Having installed all this shiny new stuff, of course I'm going to want to use it. So I stopped the forwarding to my GMail account and, er, well, how good the spam filtering is with GMail is thrown into sharp relief. I guess I'll have to install Spam Assassin or somesuch. More stuff to keep me busy. Yay!
OK, so this time I _have_ gone for the alphas of Horde and bunch of modules for it. And it is all quite shiny on my newly installed Debian box. Kronolith (the calendaring module) supports shared calendars now and I think it actually works. Which is nice.
Friday morning and guess what turns up in the post? My Oyster Gold Record Card. Rather good timing for getting an extension to Heathrow at lunchtime. Shame that Oyster don't train their staff properly. I really did feel sorry for the guy on Thursday, he was trying hard to help, but just didn't have the correct information to hand.
Saturday (while I was away at a wedding in Foreign), I got an email from the iTunes Music Store. I had asked if they would re-encode some tracks that I had cownloaded that had corruptions in them. They mailed me back apologising and saying I will be refunded for the whole album, though I'd said it was 4 of the 10 tracks that had problems. Yay. They reckon it'll take up to 2 weeks to get clean copies up on the store. I wonder if they'll remove the tracks in the mean time. Hmmm.
So, that was two good things. I'm hoping for a third now.
Apple announced a new format iPod a few days ago and I thought that meant they'd be out in the US in a month or so, to be followed by the UK later. But they're already shipping!
Of course, I'm not buying one because I already have an iPod and I don't use it as much as I shold for something that expensive. I will use it more when I travel to work by myself, though. Depending on job situations, I guess at least part of my morning journey will be by myself at some point in the next few months.
So I renewed my Oyster. 1-4 annual season ticket, which is a Gold Card and thus I am entitled to various discounts. Of course, my Gold Record Card has an expiry date of 20th July 2004. And they haven't sent me a replacement. Time to call the Oyster Helpline.
The poor dear who answered didn't know what to do. He suggested I use pre-pay. But, as I pointed out, that doesn't work on National Rail. Now, given that I renewed it online I'll, apparently, get a new record card in the post _in a couple of weeks_! What the hell am I supposed to do between now and then? And, er, in theory I shouldn't carry the record card with me. So, I should just be able to get the relevant ticket, with a discount, with just the Oyster card itself. But I can imagine that isn't how it will work in practice. National Rail ticket offices just don't have Oyster readers, so I'm screwed.
33% of today's objectives completed. After some fun and games with locking my account last night, I've successfully submitted my tax return online. 66% to go: sort out an appointment and get sorted for being on call tonight in a different location. That'll be rather a nice change, methinks.
Not the best night on call so far, I must say. Off to bed now.
It's been so long since I took any notice of the HDDs in the two PCs that I thought the two in my gaming/primary machine were two of the same and I could lump all the data onto one drive and hardware RAID (with the help of a new RAID controller). Hah. No. The twin drives are in the other PC and are 1/4 the capacity of one drive in the main one and 1/3 the capacity of the second. As in, the two in the main one are not the same size and the data wouldn't all fit onto the smaller of the two with any room for manoeuvre. So. Dammit. No RAIDing my primary box, and thus having some kind of backup of my mp3s. I wish iTMS had a method whereby you could re-download tracks you'd bought, but I guess that would be a DRM nightmare.
I can't even use tape backup because I have only a DDS3 and 18GB of music. That'd be 9 tapes and I have only 6 for my normal backups.
I've not made milkshake since... hm, I think since that dentist butchered my mouth 3 Christmasses ago. (And he has the cheek to ask me to go back for a checkup now, after he put me in casualty. Git.) Oh boy is a fresh strawberry and banana milkshake _nice_!
1 banana (sliced)
3 strawberries (chopped roughly)
1 dollop of firm yogurt/creme fraiche
about 6 ice cubes (crushed)
1 dessert spoon of sugar
Top up with milk to 500ml.
Bung it all in a jug and use a blender until it is smooth, thick and a bit frothy. Then drink it! It makes 2 good pils glasses-full of the stuff.
Yesterday. Well, it was. 10 hours in the office. Still. Needs must when the devil is spanking your arse, or something.
A week on call looms and not too horridly I think. Not a huge amount going on, mostly just the one application after tonight. Possible excitement on Tuesday evening, but I'll reserve judgement until afterwards.
I hate being tied by other people's work. I hate it when people take what one has done, twist it about until it is different enough that only they know how it works and they don't sodding-well document what they've done. I hate that the people one normally trusts to look at what they know (and I don't because I'm not a bloody developer) to get things working are all away. I am _so_ frustrated right now.
Up at 06:50, out on the 07:27 and in to work at 08:19. All for the Open Golf. Which, without wanting to curse anything, appears to be going fine. Now to make Proms visible to the cable companies so they can check it for tomorrow night.
I got woken up at 03:40 this morning by a cat mewling and sounding hurt at me. Usually, mewling means that they've brought me something like their toy mouse, or a real one, and want some attention. But this sounded a bit different, so I got up to take a look. Turned out I'd "forgotten" to feed them something other than nasty, cheap crunchies and their tiny, furry bellies were hollow with hunger. Bah. Emotional blackmailers. Needless to say I was soft, went downstairs and fed them expensive fat-bugger (so called because they're quite high in calorific value for the weight) crunchies.
My goodness aren't there some dedicated little puppies out there? 14 copies of the same viagra spam, all posted to different journal entries. Still, Movable Type 3 makes life so easy and it must be n00% faster for me to delete them than it is for the monkeys to post them.
Ex-cept I'm already on the latest version of Horde and one back from the latest of Imp. Hm. Boring.
(Woo! 100th post!)
The next project (home machine-wise) has to be another Horde/IMP upgrade. This time it will involve yer actual database work too, like a whole drop of the old database and creating a new one as I didn't get around to doing that last time (so the addressbook is a bit flaky at the moment). Woo!</mock excitement> But when to do it? Duh, I'm on call next week.
Business as usual. Busy busy. Too much to do and too little time.
Had my appraisal today which was... unexciting in the majority, with a couple of teeny-tiny surprises which were pleasantish in that they involve me doing some not totally mundane stuff aside from the usual work.
Well, three of us went to have a look and I got a photo of a car. And then it got far too crowded and given that I don't like crowds... well, we went to Gordon's for a drink then out for dinner. I'll upload my photo when I get home, but to be honest it isn't brilliant.
Off to see some in town. Probably a bad idea, what with the crowds.
Movable Type 3.0 is rather nicer, I must say. I've just upgraded and the support for Firefox is much better. Very happy I am. And the upgrade is _extremely_ easy. Just extract to your existing MT directory and run the relevant upgrade cgi.
I just couldn't verbalise my argument about this stupid anti-smacking campaign this morning. Thanks to rmc28 for articulating the point so well.
(Edit: oops, bad re-edit left a trailing slash on that URL, fixed now though. Thanks Rachel!)
It has oft been moaned about, by me, that people riding bikes on station platforms are really monumentally stupid. The response you often get is crude in the extreme, mixed in with "it's not hurting anyone" and "there's no law against it". While the latter is most definitely not true, here is why the former is also not true. So, kiddies, don't do it.
All my GMail invites are gone now.
Spent the morning installing CPAN shell (and all its infernal dependancies) and I'm ready to install Moveable Type when I've next got a geekery slot. All good, wholesome fun.
Now I need to update my documentation. Looks like a little search and replace is all that's in order.
I thought I'd upgrade apache underneath Horde. Then I thought I may as well do PHP at the same time. And, what the heck mod_ssl while I was there. Then I realised I need to recompile apache with IMAP for Horde and I don't have the c-client stuff for that lying around, so I'd need to at least make that. But the version of IMAP I'm using isn't available for download, so I need to upgrade that, too.
Let's see what else needs doing once I've done that because, to be honest, it is all going rather like a dream at the moment. And, in fact, finished in record time with the only waiting being for source download and compile time (it is only an old Ultra 5).
I have 2 invitations to GMail left. Mail me if you want an account. I'm kinda glad that Google are trying to crack down on people trying to make a fast buck by selling invitations.
So I was fiddling with the Firefox web developer plugin toolbar and found the accessibility verification tool. I thought my site might be a bit iffy in places, but having run the verifier over the journal parts, there was only one failure point, which I have now fixed. So, now it passes. I'm off to check the rest of the site now.
So, I woke up this morning absolutely 100% certain it was Saturday and feeling guilty that I'd forgotten to disable the radio/alarm thingy. But no, no such luck. Bah.
Still, I slept well and am still happy. Roll on Friday so I can hear about a job I'm interested in. I really need to get a bit of upgrading done on my Sun box at home at some point soon. About the only maintenance I've done recently is patching and minor tweaking to the backups.