Broad Street Centre

You are in the middle of a very wide road with car parking spaces to the east, a large, mustard coloured limestone college to the north and small shops to the south. A woman keeps shouting in your ear about walking tours in a sing-song voice so loud that it would be able to battle a roaring jet engine.

Exits: South, East, West.

You see:

OK.
E
You go East.

Broad Street East

You stand outside a distinguished old book shop with a tiny pub nestled within its clutches. Across the rapidly narrowing street you see a rotund building and a rather strange georgian facade with steps leading up to its entrance.

Exits: South, East, West.

You see:

OK.
S
You go South.

Museum of the History of Science

You are in a tall room containing many glass cases stuffed with old, brass instruments.

Exits: North, Up, Down.

You see: astrolade, astrolade, astrolade, microscope, astrolade

OK.

It seems that there’s something blocking access to Livejournal from my home machine. I’m currently typing this (slowly) using a remotely running Firefox at work displaying over an ssh tunnel.

The traceroute stops pretty soon after Zen, e.g.

% traceroute -I www.livejournal.com
traceroute to www.livejournal.com (204.9.177.18), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 router (10.0.0.253) 0.397 ms 0.376 ms 0.372 ms
2 gandhi-dsl1.wh.zen.net.uk (62.3.83.5) 24.763 ms 23.616 ms 24.914 ms
3 erazmus-ge-0-0-1-3.wh.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.197) 24.446 ms 36.281 ms 23.645 ms
4 lorenz-so-0-1-0-0.te.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.45) 30.122 ms 35.757 ms 31.886 ms
5 195.66.226.167 (195.66.226.167) 32.550 ms 31.993 ms 31.517 ms
6 * *

I wonder if someone’s put Zen into an IP block list somewhere.

At work planning is under way to design a new building to house the department and it’s brewing up to be a disaster of managerial proportions. Here’s the history so far, names changed to protect the guilty:

Just over a year ago it was announced that the department wasn’t going to have the current buildings refurbished but instead that we would be moving into a new building during the summer of 2008. This building would be on the site of an existing 1960s concrete, glass and steel monstrosity on South Parks Road.

The University’s Estates Directorate (previously known as the University Surveyors but obviously this wasn’t a grand enough title), the Head of Disaster and a committee of academics (one of which expressed their surprise at being chosen because they knew nothing about buildings) chose the architect after a brief competition. From the start of the whole process I’d talked to the Head of Disaster and told him that it was imperative that I talked to the architects at the very beginning of the project as architects generally think about 2 generations of computing behind the current one and that there have already been a number of complete disasters with computing rooms in the University in the last couple of years because of this. I was assured that I’d be asked as soon as any firm plans were being drawn up.

I’ve been making this view clear now every few weeks or so and asking in meetings for updates on the state of play.

On Monday, Prof. Brian Roadblock, the chairman of the IT Committee, asked me to find the floor area we currently have in our machine room “because the architects haven’t given us enough floor area in the initial design.” This sent the “Red Alert” lights and klaxons screaming in my head. As well as the current floor area I gave him the ball park figures for floor loading, heat output and minimum air through-put per rack for any cluster system which may happen within the near future and stated that it would be important that the architects know this for structural reasons.

In the IT Committee meeting yesterday Prof. Brian Roadblock, who is the only conduit for information exchange between myself and the architects it turns out, dismissed all this as “things the architects don’t need to know” and “I don’t want to get bogged down in detail at the moment” he also stated that “the architects will tell us what they need to know.”

Basically, the whole project is already stuffed. The technical people are either out of the loop or their recommendations will be corrupted by chinese whispers. It’s already about 6 months too late to avert a complete white elephant.

Friday, after a hard day at work working on lots of red tape I drove up to Bolton to visit Em and Jerry, finally arriving at 9:30pm.

Saturday started with breakfast, crumpets with honey, yum.. and mayhem from Laura and Amy out on the patio in the sunshine. Soon it was time to go off to Lyme House estate so after a quick packing of a picnic it was in the car and a zoom along M and A roads. And amazingly it was still sunny by the time we reached the estate.

It was out with the picnic.. which was wonderfully organised by Em, and a fun time was had by all.

After the food we climbed the steps up to the house and had the full tour. Unfortunately, by the time we got out to view the gardens it had clouded over. Fun was still had with the girls and Jerry rolling down the slopes before the rain started and it was time to go home.

It was a pleasant evening nattering and watching Em get ready for organising the church’s toddler group before bedtime.

Sunday started with getting the girls ready to go to Twinkles and the kids’ group at church. After dropping Em and the girls off it was back to the house where Jerry began the preparations for his hallmark roast chicken.

I don’t know where the rest of the day went, but after lunch, which, most importantly, included custard (though Laura prefered sprinkles to custard!!!) it was almost time to drive home.

And so, after leaving at 3:10pm, I got home exactly 3 hours later feeling shattered.

It was a lovely weekend and I want to public thank Em and Jerry (and of course Laura and Amy) for their hospitality.

This weekend I travelled up to Liverpool to attend Lindsey (and her fiancee’s) combined stag and hen party.

The drive up there was a bit of a pain as the M6 from junction 14 to 19 was, well, intermittent is probably the best word to use. Sometimes it was a road at others it was merely a car park. Anyway, I finally arrived at about 3pm on Saturday.

It was a fun evening, mostly due to Lindsey’s friend Janey who made a great effort with fun and games, though nothing debauched. We all finally got to bed by 3am.

Sunday morning started around 9am with a trip down to a park for “whiskey and doughnuts” where we got thoroughly chilled by the brisk breeze.

Following more natter in the basement and a visit to a local Subway sandwich shop it was time to come home again.

Today I’ve been recovering from all the driving and the lack of sleep. I managed to make it through the morning, driving to Banbury to buy some replacement ADSL line filters and visiting Sainsbury’s, but this afternoon instead of attacking the garden I just crashed on my bed and slept for a couple of hours straight.

Anyway, I think I’ll start attacking the garden tomorrow evening instead and have an early night tonight.

The night before last I decided to go for the free upgrade Zen Internet were offering to go from their 512Kb/s ADSL to the new “Max” product which is a variable speed ADSL depending upon what your line is capable. There is a 20GB per month traffic cap but I’m never going to reach that.

It turns out that this was actually surprisingly quick and painless. After filling out the web form that was that. I got a number of e-mails from Zen stating that it’d take 5-7 days, then at the end of yesterday that the regrade would happen today between 8am and midnight. This morning I find that I’m up and running.

Just to show how bad my line is though, the maximum stable speed my ADSL modem will sync at for the downstream is 2.8Mb/s with a signal to noise ratio margin of a mere 4dB! I think you can see why I’ll never get to that 20GB/month downloa

I’ve now extracted all 104 photos from my camera that I took over the holiday and put them on my gallery.
A picture cometh.

Seeing as the weather this morning was fine-ish with very light winds I decided to do an experiment. I tried driving at the speed limit or as close as the road conditions allowed from Mullion back to Oxford but changing gear early and being as light on the throttle as possible to see what fuel effciency I could get out of my 5 year old SAAB 93 2 litre light pressure turbo car.

So, after journeying for 5.5 hours (with a half hour stop) I finally got home with an average fuel consumption of 44.9mph. Not bad for a performance car.. and even with a very light foot on the throttle I was still out accelerating some cars from some junctions.

Anyway, that’s the end of my Easter holiday. I’ve nearly unpacked, I have dinner to get and then it’s not too long until it’s time for bed and thence back to work tomorrow. :-/

Yes, it’s again the final day of a holiday down in Cornwall.

Dispite the weather forecasters saying that it’s going to be calm, sunny and warm it’s windy, cool and with watery sunshine through the milky blue hazy sky. Still, it did give me an opportunity to take my 1:25000 OS map and try to follow some footpaths.

Erm, ok, trying to follow marked paths and failing was a better description. The first path/bridle path I tried was so torn up by horses’ hooves and puddle riddlen that it would be impassible without wellies. The second footpath I tried to find wasn’t marked. I then walked around on the road to where the path should come out and found a sign (woo-hoo!), followed it and found that the “footpath” actually followed the bed of a stream. Hmmm. I tried yet another footpath with a road sign.. for the first 200 yards it was fine, and then it entered another farm’s land and it disappeared. On one side of the cornish hedge was a set of steps going up but on the other side they had gone. Add to this walls or fences across the path and you get the picture. After that I gave up and walked back.

I did manage to give my Dad the opportunity to get out of the house on his own for a little walk earlier in the day by keeping an eye on my Mum for him. There is absolutely no way he can do so normally as my Mum needs supervision constantly in case she get confused or hurts herself. My trips down here are definitely a great respite for my Dad.

Not an exciting day at all really, just cold and grey.

Nothing to see, move along. Move along.