our Todal, that is... Except she only looks like a blob of glup when she's retracted her legs to puddle in front of the heater, and she mostly smells of cat. Full of lip, though.

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

One of the advantages of winter is that sunrise occurs at a more reasonable time of day. Or at least it does in these latitudes - being around 51° North.

Which means that I shan't be even aware of such events til around next October!

BTW - hasn't your IT dept heard of Firewalls? Though knowing what DH says about the firewall his IT dept installed at work . . . S-L-O-W, or something. Maybe it's IT depts for you?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Oh, we have a nice big shiny firewall - you should hear my sister swear about the way it messes with her genetics data downloads. The problem was that this particular worm is aimed at flash drives, which the students all carry around like extra limbs and are forever plugging into the library computers, and at Messenger and IRC. It was also a brand new worm whose signature wasn't yet in the McAfee database. Chaos ensued. The problem with malware is that it evolves slightly faster than the virus catchers, inevitably enough.