T O T K a t

...quite how fabulous is Mahler. And my theory that everyone's 5th symphony is their best (except Beethoven, definitely his 3rd is the best or 9th; depends how I'm feeling.): Mahler, Shostakovich, Bruckner, Dvorak (and, I think Sibelius, but I'm a bit sleepy now and can't remember the number of the one I prefer of his)...

Anyway. Mahler V rocks. But then I may be a tad biased in that it is pretty much a horn concerto in symphony form. God, it's good. Shame that my college orchestra saw fit to do it two years after I'd left. I'd've killed to actually perform that (er, not as principal but as 4th as was my specialism - I'll never forget the performance of Shostakovich 5 that we did with extra support from the RCM horn section for another piece and their reception of my tanking out the pedal Es in the final movement when the rest of the section had knackered themselves out on the high stuff earlier on)

Accelerometers married with touch sensitive surfaces, RFID and lots of pretty lights and servos... Andrew Fentem designs and makes some amazing, er, thingies.

Is it art? Technology? Toys? Communications and control systems? Or even social experiment? There so much potential in what this guy does/has done, it's fabulous! (and is that really his current mobile phone number at the bottom of the page?) Annoyingly, Kinetica's web site isn't awfully helpful on opening times and permanent exhibitions so I'm not sure what, if any, of Mr. Fentem's pieces are there at the moment.

Actually, there's a whole bunch of really cool stuff at Kinetica. For Paul Fryer's "Star in a Jar" ("The Star In A Jar is basically a simple fusion reactor in a bell jar. What you see when the machine is fired up is a small sun inside a glass dome in a vacuum almost as empty as outer space.") alone, it has to be well worth a visit.

I thought it was pretty. Red, warming. Like the fire (see other Flickr photos). Watching food programs on TV.

The vendors/suppliers are keeping the couriers busy and Fortnum's in business. Having got a card from one of our suppliers this morning, I just got a parcel from Fortnums as well. Eh, perks. Gotta love 'em. Shame there's only one though, because there are (currently) 4 guys who report in to me, so I can't really give it to one of them without it coming across as favouritism. Maybe next year. When I'm more established here.

Well, OK, it's the tax man. He just sent me a Christmas present of a refund of some overpaid NI from the last tax year. How cool is that? Not a lot of money, but still...

Guinness is good for you. Shame. I don't dislike it, but I find that I can't drink more than about half a pint of the stuff.

The roof got fixed today. Of course, it will be hard to tell if it is any better until there's some heavy rain. I've taken the newspaper, towel and buckets out of the under-eaves storage so it'll be pretty clear next time it rains if there's still a leak.

You too can get £10 for signing up to use internet banking on your mobile phone (and it's quite a good app as it goes too :o)). Go see Monilink (in the UK). Most UK banks are covered on most UK mobile handsets. And it's launched as a limited trial in the USA as Monitise, but I don't think you can sign up for it in the USA yet.

(Yes, I work for these people, but seriously... free £10!)

I am now the bearer of a 4" long, green bruise on my arm. Silly me was moving a chest of drawers (yes I took all of the drawers out first) and it fell, pinning my arm against the corner of a wall momentarily until I hefted it off me. It didn't hurt that much at the time, but left a deep ridge in my arm. Didn't break the skin though. 4 days later and the ensuing lump has almost gone down and been replaced by a pretty, green bruise. Anyhoo, shifting furniture about a bit and putting up another blind (it's now actually dark in the loft! and warm after bleeding the radiator and the towel rail) has done wonders for the ol' upper arms.

And in other news, I am knitting a scarf. No, really. Me. Knitting. I'm totally crap at it so far :o) I'm much better at Stepmania (as people will attest from teh partay at the weekend. I rocked on the dance mat! Even surprised myself as I managed to actually do the complicated cornery moves that usually fox me.).

Hot chocolate from EAT is really good. That is all.

Part of my job at the moment is to plan a double migration; one for the test/dev environment from a datacentre we'll have to move out of, and the other to separate our corporate IT provision from the company we de-merged from a few months ago. This all means a lot of planning, research, producing presentations and documents and spreadsheets, generally lots of work and fantasising about spending a _lot_ of money on big toys. OK, so part of the task is to make sure the solution isn't unneccessarily expensive, but even so and even being very careful and beating down suppliers for better prices, the numbers get quite big. There isn't even a down side in that it is likely I'll end up looking after some Windows kit and systems, because Windows got clever. I always liked NT4 Server (though I didn't want to do it full time) when I was working with it in my first full-time job, but I never got around to Active Directory and I haven't a lot of idea about Exchange yet. So, I may need to get some books and maybe go on a course (as well as hiring someone to look after desktop support).

While I'm not doing that, I've got a monitoring system to implement *rummages through the old Nagios docs*. And by the looks of it I need to update my documentation, I'm quite out of date with Nagios now. So I'll be doing that as I go along. Though it is entirely possible that, despite my current company being a Sun house, it'll be on Linux this time. Ah well, can't have it all and it does keep the O/S variety in play. And when I persuade the senior management that we need a development server for the Infrastructure team, I'll stick it on that and it'll be a Solaris box (or blade).

Been getting quite a bit done this weekend. Lots of domestic chores; fixed the gutter that was loose, sorted out a little cosmetic paint problem in the bathroom, fixed the lounge door which had been sticking a bit, fitted blinds to the Velux windows and a load of even more mundane things too boring even for a journal post ;o)