An O.K. weekend. Saturday was mostly taken up with a bit of shopping. Mostly in Virgin Megastore and HMV, where I bought 8 DVDs and the EMI “101 80s Hits” 5 CD compilation. (Not bad set of tracks, only a few duff ones, good value though as it’s only EMI artists a bit patchy.)

Sunday, well that’s a bit of house cleaning, tidying before, in the afternoon driving up to the White Horse Hill near Uffington for a lovely walk along the ridgeway. The binoculars were useful for a bit of bird watching (no, I don’t mean young ladies nobby & Grim) and saw a hovering kestrel and a lark singing away before gliding (O.K. more parachuting) down. Oh and I had a nice 99 cornet as well. All in all a lovely afternoon.

What have I done? It seems that I’ve triggered an invasion of Facebook by the Bullet and Junk crowd.

It’s all very Web 2.0. *ick* Alec should be proud.. though I doubt he’ll be joining in as he’s not written it himself. 🙂

For those who have created the bridgehead I’ve created a Bullet/Junk group so that we can continue the good work of Bullet and not write anything on its discussion board for long periods of time.

Yes, I was a sceptic about the whole social site thing but now that I’ve joined Facebook and have two circles of (real-life) friends joined up to it I have found that it’s become a good way of keeping in touch with people I’d catch up with a lot less often.

Facebook seems to be the academic/graduate version of MySpace. All I’ve done really is post a few photographs of the Tromso trip and a wedding attended and set up an RSS feed from here. Pretty straight forward and you can restrict as much or as little of the information as you wish.

So, have I been having a fun fortnight?

Not really.

The bank holiday weekend was spent holding the hand of our new mail system at work as I migrated everything over the Friday before (as the migration had been postponed for a week). I did manage to use the £50 John Lewis gift voucher the bloke who took my 380Z gave me and buy some nice, compact 10×25 binoculars.

Last week at work was taken up fixing teething problems.

I did have some fun, however. At the pub quiz last week a television film (or should that be video) crew turned up to film my team as Mick McCarthy had got through to the final of “The National Lottery People’s Quiz”. I also had to do a peice to camera looking enthusiastic and wishing Mick good luck. I’ll probably finish up on the digital cutting room floor as I won’t be in the audience for the final (being filmed 6th June and broadcast 24th June) and if the previous evening’s shoot is anything to go by they’ll use very little of it. The previous evening’s footage had a mere 3 seconds shown.

On Friday I met up with Grim and Holly in Reading, had a nice meal and then watched Spiderman 3. Not as good as the first two but O.K. The rest of the weekend was made up of shooping for clothes and a new pocket camera (Fuji F31fd) on Saturday and getting my GPS talking to my iBook (requiring soldering and a visit to Maplin’s) yesterday.

On Saturday, after arriving home from all my travels, the milometer on my car read 2^10.. how cool is that?! 😉

I’ve just got back from the White Horse pub quiz.

My team, Queen Victoria’s Truncheon, didn’t win the jackpot round (which has a prize of £1000 at the moment) but we did come very close to winning £500. On the final round we got the question right but only chose the £50 option in the end. However, we decided to gamble and won, so we had £100 to share, which meant £20 each. Not bad, eh?

As no-one won the jackpot round this week it goes on ’til next week.

Well, I got up at 6:30am, showered and got the house ready for the installers, who arrived at about 8:30am.

After much time on the phone to British Gas the installers informed me that the parts were never actually ordered, which is why they didn’t turn up on Saturday. They’re currently sitting outside my hous ein thier vans waiting to be told if there’s a boiler in the area availble for them to pck up and install. Seeing as it’s been over a hour since the last update it’s not looking good.

Update: 11:50am: Well, work’s started. One of the vans went off and has now returned with parts, the system’s been drained and the old boiler is a pile of mangled metal on the front grass.

Update: 5:34pm: The installers left about three quarters of an hour ago and… I HAVE A WORKING BOILER!!! Woohoo! Well, I didn’t think that was going to happen at lunchtime. Even the installers were pleased about how well it went after they actually got the parts. The builder who came to fill the old flue hole has done a very nice job as well.

Well, this morning I’ve been told to expect the delivery of all the stuff required to replace my boiler on Monday. Knowing this I got up before the time that I was told the delivery window started.

I’ve managed to do the two jobs I could do while waiting, the washing up and washed my car but now I just have to sit and wait… and wait. There’s less than an hour of the morning left and there’s still no sign. I wasn’t really told when the delivery window would end so do I sit like a lemon, caged in my house with no provisions (as I can’t get to the supermarket) until it goes dark tonight?

Update: 14:22: Still no sign.
Update: 16:27: Nope, still not here and I’m starving since I’ve no food in the house for lunch.
Update: The delivery never did turn up in the end so at 6pm I drove down to Sainsbury’s and the seige was finally lifted.

This evening as I was cycling home I passed an ice cream van which was playing its merry tune. This all sounds very normal until you realise what the tune was…

“Rain drops keep falling on my head.”

Hmm.. somehow this is not the first tune you’d associate with ice cream. Maybe the vendor was thinking of the architypal british summer weather at the seaside?

That got me wondering about other inappropriate tunes for ice cream vans.. any ideas?

“It might as well rain until September” maybe? Or, “It’s raining in my heart.”

I’m sure, dear reader, that you can think of better ones.

Click to see what you’re missing… large pictures.