A sunny Mondya morning.. that sun sure helps getting up int he morning.

Anyway, quick resume of events so far in the previous episode of “Life”:-

Friday saw lots of little work jobs followed by re-installing ER Mapper on all the undergrad PCs all afternoon due to the clocks changing. (The time change causes the licensing software to think it’s been hacked.. the only way to get it working again is to uninstall, re-install and then call the manufacturer for a new license! Apparently this will be fixed in the next version.) Then the card swipe system stopped reading cards at 16:59, just too late to call out engineers.

I was, therefore, very glad of the nice social chat I had all evening as the dept’s “Happy Hour” extended ’til 20:45. T’was nice nattering with those two hippy 4th year undergrad women about life and stuff. (Before anyone asks, they’re both happily in stable relationships.) It meant, however, i got home too late to eat, so watched telly a bit then went to bed.

Saturday morning was a bit rushed as I needed to go and get the weekly shopping and then go to Sinoco to buy a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and memory for the Hartlands before zooming off to Hartley Wintney to visit Alec, getting there for midday.

Visiting Sinoco is always a deeply risky thing for me to do. It’s all too easy for me to get tempted by all those nice computer bits. Saturday’s visit was no exception.. I went in for the bits for the Hartlands and came out with not only those two items but an Athlon XP 1800+, heatsink/fan, motherboard and a case. Oh well.. I HAVE been thinking about upgrading my PIII 500MHz machine (or rather, cascading the guts down to my Dad to upgrade his system) for a while now since games on the Computer Shopper cover disk no-longer worked fully due to the machine being below minimum spec.

The fixing of Alec’s bike took rather less time than expected. From the description Alec gave me before I went it seemed to me that it was rusted solid and needed a rebuild. In fact, when I saw the machine all it needed was a good oil with 3-in-1 and a little gunge removing from the derailier cogs.

I had a very pleasant afternoon at Ramtops with Rachel, Graham and Christopher.. on and Fi who popped around. The flapjacks were most enjoyable as was the company. Oh, and the computer upgrade went well too, though we discovered there was no DVD playing software sold with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

Sunday started at about 9am.. though I woke up at 6:15am for some unknown reason. It’s not as if Alec’s spare bedroom is noisey. Had a nice quiet morning listening to the radio and then surveying Alec’s “front” garden before trundling home to watch the Grand Prix on telly.

The fact that I didn’t actually see much of the Grand Prix in the end (though I did hear it) was due to the drawn of those boxes sitting waiting for me in the living room. You can guess, can’t you? Yes.. I spent the afternoon building the new incarnation of my PC and gutting the old one. The only problem with this new case is that the holes for the 5.25″ drive bays don’t fit my old 5.25″ floppy drive so I couldn’t fit it. :-/

My good intensions about cutting the grass in the back garden and washing the car came to nought, as you might imagine when there’s the draw of technological tinkering. Oh well. 🙂

…and that brings us up to date.

This week’s excitement merely involves going out to an indian restaurant on Thursday night to celebrate 10 years working here in the dept. of Earth Sciences at the Univeristy of Oxford. It should be fun.

The sun is shining! It’s a beautiful day! It’s obviously a day to be happy, bright and cheerful, so I’m not going to let work and other things get me down.

Don’t worry, be happy! 🙂

In most social groups the taboo subjects are religion, politics and the similar. It seems on LiveJournal at the moment that mental health issues are the ones which cause the most uproar and vitriol.

This was brought into focus by a posting yesterday which has generated a whole raft of comments, often taking some small part of a comment and blowing it out of proportion.

I was also surprised and dismayed by the way one of the commentators seemed to think that one particular part of a comment I made was aimed at himself. In fact, I didn’t even think of him when posting and was talking generallities. The word “sometimes” qualifying the “kick up the arse” seemed to be forgotten. This would change the meaning of the sentence from being one saying that occasionally the action would be helpful and appropriate to it should always be done.

Still, this still doesn’t clarify what the term “giving someone a kick up the arse” could mean in reality. As in the normal form of the term, rather than the metaphor, there is a difference between a tap with the side of the foot and a whalloping great kick causing damage. Maybe I should have used a wording such as “shaking the person out of complacency in a firm but constructive manner” but that doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The other worrying thing I find is the idea that to be helpful to someone you have to always be supportive and sympathetic. In this life, often support and sympathy ARE the right things to give, however, on other occasions you do have to point out to people that things they are doing or saying or thinking aren’t right in a way which may SEEM harsh at the time. It’s just like a mother forcing a baby to ween, not nice for the baby at the time but the best thing for the baby in the longer term.

How do you re-enable disabled car park spaces?

Yes, I’m back from hols in Cornwall.

Did very little.. and now I’m paying for it as I have sore legs from cycling to and from work. Never mind.

Sorry, still no angst. I think I must have a mental illness or something, it’s probably not normal to be reasonably happy.

Well, Alec’s soiree was fun.

Now, it’s rest and recouperation time before the drive down to Cornwall tomorrow.

I’m too tired for strange insites on life, so it’ll have to wait.

Last night was fun.

Good food (Thai, Bankok House), good company. What more can you ask for?

Jenn and Paul’s birthday bash was all that any night out should be.. a very pleasant social occasion. The number of people was really the top limit for such an event, 11, as any more and the party fragments into groups. All but three of the people were from the Earth Sciences department. Of those I really only got to talk to one of them, Paul’s cousin who works as a physiotherapist in a local hospital and has just found out that she’s got the higher paid “senior” position there.. a very nice lass.

After taking Paul and Jenn home, I finally arrived home just after midnight and went straight to bed. It’s a pitty I couldn’t sleep. I never can sleep well with a full stomach, so sort of tossed and turned all night leaving be a bit on the tired side today.

It’s just nice to be sociable, you know? 🙂

Only one (and a bit) more day at work ’til I’m off for a fortnight. Yippee!

Tonight I’m out celebrating a couple of friends’ birthdays.. they happen to be partners too, separated by one year of existance precisely. Jenn is a year older than Paul.

As it turns out, the boyfriends of two of the other attendees for tonight’s festivities also have their birthday on the same day (25th March).. I wonder what exciting day is precisely 9 months before the that day? It must be something global seeing as the people involved are American, English, Dutch and German.

The weekend looks like it’s going to be fun, visiting Alec along with a number of the BTG crowd to eat, make merry, watch video and maybe even do a little star gazing if the skies clear.

After that, it’s off down to my parents’ place in Cornwall. Actually, it’s a little more complex than that as I’m giving a lift to one of the 4th year undergrads and her boyfriend. She’s from a litel village just outside Redruth, so it’s only a little diversion, and it’s always nice to have company on a long journey.

Two weeks of doing very little actually sounds really good at the moment.. 2 weeks away from work.

Those fans of bodily secretions will be disappointed with this posting as I’m not going to say anything about them whatsoever. Iknow, I know, it was fun whilst it lasted, but it seems the novelty has worn off and we just have to move on.

Life? What of it? Take one second at a time and see how things pan out. That’s my philosophy. Plan ahead, make contingencies but don’t worry if things don’t go to plan as that’s just the way of the Universe.

Work? Wassat? It’s something you do to get the main societal tool, money. That’s right, money is merely a tool, like a spanner or screwdriver. Without it you can’t do a great deal, however, have too much and it wieghs you down and you find that you can nolonger carry your toolbox.

The other purpose of work, which will surprise a lot of people, is to allow you to have more of a social life than you’d otherwise have. After all, you spend a lot of time at work, you spend that time with people with whom you have to interact socially, all be it in a strange setting.

So, what has this to do with me? Well, not a lot actually. I just thought I’d write something different this time rather than a list of things I’ve done or not done. A change is as good as a rest, they say.. well, unless you’re a couch potatoe who’s been forced to do commando training.

The comments I got from my previous post via Bullet (‘cos only Alec seems to comment on here) were of the form “Don’t expect people to read your cooking tips when you have things about mucus in the same post.” Well, I would agree.. if the mucus stuff was explicit.. oh well.

Anyway, yesterday was reasonably fun, doing some shopping, getting another jumper, finding that “The Fifth Element” was in a “buy 2 for £25” DVD sale in HMV.. The only problem being that I had to find another film I actually wanted. I chose “X-Men” as it was the least horrid on offer.

After lunch I zoomed off to the UCI High Wycombe cinema multiplex to see Monsters Inc. though I think I missed the starting credits. Still, that was fun.

The evening was spent watching the two DVDs.

Today, I got up what was early for me, 10am, and managed to get the washing done and the car washed before lunch and hence the Grand Prix on the telly.