I’ve made an appointment to see the dentist.. 2pm Friday.

I was surprised how quickly I could get an appointment seeing that the last time it took about 2 months prebooking.

I’ve now got WEP encryption working with the WiFi stuff.

Of course, WEP stands for “Wireless Encryption Protocol.” However, as lots of people know, the “W” should really stand for “Wowful” or “Weak” as it’s so easily broken.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get 128bit encryption working.

This afternoon I have been replacing my house network.

The original was a thin ethernet (coax) backbone with a single 3Com mini-hub acting as a media converter sitting in my front room with a couple of long cat 5 drop cables trailing around the edge of the room to get to my big machine and the place I usually use my laptop.

The new network is based upon a Netlink WiFi Router/Switch sitting in my spare room connected directly to my two SPARCstations and my main machine with a long cable trailing downstairs to the big machine in the living room. My laptop now has a Belkin WiFi PCMCIA card.

As for the WiFi card and Linux is concerned.. I plugged in the card, switched on the machine, it booted, if configured and it worked.. I was dead impressed with Mandrake 9.0’s support.. Though it does seem to be using the old Wavelan driver rather than the newer one.

The total cost of the hardware, including the cables was £222. The prices at PC World (other than for the cables) were surprisingly as good as I could get on the net.

All I need now is ADSL and an ADSL ethernet modem. 😉

The party was at John, Katie and Sam’s house as it was John’s party.

It was a fun evening, I got to talk to lots of nice people, mostly women, as it turns out.

One thing did come to light which surprised me. It’s all revolved around
John and Katie talking about going to see the Rocky Horror Show in Oxford
and costumes to be worn. In the conversation there were three of us males
and six females and I was rather taken aback by the ideas for costumes the
women were putting forward and how daring the men targetted would have to
be and how daring they would like to be also. Most of the costumes suggested
either had kinky underwear on full display, which is understandable for Rocky
Horror, or involved dangerous or skimpy clothing with no underwear at all.

Call me sheltered, but I did find it a little shocking.

My sense of being a little sheltered was even more brought to light when
i bumped into Katie on the way home last night. She told me that she’d just
bought herself a new dress for the Dept. Christmas party as she’d worn all
her other party dresses in previous parties. She said it was “very small,
very tight, black and glittery.” My reply was, “Well I guess you’re going
to have to be very careful about what you wear underneath it.” to which her
reply was, “No, I won’t wear anything beneath it, it’s too small and tight.
It should hold all my bits in place well enough.” I was a little taken aback
by this.

Is it very common for women to forsake underwear just as that their clothes look better?

If so, then expect me to be a little shocked more often in future.

Let’s see, what’s happened?

Work-wise, the new DVD jukes boxes have been installed, the new colour printers
arrived and have been installed, I’ve been running around like a headless
chicken trying to keep all the juggling jobs in the air at the same time.

Otherwise, my parents arrived last Thursday, left Monday morning. I had a
very pleasant weekend. Went to a birthday party on Saturday evening and had
a fun time socialising.

Monday night I just couldn’t get to sleep ’til 3am. It’s a pitty it was cloudy
as otherwise I could have made use of the time watching the Loenid meteors.

Yesterday afternoon during the afternoon tea I got some hot tea on on of
my wisdom teeth and it started hurting. I thought it was merely heat sensitivity.
However, within half an hour the whole of the gum on the left side of my
mouth, both top and bottom, became inflamed and painful. This has continued
since then along with extreme temperature sensitivity of all the teath on
that sid eof the mouth since then. This kept me awake most of the night dispite
painkillers and lots of toothbrushing and mouthwashing. Either I’ve managed
to get a very fast acting infection or I’ve triggered some sort of allergic
reaction? I don’t know what it is, I just know it’s very painful.

Well, my 4 DVD Extended edition of the Fellowship of the Ring arrived in the post this morning. I had to hide behind my front door when the postman called as I had to dash out of bed and didn’t want to be had up for indecent exposure.

Anyway, although I’ll not have time to watch it this evening, it should make very good entertainment tomorrow evening after my parents arrive. They didn’t get to see the film in the cinema, so my Dolby 5.1 system & big widescreen telly should give them a small taste of the experience.

*bounce*

Work’s
still on the busy side and it’s not being helped by outside suppliers who
want to install things starting at 4pm on a Monday afternoon on a day when
you’re hoping to go meet some friends for a social event. It also doesn’t
help whenSun’s sunsolve portal won’t authorise a login account for contrct
customers when given our contract code.

Other than this, a bad attack of sinusitis over the weekend when i wanted
to be happily socialising and my bike’s gear lever mechanism breaking on
the way home last night, things are fine.

Saturday afternoon and evening was spent with one set of friends in Reigate
watching videos, chilling out and watching other people’s fireworks. it was
good fun until the sinusitis hit half-way through the evening. With the help
of some paracetamol and careful driving, I managed to get home in one piece.
Sunday was a bit of a wash-out due to the pain and the drousiness the sinusitis
usally causes. I did manage to dismantle my coffee table and pack it waya.
Now my living room is less cluttered, though I don’t now have anywhere to
dump my cycle helmet etc. when I get home from work.

Last night, after I managed to get rid of the suppliers at 7:30pm, I sped
off to meet the friends I’d mentioned earlier, as it was Paul’s birthday,
a mere 24 he was. Anyway, after a rather nice lamb passanda and some good
comapny I was ready to cycle home. It was on the way home that something
went twang in the bike’s gear changer.. it felt like it was possibly a casting
breaking.. well that’s another 50 quid out the door then as you can only
buy these things in sets.

Anyway, highlights for the week now are, my parents arriving on Thursday
and staying ’til Monday morning. The 4 DVD Extended Edition of The Lord of
the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is released today and is on pre-order,
so that should hopefully arrive soon.

onwards and upwards, as they say…

Work is still busy. Trying to get all the components for the DVD jukeboxes to arrive and aarange the installation is proving a pain.

My brain is still on BST, as I keep waking up at 06:30 instead of 07:30

No news on the medical tests front. My insides have clamed a little and changed
the annoying feeling from one place to another totally different one. It
think it got bored.

This weekend is at least partly busy with a visit to one of the BTG gang to make merry and watch videos. Sunday is the rest day.

Monday evening is likely to be a posisble problem with the people doing the
RAID array installation arriving at 4pm and the possiblility of them not
leaving until after I’d like to be helping someone celebrate their birthday
with a curry. Oh well!

Well, what have I done recently..

On the whole, not a great deal.

Other than the annoying abdominal horidness, I’m still trying to get my body
clock into some sort of state where I can sleep properly. Currently it’s
totally all over the place so I’m not getting any really decent sleep.

The highlight of the whole week, therefore, has been washing my car yesterday.
That shows the depths of social life I’ve come to. I DID attempt to go see
some fireworks of Saturday evening, but the weather scuppered that plan.

Also, for the last few days I’ve had annoying sinusitis which just won’t go away.

I just want to be able to have a really good night’s sleep and wake up with some energy.

I was awake most of the nigth with tummy troubles.

I went to see the doctor.. She proded me, she bled me (took a blood sample) and read my stools (asked for 3 stool samples).

She thinks the problem I’m having is something she can’t diagnose by finding out what it is, just by finding out what it isn’t.

It’s all very medievil.