Andrew's diary

Saturday, 30 August 2003

Found out that the reason the motorway was shut was that Dover's port was sealed because a bomb scare. Presuambly they started Operation Make-the-M20-a-car-park, or whatever it's called.

Jack's 2nd birthday party, so Mark and Kelly hosted a barbecue which was quite fun, always nice to go to family parties, even if it's not your family, as long as you know almost everyone there :-)

Friday, 29 August 2003

Spent the afternoon over in France: stocked up on beer, but also drove down to Boulogne. It was proper holiday weather: windy and wet :-). Had a lovely dinner in a little French bistro of galettes and crêpes. Upon returning to the UK, however, the trip from one side of the M20 to the other (ie. from the Channel Tunnel terminal to Cheriton) was over 10 miles long and via Ashford since the motorway was shut - even though we didn't want to go on the blasted thing!

Thursday, 28 August 2003

Spoke to someone about the job in Moe's new department. It sounds interesting, albeit a straight-forward development job. Of course, that'd make a nice change from the politics-ridden stuff I'm having to deal with at the moment. I'd have to work hard in "extra-curricular" activities to keep my profile within the lab, but could certainly do well within the team.

After work we went to A1 Bathrooms to go through the rather high quote they'd sent us and managed to cut it down quite a bit further. I think, though, that we'll haggle it down even further.

Went into town for dinner (we must be feeling flush) and celebrated nearly, but not quite, buying a bathroom by having a curry at Wetherspoon's. £4.25 for a curry with rice, bread, a poppadom and a drink!

Sunday, 24 August 2003

Greg Dyke has announced that the BBC will be opening up its TV/radio archive over the Internet. Words can't describe how fantastic this'd be. Unfortunately, the realist in me recognises the awful amount of work involved. It's things like this though that should help in the BBC upcoming charter review.

Saturday, 23 August 2003

Yay! We've nearly finished painting the door frames, loft hatch etc.

Did some playing with the phone, and managed to connect the laptop to it and used it as a modem. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that there are any open proxies or routing to the "proper" Internet, so all in all it was a bit useless. Started work on an NEC e808 portal though.

Thursday, 21 August 2003

Read Bruce Perens' updated analysis of SCO's slides. It'll be interesting to see what Dad thought of the presentations themselves and how the audience reacted.

In happier news: Robert got the necessary GCSEs to go to college :-)

Wednesday, 20 August 2003

Checked the spam bin and found multiple emails from Microsoft saying if I don't upgrade MSN Messenger I won't be able to continue using it. Well, I guess I won't be able to continue using it, then.

Watched American Pie 2 on Dave's borrowed DVD. Now that we've seen all three I can definitely say that the third is by far the best. The second suffered by trying to have all the same characters in, which failed due to the fact that quite a few of them added nothing in the film.

Tuesday, 19 August 2003

My whizzy new toy^H^H^Hphone came. Registering it with 3 was fun since they hadn't had all the paperwork come through from CPW yet. The foreign drone at the end of the phone basically read out all the T&Cs over the phone, which was fun.

Watched the first American Pie after borrowing them from Dave. It was funny in parts, but other parts were the cringe-worthy juvenile sillyness which I'd thought it would be.

Electrician came round and replaced light fittings. Not exactly the safety assurance I was looking for, but nice to know we've got someone to sue now if the house burns down.

Users running Windows causing numerous problems at work. People - at a local level, at least - are now considering Linux desktops as the norm rather than the minority.

Monday, 18 August 2003

Worked from home so that I could sort out the insurance company and give them a piece of my mind. Mel's colleague's husband, John the Plumber, came round and sorted the problem out properly. TTOTD: when moving into any property, ensure that the overflow pipe on the cold water tank is properly seated. Apparently it's a common problem.

Now that we had running water, we went out with Dave and his friends to see American Pie 3 - was pleasantly surprised at how good it was, and so we've decided that we'll watch the prior two now.

Sunday, 17 August 2003

The emergency plumber got lost around Wokingham and Bracknell. Never heard from him again. Over 24 hours without water now :-(

Saturday, 16 August 2003

CPW have 3G phones at 49.99ukp, with 20ukp trade-in on any mobile. Ordered one since I was bored ;-)

Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay bored for long: at about lunchtime I had a great splashing sound. I figured it was probably the tap in the bath going or something. Unfortunately, the den's laminate floor was soaked with water and it was cascading out of the ceiling uplighter. I ran downstairs to turn the water off, unplug the lighting circuit and get buckets and towels.

I climbed into the loft and found plenty of water, but the overflow pipe - my main suspicion for the cause of the leak - was dry. Emptied the cold water tank by filling the bath with cold water and got onto the insurance company.

Unfortunately, the claims line was shut so I had to ring the emergency claims line. Since the full records aren't available to the emergency claims team, they couldn't say what I was covered for but would arrange for an emergency plumber to come out. We'd pay him and then could claim back later.

After several phone calls chasing them up, they decided to get on to a different plumbing firm; however since it was now over 8 hours later it obviously couldn't really be an emergency and it was really our own tough luck since the insurance company didn't ring them first.

By this time Mel had returned from Folkestone after a rather desperate phone call from me...

Finally, around 9.30pm, the original "emergency" plumber rang. Said he wouldn't be able to do anything we hadn't already done that evening and would be around first thing in the morning.

Friday, 15 August 2003

Half day at work really since it was the department barbecue. Lovely day for it, nice beer. The managers cooking sounded like a dodgy idea, but didn't turn out too bad in the end ;-)

Thursday, 14 August 2003

Mel travelled down to Folkestone to sort bridesmaid dresses out, so a few days of freedom for me, before Mel comes back with her grandparents on Sunday.

Found a note on my monitor from Moe, asking me to get in touch - unfortunately despite me once again trying to track him down, no word.

Rang phone4u in the afternoon to check the phone would still be delivered since I hadn't heard anything. "Yes, definitely, probably be about a week". In the evening, I got an email - the order was cancelled due to them not being able to fulfill demand :-(

Wednesday, 13 August 2003

Another bathroom designer came round - this time from A1 Bathrooms: a local company. Seemed friendly enough and had a good idea about what we wanted. We'll see if they turn out to be as prohibitively expensive as Dolphin (can't see how they could, to be honest!)

phone4u are now "out of stock" of the phones, no response to the emails Dave and I sent.

Also got word that Moe is still keen to speak to me, even though I haven't managed to speak to him myself.

Tuesday, 12 August 2003

W32.Blaster is crippling Internet access at work as it tries to infect other machines. A couple of lines of Perl to listen on port 135/tcp make it especially easy to track infected machines - fortunately, we just hand the IPs over to someone else to chase down the owners to install the patches they were asked to weeks ago.

Had a meeting with Graham's manager regarding the Linux customer support job. Unfortunately, despite it sounding interesting and me having exactly the right skills, the funding for the post is not likely to exist this year :-(

A "plot" to shoot down Air Force One foiled - whereas what actually happened is an undercover reporter managed to buy a surface-to-air missile which may have been able to shoot down Air Force One if it didn't have all its fancy evasion capabilities.

Monday, 11 August 2003

phone4u.co.uk (note, not Phones4U) have 3G PAYG phones for only a tenner. I imagine the demand'll be great, but put an order in anyway - if nothing else it's a working spare.

Sunday, 10 August 2003

Cooked a delicious barbecue for the family, even if I do say so myself before they all headed off.

Last episode of 24 was interesting - I had to watch Pure 24 on BBC3 to work out why the mysterious evil girl at the end looked familiar: she was the plane-jumping lesbian from the first few episodes of the first series. Oooh, when's series 3 coming out?!

Saturday, 09 August 2003

Mel went off with Sarah et al to Maxine's wedding. I, however, met Mum, Dad and Robert at the campsite Grandma and Grandad are staying at for a nice picnic lunch. Afterwards, we all headed back to our house. Grandma and Grandad got the full tour and after a nice afternoon we headed into town (Robert and I walked so we'd only need one car) and had a really nice meal at Bistro Je T'Aime.

Friday, 08 August 2003

Decided where we wanted to go on our honeymoon: Cuba. Trekked into Thomas Cook after work and, although they didn't have any rooms on stilts at the hotel we wanted we got a good price on an all-inclusive break at the end of a string of islands to the north of Cuba. Now we can't wait to go.

Wednesday, 06 August 2003

Hoped the patent awards would finally go into this month's paycheck. Unfortunately, it's apparently "obvious" that despite them being filed several weeks ago it will take several more weeks before they show up on HR's records.

Robert has started a "blog" (did I mention how much I hate that word) on his web site. He's using a third-party service which generates a set of JavaScript document.write() statements - just like our embed servlet. Both are, of course, as evil as each other.

Since it's hot, we've now got lots of people moaning about the weather.

Tuesday, 05 August 2003

Hmm, my sense of humour must be deterioating: saw on a sign on the back of a truck on the way to work: "Gildan Scaffolding - Make sure your next erection is in safe hands..."

Got a very funny email where someone said they'd started reading my diary and that it was like coming in to the middle of a soap opera and so could they please have a list of characters! :-)

One time only:

Mel - my fiancée
David - my brother (2 years younger)
Robert - my other brother (10 years younger)
Dave, Megan, Emma - friends at work
Glen, Phil, Dawn, Julie, Jo, Nicky - friends from univesity
Adrian - my manager

Don't think I've missed many people I regularly reference.

Tom Kelly (Tony Blair's spokesman) made a little gaff about the late Dr Kelly, and referred to him as a Walter Mitty-style fantasist, this lead to the following conversation:

Me: "He'll be out tomorrow."
Mel: "He'll be dead tomorrow."

Monday, 04 August 2003

Just like when I was trying to get hold of Moe to discuss the job in Solution Test, I'm now being messed about with the possibility of a job in HS&T. Fantastic.

Watched Terminator 3 with Dave, Linda et al. Interesting, but not as good as T2 (or even T1). The three biggest problems were: in common with a lot of films these days, the heavy action starts very soon, in T1 and T2 the action ramps up slowly; the ending was obviously left open for a T4 rather than with T2 which tried to close it; the time travel message was confused: T1 = predestination paradox, T2 = future can be changed if you know what it is, T3 = mix of the above, but leaning towards the first. There was also no incentive for the new Skynet to attack humanity: in the first two that Skynet was threatened when its creators tried to pull its plug. In this one it's just plain evil - or at least a malcontent - which is odd for a computer program.

Sunday, 03 August 2003

Finished the toilet seat (old one ended up being demolished). Allen and Carol came down for their anniversary. Wandered to the Big Balloon Festival, bit hot - fortunately the beer was cold.

Rewatched Terminator 2 since it's inevitable we'll watch T3 at some point.

Saturday, 02 August 2003

Did various jobs around the house: tidied the garden, bought a new toilet seat for the bathroom (the old one, frankly, stank). Unfortunately, replacing a toilet seat which is, shall we say, tricky. And smelly. And messy. Gave up eventually and had a bath instead.

Friday, 01 August 2003

Left work early with a bad head.