Andrew's diary

Thursday, 31 July 2003

Graham - who moved down to a customer-facing role in HS&T - told me that his colleague has left to work at Akamai and they'll probably need someone else to replace him. Sounds like an interesting job - he's going to mention me to his manager.

Tuesday, 29 July 2003

Found a native EPOC ER5 SSH client: SyOSSH. That was kept quiet.

The upset and hurt that trying to organise a wedding can cause kicked up a gear in the evening when Mel's grandmother got the wrong end of the stick (pretty much missed it completely really) and said that they wouldn't be able to come to the wedding now since they couldn't get there. Bearing in mind it's still over 8 months away I don't think travel arrangements are that important. Unfortunately, they do and since they said they weren't coming that (obviously) upset Mel.

I think I managed to sort it out in the end, but who knows. Why people react so thoughtlessly and emotionally to something is beyond me. I'm also of the belief it's not our problem how people get there as long as they do. Was there really any chance of Mel's grandparents not coming to the wedding? I doubt it. Something would have been sorted out, but not by us - we've enough to do already.

Friday, 25 July 2003

Applied for the job, will have to wait and see what happens when Moe gets back.

Saw some pretty cool webby things: a picture using <img src="data:..."> and a JavaScript graphics library using table cells.

Thursday, 24 July 2003

Finally got to speak to someone about the job in Megan's department. It's not as interesting as I'd have liked, but does sound very good. Unfortunately, Moe's now on holiday until the week after next so even if I did apply for the job today, no decision would be taken. I'd somehow got the impression it was urgent though. I don't like being faffed about...

Wednesday, 23 July 2003

"...a dream cannot produce a definite thought. If it begins to do so, it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of conciousness. That is why dreams seem to skip the very points that are most important to the concious mind and seem rather to manifest the "fringe of conciousness," like the faint gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun."

Man and His Symbols - Carl Jung

It's an interesting book and that's the first quote which had really stuck out at me and made me think.

More bloody SMS spam from T-Mobile themselves despite them assuring me I was off their books now and suggested the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). I'm already signed up, does that mean they now owe me £5,000? I doubt it. Fortunately, it doesn't look like I'll see any others as the T68i's become incredibly unreliable: dropping calls, refusing to connect to the network etc. I'll have to investigate how to get it replaced under warranty.

Tuesday, 22 July 2003

Still no word from Moe. Still no response on the bleb.org backup servers. I could start feeling very neglected soon...

It also didn't help that Megan and four others won TechConnect but I didn't. I'm very pleased for Megan, but some of the others were more controversial. Megan was one of the two main finalists who are still in with a chance of going to the US though :-)

Fortunately, the current bleb.org server (lithium) came back up today, so it wasn't all bad.

Monday, 21 July 2003

Tried to get hold of Moe to discuss the job which was the cause of the frantic phone call with no success.

The replacement for Harry Potter arrived: same problem.

And, finally, in shocking news - Dave passed his driving test! The roads around Winchester will never be the same again ;-)

Sunday, 20 July 2003

Robert's birthday. Mel and I went to a barbecue at Joy's house. Very pleasant.

Saturday, 19 July 2003

David Kelly's death is now being attributed to suicide. Very suspicious that a guy who's faced down evil dictators and scientists kills himself over media attention due to him appearing in front of a select committee. Perhaps I'm just paranoid but that doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.

Angela and Richard had an end-of-term party at their house. Very tiring. Lots of friendly people, however.

Friday, 18 July 2003

Last day of the doors being fitted, for which I had a day off. In the afternoon, however, I got an urgent phone call from Megan regarding a job which the outgoing manager in her department wanted me to have. I'll have to speak to them next week to see if I want it, but it's a really good feeling to be rung up like that.

David Kelly was found dead today in woodland.

Thursday, 17 July 2003

The carpenters have arrived to start on the internal doors. It's amazing the difference it's made on the landing already - and the doors aren't even painted yet. Worked from home so I could supervise/make tea.

Harry Potter arrived - our first R1 DVD. Unfortunately the second disc wasn't the special features disc but was, instead, the 4:3 version of the film. Not exactly what we wanted. Obviously a day of mis-delivered items as MFI tried to deliver the top part of the TV table which we returned in February.

David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence expert who's caused some embarassment for the Government has gone "missing".

Wednesday, 16 July 2003

Lithium once again down. Very irritating and so I've tried to get some of the free offers I got up and running. They don't, however, seem entirely willing to reply to emails now.

Monday, 14 July 2003

The hassle begins: I get told to jump, so I jump. I get told that my desk needs to move so the helpline (who were sitting here a year ago) can move back. Why? Because they don't "like" their current office.

Sunday, 13 July 2003

Woke up at 5am with a bad head, but was up by eleven. Unfortunately that meant the rest of the day was spent doing nothing more than poring over holiday brochures trying to determine a honeymoon destination (and watching a few episodes of Futurama on DVD :-))

Saturday, 12 July 2003

A lovely day (weather-wise). In the morning we went into town and bought bits to experiment making wedding invitations with. Also went into the only real hifi shop in town to investigate a nice new amp - unfortunately they're either a) too expensive, or b) concentrate on optical digital inputs rather than coax (which I need for the music server, digibox etc.)

Also persuaded Mel that spending £18 on the first Harry Potter DVD was silly when the region 1 version is only eleven quid. This meant we went to Safeway and bought the last version of their Compacks DVD5000 player which, unlike the last DVD player we purchased, was thoroughly researched. The company has an online forum on their own service website: very encouraging, and something I wish more companies would do. It's very swish - now we just have to wait for our first R1 DVD to test it with ;-)

In the evening it was Sam & Ness' wedding reception - it was a good do but it was disappointing to see so few people from the team there. Although in retrospect it just meant more food for the rest of us ;-)

Wednesday, 09 July 2003

TechConnect - "the chance for the technical leaders in the lab to see what you've been working on". It was good (on the whole) but too many people crammed into the central hall of the House with no aircon and no refreshments. Ended up hot, tired and thirsty. Megan seemed to enjoy it - doubt either of us will win, though. Might have done if we'd could've done something on the patent.

Apparently Bournville is the nicest place to live - as determined by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I find that rather funny, given that George Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree were major competitors. Of course, living with one of the Rowntree clan whilst in Essex gives me a particular interest.

Sunday, 06 July 2003

Outlined, on paper at least, how to get to Salvare 0.3.0 (which'll support network booting etc.). Basically the bootstrap code will support:

• Having a Salvare boot disk (a la tomsrtbt)
• Having a Salvare boot disk to bootstrap the full system from CD (if the BIOS doesn't support CD booting)
• Having a Salvare boot disk to bootstrap the full system over the network from a variety of mirrors

Sourceforge said I got around 600 hits the day of the Freshmeat announcement :-)

I also managed to get Windows playing the network audio (streamed off /dev/dsp on the music server) by writing a Java application of all things - so it should theoretically be portable to any Mac OS X machine we get in the future (yeah, like we could afford that). Will try and get around to writing it all up at some point in the future.

Oh, and stan got Slashdotted.

Saturday, 05 July 2003

In bed all day until the evening with a nasty migraine. Suspect, in retrospect, that the spicy food at the buffet was a bad idea.

Friday, 04 July 2003

The department had, basically, a party at lunch time in the Clubhouse. Free food (mostly spicy) and beer :-)

I'm also fed up with being asked to do content work when there's more important things to be doing. There's also the problem that when you do other people's content for them: a) they never update it and b) don't know what they've got.

Finished Harry Potter: the writing's definitely improving with each book. Unfortunately, the book was too long with long periods of not much at all happening and the hype about The Death was used to build suspense without having to rely solely on the words (which was ironic because the bits with this added suspense didn't actually need it as the words could stand on their own). Interestingly a lot of people have claimed the titular charcter is too angry in this book, personally I'd have said "stupid" ;-)

Thursday, 03 July 2003

Doing a small paper on Hoogle for an event next week, however the template we've got to stick to is in fscking PowerPoint. It's bad enough trying to use Word to do DTP, but PowerPoint?! I was sorely tempted to break out Impression Publisher and do it properly but in the end did it with OpenOffice.

Officially released Salvare v0.1.0 - the first stable(ish) developer's release.

Tuesday, 01 July 2003

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" arrived today. We managed to resist the hype for a week, but Mel started reading David's copy on Saturday and I read the first few pages.

Got halfway through this evening :-)

Work seemed to fly by today, but it was rather irritating to be in yet another told-you-so situation. I was made even more incredulous when the same people who told us to turn comments off were asking if it was possible for users to comment on an article. Do they have any clue, plan or strategy? I doubt it.