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Monday, 30 September 2002

Feeling really ill with sore throat and cold, but made it in to work anyway (though left a little early).

First report from the RISC OS Ltd. AGM which, once again, portrays the key figures in a not very flattering light, but suggests that the arguments and in-fighting have reached an all-time low and the situation may improve. It'd be great to see all the work going into RedSquirrel make it into the light of day.


Sunday, 29 September 2002

David and I sorted out the laminate flooring in the den: in the two inch gap the previous owners had glued pebbles to the floor, which meant getting out the chisel. However, the new strips we laid look a lot better and once we get the skirting boards painted, walls finished and beading down it'll be the first fully finished room (excluding the, ahem, electrics).

Also managed to finally clear the backlog of email in my inbox... woohoo! :-)


Saturday, 28 September 2002

Looked at the tiles on the side of the house to see if we could go and buy some and fit them... decided the answer was probably "no". Went to Emma and Steve's wedding - the weather was perfect and the church (at Hursley, larger than you'd imagine) was packed and, given the Christian nature of the families, everyone knew the words to all the hymns. And sung. Loudly (and well). It was also longer than the other weddings we'd been to recently, which shows something about the decline of religious worship in this country. As an agnostic (at best), I find it interesting to watch people in church, but think that living a "good" life (or at least trying to) is more important than arbitrary acts of worship of an unnecessary higher power (see The Blind Watchmaker). However, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than our petty lives, and if that turns out to be God, Heaven, etc. then I won't turn eternal blissful life down ;-)

Friday, 27 September 2002

A nice group lunch paid for my the company today. Then in the evening, deployed a honeypot for formmail exploits. Caught an attempt from an AOL email address within 4 hours.

David arrived in the evening. Watched telly and drank beer.

However, the coolest thing of the day has got to be Duncan's mention in NTK :-)


Thursday, 26 September 2002

Spoke to Dad in the evening about their visit to a Migraine Trust seminar yesterday, and gained some interesting knowledge about current theories about the cause of the illness and the cause of the pain (it's "real"), but unfortunately why you get an attack when you do is still unknown.

It's interesting, though, the current theory on what makes migraine sufferers different. It seems that all the stimuli coming into the brain aren't formatted as the brain expects - it then has to spend time decoding and re-formatting these impulses to make sense of them. Perhaps that's why sleep and a darkened room are the best treatment: it gives your brain a chance to catch up.


Wednesday, 25 September 2002

Nik gave an interesting talk at lunchtime, nothing I'd not heard before, but the questions which was raised were insightful. It's especially relevant now that Nik's working within the IT Department.

Got the user accounts front end almost completely up and running. You can't do much with your account yet, but I'd appreciate any comments from trying it out.


Tuesday, 24 September 2002

Did some more work on the tentatively named CGI::User - and even got to the stage of logging in and out, creating users and validating accounts. Also worked around a strange problem with mod_rewrite.

Google also launched their new, revamped beta news service. It's very cool and can only get better.

Mel rang British Gas to moan about a) not being rung back when they said they would and b) trying to claim that the final bill we've already paid was wrong and it should be 20 times as much. It turns out that it may be because the previous house owners are disputing the meter reading when we moved in... <sigh>.

In more positive news, my Screwfix order arrived exactly when it was supposed to, but unfortunately a 5mm difference prevented me from putting the new tap onto the existing pipes. Fortunately, I could extract the cartridge from the new tap and put that into the old one - problem solved. But now we've got two taps which don't match (I can't remove the other cartridge to get the taps matching as it doesn't have any nut left), and a new shower hose - very eclectic :-).


Monday, 23 September 2002

Our fascias & soffits are being done on Thursday. Started work on a Perl module to manager user accounts and sessions on the site - there doesn't seem to be anything already to do it...

Sunday, 22 September 2002

Tried to fix the tap in the bathroom (since the water board think we're wasting water through a leak) and failed. It's not worse, but it's not any better. We've taken to turning the stopcock off whenever we don't need water and I've ordered a new tap from Screwfix to tide us over until we can sort out the new bathroom.

Saturday, 21 September 2002

Did some more decorating in the den and burned some more CDs on the Linux box - it crashed once, and worked once - so still ahead of Win98 ;-)

Also spent some time working on icons for our home server's website in PaintShop Pro - they're not bad, even if I do say so myself.

Also put the new beta of RedSquirrel through it's paces, it's really coming along; it's just a shame that it isn't being publicly released.


Friday, 20 September 2002

Bob and Laurel stopped in at the Clubhouse on their way to France, so large group of us sat around eating, drinking and catching up.

Spend lots of money at Homebase - yet another 10% off day: they have them so regularly you wonder why they don't just slash their prices by 5% and undercut everyone else (on the high street) permanently.

Slashdot linked to some interesting critiques by David Brin on Star Wars, including an interesting idea (at the bottom) for tying all the loose ends and plot holes together in Episode 3.

Spent time installing, configuring and Debianising webCDwriter which worked first time (after getting the CD-RW installed in the server). Very cool :-).


Thursday, 19 September 2002

Worked through some of the backlog of emails and organised for the fascias, soffits, guttering, front door and internal doors to be done with PDH Carpentry (a local couple of carpenters). Price is reasonable and it'll be useful to have a handyman contact for things like plumbers, electricians and builders (all of which we need too!).

Wednesday, 18 September 2002

In June 1999, David Blunkett said he'd resign if the his stringent education targets weren't met. They haven't been. He hasn't resigned (though he's no longer Secretary of State for Education - funny that).

Tuesday, 17 September 2002

It's unbelievable how dim some Americans are: I received an email today saying that "organization" and "personalize" were "mis-spelled on the left of the [Hursley Intranet] site". Much fun was had thinking up the best responses:

"This is a local website for local people."
"No, you've been spelling them wrong for the last two centuries."
"No it really isn't."

...and some slightly ruder ones ;-)

Also got an email from Mike (with a Perl question) - feeling somewhat guilty as I still haven't replied to his email from a couple of months ago.


Monday, 16 September 2002

Inconsequential meetings and mindless bureaucracy form the flacid backbone of any large company. Especially IBM, it seems. I'm not sure whether or not it's me noticing it more or whether or not the company's reverting to the self-destructive tendencies of the mid-Eighties - either way, it's got to change.

Saturday, 14 September 2002

Got Monsters, Inc. out on DVD and watched it: enjoyable, but glad I didn't go to see it at the cinema.

Friday, 13 September 2002

Departmental barbeque this afternoon, and wonderful weather for it. Hog roast, beer, sunshine :-). Nearly won at the pub quiz with Dave, but we were beaten by just a single point (grrr).

The Lost World was on in the evening - not a good film, but the one gaping plot hole which really annoys me each time I see it is the boat crashing into the dock and then finding body parts of the crew scattered around. Which dinosaur is small enough to get onto the bridge and leave a tasteful hand hanging from the wheel? Obviously not the T-Rex as that's still locked in the hold (and much too big); not the baby T-Rex as that was shipped via helicopter straight to the new park. It was obviously supposed to be raptors - but where did they go? (Must keep telling self: it's only a film; it's only a film)


Thursday, 12 September 2002

Finally got around to repartitioning the 13GB disk and shuffled the partitions about: standardised the filenames from the CDs I ripped recently (FreeDB is good but you'd think people would actually enter correct information) and copied them to the server. Now just need to write some Perl to find the duplicates and hardlink them together.

Wednesday, 11 September 2002

Didn't have anyone to talk to and my machine crashed at 13:45, so I ended up participating in the one minute's silence. Later, I got a phone call from Paige - who I haven't spoken to in ages - and he asked for my help with a trial run of linking up Hursley village's school with a school in New Hampshire using IBM products such as SameTime. Sounds fun, but the trial's tomorrow, so spent ages trying to get Emma's laptop into a fit enough state to actually be useful. We eventually decided the sound is just plain broken and'll have to use my laptop instead.

Tweaked the stylesheet for the site slightly, looks a bit better now I think.


Tuesday, 10 September 2002

There'll be a minute's silence at work tomorrow at 13:46, the exact time the first plane hit the first tower of the World Trade Center last year. How many people around the world hold a minute's silence for the millions of people who died in the two World Wars on 11th November? Should more people commemorate those who died in last year's terrorist attacks than the World Wars just because it's more recent?

Stopped at Halfords on the way home and bought a CD-changer for the car (a Sony CDX-T69 with "sound-on-top" so that it'll connect to my Ford Model 5000 head unit)... it's due to be fitted in a couple of weeks; which'll mean plenty of music for the long drive to/from Ireland.

Updated my diary for the last month - but I'm bound to have missed something.


Monday, 09 September 2002

When I'm in a meeting where I know I know less than the other participants I'll usually keep quiet until I'm sure I'm not going to say something obvious and that what I do want to say will be useful to the conversation. It seems that not everyone does this and that they'll say meaningless or trivial things just to make sure they're heard. Kinda obvious really, in retrospect. (Dave, note this doesn't necessarily mean a work meeting. Honest.)

Booked the hotel (an Irish castle in the middle of nowhere :-)) and ferry for our Irish getaway.

Dave re-poked me to update my diary, and so did Glen. The whole look and feel of the site needs updating, TBH. And I've still got email to reply to from holiday.


Sunday, 08 September 2002

Drove home and started planning a half-term holiday. The Gadget Shop are launching a version of the chameleon phone as seen in the BT advert. For 70 quid it doesn't look as good as the BT version (from watching the video) but the fact that it exists now and didn't 6 months ago shows something, but I'm not quite sure what...

Glen's buying Dave's Transformers CDs - I want a cut ;-)


Saturday, 07 September 2002

Drove to Folkestone for Mel's grandad's birthday and a barbeque at her aunt's.

Thursday, 05 September 2002

The Zenith Bowater salesman came round at 7.45pm (at Mel's invite - I'll point out now) and was a real, genuine, honest-to-God, uPVC salesman with videos, samples, brochures, calls to his manager to get a better price etc. etc. Two and a half hours later we get rid of him (admittedly once we wanted him gone, he was gone quite quickly but I think that's more to do with me being pushy). Whilst he was busy working stuff out, I'd done a quick search on Google Groups and found out that:

  1. The "showhome" discounts/promises they seem to offer to everyone
  2. They'll always start off at a ridiculous price and drop it
  3. They're still too expensive

Suffice to say, they won't be getting the contract.


Wednesday, 04 September 2002

Had a plan to get Robert to school (he didn't go yesterday) and it worked! Anything else can happen today and I'll still be happy as this is important. Admittedly, it did involve ringing my parent's at 4am to check on him... ;-)

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