Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

OK, I’m not, but that’s the only proper lyric I can find for a Friday, so there!

After som brisk working this morning I dashed home (only 20 minutes late) to wait in for the gas man. He came just after 2pm. So, I’m now sitting at my machine at home with windows displaying stuff at work, doing work things. This is dead useful.

Still, there’s far less social activity at home.. as in none at all. Not that there’s THAT much at work, but at least I do get to meet and talk to real people.

Anyway, plans for the weekend.. none.
Social events.. none.
Housework.. plenty (if I can force myself to bother).

At least the weather’s currently not so bad.

(If you’re racking your brains on that lyric, it’s The Cure, “It’s Friday I’m in Love.”)

Well, this morning I woke up early. I won;t say bright and early as itwas
still dark outside and my manner wasn’t bright either. In fact I drifted
into wakefulness only realising I was awake after some time.

I don;t know why, but it seems that playing with little Christopher and his
train set has rekindled my interest in model railways which has been domant
for nigh on 20 years now. And it was a subject about which I had been dreaming,
namely, building a garden railway in my back garden and all the complexities
of the engineering involved.

As I lay there I could do nothing more than think of the way of building
such a thing based upon biulding my own pre-cast concrete viaduct sections
and the difficulties of making the foundations for the bases so that they
were perfectly level and to a hieght tolerance of under a millimetre.

Anyway, this is all dreaming as (a) it would cost a huge amount of money
just to buy the tools necessary and hire the digger, (b) I’d have to totally
redo my back garden, and (c) I’m not sure I have the skills to do the foundations
to the accuracy necessary. Oh, and then there’s the concrete cast moulds
to design and build.. which would require Norm Abram’s level of wood working
tools. In total, I’d guess the up-front tooling costs would be in the region
of around £2-3000 (bench saw, mitre box, jigsaw etc.) plus the hire
of a mini digger, surveying gear, laser levels plus the matterials. And this
is merely for the civil engineering to create the viaduct and embankment!
(There’s still the shed to enclose the electrical workings and to store the
rolling stock, the track bases, the wiring, track, scenic matterials and
control systems to buy after that before the first train can run.) And after
that I’d have to start on getting the garden into a good state again.

I’d imagine, all in, to build the permanent way and get a running railway
would probably cost in the region of £5-7000 before adding rolling
stock. Way out of my spending league.

OK, the only decent Wednesday song lyric I can find.. from “She’s Leaving Home” probably by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Of cause, I wasn’t up at 5am. Indeed, I overslept this morning slightly and
what a morning to oversleep! I discovered that the main server was down before
leaving home and tried to cycle as fast as i could into work. however, my
legs weren’t really very good this morning, the wind was against me and so
were the majority of the traffic lights. When I did get to the server I found
it was partly my fault. The server had panic’d (the traceback said it was
during a ping) and rebooted but I’d typoed in /etc/vfstab putting a 2 where
there should have been a 3 so it sat there asking for the root password so
it could be helped out.

Anyway, the rest of the morning’s not been so bad.

Today has been.. erm, busy.

I hit the ground running the morning finishing off the install of a lecturer’s laptop with both Linux & XP. Well, that took until 11am.

Following tea, it was down to the machine room to help out a colleague installing CDROMs in the DVD jukebox.

Lunch was a bit late, even later ‘cos I had to cover in the porch of a church half-way to the baguette shop while the heavens opened and a great flood ensued. The return trip was slightly wet but ok, especially as I met nice little Veronica Chang at the traffic lights near the church and she offered me half her umbrella to shade under for the rest of the journey back. (And no, Grim & Alec, she’s not someone I should ask out! :-))

After lunch was gobbled down it was off in the dept. escort to Sinoco to get a replacement motherboard for our librarian’s PC. (It’s suffered a capacitor failure and she was rather desparate as most library things now require a computer to do.) As soon as I got back it was time to throw the M/B into the machine and get it working.

I’ve not just caught up with my e-mail and replaced the paper roll int the A0 printer.. now it’s time for tea!

(PS. I wonder if I can find a song title/lyric containing Wednesday for tomorrw’s update to keep the theme going.)

Well, yes, it’s Monday!

Work’s been full of firefighting little things and telling the dept. admin
about my jury service. She took it all in her stride and said, “I guess we’d
better give you some time off then.” 🙂

Yesterday was a resonably successful day in that I got rid of an old Sun SPARCstation 4 down the tip and got the car washed.

Well, earlier I wrote that I was going to see the Harry Potter film in High Wycombe as it was probably the safest bet. So, I get to the cinema complex with plenty of time to spare and try to buy a ticket… no-go! The showing was full.

I now have one more chance to see the film tonight, 19:45 at the Magdalen Road cinema in Oxford. I’ve checked the web to see if there are tickets available and there are at the moment. So, I think I’ll leave home at 7pm, which means I should be at the cinema by about 25 past. If I don’t get in then I’m going to give up and wait until it comes on the telly in three years time.

Yopu know I said I’d say if anything interesting happened in my life. Well, be careful for what you wish for. This morning through the letter box flopped a letter calling me up for jury service on the 3rd March.

Well, that’s 2 weeks out of my life I have to give to the state and I’m not begrudging it that time. After all, it’s part of the contract between myself and society, so I’m going to take it as being an honour to serve.

I bet I’m going to annoy the hell out of all the other jurers who will be in those juries as I’m a stickler for fairness, searching all lines of possibilities given the data provided to make as sure as I can that I make the “correct” decision.

Anyway, on to other things. Last night was quite fun. After happy hour John, Kate, Paul (John’s friend) and myself went out for an italian meal and thence to a pub where John was to go salsa dancing. However, due to finanical logistics (there was an entrance fee) things didn’t turn out quite the way planned so Paul and myself went off to meet Sam at an out of the way pub in the city centre. I got home again at about midnight in the end.

This afternoon I’m (hopefully) finally going to get to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I’m not going to take any chances and go to the UCI multiplex at High Wycombe for the 4pm showing. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong this time.

Let’s
see.. I went to a Sun technology seminar thingy yesterday but can’t tell
you about it ‘cos of the NDA I signed. All I can say is that the Sun engineers
have a mexican food fixation.

Oh yes, and why do freebie t-shirts only come in extra large when the majority
of the population are in the range Small to Large? I had to give wawy the
freebie Sun t-shirt as I’m in the small size category and hence it would
be useless to me other than if I wanted it as a tent.

My other gripe is due to a letter I got from my morgage lender telling me
of their unilateral change to the conditions of my house insurance. The amended
terms rule out any loss due to any chemical or biological contamination by
anyone who did it deliberately or the government destroying things incase
they’re contaminated. OK.. so it’s more weazel words to make sure that they
never have to pay out, I can understand that. (Insurance is there for the
insurance company to make money, not for them to actually pay out for a loss.)
What amused me, however, was a sentence which was a quick summary of the
new rules which had appended a phrase stating that, of course, none of these
things were actually covered before anyway. Erm.. so, they’re amending the
rules to exclude something which was already excluded… so why did they
need the extra wording? Erm.. looks like someone’s trying to bullsh*t out
of responsibility, just incase.

Seeing as it’s a Friday, I might as well detail what I think my weekend plans
are going to be. Saturday includes getting a hair cut, going shopping and
hopefully getting to see the Harry Potter film. Sunday involves getting the
car washed. This is the total degree of planning so far.

If life gets at all interesting I’ll remember to tell you.

Last
night I went and saw the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for a second time
with a bunch of friends. Before this, however, we went to a glorified pub
in Gloucester Green called the Goose to have food.

Well, let’s say I’ll not be going to that pub for food again. The “Smothered
Chicken” was expensive for a smallish dish of tomato sauce containing two
rashers of bacon and two of the the smallest bits of chicken you’ve ever
seen with a bit of melted cheese on the top. It was very much cuisine a la
microwave.

Anyway, back to the main feature of the night, The Two Towers. On a second
viewing, trying to get the book out of my mind, it was a decent film though
the subject matter could have been done a whole lot better in a few ways.
eg. The Helm’s Deep battle could have been shortened to allow more of the
events leading up to it and the desparate rear-guard action to be shown.
Also, a lot of the Arwen parts were unnecessary at this point and detracted
from the flow of the film. (This is ignoring the plainly BAD idea of getting
elves to show up at Helm’s Deep as the elves still don’t trust or support
men at this point in any form other than support of the Rangers in the northern
lands. Oh, and where is Fanghorn forest?)

Unfortunately, I had sitting next to me a bunch of japanese teenagers who
chatted in japanese throughout the film and were generally annoying.

Well, after the film I got home at about 11:20pm but didn’t feel like sleeping
so I watched the episode of Star Trek: Enterprise I’d set my video to watch
for me earlier in the evening. It was a character based episode, ok as something
to watch but nothing worth watching again.

Once I got to bed at about a quarter past midnight I lay awake for a while,
still not sleepy. I’m not sure what time I got to sleep in the end.

So, now it’s morning. I’m in work. I feel sleepy. I think that says it all, really.