Continuing the day’s quiz of the week…

Take the What High School
Stereotype Are You? quiz, by Angel.

The
Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) are having problems with the
network firewall between us and the outside world and have been doing so
since Saturday afternoon.

this has meant lots of problems for people
trying to access Bullet and lots of problems for me trying to access patches
and things for software. Grrrrr.

At least the weather’s nice.. And
so are the nice young ladies in skimpy summer dresses out on the lawn outside
the department… it’s nice out there! *grin*

Sorry. 🙂

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Well, it’s nearly time for holidays.

Solar mumblings and stellar events

I almost forgot about Sunday, which is easier than you might think.

Now, what did I do?

Continue reading →

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Saturday night was “interesting.”

The BBQ was good, the company very pleasant and rapidly getting drunk. Which wasn’t really a problem.
Continue reading →

I won’t bother with lists of not doing much since my last proper posting but I will bring you up to date on a few things.

Firstly,
i took my car to the SAAB dealer this morning.. they test drove the car (which,
unsurprisingly started working FAR better the morning I took it to the doctor)
and then took it around the back. The result, a change of spark plugs later,
costing 15 quid ‘cos they didn’t bother charging for installation, and the
car has it’s woosh back.

Apparently, SAABs, unlike any other car,
don’t have a pre-set firing order of their cylinders. When you start the
engine, the engine management system fires all the spark plugs, monitors
the voltage drop over them and then figures out which cylinder fired and
hence what should happen next. Apparently this is a neat trick, but requires
that the spark plugs be working properly. This is why I was getting a slight
misfire upon engine starting and possibly why I was getting such awful performance,
as the engine management system was making sure the engine didn’t get damaged
if there were a fault with a leaky valve or some other fault.

Secondly, I got my hair cut..

Finally,
I was about to travel back to Oxford to go to Sinoco computers to pick up
an LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive so that I can give my old CD-ROM to my dad as part
of an upgrade to his system. (I’m donating to him the case, motherboard,
PIII 500Mhz CPU, memory and CD-ROM but he doesn’t know this yet.) However,
passing Dixons in Witney on the way back to the car after my hair cut I noticed
that they had on sale the very same drive I was going to buy from Sinoco’s
but £15 cheaper and this was the full retail boxed version rather than the
OEM version.. So I dodged in there and bought it instead,

On the whole, a decent day’s events so far.

This
evening I’m off to a BBQ at a friend’s place in Oxford, so I will probably
wash the car this afternoon after doing the weekly shop.

PS.

I had a nice long chat with the head of the maintenance at Oxford SAAB about various things, including the fact that all the technology put into the new Vauxhall/Opel Vectra (You know, New Vectra, New Rules advert) is actually taken directly from the SAAB stuff developed for the old 9-3 and 9-5. The new petrol engines in the GM range are all SAAB derivatives also. Was it GM who bought the SAAB car division or the other way around?

I’ve been so busy at work this week it’s been a total blur. I can’t place what I’ve done when.

I do know that I managed to get out and have a drink with one of the postgrads who has handed in his thesis on Tuesday, but only for an hour or so.

I s’pose I’d better think about going and doing the washing/washing up and clearing up in a minute. What an exciting life I lead, eh? 🙂

I have had some weird dreams this week though. I can’t remember the details so much but they all seem to be set in either the village I grew up in (Houghton Conquest, mid Bedfordshire) or the county town (Bedford). It seems that mentally I never left there even if I did physically 20 years ago. The night before last included walking along the High Street of the village along with a number of people who are postgrads in the department I work. Last nights included catching a bus from the Bedford bus station after buying things in some shops there. All very strange.

At least the dreams aren’t disturbing.

After
finishing up the picture gallery stuff on Saturday (which I’ve since redone
and added a few more pictures, more of that later…) I went home and failed
to become hungry, so didn’t have anything to eat. The rest of the evening
was spent getting bored by the telly before getting an early night.

Sunday started well.. I slept in until about 11:30am. 🙂

After lunch and the weekly phone chat with my parents I was
going to wash the car and mow the lawn^H^H^H^Hgrass but I just felt too hemmed
in by the house and garden and so decided that I needed to find a nice place
to go play with my camera.

I first thought of going up to White Horse
Hill, but thought that as there was rain due and it was quite a distance
away that this wouldn’t be wise. Similarly, for meteological reasons, walking
the bit of The Ridgeway near Didcot was out. Then I thought.. hey, I’ve not
been to the Didcot Railway Centre since about 1981, let’s go there.

Anyway,
so I toddled up there in my car (which I think is having turbo problems yet
again as there’s absolutely no boost I can determine). I parked int he long
stay car park as instructed and then gumped at the cost.. £3.50! It was a
good thing, therefore, that all the ticket machines were out of action. 🙂
The second shock was the entrance charge, £6.50 for adults and £4.50 for
children, and I can’t pretend to be the latter any more. Still, I’d come
this far, so I duely paid up.

It was a pleasant afternoon wandering about the railway centre taking photos, which you can see on my Experiments photographic page.
Somehow, the place seemed to have gone down hill from when I last visited.
There seemed to be fewer coaches, fewer locomotives etc.

Anyway, today
is Monday and the start of another week. Other than a BBQ to go to on Saturday
evening, I have no plans.. but at least the job work load isn’t quite as
high as last week’s.

I think I’ll take my car down to the SAAB dealer
on Saturday morning for them to check out the turbo and possibly go into
Witney and get my hair cut then as well.

So, what am I doing here sitting at my desk at work?

Well, I’m certainly not working, that’s for sure.

In
fact I’m attempting to create a gallery of pitcures on a web page and it’s
far more convenient to transport the pictures here on a ZIP disk than spend
days uploading them via the modem. It’s also far simpler to play with the
images and things locally than over a slow modem link.

I’m not using
the Gallery PHP script things ‘cos our web server won’t run it (it needs
the rewrite module and we have this disabled and we don’t allow user CGI
scripting for security reasons. So, I’m using the KDE 3.0 thumbnail stuff
and then re-writing the page produced by that.

You can have a look at the results here and here.

Anyway, what’s been happening this week?

Well,
I’ve been very busy witht he department opendays, Wednesday was the teachers
openday and thursday & friday were the student ones. It would have helped
if the whole design and installation hadn’t happened on tuesday afternoon,
so I had to stay ’til 8pm to get the machiens moved, in place, reconfigured
etc. ready for the wednesday morning.

Wednesday evening was spent
at the departmental not-the-undergraduate-annual-dinner, which isn’t actually
annual yet as this was the first one.. quite fun.

The rest of the week has been a bit of a blur due to lack of sleep from tuesday wednesday etc. Oh well.

Anyway, enjoy the photos.. all made using my new camera, of course.