Other than a bit of mucus filling my sinuses and the coughing up the old ball of slime (only after exercise, so don’t worry) the cold seems to have been well and truely beaten! Yippee!

Basically, from slight sore throat to the endgame that’s 7 days.

Life can start again.

Seeing as other people are giving their cooking tips on their journals, I’ll do one and see if I get as many comments. 🙂

How to cook pork steaks nicely:-

1. Put a small amount of corn oil in a frying pan.
2. Add a copious amount of dried mixed herbs and pour on about 2 tablespoons of water.
3. Mix well and add a pinch or two of salt.
4. Heat at on a medium flame ’til the whole lot stops sizzling. The cooking oil will now be bright green with all the goodness from the herbs infused.
5. Turn the heat down and put the steaks into the pan. Keep it hot enough so that they sizzle but not spit.
6. Turn occasionally, cook for about 15 minutes. Serve with new potatoes and peas.

Well, it’s Saturday.

Thankfully, I got a better night’s sleep last night, though at one point I did wake up totally soaked in sweat and had to change the bed linen. (How can anyone sweat THAT much?)

My nose tap has started to slow down now, but it’s going to the slightly gooey stage. Now, of course, I’m getting to the coughing time 🙁

As for things I did today. Tom (xencat) phoned asking if I was feeling well enough to meet up at Gloucester Green for a day out. Although at the time I was feeling a great deal better than I had been.. I actually had some working brain cells and didn’t feel as though I was high as a kite, I decided that I wasn’t really up to a whole day out and also didn’t want to risk giving this awful cold to Tom, Shona or either of the Tanaqui’s so declined the offer. This was probably a good thing as later on during my shopping I started feeling iffy again.

Anyway, I popped into the All Formats Computer Fair to see if there was anything useful in their second hand stalls.. there wasn’t, and I was disappointed to discover that the £1 off tickets are only valid until the next fair, which means that it doesn’t give the dates for the following months, which I really wanted all along.

I then popped into town, bought a new jumper, diverted into the Virgin Megastore and saw that they were selling 2 DVD’s for £11, 5 for £50 or £15.99 each.. if you work this out it means that if you buy two then they are £11 each or £10 each if you buy 5.. Seeing as (a) it’s not much better buying 5 v 2 and (b) there weren’t 5 DVDs in the offer which I wanted, I managed to find 2 and buy them: Stargate (Director’s Cut) and In The Line of Fire (Collector’s Edition).

Neither of the DVDs have wonderful extras.. I dunno why the Clint Eastwood film is the collector’s edition as it’s not got mant special features at all and the one thing it does have which isn’t a trailer has marginal connection to the film.

Anyway, After this I trundled off home played with the DVD’s a bit and waited ’til 1pm so as to allow the crouds to subside from Sainsbury’s. Thence, it was Sainsbury’s shopping, where I forgot the milk, so after watching Stargate with the comentary popped down to Tesco’s for the milk.

The evening has been spent watching In The Line of Fire followed by Galaxy Quest on Sky Premier Widescreen and the last half of Charmed.

Hmm.. it seems like the actors from the BBC comedy “Coupling” are doing supernatural drama now.. “Strange”

(That’s all I can describe seeing the actor who played the sex crazed welsh lout in Coupling looking the same and playing an ex-priest fighting evil, whilst the woman who played one main love interest in Coupling trying to defend her son from an electricity demon. And I’m sure the demon was played by an actor who had a bit part in Coupling too.)

Anyway, it’s now 10:30 and I thing I shall try to go to bed and sleep after a mug of Lemsip.

OK.. So this cold I talked about in my previous entry got worse overnight.. I went on a sort of temperature rollercoaster, burning up, feeling chilled and all the time having a nose running like a tap.

Not only this but it upset my innards so that I was running to the loo all the time. What made this more interesting was that everytime I tried standing up I felt extremely nauseous and also light headed.

Let’s say that I didn’t get much in the way of sleep.

Funnily enough, I didn’t go into work today.

Thankfully, the problems with the innards finished by lunchtime, but the tap which is my nose continues to flow.. maybe I need a plumber?

Let’s see..

I’ve got an awful cold.

I drove part of the way into work this morning ‘cos of the cold and parked in a part of Oxford called Marston, just across the marshes from the University, about 15-20 minutes’ walk. (It’s never a good idea to exercise if you have a virus ‘cos the increased body metabolism just helps make more virus.)

Work wasn’t much fun with a cold, and I’ve got to go in tomorrow.

I got back to my car this evening to find some b’stard had keyed the rear passenger, driver’s side door. Thankfully it’s not dented. A friend who suggested parking in that area has done so for the last 3-4 weeks without problem. Maybe it’s ‘cos his car’s a G-reg Peugeot 405 without a Uni parking permit and mine’s an X-reg Saab 9-3 with an out of hours permit in the window.

The scratch MAY be fixed with touch-up, but I doubt it somehow, so it’ll need a half-panel respray, probably.

Grrrrr.

Hmm.. what have I been up to during the last week?

Not much in the actual week, as such, other than popping in on a couple of Friends in Wheatley to give them a video tape and to cheer Jenn up ‘cos she has the gastric flu thingy going around.

Saturday was fun. After the normal weekly shopping in the morning (where somehow I spent 10 quid more than usual.. about 30 quid) I popped into London and met up with Alec etc. for the By the Gods meeting thingy. We joined up in Charring Cross Police Station then went of for a meal in an Italian place in Covent Garden. I had a lasagne, salad with apple crumble and custard (I know, not ver Italian) for afters. We then popped off to a little cafe near Charring X nick where Maureen and her police pals often drop in for coffee. T’was then time to pile into Maureen’s RAV4 to travel back down to Page’s Bar in Westminster.

The evening in Page’s Bar was spent, as usual, with much nattering and otehr fun things, but unfortunately, I got a sinus headache so had to leave a bit earlier than usual, at about 10:20.. still, it meant I got home at midnight. I did discover some useful information.. The episode of “Alias” Sky show on Saturday IS NOT a repeat of the one on Wednesday, which means I’ve been missing half the episodes!

Sunday was spent with a bit of a dodgy tummy.. I think the lasagne was fighting back as they’d only microwaved the thing rather than having it freshly nuked from the oven. I felt just blurgh all day, so didn’t do anything much at all.

This weekend has been a bit of a hell.

Saturday was meant to be a quick upgrade of the webserver from RedHat Linux 6.1 to 7.2.

1. The upgrade failed due to there being too little space in ‘/’ because the Linux distrobutions are getting more and more bloated.. and I was trying to install a minimal system.. which takes a mere 2 gigabytes.. yes, adn that was highly stripped down!
2. The abortive upgrade did nasty things to file permissions.
3. Although the subsiquent installation of Mandrake 8.1 went without a hitch, I didn’t notice the filesystem permissions mess left by the upgrade, so I wasted 4 hours trying to find out why apache couldn’t serve any web pages.
4. Portsentry is very good at its job.. rather too good, actually, it even blocks hosts you tell it to ignore.. and there’s no real documentation.. so the web server stopped serviving anything.. KILL! KILL! KILL! This wasted a couple of hours on Sunday trying to work that out!

So, that was 11 hours in work on Saturday and another 2 on Sunday. Plus I didn’t sleep well Saturday night due to my head still full of web server thoughts ‘cos I didn’t get home ’til 9pm and couldn’t relax.

I’m feeling rather knackered this morning due to this, even though I did give myself a nice 2 hour lay-in.

The good things to come out of the weekend were:-

1. I bought a Creative 3D Blaster GeForce 3 Titanium 200 graphics card to replace my aging ATI Expert@play + Voodoo 2 in my games PC.
2. I bought Windows 98SE so I could replace Windows 95 OSR2 on said machine.
3. I finally got to swap out my old 6GB disk in the machine for the 18GB one I’d had as a slave and reconfigure the box more cleanly. This also meant that I could bring my IDE Zip drive back into use because the old 6GB Seagate wouldn’t allow anything else to work on the same IDE channel as itself for some unknown reason, so there was no place to plug the Zip drive in and have it work.

All I need now is a weekend.

Yet another bouncy day, this time with a Vangelis theme.

Still dunno why.

I don’t know why but I’ve been happily bouncing around today whistling “Point of View” (DB Boulevard).

I’ve not really had either a good or bad day as far as work goes.. a bit of a non-descript day really.. a bit of this and that, a tad of Perl programming.

Maybe it was the reasonable weather (well until I had to go home and it started raining).

I s’pose I’d better give a life status update, seeing it’s Monday.

During the last week I’ve.. not done a great deal.

Highlights:-

• Saturday Evening visited some friends in Wheatley, had dinner, played Scrabble&trade, Yahtzee and talked.
• Sunday failed to clean house as got trapped setting up a SPARCstation 4 running Solaris 8 and not geting KDE 2.2 running from dtlogin but working fine from the command line.

As you can see, my life is going through an amazingly exciting patch. Still, I’m not really complaining as if it were interesting it would probably be more painful as well. As it is I’m comfortably happy with no emotional worries or ties.

Plans for the rest of the week are as follows:-

• Try to throw off the tiredness I’ve had of late
• Watch some telly
• On Saturday, upgrade the departmental web server so that it’s running a more modern Redhat version with PHP4.

Since Wednesday last week there have been a few unexpected things happening.

Firstly, my grandmother on my mother’s side (who’s 96) went into hospital with a chest infection and thought she was going to die, so my parents came up from Cornwall 2 weeks before their planned visit to use my place as a staging post on the way to Derbyshire, where my uncle and grand mother live.

The night before they were due to drive down (Thursday) they got a phone call from one of my cousins telling my dad that his mother’s been taken to hospital with a suspected minor stroke..

Anyway, the upshot of this was that on the Friday my parents travelled up to Derbyshire to see grandmother No.1 who was getting a lot better after the hospital shot her full of antibiotics. Saturday, my dad travelled up to Northampton to see grandmother No.2 who by this time was back home and her normal totally dotty self.

For me, Saturday was mostly spent helping a friend move from Cowley to Wheatley as had been previously planned.. which left the only real day with my parents being yesterday.

Life can get a bit hectic at times without warning.

Anyway, my parents started back home this morning so I’ll be back to normal this evening.

I think I may take advantage of the free weekend in a fortnight’s time to upgrade our web server as that’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while and haven’t found a clear weekend to do it.