Older blog entries for Bleep (starting at number 70)

So, the final day before Dublin. Diary entries until Monday morning will be in the travel section of my WWW site. I've decided that matters of less mundane than normal deserve to be somewhere more interesting!

My PC decided to wake me up at 1am which was somewhat annoying. My pager decided to let me know the battery needed replacing at 5:45am and so when 7am arrived I was a little fraught and still tired. Traffic hell - arrived pissed off.

We finally sorted out the mail configuration today. This alone is an absolute God-send and means we are now very close to taking a major project live that we have been working on for a while. I am quite excited about this. Annoyed everyone by being in a "Friday" mood even though it's not.

Lunch had me posting letters, paying in Tax Rebates (unexpected), changing Pounds (sterling) into Irish Punts and finalising the details of the house insurance. More work.

Got some clothes on the way home, and junk food. Signed up with Thawte for a Freemail personal certificate so that I can start getting on with WOT.

Packing. Wierd - I've only just gotten back from being away!

I'm starting to dislike Mondays. Panic in the morning, stress in the afternoon, and the evenings tend to be too exhausted to do anything!

Still pissing about with Sendmail and virus checking software. Ho hum!

Inherited a Penguin Hell to organise :)

Tuesday

So, suddenly Dublin is the end of the week and I'm getting paniced. A nice chap from Dell came and sorted out my laptop and I spent most of the evening cleaning the kitchen, bedroom and sorting out paperwork.

Lots of OU work to get on with and no time to do it! Still haven't finished my first assignment and it's due in soon!

Wednesday

Mail configurations, long burning CD's and huge amounts of paperwork today. Not the most exciting day.

We did do slightly better at the pub quiz though (18/30) that's an improvement by one per week! Hurrah!

Still no OU work done. Dublin looms (need to sort stuff out tomorow) and lots and lots of reading to do.

7 potential penguin sponsors so far!

Chiropodist in the morning so that (admittedly quite nice) woman could attack my feet with a knife. Actually this wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined and my feet are happy feet now! Much kudos to woman with knife then!

Bit of frantic rushing around and getting the laptop ready before heading off to Bracknell. Arrived at Iain's in time to get some food and watch the rugby! Priorities! Scotland did not to so well really as you can see. Arse.

Some time later various others arrived and an entertaining evening was had by all. Some left at 2am the rest of us watched the much much much (much much much - can I emphasise this enough?) start of the Grand Prix season in the F1. It was an odd race... I was please to see Coulthard get some points but the death of a marshall rather tempered the result.

Drove home at 4:45am. Arrived home at 6am. Builders arrived to work on next door at 7:30. Bastards!

Sunday

Less to do today really. Lazed, shopped, visited parents. Discussed holiday plans for later in the year. Hopefully I'm going to learn to sail in the summer and then we're thinking of going away somewhere and doing some sailing... France was looking promising but now Jersey or Guernsey are also possible. A nice day.

Oh dear, I have been neglectful! Must catch up on the whole week!

Monday

Rather a non-descript day actually. Work was a fixing day but nothing exciting. Lots of code problems with sites held me up doing the development work that I wanted to do on network filesystems for log storage and the building of the private networks. This has annoyed me as I really wanted to get on with this but the impotus is passing now.

Did spend some time hassling Dell about arrival of the Laptop. How long does it take?

Lots of bad things going on in the news like Foot and Mouth disease spreading around the country and what can only be described as a disaster in UK farming (Bryce'll have something to say about that I'm sure).

Tuesday

OK, only one event today. Laptop finally arrived. Hurrah! Fiddled with it a lot to get it to a state where I could work with it and it had all the software I needed. Ace!

Wednesday/Thursday

Yet more boring days. They don't seem boring at the time, busy and things to do etc, but looking back on them I don't seem to have done much! Strange.

Friday

Sorted out insurance for trip to Dublin from these people. They employ lots of cute woman to work in their shops. I do so like it there.

The inherited the penguin issue. Fun, fun fun. Sadly the zoo is currently shut to avoid them getting foot and mouth disease.

Had a lovely weekend of not-doing much type activities. Other that the builders next door who decided they didn't want me to get much sleep that is!

Hmmm, what have I done, well lots of OU reading (but I'm going to be doing a lot more than this), walked D&J's new dog, planning next weekend in Bracknell and various other odds and sods... none of it was worthy of writing about - which was nice for me!

Wel the fog's cleared and now we have roadworks. I think someone is trying to tell me that I'm not going to get a break in the mornings!

The weekend approaches. Lots of RPM and security work to do but otherwise work is the same old stuff.

Pub quiz on Wednesday night was dismal. We did very badly.

More fog! How annoying. Still managed an impressive time to work (so I was early!)

More RPM stuff today, built several smaller pacakges in the goal of getting all of our standard installs built as RPMs. Most of the fun is in post ./configure pre make stuff. A multitude of other exciting events people deemed appropriate for me to deal with/fix/know about i.e. UPDATE users SET password=password("blah") forgotetting the all important WHERE user = "username" bit. Oops. And on a live server and all! How I'm supposed to determine the nationality of a user from an entry in a CLF format web-log is a mystery to me!

More OU stuff - finished module one! Read my first assignment (long, but easy) and left it there. Did more Dublin reading. Looking forward to it now!

Fog! Couldn't see a damned thing! Shame as it's the first day of half-term and I should be able to get to work in no time!

Spent most of the day doing RPM stuff. This is a continuation of what I was doing before. The goal is to build an RPM of our build20 (Apache+SSL+PHP+libmm). Some more work on the RPM code is needed but most of all it needs some more work on it's speed - it's currently running at 75 requests a second over 1 million hits... which is OK for a PentiumIII with 128Mb RAM - needs to get to 120 though.

Did lots of OU stuff and caught up on lots of things. I'd been waiting for the laptop to arrive from Dell but they seem to have problems delivering it. If I've not heard from them by 5pm on Wednesday with a definate date of delivery there will be HUGE problems.

Grrr. If you type in the details of my laptop on the Dell WWW tracking system you now get an error telling you they've found the order but can't tell me what state it's in. Grrr! This is getting annoying. Perhaps it means they've sent it. Apparently they'll let me know in 24 hrs - so the auto-responder on their support e-mail address says.

Managed to spend quite a while this morning reading Linux User who managed to scan my tag at Expo last year and have subsequently sent me a copy of their rag every month. It's an OK read I guess. Interestingly I notice they have a mailing list and it's hosted on zenII - what are the odds!

Cleaned up under the futon! Cleaned up the bed-side table. Discovered lots of books I had been intending to read and hadn't quite gotten around to reading. I shall be busy! Went shopping for food. Food bills are definately falling and I'm sure I'm not eating any less.

Read the household insurance documentation and sent the pertinent bits to Mr C to check over that he was happy with them. Booked Dubin at Bewleys.

A quiet evening reading Rebel Code I think! Have updated the front page of new WWW site - keeping the upcoming events bit current. Managed to mangle the design into my GnuPG key block page today - this is good as it means that's another sub-page done.

Today was a day for lounging. Lay in bed this morning listening to Home Truths on the radio. John Peel is quite superb! I was particularly taken this morning with the story about the homework... that sounds vary familiar to me!

Dragged Mr W down to the centre were we met up with Jess and went to the market. Caught up. Actually the market is quite strange and they sell a lot of crap there :) The penis candles were quite a sight though! Decided on a course of retail therapy that I can't really afford. Wandered off to Virgin Megastore where I bought Rafi's Revenge.

In Waterstones I engaged in a little bit more retail therapy. I now own a copy of Rebel Code. In preparation of the upcoming films I've bought a copy of Lord of the Rings - The fellowship of the Ring. I also bought a copy of The sciences good study guide. This is another of the OU books I need to read.

Set the desk up with the bed-side light for some extra light. Wonderful. Moved the ISDN hub and the phone onto the desk too. The only problem now is that I don't have the stereo sorted out :(

Found a wonderful site, Recycle More - very cool. I need to get going with this - we produce far far too much rubbish!

The laptop is still due on Wednesday. Grrr! It had better not slip any more.