Gran was right, eating cheese before bed will give you bad dreams

I whispered to the guy at the table, that all was going ahead as planned, then I was called over to the reception desk in the large dinning hall. They said I had a delivery, it was a tall glass like dome containing something. I walked back but then turned around again to the reception desk. I said, “Is it okay if I store this in the cellar due to the earthquakes?”. They said it was fine. I walked passed the table and whispered, “It’s okay I’ll follow the girls out somehow.” I made it to the stairway and started descending the numerous staircases. I made it to the ground floor where there was a small but busy haberdashery shop, the final staircase led down to the cellar. It was obstructed by various boxes of bottles, I managed to climb over them all and found myself in a tunnel in the cellar. I walked further on and there in front of me was a wall full of electronics, I could faintly hear the sound of a tape recorder playing the same brain washing message that had gotten to all of us. I picked up a tea trolley and with one mighty swoop I snapped off all the circuit boards hanging out of the wall. I then pulled a load of wiring looms away from it. In the background I could hear people coming down to the cellar. I quickly moved to the center of the room and found an air-conditioning unit above me. I removed the cover and started pulling out the foam inside. I then dived up into the foam and found myself in the floor above.

I woke up and took the dog to daycare. I went back to sleep.

We’d just come back from holiday and Jamie was saying that he fancied a trip to New York and that he wasn’t going to take me. I said if he did that I’d divorce him. Andy and Lisa turned up, they sat on the couch while Jamie fannies about. He then said that, “we are going out now, sorry you could come as well but there isn’t enough room in the car.” I asked where they were going, he replies, “We are going to see my old friend Dave Vitty do a show at Rage”. I start to seeth, Andy and Lisa look uncomfortable. They leave the house. We are all in a restaurant together, Jamie starts moaning about money, I say that I want nine pounds for Sasha’s doggy daycare and a fiver for the petrol. He hands me a load of change. He also says he wants to move to London, I say no, unless he starts earning more than me. We are back at the house, he then complains that tickets to New York are more expensive than he thought as the payment bounced.

I woke up. Time for work.

Oddly a letter arrived for Jamie from the bank, he’d probably gone over his overdraft limit again. I said he shouldn’t have tried to buy that ticket to New York, he looked confused.

Today was the last day of conference material. Got through it all, tomorrow I start on the practical stuff.

Finished up and then went geocaching again. Found another four. Still stuck on the one by the Hilton hotel. Think I’ve got good clues for another two. Also just managed to solve a picture puzzle, I thought it was an anagram, but it was actually coordinates. Now programmed into the GPS, so ready to go tomorrow. Yes, over bloody Almondsbury way again.

Three more caches found

Got up and did yet more research work. Made quite a few decisions on how I’m going to tackle the job, some will no doubt be wrong, but I have to start somewhere.

Went for a run as it’s Jamie’s dog day. Jamie finished work early, so oddly we had a shag at about five thirty, it was quite fun a vigorous, then I went back to work and watched a presentation on anti-alaising techniques.

Finished off and then trotted out with my little GPS. Ended up in Almondsbury again (they all seem to be that way) and finally found one called ‘green fingers’ which was hidden in a bush, this is my second attempt at this one. It was actually hidden on the ground in a model of a hand, very clever. I then walked further over towards the quarry and found two more there, there’s a third one of the other side of the railway line but light was fading. Came back, ate salad and watched telly. Early kick off tomorrow with Sasha going to daycare.

New GPS and a new job title

Carried on working on what I was working on last week, which wasn’t really working on anything but going through a lot of documentation and conference notes.

Walked the dog, nice weather again today.

My new GPS arrived. Went to the gym and did combat, great fun, nice to be back into it, was a very hot studio though.

Came back and got my GPS out, signed up to a premium account on geocaching.com. Downloaded a free map and found an old SD card to put it on. Also set it up for paperless caching, so I can send geocaches straight to the device. Went for a little jaunt and failed to find two caches, so many well spent, but I haven’t really worked out how to use it all properly yet. Need to play around with it a lot more.

Ate salad. Watched an episode of ‘Endeavour’ which to be honest I think is the best one out of Morse and Lewis.

Spoke to the boss earlier, had a short discussion. I’m now a certain console platform lead. Which is good as I’ve spent the last week learning about it. I’m still spending a day a week working on mobile stuff to keep my hand in. Now due to fun NDA’s that’s the first time and probably the last time I’ll ever mention anything about it.

Left a bit, keep your head down ‘Today’s special value is coming on’

So today started how I like to start a Sunday, late. No action was had, we have the sex drive of a fridge. I got up, let the dog out for a pee then made breakfast, which consisted of very strong coffee and Bran Flakes. Then got out of bed eventually, picked up the dog shit then had lunch. Now since I’ve had this bit of a cough I thought that sanding plaster probably wasn’t the greatest idea so decided to do a bit more geocaching instead. Off I trotted to Almondsbury, searched for three, found two. Ended up looking up under a bridge for ages and couldn’t find that one, but did find another one cleverly hidden inside a log. Good fun.

Walked back rather briskly as we were going to a BBQ at Sarah’s. Usual drinking and hilarity took place. Her boys are getting very vulgar, I like this. There was much talk of vagina’s and how certain people may be getting theirs serviced. Anyway, nice end to the week, think I’ll finish it off now with a nice bath then bed.

So I dreamt about a wiring fire this time

So this morning I didn’t get out of bed perhaps when I should of and ended up nodding off again. So I then dreamt about a small fire in a cable cupboard in Jamie’s room. This is more than likely to happen, unlike the £450 parking ticket.

Just when the cold was just about over I’ve now started coughing which is rather annoying.

Walked the dog. Had lunch then did the shopping. Popped out this afternoon on a quest to get some crickets for the lizards. On the 3rd shop managed to find some, very odd shop in Henleaze, all mirrored glass and no customers. Visited mother, listened to her ankle problems and admired her deep hole. Came back and did the accounts, drank a bottle of Carling Zest, it’s an interesting taste. Ordered my GPS unit for Geocaching, should be here Monday. Bought the new Daft Punk album, will give it a blast later.

I had a dream about getting a parking ticket

So I was dreaming…..for some reason I was at a family gathering at a castle. I’d parked the car at a pay and display car park at the bottom of a hill. I was at the castle then had a horrible feeling that I’d failed to buy a ticket. So I walked back down to the car. Sure enough, on the windscreen was a parking ticket for £450. I was rather annoyed so tried to purchase a ticket, but the machine wouldn’t take my money as it was gone past 6PM when then charging stopped. I then woke up.

Spent the day going through conference material. Again, can’t really say any more than that.

Rang up GoDaddy.com about my SSL certificates expiring and asked if I can just change to a 3 year 5 domain one. Apart from the American on the end of the phone continuously to me as ‘you guys’ it was all pretty smooth. It’s now all on one certificate, so I have that on mannmansion, then I added my other blog (and it’s www equivalent) and the pfSense firewall. All is good and now expires 2016, I cocked up a little bit as the original certs don’t expire until the end of July, but considering I only paid a tenner each for them anyway and now got a 40% discount I’m not going to kick up a fuss. Install appears to have gone fine with all Apache sites working fine and mail still appears to be sending (actually I better test that). I need to sort courier out which is the odd one as that uses different certificates based on IP address, I guess I can remove that bit now and just point it to the one. That’ll be a job for another day though. Yes, mail is sending.

Walked the dog. It was very nice lunchtime. She was very well behaved with a couple of other dogs we came across.

Right, I’m done for the day then. Bath and wine.

I watched conference videos, lots of conference videos

I’m not going to say what they were of, but it was fairly hard going. It’s a case of ‘learn this’, it’s my job, so I did. Simple as.

Still suffering a bit of a cold, I blame Jamie for that, so had to take a few breaks.

New switch arrived. Replaced in place of old one, works perfect. Can’t find where the hell I got the original one from, so will probably just offer it to Zen and see if they can make use of it.

Hopefully perk up tomorrow.

REIN the revenge

So this morning started far too early with taking the dog to daycare. Then it started again at about 10AM. DLM hadn’t kicked in on the Zen line and it was still shit, although email was getting through. I decided to do a bit more investigation. I set a netbook up with a Dreytek in the lounge, then chopped the external cable and mounted a master socket and filter through the existing wall cable. Magically it synced at over 7mbps. Okay, so dodgy cable, bad master socket or filter I thought. So reconnected it all back upstairs, back to 4mbps. Changed the master socket and then the filter, still the same. I was about to try the alternate pair in the cable but before that I decided just to power stuff off around it in case it made a difference. Killing the phones and the work PC made no difference. Disconnecting the PABX, again nothing. Then I killed the filter side of the UPS, magically the sync jumped right up. So it was a case of eliminating each plug one at a time. It turned out to be the Netgear 16 port switch. As soon as I disconnected it the sync shot up, as soon as it was connected it lost sync. It apparently has a life time warranty but it’s years old and the receipt has been filed long ago. I’ve ordered a new one off Amazon prime and it will be here tomorrow. That’s goodbye to a hundred quid for the sake of a hardware failure. That’s the second switch that has failed in the past couple of years. Still at least that’s got to the bottom of it, the line is now stable at around 7mbps. I’m sure the margin will increase again to 9db, but it should settle at 6mbps.

The rest of the day I did a bit of systems work I was asked to do. Then finally got round to playing with my new toy. It’s very good.

I now have enough happy pills to last me until the end of November

Started off this morning by calling the doctors as I ran out of pills last week. Managed to get an appointment first thing. I arrived and was subjected to the usual bought of screaming and unruly kids. Thankfully appointment was only ten minutes late. Doctor I think has come to the conclusion that he’ll keep me on a repeat for six months with enough for two months at a time so I’m not tempted to O.D. Then waited about half hour in the chemist while they chatted about what they got up to over the weekend.

Got home, fired up work computer, took meds, got spaced out for a couple of hours. I’m now working on something interesting, actually not working as I spent most of the day downloading docs and SDK’s. I decided to speak to Zen about the falling line stats. after going through all the usual hoops they did a dslam reset which has now buggered it up completely on a 3db margin and syncing at 4mbps. Which is all fine in theory except it’s clocking up about a thousand CRC’s a second. No matter how many times I resynced DLM didn’t want to kick in so now looks shafted. This means I’ll need to run a new master from the incoming cable and test it there to make sure the new wiring isn’t up the swanny, then when it isn’t I need to log a call with Zen who can log a call with OpenReach to go and hit the exchange frame with a large hammer. A real pain in the ass, but needs to be done.

Didn’t venture out today as it rained constantly, so caught up on quite a lot of telly. Trying to get an early night as I’m still getting tired. Taking dog to daycare at 6:30.

Fun over, back to sanding

Got up very late, to be honest I think it was the last of the jet-lag, as last night was very weird being asleep at eleven and then wide awake again at midnight. No sexual activity this morning, although Jamie did have the most amazing pair of baggy pants on. Went he went downstairs to get breakfast he came back into the bedroom carrying two bowls with them almost round his knees.

Anyway we got up, I had lunch. He buggered off to his anaemic beanpole blue friend’s, still there now, obviously stocked up on tissues. I decided that the dinning room wasn’t going to sand itself and the weather was a bit crap so got on with it. Did about an hour then took a break to walk the dog. Came back and did another few hours. As it’s fairly quiet I put the TV on in the background and caught up with a couple of bits. The coving along the front room wall is now all sanded and so is the arch. I’ve had to add a few bits of filler but one more going over should complete it.

Took the Dyson out to the garage and blasted it out with the compressor. Also washed the filters.

Done three more Tripadvisor reviews, still a lot more to come. Right as it’s a bank holiday I think I’ll have bath and a glass of wine before I have salad and then get ready for the joys of work tomorrow. At least it’s a short week I guess.