And Henman stylishly leaves the Wimbledon championship before it even got exciting. Hey ho. Maybe the crazy Danes were right.
It's all so quiet here this morning. Most people appear to be feeling the worse for wear after last night's little drinkies. Me, I had 2.5 pints and felt bloody awful. I thoroughly enjoyed (not) two cow-orkers having a blazing row in the pub as well. Still, the steak and kidney pie that other people had appeared to be rather good. I kinda regretted my measly ham and brie toasted thing.
And there's relief for me this morning that the ntp clients have settled down after 16 hours bedding in. They were jittery as hell for the first 3 hours yesterday and I was a bit worried that they wouldn't settle enough for broadcast use. But they did. Meh. I'm rambling. About trivial crap. Probably because I feel rubbish.
Still happy, though.
Yes. Stomach behaving. That's one of the nice things about the tube strike; we're working in the central London office today and tomorrow, so can go to nice places for lunch. There's this nice little Italian place on Kingsway... and one Puttanesca later...
Still a happy bunny.
Well, my stomach apears to be behaving now, even after the pint of beer last night. Shame about the cold, really. Not a huge amount going on after a not_too_ bad week on call. I did have some things to rant about, but I'm too sleepy and generally content to bother right now.
BBC (plus CBS news) clip archives are opened up at the BBC Motion Gallery. Worth a look.
Feeling tired still, but have put away a mug and a half of tea. Which are staying down. Thankfully, I'm not hungry. Maybe toast later.
Last night on call came and went. I'd like to say "uneventfully" but there was a little bit of excitement and a reasonable amount of on-edgeness from some people. Anyway, it would have been not too bad had later not involved being awake for most of the night being sick. Not even water would stay down.
So, this morning I'm staring at a mug of tea and wondering if it is a really good idea or not, given that my stomach is still feeling nasty. Oh, and I'll tell you what, being sick while you've got a blocked up nose from a cold is a particularly vile experience and one that is rather novel for me.
Meh. This cold gets stinkier and stinkier. Almost through the two boxes of tissues I bought on Monday and now my voice is intermittent.
Last night, at around midnightish, the main house power tripped out. I thought it was a power cut until I looked outside and nobody else was in total darkness like is usually the case. A quick trip to the metre cabinet, where the trip switches are and there the main one was off. So, I turned all of the little ones off and the main one back on, then the others back on in turn in case the surge tripped the main one again. No problem turning any of it back on again. Odd. Anyway, a couple of clock resets this morning and everything was OK. Until I wanted hot water. No hot water. The boiler was sat there with the ignition lock indicator flashing. I had to reboot the boiler. *ahem* It seems to be right up there with flashing the firmware on the car engine. Yes, I know there are simple systems in things like boilers, but still. Rebooting the boiler. Bah.
So I have a cold. For the first time in ages. I'd forgotten how cruddy colds are. I slept awfully the night before last, snored like a pig and had a rotten sore throat yesterday because of it. Last night I kept waking up and finally just got up at 06:20 because I was very awake.
So, here I am, in my lovely Ikea bouncy chair, sipping tea, eating a toasted bagel and blowing my nose every 5 minutes. Bah. Still, the weather is nicer than the forecast said, but I wonder how long the clear skies will last.
So I fell asleep at 12:30 and woke up again at 17:00ish. I feel _so_ rough now. And garlicky after the huge bowl of couscous with stuff in it I just ate. *blarf* Hope I can sleep at a normal time tonight.
Sometimes my job _really_ sucks. Like when I get woken up at 06:00 on a Sunday to deal with a problem that turns out to be partly logical and partly thoroughly illogical. The logical part takes 10 minutes to fix, the illogical part... just over 3 hours. Still. It _is_ fixed and with no impact to anyone who isn't operational. And I learned some stuff about JBoss in the process.
Of course, now I can't get back to sleep and I was stupid and played games until silly o' clock last night then lay in bed afterwards until 03:30 because I couldn't get to sleep. *tired*
Mmm, really nice dinner at Belgo Centraal last night. They have a lobster promotion on and I remembered what the really nice passion fruit alcoholic thing I had a while back was. Yum. Good lobster, good steak, good beer and good genever.
OK, so someone else did the hand-holding on the phone with the customer during the cut over, but it is up there and looks mighty fine. Looking good for the football this evening. Ohyes.
Thankyou OfCom for slapping down Fox News over a presenter's personal comment section in a News programme, which claimed that BBC had displayed "a frothing-at-the-mouth" anti-American bias.
It's looking good. *fingers crossed* A lot of today's work for it has been insanely repetitive and involving _lots_ of very very similar files being created. I will be supremely pleased if it does launch tomorrow. Hopefully a rather large number of customers of the customer will be happy with it too.
Nice, gentle weekend in the sun, but no burning. Got a bunch of stuff done; little bit of tidying and suchlike. Barbecue in Battersea Park on Sunday. Not altogether looking forward to next week on call, what with continuing Euro 2004 and Wimbledon starting up. Hey ho.
I really am liking the current trend for epic historical and mythological stories retold in film. Gladiator, Lord of The Rings (all three of them) and Troy were great, Arthur and Alexander are coming up soon(ish). Good stuff. Great stories. And hopefully ones like Troy and LoTR will get kids interested in the classic literary works. Maybe. Oh, I can hope, can't I?
Me, now that we've had the Iliad (albeit very very very abridged), I'm hanging out for the Odyssey and the Aeneid (hm, maybe not so easy at all) to be made into films now.
Well, OK, not damned Google, but damned whoever bought the adwords that were associated with my previous entry. Not the kind of adverts I want on my site, thank you very much. So, now I going to talk about kittens and how cure they are and how entertaining it was watching cat B killing a moth yesterday that was flying around in my study. Cat B is normally the one I don't appreciate quite as much, but he was so sweet, jumping against the wall, batting the moth around a bit, then eating it. Moths crunch. Kittens like crunchy things. Especially ones they got to play with a bit first. Talking of cat toys... this looks fun.
OK, this political correctness shite is getting silly. Really silly.
Why is serving pork in the canteen insensitive to Muslim pupils? For crying out loud, where do you draw the line? No pork because of Muslim pupils, no beef because of Hindus, no meat at all in fact because of vegetarians. So, how many school canteens would be capable of serving enough variety of balanced vegetarian food that the meat-eating kids won't just go out to the local MacDonalds and get a burger and chips for lunch instead?
And what place does religion have in non-"church" schools anyway? None! It could be argued that only the Church of England has any place in schools/courts/public services in this country as it is not secular (yet). No. Religion has little place in schools beyond Religious Education lessons where children should be educated broadly, in my opinion, on the basics of the major world religions.
Bah... I run out of steam at this point (and need to go home).
Well, I'm well underway for my 4th 24x7 (re)launch this year. And it is going scarily well. Probably rather getting used to doing them now.
Oh, and *drool*
So I was up playing DAoC until Silly O'Clock on Friday night and got to bed at 03:30. Thing is, the sky was light at that time. I don't think it had even managed to get dark from the sunset before getting light from the sunrise. It was faintly surreal, given how tired I was.
I saw Harry Potter #3 yesterday. It was boringly average. Maybe Troy the week before was a bit too actionful by comparison. Troy was rather good; 65% of the film being fight scenes and Orlando Bloom gets to get on with his almost typecast archery. One thing that I didn't like about the film was Hector's wife, Andromache. She was _far_ too skinny. Brad Pitt made a fine Achilles, I must say. If you know the Iliad, you'll know the plot twists and be faintly pleased with the way various bits of the story (what happens to Achilles' for example) are handled.
My new Oyster card arrived in yesterday morning's post. That was damned good service, once I'd managed to get it reported as lost. Impressed; yes I am.
Well, not often do I blow my own trumpet (here anyway), but today marked the third (successful) 24x7 (re)launch I've implemented in 6 months. So ner. Oddly, this one was the most satisfying even though the first one, back in January, was the most "new toy" of them all.
Aaah, sometimes this job is satisfying in that the stuff I tend to do most is viewable by over 2 million people, On Their Televisions, which is _so_ different to the Internet. (The other stuff is actually a lot more - around 10 million or so on the other two digital platforms - but then I got "given" this platform when I started because nobody else wanted to do it. Hmph. I still do work on the other platforms, but this one is kinda my puppy in some people's minds.) I mean, pretty much anyone can get some kind of web page up for anyone with access to a PC with an Internet connection to see, but television is a different kettle of fish.
And I don't care if people think this is trivial or silly.
Aaaand the icing on the cake.... I just phoned the Oyster helpline to check the status of my replacement card and the card hadn't even been marked as lost. *wail* Well, it is now and there'll be a new one in the post which will hopefully get to me on Friday.
I lost my Oyster card over the weekend. Foolish me, I know. There is a nifty online system which allows for the reporting of lost or stolen cards and, my second mistake, I reported the wrong card from the drop-down list as lost. So, a day later, having realised my error, I reported the correct one as lost. In the mean time, I had to buy a ticket to get to work in the morning.
In fact, one ticket for the train to Wimbledon and another to get me to work by tube. After a bit of discussion with various people at work, I decided to get a 7 day travelcard to tide me over as it would save me 20p and a lot of hassle in the long run. OK, so I'd have to get a photo card as the travelcard would cover more than just zones 1 and 2.
Off to the station, armed with change for the photo booth. Photos procured and debit card in hand, I ask the ticket man for a photo card and 7 day travelcard for zones 1 to 4. Unfortunatley, he has only male photo cards, not female ones so asks me where I'm going. I told him my home station and he doesn't have a clue where it is, but knows it isn't LUL. So he asks me where my final tube station would be on the way there; which is Wimbledon. No LUL ticket office there, but they can issue me a BR photo card, so he tells me to sort it out there.
Having more than a tiny bit of clue about tickets and public transport, I asked the guy how I was supposed to get to Wimbledon with no ticket and he says he'd let me through the barriers here and I could sort it out at Wimbledon. "But, er, what about penalty fares?"; I asked. To which he replied that one cannot get penaltied on LUL any more. Er... riiiiight.
I decided this guy was not going to get me anywhere and to risk getting on the tube. Interchanging at Notting Hill was the obstacle. Quite frequently these days, there are Revenue Protection Inspectors (RPIs - ticket checkers) at the interchange/exit between the Central and District lines at Notting Hill Gate. And yes, they were there last night. Oh joy unbounded.
I explained to the guy what had happened and, given that I was supposed to be cooking dinner for someone and needed not to be pratted about at this point, said "I do not want to have to argue about this, please call White City ticket office to verify my story." At which point the guy merely waves over his supervisor and I have to explain again, including the "I'm not arguing" bit. The supervisor waves me over to the excess fares window to do my thing. Hoorah!
_But_
There is no man at the excess fares window. So, the guy manning the manual barrier radios for someone to assist. Who then argues with him as to the fact that I should be being dealt with by the RPIs and why didn't they just penalty me. To which he explains that the RPIs are the ones who have sodding well sent me. Two more radio calls later, someone deigns to come to the excess fares window, then wave me through the ticket barrier and make me wait at the back of the existing queue for tickets, having already taken my photo and debit card away from me. Argh!
Finally I get to the front of the queue and ask the guy for a photo card and 7-day travel card, zones 1 to 4. He then goes on about why didn't I get a ticket where I got on, like I'm some kind of moron, so I explain the lack of female photo cards at White City. He then asks what happened to my old one, so I explained how I'd lost my Oyster card. Just to make me feel even better, he then suggested that I'd been using my Oyster card to break into cars seeing as I'd come from White City.
So, I'd like to thank TfL for their total lack of decent training for the staff member at White City who doesn't know how the ticket and penalty fare system works and for the lack of customer service training for the rude bastard at Notting Hill Gate.
So there I was, in the middle of finishing my Epic Quest with my favourite warrior (heya Fende *wave*) and I went link dead. In other words, lost connection to the game server. Usually this is a temporary glitch and restarting the game will result in a successful reconnect.
But, it didn't. And I couldn't browse web pages... or resolve host names... even after setting new DNS servers... or... ping the DNS servers or, indeed, anything outside the router. So, I hit the router, thinking it might have been knackered, but it seemed fine. I appeared to have a new IP address so that might cause incoming issues resolving my host name, but not outgoing. Time to decommission the router ahead of schedule and get the WiFi thing into action. No joy there. But, ah, yes I remember that Blueyonder require the MAC address of the connecting PC to be declared, so I set the WiFi thing to clone the MAC address of the outgoing NIC in the, now defunct, router PC. No luck there either. Hm. Time to phone Blueyonder to ask them to add the MAC address of the WiFi router to my access list.
The outgoing message on the Blueyonder support line turned out to be "All customers in the London, Greater London and South East area may be experiencing problems connecting to the Internet. Also all customers may be experiencing problems with personal web pages, chat and message boards, game servers... this is due to a power outage in the Croydon area." Damn. So, in preperation for getting the connection back later, I held on to talk to a technician. Who then told me that "since the upgrade, you don't need to declare the connecting MAC address any more".
This morning, yay! It all works! So I had a quick trundle through DynDNS to add the new IP address and by this afternoon all should be cool. Fun. Or...?
The house is looking less vile after this weekend. Bathroom cleaned, a bit of tidying and a tiny bit of rationalisation done along with some hard hoovering. The blind in the lounge got pulled down by a stupid cat, but is back up again now. Oh and a I lost my Oyster card. Bah. Still, I've reported it lost so it'll be cancelled so that nobody else can use it and I'll get a new one in the post probably tomorrow.
Having been a bit mopey yesterday (I blame the weather), I'm feeling better today; contributing factors being the slightly nicer state of the house and the great dinner in the Loch Fyne Restaurant on Fulham Road on Saturday. Still need to get various bits of building and decorating work done, but it's starting to move along a bit.
This week is busy busy busy and there's things left to do like decomission the router PC in favour of the nice new WiFi/ethernet one. Less noise and less power consumption with that done. I need to get some shelves for the spare bedroom and sort out my books, archiving the young kiddies ones to the loft as there's no need for them to be taking up shelf space at the moment. And a storage unit thing for the back room downstairs.
