Andrew's diary

Friday, 31 December 2004

We stayed in and watched Jools Holland's Hootenanny - Mel cooked a three-course dinner, drank some wine, did some lounging...

It's been a year of ups and downs and it's strange to think that next year could be a year of even greater change and upheaval.

Wednesday, 29 December 2004

Gave Oxfam a donation for the victims of the Asian earthquake/tsunami. Many people now seem to be touting the "Disasters Emergency Committee" as a coordination point, and although they have people like Oxfam as their members, it seems a little too central, governmental and quangoish to be my preferred donation point. The upside would be to ensure that lots of different charities got money, but then the bigger ones may not get the economy of scale in terms of purchasing equipment; and who decides who are the most deserving charities? There's also the fact that the DEC itself must have operating costs, and so two sets of overheads will come out of any donation.

Saturday, 25 December 2004

Lots of DVDs and PS2 games - and David and Robert were really pleased when we unwrapped the console itself, considering we'd been leading them to believe we wouldn't be getting it until mid-January.

Mel did a fantastic job with the stockings again - although I've said that next year we may have to be watching what we spend much more closely.

Friday, 24 December 2004

Had drinks with Sam, David and Robert before the midnight service at Church: the Barley Mow's improved a lot since the first (and only) time we'd been in there before. It still seems very small for such a large building though.

Thursday, 23 December 2004

After dinner we packed up the car and headed up to Stockton: tomorrow I'll work from (a) home and write up the high-level design we've been working on. No sign of the stuff from London yet (apart from the email version).

Monday, 20 December 2004

Came to a conclusion (after getting some final details), let them both know and am just wondering how quick things will be. Before Christmas?

The EPP rang asking about Mel's new laptop: the one we wanted isn't available any more; and there aren't any more 2.4GHz ones or 14.1" screens, so it'll have to be bigger and slower. Bah, humbug...

Friday, 17 December 2004

Woke up with a bad head, but managed to get up mid-morning so I could get into work to label, shut down and disconnect various bits of get for yet another office move this weekend.

Thursday, 16 December 2004

Woke up on my day off with a bad head so took a cornucopia of drugs to offset them, and left the house with Mel to be dropped off at the station.

Once home at lunchtime, I tidied the house, hoovered etc. in preparation of the evening's guests: Maxine stayed the night as it was the school's Christmas "do", and Megan and Ben came round to "keep me company". It was very odd seeing them as an outted couple, but it was a good evening, with Chinese take-away and a few episodes of Coupling.

Wednesday, 15 December 2004

Blunkett's gone! Woohoo!

His personal circumstances are unfortunate, but the guy was a raving right-wing loony.

Tuesday, 14 December 2004

Using this article as a base, managed to get fixed width fonts in GMail - both in the message display and the reply box.

Firsly, install the URIid extension (I had to download it and the run the XPI file directly). Then add the following CSS rules to your Firefox profile (eg. ~/.firefox/default/*/chrome/userContent.css:

body#gmail-google-com div.msg div.mb, body#gmail-google-com textarea.tb {
font-family: monospace !important;
font-size: 10.5px !important;
white-space: nowrap !important;
}

You can even add another rule which hides div.ad if you don't want to see the advert bar.

Monday, 13 December 2004

Private entry

Saturday, 11 December 2004

Dad bought a new(ish) car on the way up to Macclesfield. A shiny Focus ST170 :-). It was good to see Grandma, Grandad, Grandad and Janice and Stewart again. The Chinese we went to in the evening was lovely - and I think my grandparents enjoyed it, despite it being their first real Chinese meal!

Friday, 10 December 2004

After work, drove straight to the school and picked Mel up. Drive up to Stockton was as fun as ever, but dinner was nice.

Tuesday, 07 December 2004

Mel's birthday. We went out to Ciao Baby Cucina in the evening, and watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban afterwards on the DVD she got today.

Monday, 06 December 2004

Celebration meal for the eGA of CTG v6 - which hasn't happened yet, but we're fairly certain there'll be no (more) problems between now and then.

Saturday, 04 December 2004

Birthday. Lots of DVDs mainly (X-Men 2, Red Dwarf, Coupling, for example) and the best treat of all: Mel's parents and Carol's parents down for the weekend.

Friday, 03 December 2004

Finished the course; drove home to get showered and changed and then went out to pick Linda up for our "date" at the Christmas Ball - whilst Mel played "Santa's Little Helper" (note: not the dog) at her Christmas Fayre. The ball was good; no spontaneous rounds of "Happy Birthday To You" after midnight though.

Thursday, 02 December 2004

Out of the office at IBM Warbrook (the "IBM Business School") for an "Assertiveness without Aggression" course. Warbrook was very impressive: definitely a place for salesmen to learn their trade on a residential course for six weeks in a tranquil setting with bars and lounges everywhere.

The course was quite cool - although a lot of it is common sense distilled into rules.

Wednesday, 01 December 2004

A similar problem as yesterday turned up with HP-UX issuing SIGBUS on non-aligned pointer dereferences - why these are turning up now, rather than in the four months since the bug was introduced, I've no idea...