Thankfully, my tummy upset stopped plaguing me by the time of the dinner at Le Petite Blanc last night.
I had a fun time with good food. (I was glad I chose items from the A La Carté menu though as the portions on the set menu were a bit on the small side.)
This morning I’m feeling really tired. I think I shall go and get a machine coffee now to wake myself up.
Last
night, the night before the social dinner event I’m going to tonight at Le
Petite Blanc for which I’ve already paid over £30 I get a stomach bug.
I was awake ’til about 4:30am feeling as if I was blowing up like a balloon and feeling every peristaltic action. Wonderful!
So, today I’m feeling shattered, my abdomen still feels like a balloon, I’m
very slightly nausious and I keep getting hot flushes. Not exactly the best
way to be feeling before going to a restaurant with nightlife following it.
Sod’s law, isn’t it?
Well, what’s happened in the last week?
Well, the Grand Prix was ok, I s’pose.
My bike didn’t get its chain guard even though it has arrived and does look as if it will fit. The next attempt will be Wednesday.
The appointment to see a bootleg verson of “The Core” on thrusday didn’t happen.
Friday afternoon was the department BBQ. Well, I say department but it was really only set up by the postgrads who run the Friday “Happy Hour.” It was based at St.Edmund (Teddy) Hall boathouse on the river. It was a lovely warm and sunny day with enough of a breeze to make it very pleasant. The food was iffy but the company was good. On the whole it was a good afternoon. When I got home I realised that I’d got a little toasted in the sunshine.
Today I finally managed to wash my car and then give it a good waxing. It’s now looking nice and shiny.. well, it was until it started raining.
Over the last couple of days my big PC has been attacking me. I’ve just installed a couple of new fans and a more beefy power supply. Unfortunately, during my experiments trying to determine what the best way of cooling the case would be I managed to get one fan to slice into my left little finger knuckle and the case side slid through my hand and sliced into the side of my right-middle finger. I dunno how it did that as that part of the case isn’t really even sharp.
This afternoon at about 4pm I got a phone call from work. A pipe had burst on the top floor of the building almost directly above our main computer rooms. Let’s say that it has proved that Macintoshes are not as waterproof as their namesake coats. There is a rather soggy iMac which I think is probably drowned. Thankfully, no water went into the machine room. Still, the A0 printer which students were using to prepare for tomorrow’s mini-conference within the department is our of action as the room its in has no power. I can see some panicing happening.
So, what exciting things have I been up to since my last update?
Well, there’s been a little bit of moral support for 3rd years who were awaiting their results. I’ve done the annual department photograph. I’ve been to the pub on Friday night.
Other than this, I stuffed parts into my work machine (euclid) yesterday so that it now has ha;f a gig of memory and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. Both the memory and the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive were left-over parts from one of the research groups.
In the afternoon, after doing my normal shopping and getting an optical output cap for the DVD player, I popped off to the UCI High Wycombe cinema to see X-Men 2 (or as it should be titled, X2). It wasn’t such a bad film, better than the first. OK, it wasn’t a classic but it was fun.
I did want to cut the grass and wash the car today, but it’s a bit too hot for that. So, I’ve been reading and trying to get further in Unreal II.
I’m now about to watch the grand prix. I wonder if it’ll be interesting.
Properly,
I think I should start this entry by saying what I did at the tail end of
last week. Namely, a bit of shopping on Thursday evening (including buying
The Animatrix DVD) followed by Buffy and angel. Friday evening was spent
partly at happy hour and partly packing for Saturday’s journey to Liverpool…
Which brings us to Saturday morning. It was a 6:30am start. This is, of course,
far too early to start a Saturday. Half way through showering I hear a knock
on my front door. it was Tom (xencat) who had turned up rather earlier than
I’d expected, so I settled him down in front of the TV with the HiFi set
to full surround sound and stuff the Animatrix on the DVD while I went back
upstairs and finished getting ready.
We left the house at about 7:30, trundled up to Tescos to get goodies for
the barbecue later in the day and discussed bicycles. From there is was a
quick garage stop to give my car a breakfast of Super Unleaded before heading
off to Liverpool.
The journey up wasn’t too bad. Not that much traffic and no hold-ups to really
meantion. We stopped off north of Birmingham for a comfort break and to grab
some not very fast food in the Burger King before toddling off again. We
finally made Lindsey’s house at about 11:30.
Most of the afternoon was spent either trying desparately to get their barbecues
to make any heat and cooking. Still, the company was nice. After returning
from a little amble around a local park I made some chocolate stuffed bananas
on the BBQ and all seemed to enjoy them even though they weren’t very hot.
The evening was spent in a local pub with some mor eof Lindsey’s friends.
Unfortunately, Lindsey got a headache and most of us were far too tired to
stay late or stay up and talk, so it was a pretty early night in the end,
and i didn’t need the pajamas either. Unfortunately, I had drunk rather too
much cola, so most of the night was spent running to the loo, so I didn’t
get a great deal of sleep.
Sunday dawned.. or rather it squidged, as it was a bit wet. By midday, Steph
and Mel had left (after replacing a flat tyre) so Lindsey, Tom and myself
went off into Liverpool to shop. Typically, as we came out of the car park,
the heavens opened. Thankfully, I had my big Saab umbrella, so only Lindsey’s
shoulder and the bottoms of my trouser legs actually got wet.
After some lunch and Tom having a massive spending spree in HMV (hey, that
rhymes!) we drove back to Lindsey’s place, we dropped her off and then I
drove home.
Having got home at about 5:30pm I collapsed in an arm chair and failed to move all night, well other than to go to bed.
Today, I have no IQ whatsoever. i think I should have stayed in bed.
This morning I woke up bright and early to the wailful treep of one of my smoke alarms. It was 5:30am and there was a power cut. Oh loverly!
Once I’d removed the failing battery and called Southern Electric I wandered back to bed but couldn’t really get back to sleep. Not only could I not dose properly but at 6:40 the power came on briefly waking me from the little sleep I was getting.
It wasn’t until an hour later that the power finally came back on and I could go around powering up all the computers and reseting the clocks again.
Well, this lunchtime I attempted to get all the things necessary for the weekend. Namely, pajamas (as wacky boxers, silk or not, aren’t generally available :-)) and a present for Lindsey.
Well, on the pajamas front I managed to get some in Debenhams. But, I failed to find something nice for Lindsey although I spent about an hour scouring Oxford and even getting a bit whiffy from testing perfumes. So, I settled on a £20 HMV voucher.
When I got home I tried on the new pajamas… I think Debenham’s idea of small is strange. OK, the bottoms are about the right size around the waist but are about 3 or four inches too long. The top is almost big enough to envelope two of me. Oh, and I think I may have to find a safety pin to make sure the opening at the front of the trousers stays closed.
I went to the dentist this afternoon. It took about 40 minutes to prepare the broken tooth for a new crown (to be fitted in a fortnight) and involved needles (yuck!) and copious amounts of drilling. At least that’s over, and the jabs are wearing off. I can feel all my face again but not all the muscles are working yet.
Anyway, other happenings included consolidating 4 PCs in the machine room so that they use only one set of keyboard, mouse and monitor, saving a lot of space and allowing more machines to be put in there. Those Belkin 4 port KVM switches seem to work well.
I’m looking forward to next weekend. Saturday morning I’m off up to Liverpool with Tom (xencat) to celebrate Lindsey’s birthday. Apparently, the plan for the day is going to be BBQ with kids followed by pub and then a slumber party in Lindsey’s bedroom.
The last bit sounds a little unusual, especially as Lindesy’s informed me that I should get some outrageous pajamas or boxer shorts. Hey-ho!
Thank goodness my car has airconditioning. It got up to 30C (mid-high 80’s F) around here today and even with the air being recirculated, the car’s aircon was having trouble getting down to 19C.
As described in my previous entry, most of my day was spent exchanging DVDs and getting my hair cut. I spent most of the afternoon and evening, however, sitting on my sofa with a 12″ desktop fan (which I picked up for £15 in Woolworths today) next to me trying to keep cool. At least today seemed less humid than yesterday.
I’m hoping that with the help of the fan, tonight I will get more sleep than last night. I didn’t manage to get any rest until gone half one when the temperature got down to a comfortable value.
I hate really hot, humid weather.
Well, I went to Richer Sounds this morning carrying the DVD player I got last week.
Anyway, the upshot was that after a little persuasion they took the old player back, especially when I told them about the experience I had when I first hooked up the machine last Saturday and needed to put the HiFi’s volume onto full to get any sound out of it at all. And he couldn’t understand why Shrek wouldn’t work either as it does on their demo machine.
So, I then ask the saleman that I’m interested in the Toshiba SD-520E and then asked if there were any other machines of a similar price which mat be better. He suggested the Cambridge Audio DVD75 as it does Progressive scan in both PAL and NTSC, unlike the Toshiba which only does it in NTSC mode. I ask for a demonstration of the unit and found it to be a decent machine. I paid my extra £50 and walked out the door with the new machine.
It wasn’t until about 1pm that I got home after getting my hair cut and everything. As soon as I got in I took the player out of the box and attempted to set it up. Things started to seem a little wrong when I started getting shocks from the unit after I’m plugged it in. I was getting tingly sensations on my fingers where they were brushing the HiFi’s metal case. I then tried turning the unit on and nothing happened. At this point I got out my multimetre and found that the case of the player was live with 121 volts AC. Hmm..
Back went the DVD to Richer Sounds. At first they didn’t believe me saying that it must have been static. Finally, the manager came across and told them to DOA the machine on safety grounds. So, they brought me another machine.
This time I wasn’t going to leave the shop without the machine being tested, so off to the viewing room I went, the salesman took the player out the box, plugged it in… nothing. So they brought another… nothing. Oops.. a duff batch.
At this point I asked if I could have the demo machine as that obviously worked. They were happy with that. So, I now have a nice new working machine. Though I will have to pop in to get the cover for the optical out port as that seems to hve been remoted and not put back on.
So far, I’m very pleased with it. The picture is sharp with very little banding. It plays all my DVD’s, is branded for all the standards. It shows JPEG pictures and on top of all that, the sound output is gorgeous! CD’s sound better than from the HiFi’s own CD player, DVD have rich sound too. The only thing it doesn’t do is control the widescreen mode on the telly so I have to tell the telly to switch to 16:9. I think that’s a pretty minor failing.
On the whole, if you’re looking for a £200 DVD player with progressive scan, JPEG, DVD-Audio, MP3 etc. playback and Dolby Digital decoder you can’t really go far wrong this player.. assuming you can buy one that works. Oh, and the remote is nifty.. it’s wafer thin, is powered by a coin battery and the buttons glow in the dark. 🙂