Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday dear me-ee.
Happy birthday to me.

T+37years and counting.. mission status nominal.

Friday lunchtime, this past weekend looked as though it was going to be pretty quiet with only one thig planeed, to fix a friend’s computer so that she could get on with writing up her thesis at home. By 7pm Friday I knew I had a full weekend on my hands.

Firstly, during Friday afternoon one of my friends who lives down Farnborough way said that she was taking her son for a birthday trip on a steam train on Sunday and then asked if I’d like to come along too. Well, how could I refuse? After all, I’d be uncle Steve again and Christopher’s such a fun chap to be with. Of course, this would also involve buying a birthday present.. and what better present for a 5 year old fan of Thomas the Tank Engine then to get him a train set?

Secondly, during the “Happy Hour” general departmental get together thing on the Friday evening, one of the postgrads was talking about how two of his friends had pulled out of dinner that evening and now they had lots of food to eat and no-one to eat it, then asked if I was free that evening. Hey! I’ll never say no to a free meal and some friendly conversation.

Saturday morning started by going off to Toys’R’Us and looking for a train set. Unfortunately, the range of railway stuff they have is pathetic! I had a choice of a titchy set with just a small oval of track, a little loco and a few trucks or a set with a larger oval, two points, an LNER A4 loco and three Pullman coaches.. so it had to be the latter! I then popped into Halfords to get some rear brake blocks and thence back home via Sainsbury’s.

I decided (wisely as it turned out) to check the contents of the train set box once I got home, only to find that the loco, tender, TrakMat&trade and instructions were missing. What a pain.. I knew it’d take a while to get that sorted and there was only just about an hour before I’d arranged to fix Jenny’s SPARCstation 10.. so no time for lunch.

Anyway, I managed to get the set replaced and get to Jenny’s house just in time (the traffic was being awful, as usual on a Saturday.. especially when there’s a football match on).

The fixing of the SS10 took about 5 minutes.. I had to run devfsadm and restart the volume manager for it to recognise the CDROM drive.. then after a quick cup of tea and a chat it was off again.. via Blockbusters to see what DVDs they were selling as ex-Rental.. and found “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” an excellent film, for £9.99.

Once I got home I flopped a bit and watched the DVD before going to bed quite early.

It was now Sunday.. so seeing as I needed to be at Rachel & Grahams by about 10:30 and I needed to get petrol, it was up at 8:30.. a bit of a shock to the system for a Sunday. I was out the door by 9:15. I arrived a short while before the Hartlands got back from church, bringing along Christopher’s best friend, Bethany. There was a little tooing and frowing.. Rachel popped off to collect Aaron, the other of Christopher’s best friend to come on the trip. Meanwhile, I took the train set out of my car and put it into the house before Graham and I trundled on afterward.

The journey to the Watercress Line steam railway took about half an hour.. we rushed a bit because we thought we’d miss the train.. as it turned out, the timetable Graham had was for last year and so the times were about 15 minutes earlier than they should have been, so we arrived with plenty of time to spare.

Dispite the rain we all had a fun time on the train.. at the far end of the line we got off, watched the engine run around and get coupled to the front for the return journey then went off for lunch in a nearby pub. T’was a really nice lunch and I couldn’t avoid having the Bread and Butter pudding with custard afterwards.. it had custard!

We wandered back to the station, had a look in the shop, where the kids had badges bought for them then we waited for the train back to arrive. We had another pleasant journey back, with Graham nattering to one of the volunteers, I think he must have been about 15 years old, who told him that he was folling in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps as his grandfather had been a locomotive fireman and his father a driver.. and now he worked on this line in his spare time.

When we reached the station at Alton we all got off and watched the engine being decoupled from the coaches before toddling off home.

Thankfully, when the kids arrived they were so interested in talking about the trip that they ran straight upstairs to Christopher’s room without noticing the big train set box in the living room.. so when I got in I was able, with the help of Rachel, to spring a surprise on Christopher.. who jumpped up and down and grinned and generally couldn’t believe that he’d been given such a nice pressie. It’s times like these when you know the real worth of things.. money is only a tool.. and if that tool can be used to make other people happy then it’s well spent.

The rest of the afternoon was spent helping Christopher, his friends and Rachel & Graham set up and play with the train set, with a short intermission for birthday cake.

Finally, Christopher’s friends left and it was time for little Chritopher to go to bed.. so we all said goodnight and he ordered us not to play with his train set. 🙂

Later, we packed the set up and it was time for me to go home.

So, as you can see, a rather packed and enjoyable weekend!

Well, I’ve figured out enough to extract the files from one of the tape images but the other has some extra header formats, probably directory entries.

Anyway, I gave the user an update on this and she was very pleased. Se also said that now she knew what was on that tape that she didn’t need it at the moment but may sometime in the future… Hmm.. I’ve spent 4 whole days getting this far and she tells me not to bother. :/

Oh well. it was “fun” anyway.. it got me hacking properly again.

Last week was uninteresting, so I’ll not document it.

Of the weekend, the only interesting aspect was going to the “By the Gods” event in central London on Saturday afternoon/evening. Typically, the meeting time was right in the middle of the worst of the weather with gales and driving rain causing damage to my umbrella and a good soaking to my trouser legs.

Sunday was spent recovering from a late night on friday night finishing reading “Zodiac” in bed and the late night the night before. The weather was so drab and horrid that I didn’t feel like doing anything at all so vegitated.

The only really “interesting” intellectual challenge I have at the moment is trying to reverse engineer the data format of the tapes written using the old Data General RDOS operating system’s DUMP command as a user here has a couple of tapes from the late 70’s and early 80’s with data on which she needs. I managed to find the last working 1/2″ reel-to-reel tape drive in the University to extract the data and saved the tape images to file.

So far I’ve got to the point where I can extract the first couple of files from the image but then the header format seems to change for some unknown reason.. so it’s back the the drawing board.

Seeing as I seem to only really update this thing on Mondays, here’s the weekly update:-
Nothing happened.

Actually, this is not quite true as quite a lot of things happened, it’s just that they were all mundane.. well, excpet one or two thigns at the weekend, which I’ll get to in a bit.

OK, basically, weekdays are totally boring and mundane, weekend days sometimes aren’t and this weekend’s set of days wasn’t.

Saturday: Went to Witney, got my hair cut, popped into the Blockbusters and got an ex-rental DVD of Shrek for £9.99. Journied back to Oxford and shopped in Sainsbury’s (mundane). Got home, had lunch, put away groceries (but not necessarily in that order) and phoned Alec about his suggestion about visiting him he’d made on Bullet on the Friday afternoon. Toddled over to Hartley Wintney to visit Alec. Nattered, geeked and ate the rest of the day away finishing off with watching the whole of series 1 of the BBC comedy series “Coupling” which was very funny.. Why did I miss it when it was on BBC 1? Stayed overnight at Alec’s.

Sunday: Got up, washed, had breakfast of corn flakes and honey followed by tomates and cheese on toast. Scoured Alec’s bird table with his new high-pressure washer. Toddled over the Rachel & Grahams’ to play with Christopher, socialise and enjoy Rachel’s cooking of pheasant. More playing with christopher, talking, looking at Ikea catalogues, fun with large balloons ensued finished off with watching Time Team and eating cocnut (fresh) before it was Christopher’s bedtime and time to leave for Alec and myself. I dropped off Alec at his place then drove home. Cleared up a bit, put the rubbish out, couldn’t be bothered with the washing up (there’s enough crocks for the morning), went to bed, read and slept.

And thus the weekend finished.

Sorry, there’s no angst to report, so the banality of my journal continues.

Obviously, on-one’s cursed me with the old Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” recently, thank goodness.

Well, it’s Friday again, at last!

The week’s been ok, nothing special’s happened other than I’ve got wet cycling home a couple of times (it started raining at half distance so I couldn’t prepare) and this morning I had fun in my part of the city where they hadn’t gritted the roads or pavements. Let’s say that it was difficult to stand up due to the ice and even the slightest incline would generate an uncontrollable slide down it. Hence, for the first quarter of my journey I pushed the bike and gingerly walked. It was quite fun watching a dustcart trying to take a turning at 2mph and almost piroetting.

As for the weekend, I think I shall go into Witney tomorrow and get my hair cut. Other than that, I have no plans whatsoever so i’ll probably get very bored. Still, I could look into writing a directory search for our new departmental web site my colleague has been working on or continue with my user-friendly, advanced “vacation” program replacement.

We’ll see. Social life will have to wait ’til next weekend when it’s the By the Gods meeting in London. I’m not sure you could really say I had a social life and I definitely don’t have either a love or a sex life.. but at least it’s not complicated and sordid.

I bought myself a new toy over the weekend using my Christmas money.. a nice DVD player.

It’s fully multi-region, plays not only DVD’s but CD’s, VCD’s and MP3’s too.. oh and it has a Dolby Digital &trade 5.1 decoder too.. all for £120! It’s and Acoustic Solutions DVD 551.. no, I’ve not heard of the manufacturer either. They do have a web site though. (Warning, it’s Flash only.. silly people.)

Anyway, it means that I now have a nice home entertainment system with big widescreen telly, hi-fi with Dolby Surround decoder, SVHS video recorder, Sky digital receiver and now a DVD player with the 5.1 output going into the HiFi’s 5.1 input.

I’m a happy bunny.. all I need to do know is save up for some DVDs! 🙂

Last night, having for some unknown reason not been able to get to sleep ’til 4:30am and then waking up at 07:07 and not being able to get back to sleep and then having to drive from Cornwall back to Oxford I was just a tad knackered. Hence, just after Time Team finished I went to bed.

That long sleep seems to have done the business as I was awake and fully functional at the 07:30 get-up time this morning.. which was a good couple of hours before I’d even think about waking up during the holiday.

It’s amazing how unfit you can get in just 2 weeks. Not only have I had to use one belt notch up from the one I used before but my legs ached hugely after the cycle to work and I was very much out of breath, and I wasn’t even going very quickly either. I’m guessing it’s going to take at least a month before I’m back to the same level of fitness as I was a fortnight ago. Never mind.

After much helpful debugging help from the Bullet crowd, the alpha-test version of the ‘vacation’ replacement program I wrote over the holiday seems to be functioning well. I’m using my own account as a testbed.. so far it’s not replied to any mailinglist.. YET! 🙂

Anyway, time for tea!

I’ll not go through all the little details of my Christmas break on here as so many others have done. I’ll merely do a quick summary, after all you have more important things to do that read lots of drivel.

The last fortnight has been spent resting and generally not doing a great deal, stuffing myself with too much food down at my parents’ place down in Cornwall. T’was most pleasant.

Before that, on the Thursday night before Christmas was the Department’s Christmas Party which took place in the basement of a bar in Oxford. Great fun was had by all and I was even persuaded to dance!

The Friday was rather a daze due to the lack of sleep from the previous two days (trip to Reading to see Lord of the Rings on the Wednesday evening etc.). I was going to phone Lindsey up to wish her the seasons’ greetings but was so shattered after getting home from work I went almost straight to bed and slept right through to Saturday morning, when it was time to drive down to Cornwall.