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Andrew's diary

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Tuesday, 30 November 2004

At around lunchtime, Kate came in and asked me to look at a sev1 problem which needed fixing today. Paul helped sort it out in terms of builds etc. and we managed to finally have finished with it and fixed it by 7ish.

Monday, 29 November 2004


Saturday, 27 November 2004

Went out to Banbury with David, Mum and Mel. Mum and Mel seemed to enjoy the shopping; David enjoyed ogling attractive young ladies and I tagged along. In the afternoon, Mel and I went out into Rugby and ended up looking at new houses; some back of the paper calculations showed that we could actually afford a decent new house up here!

Friday, 26 November 2004

My first taste of commuter life wasn't entirely fun: I booked the taxi to get me to the station intentionally early and, as expected, it turned up ten minutes late. After finishing the day's tasks I got to Euston at 6pm, to long queues at the ticket machines (and the windows were twice as long). I got a ticket though, and got to platform 4 for the 18:18 Virgin Train to Rugby (amongst others). Unfortunately, it was full: only passengers with reserved seats were being allowed on. I went to Burger King for an ever-so-pleasant meal, with the next train to Rugby at 19:02.

When the platform was called there was practically a stampede to platform 12, with a sprint on to the train to try and get a seat. The journey itself should've been fine, in only taking 52 minutes, which is only slightly longer than the train from Basingstoke this morning. Unfortunately, somehow it got into the station 20 minutes late - and it took David ringing me from Rugby to let me know. Why wouldn't Virgin make the earlier train longer if they knew it was going to be so busy? And why are there no announcements about ETAs etc. whilst on the train?


Thursday, 25 November 2004

Team leader came into the office today and clarified that although I was on the 2PC team due to me not likely to be going anywhere, it was also because I seemed to have formed a reputation for getting things done, on time and of good quality. It's nice to be appreciated, especially when you thought you weren't.

The Christmas Ball's "Organising" Committee sent out a rather offensive email, referring to individuals who hadn't booked a whole table as "stragglers"; vegetarians eating "rabbit food" and having the general tone of someone organising a night at the pub with his mates.


Wednesday, 24 November 2004

The Club's different committees don't seem to get on very well, which is odd considering most of the same people are on most of them.

Monday, 22 November 2004

Dixons' CEO was on the radio this morning as they're to stop selling VCRs due to the high sales of DVD "players". He was then asked if in 25 years they'd be doing something similar with DVD: "oh no, DVD has amazing longevity - mainly due to the fantastic quality it offers". I know as CEO he doesn't want customers to feel they're buying dead-end technology, but surely he must realise that all technology is eventually replaced/improved upon. 25 years and we'll still be using DVD? Yeah, right.

Friday, 19 November 2004

Got pulled into the 2-phase commit team as apparently I'm the team member "most likely to still be around". A "valuable contribution" was an after-thought; but makes me wonder where everyone else is going, and what they know that I don't ;-). It's a valid point though, it's pretty unlikely I'd be moving within Hursley or IBM in the near future; unless something very unexpected and high-level came out of Peridot. But that still fits into the "unlikely" category.

Thursday, 18 November 2004

Had the morning off.

Worked from home (slowly) in the afternoon. I'm not sure if it's ADSL or the new VPN method I'm using, but working from home is becoming more and more painful. Perhaps I'm just too used to 100Mb in the office, compared with 1/200th of that at home.


Sunday, 14 November 2004

The traffic on the way to Folkestone was nothing compared with that on the way back: late on Friday night a petrol tanker spilt its load between junctions 5 and 6 and the carriageway was closed in both directions. Allegedly it was open again clockwise this evening, but the traffic was still slow - so we came the back way all the way back. 3 hours. Eugh.

We were just lucky we didn't want to go the other way: the A25 was jammed solid with traffic which couldn't even use the M25 as it was still closed anti-clockwise.


Saturday, 13 November 2004

Went over to France and visited La Coupole (near St. Omer) which was to be used as a launching base/silo for V2 rockets in World War 2. Very interesting. Dinner in Cité Europe after lots of shopping.

Friday, 12 November 2004

After work drove to Folkestone through a nightmare of traffic and drizzly rain.

Tuesday, 09 November 2004

Made the "fun" decision of installing the latest WAS beta on my desktop machine (which struggles to run the RH9-based c4eb): 500MHz and 388MB of RAM is not the speediest environment for it.

We've named the twins "Hubris" and "Catastrophe" - we hope they don't head your way.

That was the best line from the pretty, but vacuous, "docutainment" (or should that be "entertuary") Space Odyssey on BBC1.

Reviewed the job descriptions I'd been sent, I had to laugh when I got to the Hammersmith-based dotcom. That sounds like it'd be a great career move ;-)


Sunday, 07 November 2004

Took pictures of my Clié and posted them, complete with advert online. Hopefully someone'll save me the faff of eBay by wanting it before resorting to an auction (even if it would make more money that way)

Saturday, 06 November 2004

Bad head. After getting up and eating something, watched A Knight's Tale and then, after Mel'd gone to bed, Toy Story 2.

Thursday, 04 November 2004

Some little bugger has snapped the badge off the front of my car. What's the point of mindless vandalism like this? It's just plain stupid...

Spoke to Steve Flack, who seemed like a nice guy - gave me some interesting things to think about. Had a fun defect involving some low-level byte work on the C layer, which was surprisingly enjoyable - very reminiscent of matching what the RISC OS PRMs say with what actually happens ;-)

After work, took Mel to Wetherspoons for a curry, followed by Shark Tale. Pretty disappointing really: not as good as Finding Nemo and not even in the same league as Shrek 2.


Wednesday, 03 November 2004

Most of the day was spent with 254 electoral college votes to Bush, and 252 to Kerry with Ohio the deciding factor. Surprisingly, Kerry eventually conceded, giving Bush four more years as the "head of the free world". The worrying thing is what this'll do for world stability. The US had most of the world's powers behind them after 11th September 2001; and yet that goodwill has been squandered. Even worse, the US seem to view the "war on terror" as their war - even though many different countries lost citizens in the 9/11 attacks and the bombs in Madrid, Bali etc. were not aimed at the US.

Tuesday, 02 November 2004

It's neck and neck, but I suspect Bush will get it... just.

Monday, 01 November 2004

Released Salvare v0.1.5, which is long overdue. Played about with getting hhgg2xml working again. Passed $100 on Google AdSense! Dunno when/if they'll send a cheque though.

Got a reply from Andy - will have to carefully read and email him back.


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