Geocaching success

As I spent most of last night working I took an hour off this morning to catch up on my Japanese lessons. I’m on target to finish again now but it’s going to be pretty hard going.

Went for a run.

Finished work at a reasonable hour so decided to go out and have another bash at geocaching. I picked one which was about 1.5Km away. The problem was this little road called the M5 which was in the way, so ended up being 3.5Km away. It was up towards Hortham under a bridge. It was nice to actually find one. The phone GPS is a bit crap, the compass just spins round and round so you have to find it using distance alone. I may treat myself to a GPS when I’m in Japan. Anyway it was a nice evening and got home just as it was getting dark. Corked the rest of the Pinot and stored it to mature. Watched some telly. Early start tomorrow as Sasha is off to playgroup.

Something pretty to look at

So back to doing dull work most of the day. Just cracked on, it kept me pretty busy and it wasn’t exactly taxing. Just required an awful lot of typing.

Walked the dog, weather wasn’t bad for once. More work. Then off to Body Combat. To my surprise there was quite a nubile blonde young chap joining the class for the first time. He stood next to me right at the front and was bloody useless. Mind you I’ve been doing combat longer than he probably has had pubic hair. Needs more weights work, no definition, no coordination and was unable to string a combo of more than one move together without fucking it up royally. Mind you it gave great amusement to the bulk of class, which mainly consists of overweight housewives. Still he had nice hair, hope he comes again and the ‘ladies who do lunch’ brigade didn’t scare him off.

Came back and did more work. Ate salad.

Geocaching

Woke up earlier than I’d planned, let the dog out for a pee. Decided it was too early for breakfast so went back to sleep. Then woke up later than I’d planned. Never mind. Ate breakfast, drank coffee and read the paper.

Then it was back on to DIY, was overly in the mood today but cracked on. Glued in the alarm cables and put filler over the top. The painted all the walls with acid, this was to neutralise the industrial paint stripper. This actually took less time than I thought it would. So had lunch and then put some filler over one wall. There’s an awful lot of filler ahead. I need to get a smaller palette knife though to do the coving with. I think it’ll all be fine, just a lot to go.

I decided I wanted to get out for a couple of hours, so wanted to try something new. As the weather was still a little bit shit I decided that naked sky diving would have to wait another week, so thought I’d give geocaching a go. This is where you are given gps coordinates of a location which contains a ‘cache’. This is usually some kind of box which contains a log book, you fill it in with your geocache number. Basically it gives a target for a walk. I picked the closest two, the first one was only 1.5Km away but it still took me about an hour to find the location. I use an app on the phone which homes in on it. The actual cache wasn’t to be found, but a lot of these things tend to get nicked, so no surprises. I then went off and found another one. I must admit it was quite good phone and got me to walk to a couple of new places. I’ll try and do a few more over the coming months, see if I can actually find the boxes.

Came back and bottled the Pinot. Managed to get 24 bottles out of it, and now drinking the dregs.

The Vigor is holding the line steady, but I see the actual network throughput has stopped, so you won’t read this until the network is reset. It’s set-up to restart ppp at 4AM, so hopefully that will kick it off, if not I’ll try and use remote access to restart it.

If you want a cheap inuendo, I’ll give you one

This morning started how I quite like to start Saturday mornings, with sleep. It was then followed by a bit more sleep, breakfast, coffee, vitamins and Fluoxetine.

Got up and walked the dog. There was a dog running about that wasn’t on a lead, Sasha got a bit over excited and started chasing it and basically walked over it. I pulled her back and apologised that she just wanted to play. The women moaned ‘oh really, I’ll her on a lead then she they won’t’. Jesus, there’s someone who needs HRT, miserable bitch. Mind you I can hardly complain about being moody. My mood swings more often than the Plimsoll bridge. Further down the path we met a lovely Welsh women with I think it was a ‘chow chow’. Medium sized dog with the most amazing afro. It was also apparently a moody shit, so would have got on fine with me. We were talking for about ten minutes.

Came back, had lunch. Went and met bum boy at Tesco’s and did the shopping. Also went to Pet’s R’Us and got Sasha a new bed for her box, we also got her a basket style one which she will probably eat. We also stocked up on Pig trotters, Jamie has some odd eating habits.

I walked into town, failed to buy anything, it’s cheaper that way. Visited mother, she’s still alive. Updated her virus software. Came back home and did the accounts. Pizza dough is currently in the bread maker. Jamie is currently in the bath, which is where I want to be. I would join him but Archimedes was pretty spot on and we’d only need an egg-cup of water. Mind you last time we were in the bath together he kept moaning about every time I peed in it.

More DIY tomorrow, only 1059 Sunday’s left.

Better living through chemistry

This morning I wasn’t woken by a courier.

Spent all day working on this data stuff again. I just knuckled down and got on with it, I don’t really like how it looks, but never mind.

Walked the dog.

Courier arrived. It was the Draytek back from repair, they’ve swapped it out. I must admit, gold star to Draytek that was bloody quick service.

Went to the doctors. He failed to join me in a suicide pact, so prescribed more Prozac instead.

Did more work. Went to BodyPump. Did more work.

Then looked on the server syslog and notice some iNode block errors. After further investigation it appears that the backup drive which it archives to every night is shagged. So it no longer has a backup. I’ve now gone into panic mode about it. I’m just doing a backup run now and I’ll copy it over to another machine. Nothing has been lost, but potentially could have been nasty.

Thirty five quid per fucking pony

Rudely awaken this morning by yet another courier. This time a box for Jamie. It contained four ponies. To be exact four ‘My Little Pony’s’. They were shipped from the US. Looking at the invoice, the shipping costs and the import duty they cost thirty five quid each. That’s a lot for a pony.

Spent the morning discussing a database task with a work colleague. It took about two hours to explain something that turns out to be quite simple, yet is being implemented in probably the most complex way I can think of. It’s not my department so I’m just getting on with it without complaining, I’m sure there are lots of other reasons why it’s being done this particular way and I’m just being dense.

Tried to get a doctors appointment, rang at 8:45, apparently all the appointments were gone for the day. I should have said, “Well I’ll just fucking die then.”, I didn’t. I said I’d call back tomorrow.

Went for a run. Did some more Japanese. Only eleven working days left until we go.

It’s torture porn night, Twilight Breaking Dawn Pt.1 tonight, bring on those abs.

May be it’s time to see the doctor again

So woke up at 6:30 an took the dog to daycare. I was then woken again at 8 delivering something that’s probably worth it’s weight in gold, although I don’t have time to play with it at the moment.

The project I was working on has been canned, no great surprise there as it was getting beyond the concept stage and would need quite a lot of work by a lot of people to take it further and there just isn’t the resources to do that at the moment. Yes it’s disappointing, but that’s the way of the industry. I’ve spent two months working on it and it comes to nothing, I’m just slightly pissed off about how I found out about it. I’m now working on something for a couple of weeks that I’m not to thrilled about, but again it’s the way it goes. Only a couple of weeks before we go away anyway.

Didn’t actually get a huge amount of work done as it was all reading stuff and data builds and lots of prep. Still not finished yet.

It has put me into severe mood swings again though, which was one thing I was trying to avoid. I’ve started visiting dark places which I really don’t want to go to. I think it’s time to visit the doctors again before it’s not just a brief visit but a long term permanent commitment.

On the good side I transferred the Pinot and had a glass in the bath. It’s bloody good, but needs to mature a bit first.

Hopefully tomorrow will be brighter.

My latest TripAdvisor reviews have been published. “We will rock you”  “Inamo”

So shite customer services from BroadBandBuyer and currently a gold star for Draytek

Still got no reply from BroadBandBuyer.com regarding the Vigor 120. So on the of chance I sent a mail to Draytek tech support. Oddly within an hour I had a form to fill in for an RMA. So after a quick scan of the dispatch note I sent it off and within another hour I had the RMA and the return instructions. I’ll post it off tomorrow and see how well they do from there.

Work wise, still working on some audio stuff. All sounds very nice. Did new builds, including a new iOS one. It looks like I’ll be doing something else for a while now until I come back from Japan. It was coming almost to a natural end anyway without some more design input.

Went for a run. Then came back and took the dog to the vet for her kennel cough booster. She was fairly good, but must be said she’s not really a vet fan.

Did some more work, then got on to my next Japanese lesson. Didn’t get through all of this one, feeling a bit tired.

Dog off to daycare in the morning, then probably finish off the last nights Japanese lesson. Need to go to the post office as well to sent that modem off.

If I don’t like you’re restaurant I’ll tell you….via TripAdvisor

It’s a Monday. I hate Monday’s. Today I was working on audio. Actually found a bug in my Wav codec which has been there forever, but was quite obvious after some digging. The task was to produce some quite complex mixed streams. It’s one of those things where I knew how to do it, but just needed to work out the best way to do it. Anyway, got it all working and it’s sounding great.

Walked the dog. It was a nice day for once.

Went to BodyCombat. Came back, did some more audio work. Then did my next Japanese lesson. I need to go back and review a bit as I’m not remembering all the vocabulary.

Sat down. Ate salad. Did a couple of TripAdvisor reviews, I’ll add links to them when they are published.

The great gig in the sky

So I was sitting down reading the paper after just eating a sausage roll and a boiled egg. Pink Floyd were playing on Radio2. It was actually ‘Us and them’, but they are both off the same album, ‘Dark side of the moon’. Pink Floyd are worth getting into, not to the strange extent of Jeff Minter (look it up), who thought Floyd were on a massive drug fuelled mission to extend everyone’s minds. When Roger Waters wrote ‘Money’ on the same record he wasn’t thinking about doing a charity concept album. To prove the point the woman whaling her head off on ‘The great gig in the sky’ got paid about £30 as a session singer and apparently hasn’t seen a penny since.

Anyway, the song was going on for the usual ‘Floydal’ four hours and I got thinking about death. Now if I take after my dad I have exactly twenty-four years left. Okay he lasted sixty-five years and six months, but those last six months he was drowning in his own bile, so we’ll forget about those. I was thinking actually about death itself, let’s not forget, you want to approach it properly. After all it’s one of those acts like birth, losing your virginity and having sex with a chainsaw, you only get to do it once, so you may as well do a good job of it. James Dean did a good job of it, certain Tory politicians found dead inside a cupboard with a gag-ball in their mouths wearing woman’s tights probably didn’t. Not sure how I’d like to go…but probably like everything else in my life it will turn out to be rather dull and tedious.

It’s tempting to do one of those ‘bucket lists’, that’s where you do a list of things you want to do before you die. Unfortunately mine would be fairly dull. It would consist of things like ‘Invite Adam Rickitt round for a candle lit dinner. Then discuss his political views and why he wanted to become a Tory politician. Before stretching his hole wider than the Severn Barrage’.

So that’s twenty-four years, or 1248 weekends. Let’s exclude about 15% of those for pointless dinner parties and holidays, that’s 1060 weekends. Or to put it another way, 1060 Sunday’s. Finishing the dining room is going to be touch and go….