Work

I found out yesterday that the exam board used in a project I'm involved with will accept the audio recording from an oral test (ie the speaking part of a test) as an mp3 file. This seems somewhat interesting as it's extremely easy to manipulate the files after they've been generated using freeware audio editing tools, such as Audacity. Obviously, though, this problem isn't a new one - certainly, it's possible to manipulate audio on tape or CD with as much ease.

The easiest way to prove that a file has been edited is to generate a hash of the original. If the hash doesn't match this file, then there's obviously been a change to the file. But how does one know that the has generated is that of the original file, and not one of the edited file? What's to stop someone just generating a hash based on the edited file?

Thinking about this a bit further, I hit on an idea. There's open source mp3 players/recorders out there such as the iRiver. This device runs an operating system which can be developed for applications such as this. It would be possible to create a custom operating system for devices such as this which could generate a hash based on the file that's just been recorded, along with the time, date, and a secret cipher. This hash could then be saved to an associated file.

From here, both the audio file and the file containing the hash would need to be sent to the exam board. As usual, if the hash matches the contents, all is good. It wouldn't be easy to create a new hash based on the edited file unless one knew the secret cipher and the other bits associated with the hash (ie method, and the date and time element). There's got to be something I've not considered here, though. What am I missing?

I've got a Cisco router here in front of me, the router is "reconditioned", but was received with a console password on it. Now, this is interesting for two reasons. As it's reconditioned (apparently) it shouldn't have a config on it anyway, and even so, whoever had it beforehand should really have cleared the config off.

More interestingly, the router is identifying itself with the name of a medical company. Interesting. So, rommon the box, get into it and do a sh start and see what we've got.

Username and password for the VPN service that said company uses, further identifying information for the company, firewall rules, SNMP server information, and, of course, the console password (in type 7, so easily breakable) for the router. What says that the same password is used on a number of bits of their kit?

It's not difficult - really. This is basic network security stuff. Just clear any configs off before the router gets taken away.

During the week I usually get up around 0720 and head in to the office, so attempting to keep with the routine, I got up with Sioned & Gruffydd at around 0700ish, did the usual stuff (feed, change), had some breakfast and whatnot before the midwife arrived. Straight after that, we headed over to Bangor and dropped in on a few people, including the offices I work for, all in all taking around two hours. This afternoon, we had the audiologist from the hospital over to check Gruffydd's hearing, which was all fine. Immediately after that, we had the Doctor over (he's sort of a family friend) to do more tests. Straight after that, Sioned's parents came over - I'd asked her Dad for a hand with a wardrobe we'd bought from Ikea which is, frankly, crap. I was having problems hanging the doors on it - they wouldn't hang straight. He pointed out this is because one bit of wood is warped, one bowed, and the whole thing seems to have twisted. Top marks to Ikea on that one, then. We made the best of a bad job before they headed off and we had some tea. Gruffydd elected to have his tea just as Sioned was serving up. Whilst this was happening, I was wondering why my laptop had lost the DHCP lease from the server, but thought I was doing something a little odd.

No. Wrong. Way more than a little odd. The UPS in the rack had switched off. I suspect we'd had low incoming power most of the day due to the storms, and the batteries eventually ran out. On powering everything back up, I seem to be one disk short of the quota - fortunately it's a backup drive, so it's not all bad. The issue being it's the one with the bootloader on it. Arse.

I'll have a quiet day tomorrow, please.

For longer than I can remember (at least six years now) I've been using a laptop as my main production/development/blah machine. Taking the decision to put the machine in for a repair isn't one that I've taken lightly, trying to schedule in my head when it's going to be best to be without it.

I ended up calling a few places that aren't too far away to try and gauge how long I'll be without the machine to have the repair done. There's a bit of dust seemingly inside the screen (other people report it as being "dust behind the screen" - it's certainly visible, and definitely not dead pixels and so on). Whilst this isn't that common, it's not entirely unheard of, with reports coming up through Google of people saying much the same thing. (Here, here, here... and numerous mentions on the official Apple forums.

The Apple store in Manchester's Trafford Centre said they'd got no idea how long it'd be. Another independent Apple Authorised Service Provider (AASP) suggested a wait of 2-3 weeks (which is pretty unacceptable for me), whilst the outfit I plumped with - Digital Store reckoned on less than a week. The guy I spoke to on the phone was really helpful giving me all the information I needed.

I arrived in Manchester and dropped the machine off with them at lunchtime, having spoken to the same guy that I'd earlier spoken with on the phone - seemed to be a pretty top bloke who seemed to live and breathe Apple gear.

So, we'll see how this pans out - hopefully the extended Applecare I've taken out will be worth the money. I'm not into the extended period yet, my first year (which is given anyway) runs out in June.

Hopefully, anyway, I should be back with it later this week. We'll see what happens.

I've been utterly crap at keeping the blog up to date recently, so what better time to look back on the year, and also conveniently put everything that I've not put on here already, er, on here.

December is, as is now standard for me, panto season. It's been a little bit more busy this year as December also saw the first data return to the Welsh Assembly Government for the University. This was a little bit stressful as most of the providers had either forgotten, sent in incorrect data, or submitted their data late. Lots of late nights and whatnot, and it was in on time, and I'm pretty happy with what we've sent. I'm also working on some new stuff for the website which includes media management and a Health & Safety system. All of this will only be visible to the providers, so not something for the general public. This is all tying in to a presentation I'm going to be doing to the other University techies on what I've been doing for the past year, how it's all come together, how it works and whatnot. I've got a few ideas for the presentation, but not started writing it yet. Panto - I said I wouldn't take that many shows this year as I'm fairly tired, and also it's not really financially viable at the moment for me (I get paid less at the theatre than I can justify). So I only ended up taking 20 shows this year (I think I did about 40 last year). Sioned still thinks that this is far too much. Ho hum. Only a few more left to go, then that's it for another year. Christmas was spent at my Mum & Dad's, and was rather enjoyable this year. Sioned & myself received some very nice gifts, there was excellent food, and the company was good.

October and November saw me working on an interesting project for another department in the University which caused a hefty political argument, eventually seeing the whole project canceled. Fortunately, I think I've come out on the other side without too many battle scars.

The department within the University that I was seconded away from (Work based learning within the School of Lifelong Learning) has slowly been making more and more people redundant. The have a contract with the Welsh Assembly Government which is typically renewed each August. This year (August 2007) the renewal was, financially, much lower than in previous years. This put a large amount of pressure on to the department. As a result, in March, the department will begin the final wind down. Students currently on program will be moved to other providers, and remaining staff will either be made redundant, or, where possible, be re-housed elsewhere within the institution. What does this mean for me? The department I'm now working for (Canolfan Cymraeg i Oedolion) has funding for a further three years. After this time, we either get more funding or I'm looking at redundancy. We're in a pretty good position within the institution, and within the country as a whole. Hopefully it should be ok.

The summer saw Sioned finding out that she's pregnant. We're going to be having a baby in late February/early March. Sioned is feeling poorly pretty much constantly, and seems to have a pretty much endless set of appointments with various people within the medical profession.

Also over the summer, we got rid of the Saab and now have a BMW 3 series diesel. In some ways, I still prefer the Saab, in others (especially the economy), the BMW is a nicer car. Ok, it hasn't got the pickup that the Saab had, nor the top speed, but it's still just as nice.

March this year saw us getting married, and then heading around Western Europe in the car. Absolutely brilliant time, really enjoyed it. Germany is a brilliant place, especially the Nurburgring.

I've also started playing in the Bangor pool league - I've got a win rate of 50% which is pretty decent, I think, for someone who's only just started playing. We're a new team to the league, so to also not be rooted to the bottom of the table is pretty decent, too.

As posted on the blog, I changed from my slightly-long-in-the-tooth Nikon D100 to a D2X. I've used the new body in anger a few times now, and it's a joy to use. Over the last week, I did just over 1000 exposures in a few hours and the battery is still over half full. The images it produced, in quite a few cases, required very little processing/colour correction. It's a brilliant piece of kit, although as you'd expect, the noise at anything above ISO500 is noticeable. I gather this is well corrected in the Nikon D3. Hmm... ;-)

This year also saw the purchase of my Macbook Pro. I'm really getting on well with it now - there's quite a few shortcuts and the like which, once you get to know them really do increase productivity. The machine was, within a few days, my main development/production machine, and has since stayed there. It's a brilliant bit of kit. It's been dropped once and - as you'd expect, hasn't suffered any illness as a result of it.

I think next year is going to be a whole lot different.

I find that someone under iraq.centcom.mil is looking for a Welsh course. Unfortunately the coverage area for the North Wales Welsh for Adults Centre doesn't quite stretch that far. Nice to have the enquiry anyway...

No updates for a while, so it's time for one of those mega updates that come along every now and then. Working from today backwards...

Today has seen me moving the rack from its previous home upstairs in the office to somewhere else. This involved de-racking everything, taking the rack apart, huffing it all down two flights of stairs and then putting it back together in its new location. The UPS (3u APC 2.2kVA) weighs far too much. Managed to do it all in about 5 hours, which wasn't too bad. The reward, after sweating buckets was a nice bath, a glass of coke and a pack of marshmallows.

Yesterday we headed over to see Joel, Nicky and their kids for their summer barbecue. We needed to give the new car (see below) a run out - we'd also not seen them since the wedding, so it was good to catch up with them.

Last week, we took delivery of a new car. We'd sold the Saab due to it starting to become a bit impractical before the Eisteddfod, and since then I'd been borrowing a jeep from Sioned's Dad. Due to the miles I'm doing now, a diesel was required - so we're now the proud owners of a BMW 3 series diesel - photos here. This also involved seeing a couple of cars which... weren't quite up to scratch. I'd originally been looking at Mercedes C220 CDIs. Myself and Sioned's Dad went to see one in Bradford which was - for want of a better word - a bit of a shed. For the money, it had surface rust, knackered wheels and stained seats. Nice. We then went to see a BMW 3 series diesel in Nottingham. You'd kind of hope that a diesel engine (well, any engine really) would have oil in it. Not this one. Plus (bearing in mind it's a diesel) hadn't been serviced for around 30000 miles. Ouch. We walked away in both cases. I'm rather pleased with the one we finally bought.

I've been working from home a bit during the two weeks since the Eisteddfod, mainly due to being horribly knackered after it, and mainly because it had given me some good ideas about where I wanted to go with the website that I've been working on. Most of this has come through to fruition now, with a nice enquiries management/CRM bolted on which does some bespoke functions, as well as building in some other things which we needed. Pretty productive all in.

Over all, the Eisteddfod was pretty successful - and I rather enjoyed it, much more than I did the one in Swansea last year. I also did some followspotting work there, which involved actually sitting on the rig. I love doing work like that :-) The Internet connectivity didn't get much better during the week after my previous post - we were lucky to see more than half of the day with any connectivity, much less anything capable of uploading photos/videos. Whilst traffic shaping there was obviously a taken (since it was being run with ADSL as the backhaul), you'd still hope for some form of upstream bandwidth.

During the Eisteddfod (well, before actually - but I'd not been able to put my finger on what it was) the D100 suffered a shutter failure. It's not a total failure (yet?) - exposures faster than 1/320th see a black banding appear over the image. Fixation want £180 to replace this. In other news - Nikon have announced the D3. 9fps! 9! My god.

In other news, Mum & Dad are up this weekend - it'll be good to see them again. They're staying overnight as well, which means we'll be able to do a few more bits with them than usual.

This week I'm working at The Eisteddfod in Mold, for the North Wales Welsh for Adults Centre. We're relying heavily on an internet connection as we're uploading photos, video and webcam output live to the website. It's kind of important to us.

The company providing the connection (I'll not mention names, but they're quite big in North Wales) are charging a fairly high fee for what's essentially just ADSL (think over £100 for a week). We've had in the region of 4 hours service during the 9 hours I was on site. When it was working, it was shaped to hell - mainly, I suspect, because it was ADSL. I'd be interested to know just how many customers are being shoved down a single DSL because the latency was shocking (131ms to a machine that usually returns about 5ms from my home ADSL, and <1ms from the University).

Hopefully the rest of the week will bring a better service, but I'm not holding out much hope.

In other news, apparently I walked through a shot which was subsequently broadcast on national (Wales) telly earlier this evening.

I like to think that I can live a pretty simple existance (for a geek) - give me a laptop, an Internet connection and the occasional bit of food and drink and I'm happy to go on for as long as I need to.

I've been down in Swansea in South Wales for the past week - it's not often that work send me away for stuff. Perhaps the last time was when I was at the Eisteddfod, strangely enough in Swansea, this time last year. That was only for a couple of days, so the effects weren't quite as pronounced as they are now, and things were slightly different then anyway.

When you're away with work - whatever the reason, if it's being away on training courses, or conferences, or just working away - that's why you're there. To work. That's true to a point, the point being that I'm only paid to work for a set amount of time each day. If they want to buy more time off me - fine, go for it. As it stands, I feel slightly taken advantage of. The rest of my day isn't even my own when I'm away, because I'm in an area I don't know, with nobody around me that I know, fitting in to someone elses version of the world. It's just gone 2300, and I'm bloody starving. I phone for room service, because I fancy an ice cream. Can't be done - last food is served at 2200, it's a choice of sandwiches or wraps (isn't that essentially the same thing?). Apparently people don't want food after 2200. But wait, isn't this just an all expenses paid holiday in a fancy posh hotel? On the one hand, you're having your food and drink paid for, but on the other, you've got nobody to enjoy the going out bit with. Sitting alone in restaurants, eating alone. Going to the pub in the hotel with nobody else to enjoy it with. All of the empty business suits are sat there doing the same thing - apparently relaxing after a hard day doing pointless but oh-so-important business deals that'll change the world. Does the sneer give away that I'm totally fed up?

I think this reinforces the point that every single person is unique, and taking the person out of their own environment and putting them into the one-size-fits-all world of being on the road doesn't work for me. I've got an Internet connection that feels like wading through treacle, a telly that shows Sky News (no BBC News 24), the single music channel available is TMF (how many times can they rebroadcast the same show in 24 hours?) and the only kids channel is CBBC, which finishes broadcasting at 1900 each day. Great. The menu in the hotel bar hasn't changed once, and eating out in town ensures you end up feeling like a social lepper because you're eating alone. One of my friends suggested I take something to read (note: Make sure you get the free newspaper from the hotel each morning) just so that you don't end up studying the wallpaper in the restaurant too heavily.

There's only so many things you can do before you just end up being bored with trying to stop yourself from being bored. Last night I found myself organising the Documents folder and doing the things I'd been procrastinating over for far too long. Things that had long ago been put in the "far too pointless to even consider doing" pile are now finding the light of day.

To the people that like being on the road - good luck to you, and long may you enjoy it. It's not for me though, and I'm going to pay far more consideration to the length of the stay whenever something like this comes up again. There's far more to working away than first meets the eye.

I've been slack in my updating of the blog again of late, it seems, so an update on everything interesting (not that much then...).

Firstly, work - as usual, this is pretty high up on my agenda. In the past week I've been put on notice that I'm going to be losing a pretty big ongoing contract that I've enjoyed for nearly a year. In one way it was a bit of a shock, but in others there'd been signs that it was on its way out. This isn't something that's down to me, but the department that pays me has lost a significant amount of funding - there's going to be significant job losses across the board, and it looks very much like I'm going to be out. That said, the fact that the contract has lasted this long is frankly quite shocking. It's good that it's lasted this long. On relaying this information to Sioned, she said that I shouldn't worry too much as I'll no doubt manage to fill the gap quite easily. Still, I didn't think that it'd be as quick as having an e-mail some 7 hours after hearing the above news asking if I'd like to consider working on another contract with another public sector organisation around here. A further phone call today sees me scheduling the meeting for the middle of next week. Monday I've got another meeting to finally hand over a working version of a piece of software I've been developing for the last few weeks to a local SMC. It's been an interesting project as - whilst it's just-another-piece-of-software, it's been developed for use in a sector I've got absolutely no experience of. This is one of the nice things about working in the way that I do - I get to experience a lot of new things and constantly add to my knowledge. Next Wednesday sees me heading down to Swansea for a few days for a training course. The University are sending me down there, and I'm staying in the new SA1 development. I gather there's a lot of nice places to go out and intend to have a good mooch around the area whilst I'm there. If anyone can recommend good eateries that cater for vegetarians and any other places I should look at whilst I'm there, then let me know! I'm there for 5 days all in, so I've got a bit of time.

In geekery news, I've been giving the new Macbook Pro a hell of a hammering. It's been used to edit about 60 hours of video so far, done some audio recording (doing editing on the fly) under Logic, as well as doing a fair bit of work under Parallels. Frankly, it's been utterly flawless. I'm really rather pleased with it, although as expected, the video editing eats disk like it's going out of fashion.

Our car is up for sale. The Saab is going to be gone soon, and we're replacing it with a Mercedes C220 or C270. The Saab - whilst bags of fun to drive, is costing me an absolute fortune to run being as I'm doing so many miles at the moment. It returns a not-unreasonable 30mpg from a 2.0 litre petrol with a turbo behind it. That said, it's still a bit too low so we're opting for a boring-but-more-economic diesel next.

House stuff. We've pretty much decided we're going to stay where we are for now. Whilst our house is still worth a pretty respectable amount, we're now at the stage where we're close to being pretty happy with it. During the last week we've managed to finish off the new kitchen which has been a project going on for about 6 weeks. We've now got some rather nice new worksurfaces (black, of course) with funky new cupboards everywhere. We've also changed the format of the kitchen ever so slightly (moving the cooker a bit). Today has seen us taking the back garden apart - ripping the whole lot up in preparation for another change there. We've now got a skip full of crap just outside.

I somehow managed to end up being one of the few that were chosen to be offered tickets for Live Earth at Wembley this weekend, although we didn't really much fancy the line up, nor the trip down to London and ending up back here at some stupid hour, and besides - it wasn't exactly a cheap gig either (£125 for a pair of tickets?! Screw that) so didn't bother going. It's been a pretty reasonable decision, I think, as I've had far too much stuff to do this weekend (finishing touches to the software et al).

I think that's about it for now.

I've used a laptop as my main machine for some years now - probably around 7. As such, the machine gets a lot of abuse, and needs a fair bit of grunt behind it to cover everything that I'll possibly throw at it. This ranges from: o Database development (MySQL, MS SQL and Access) o Web development (primarily in PHP, but written by hand in a text editor) o Application development (usually in VB) o Graphics editing (Photoshop usually) o Recently, video editing (Premiere) o Massive amounts of e-mail (Thunderbird, which usually takes about 600mb of RAM)

My previous laptop - a Toshiba 1130 had been bought 4 years ago. It's done an *amazing* job and I'd have no problems recommending a Toshiba to anyone who needed a laptop. So why have I changed to a Mac now?

Toshiba weren't able to offer me a machine which fitted my needs exactly. The previous laptop was pretty basic in what peripherals it had. The physical an technical needs of the machine are: o It's got to be small(ish) and light. o Needs to have onboard wireless networking. This is a *must*. o Ideally have onboard Bluetooth. o Decent amount of RAM. My previous machine had a gig. Anything less than this isn't any good to me. o Firewire. I'm going to be doing a considerable amount of stuff over the next year with video editing. o With the above, it's going to need a big-ish hard disk on it and a DVD burner. o It needs to look relatively pretty. This doesn't bother me personally, but being married to (and living with) a non-geek, it needs to be relatively unobtrusive.

Toshiba (and some other contenders) were able to offer something which ticked some of the boxes, but not all of them.

It was an odd choice that I started investigating the Mac. I know Joel relatively well and have a deep respect for his technical ability and consider myself to work in a similar way. He's recently converted to a Macbook Pro (from here known as an MBP) and is working extremely well in it. One of the things that I need to be able to do is take to a new machine easily and not have to go through a significant learning curve. This was one of the things that's always steered me away from OSX (Mac's own operating system). With the recent developments within the Apple field of things like Bootcamp and Parallels, which allow you to run Windows (and other operating systems) natively on the newer Intel based Mac hardware, this was becoming a non-issue rapidly.

Sioned and myself headed over to Manchester a couple of weeks ago to the Apple store there to compare the different models. Did I want a Macbook or an MBP? Glossy screen or matte? After making the choice, I put a call in to the Apple sales people and ordered a 15" MBP with glossy screen. It arrived yesterday, taking a total of 11 days from ordering to delivery. Why didn't I order over the counter in the shop? Because I work for a University I get a significant discount which isn't available over the counter.

I was concerned that the screen would have problems with glare, which was one of the reasons for checking it out in the shop. This isn't a concern for me, although if you have any possibility at all of using the screen in direct sunlight, go with the matte screen.

Out of the box, OSX is rather intuitive. It sets itself up quickly and easily. I'm rather impressed. Some of the foibles of it are taking some getting used to, but I suspect that's partly coming from a ridiculous number of years using nothing but Windows. I remember changing from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 and wondering where Program Manager had gone. This feels pretty similar.

I downloaded the Boot Camp Beta and set about installing that, but found that A) You can't install from a USB memory key B) If you burn a CD, it needs to be bootable. This caused a few coasters, but I was well on my way after a bit of googling.

From here, I set Parallels up so that it would use the existing bootcamp setup, so essentially I can run XP natively and also within OSX. This seems a pretty decent setup. Whilst Parallels is absolutely fantastic, it's still suffering some issues in that giving it a really intensive workout can cause it to slow down. Because resources are shared between OSX and XP in this way, the whole machine isn't available to either OS. As such, when I'm running resource hungry applications, this does become apparent.

Safari seems a bit unstable, having crashed on me four times so far - quite often whilst looking at results on Google, which is a little disturbing. I've given up on that for now since I prefer the UI of Firefox anyway.

Overall, I'm rather pleased. There's lots of nice little things that've been well thought out, ranging from the charger having the inability to tear itself, instead being held in place by a magnet. The keyboard which lights up and the screen which dims when in a dark room... you can tell it's a good amount of design time has gone into it.

I'm looking forward to using this machine for the next few years.

Me: "So basically, you make your pricing up as you go along, but want the system to account for that?" Them: "Um, sort of..."

Pfft.

As some of you will know, a fair portion of the work I do is in the Higher Education sector. I recently needed to buy a small amount of kit (just over a hundred quid). A quick search on the interweb showed that Expansys was going to be the cheapest supplier of said kit.

On checking our finance database, it turns out that the University has an account with Expansys. Yay! I call them up and say "Hi, here's our account number - I'd like to make an order please!". But what's this? Because I didn't open the original account - and I have no idea who did (let's see... 3500 employees. It could be someone from Finance itself, or someone from an individual department...) I can't place an order. Hum. Ok. Apparently we can't open a credit account with them because we've not got an order history (WTF? The University already has an account - you've just said that - but we can't open another because the University hasn't ordered from you before?). This strikes me as a bit chicken and egg, but anyway. Most suppliers fall over themselves to open an account for a University. My options, apparently, are pay for it myself and then claim it back (The University frowns on this as, I understand, the Tax man really doesn't like it), or get a pro-forma from them. Once this is paid, they'll ship the goods. I opt for the latter, since this is the only option open to me.

The pro-forma is paid on 15 May 2007 by BACS from our end. Now, I know BACS is slow, but it's absolutely 100% in their account on Monday. This we know. I ring them on Monday. "We've not received the payment". Fine - maybe it's taking a day to show on their end for some reason. I ring back Tuesday. "We've not received the payment". By this time, I'm starting to do my nut. It should not take 10 days to order a hundred quids worth of stuff. I give them all of the references from the BACS transfer - the bank for the University has spoken to the receiving bank and they've confirmed the money is there - but Expansys are saying it's not. They agree to get their finance department to look into it and contact me.

This morning - finally - an e-mail. They've received the money. Yay! But wait - there's more: "We expect the stock to arrive on an internal transfer in the next 3-5 days".

Expansys. Bunch of utter muppets. Keep well away from them if you want any chance of seeing your stuff within a reasonable time frame.

I've neglected the blog a bit of late. I usually try to write the interesting (well, to me, anyway) stuff I've been doing. I've been feeling a bit "Meh" of late, and not really been up to much, and what I have done hasn't been that interesting anyway. Or, at least, it didn't/doesn't feel like it.

On the work front, I've toned down on what I'm doing with the theatre as I'm absolutely knackered. Having said that, a desperate (ish) phone call over the weekend is seeing me working there tonight. That, and I've got a few bits on the go at the moment (designing and implementing a client management/stock management system for a small trader near where I am, which should also entail some ongoing support for them), as well as some ongoing projects in the University. I was on an interview panel last week which recruited a new System Information Officer for my old post within the University. This doesn't mean an immediate end to the contract I'm doing there - if anything, it's going to ramp up for a few weeks whilst the new chap gets bedded in, and then will start to drop off in mid-August to September time. My other main contract with the University is term-time only, so will be coming up for a rest in a few weeks time when the term finishes.

I took a brand spanking new Mercedes C200 CDI out last weekend (ie not the bank holiday weekend) for a test drive as we've pretty much decided that's what we're going for (well, it'll be a C200 or C220 - there's not much in it. Same engine, just the C200 is chipped down). The toss up was between the BMW 320d and the Mercedes C200/C220 CDI. The Mercedes won it for us as they just feel that bit nicer. It seems to pull sluggishly compared to the Saab, but then the Mercedes is a diesel, and also doesn't have a turbo on it. On the subject of cars, the front left tyre on the Saab had a valve failure last week. Trying to park the car with half the pressure it should have (usually has 33PSi, but had 14 in it) was an odd experience. Turn the wheel and nothing happens.

We've bought a new kitchen! Delivery is next week (Tuesday). Sioned has been muttering for aeons that she's not happy with it. The arrival last week of a new Smeg FAB32NE4 pretty much cemented that we needed a new kitchen to go round it (how does that one work then...?) We managed to get the price down from a mere £1037 to £410. Again - how does that one work then?

This weekend (bank holiday - yay!) saw us have some friends over on Friday evening for the first barbecue of the season. The evening went on for a good while, before people left at around 2330. Ace. Sunday saw Mum & Dad up for the day and the traditional visit to the Llandudno Victorian Extravaganza. Unfortunately the weather had turned on the Sunday - up until then it was top notch, with Friday and Saturday (as well as the days before) nice and warm. Sunday was overcast, damp and drizzly. The original plan had been for another barbecue, but this wasn't to be, even after we'd spent 30 quid on food for said grilling.

Yesterday saw us shopping for a new telly. Not that we need one, but we thought it'd be rather nice. We're a bit restricted on how big we can go at the moment - the largest that'll fit in the gap being 32". Could we find something with a decent colour reproduction in that size? Hell no. Well, not at a sensible (ie <£900) price. We're not too fussed about 1080p at the moment, but even so - a contrast ratio greater than 1200:1 would be nice. Apparently achieving real black in anything 32" or lower is unheard of. Ho hum.

Went to see the Bluetones last night with Sioned - this was part of the Valentine's present that I'd got for her earlier in the week. The venue was one that neither of us had been to before - Central Station in Wrexham. Absolutely top venue, with really good people. I phoned them earlier in the day and asked about the possibility of taking photos there with professional level gear. Their response was "Yep, we're fine with it, as long as the touring company are". Cleared it with the tour manager when I got there, and managed to get some halfway decent photos, problems were generally caused by the lighting in there - far too much red, some of the photos would take me a fair while to sort out in Photoshop - perhaps when I get some more time I'll try and sort some more out.

Valentine's Day itself was pretty quiet for us - as getting a table anywhere is notoriously difficult, we elected to just have a meal in. We seem to be shopping pretty regularly as Marks & Spencer for food now, so, for me, it was feta cheese & herb parcels and potato gratin, whilst Sioned took a goats cheese tartlette with potato gratin. Rather nice it was, too.

CCIO has run a conference yesterday and today. Being on the other side of the fence is pretty interesting, as in another (and a previous life) I did tech work on conferences, so it's been interesting to see what it's like when the things you expect to be there aren't. I guess it also made me a lot more empathetic towards the people running the venue. On the subject of which, the Royal Victoria Hotel in Llanberis is an excellent place. They're staff there are helpful and pleasant, and did everything I'd asked of them (from a technical point of view) quickly. Top people. The bar there isn't bad as far as hotel bars go, although the cloth on the pool table seems a little thick in places :) I sorted out a couple of small issues they had with their Internet connectivity and left my details if they need any other tech work, so another potential client for me.

I'm back in the office - I was in yesterday morning, but by lunchtime was feeling totally monged out again, so headed home. I've been working on a small project over the last few days - nothing exciting - taking an existing form, prefilling it with information held in our database, so that the individuals who need to fill in the blanks have less possibility of cocking up. I'm now doing the run of all of these, and my new laser printer (new office - new furniture - new equipment) is getting its first thrashing. Oddly, it smells of McDonalds Chicken Nuggets.

I wonder what HP are using in their printers these days...

I've just managed to complete my tax return for the tax year 2005-2006. I've somehow managed to end up with a nice tax refund, which is always a good thing (although not large enough that the tax people say "Er, hold on...".
I'm quite pleased that I've managed to do this as, obviously, it's been hanging over me for some time. As I seem to have loads of box files containing all of the paperwork (P60s, etc) for people I've worked for, it made it somewhat easier - the whole thing completed in about 90 minutes.

Woo.

IPSec. It looks like Microsoft released an update to IPSec which was installed (the machine pulls its updates via autoupdate). This then blocked all "dangerous" ports. Excellent. *sigh*

The panto has now been and gone. I am absolutely *knackered*. I can probably do all of my cues in my sleep. I'm looking forward to a good few weeks of recovering now, and spending a lot of time just doing nothing. Whilst time-wise it didn't seem to be that much work (probably 7 or 8 hours a day once we'd got well into the run), it seems so much more than that.

In other news, last week I took delivery of a Nikon VR 70-200 F2.8 AF-S lens. I mentioned a couple of entries ago about how nice the lens was when I trialled it at a camera shop. I used it in anger on Thursday night, and also Saturday night when I was taking photos of the show itself. My word, it's blown me away. Whilst the photos aren't available for public use, I'm hoping to be able to use it to its full potential sometime soon and put the results on the photo site. Some of the images it gave me from the shows are absolutely awesome.

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with the University. My current task is beating a Win2k Adv Server into submission - If anyone has any suggestions as to why shared drives/directories wouldn't be visible to the rest of the network, please let me know :)

The rest of my birthday was rather nice, all things said. As mentioned in the previous blog entry, family turned up later on, before I headed out (whilst Sioned stayed in) to Leicester with friends. It was a good turn out, and I thoroughly enjoyed the night.

As usual, I've been working pretty solidly since, but I've got a day off on Monday (New Years Day). It's looking increasingly like we'll be staying in on NYE since we've been lax in getting stuff organised, and I really doubt we'll actually sort anything out this late on.

Sioned and myself have decided on a pseudo-New-Year-resolution that we're both going to see my family more. Christmas brought home the fact that I'd been too busy on various things to actually get back to Leicester much, which is something I kind of regret. Not seeing both my family and close friends is not good, so we're aiming for at least once a month. I'm probably going to try and cut down on some of my work, too. Having seen what I've earned during December, it's more money than I know what to do with. Family & friends are far more important, tbh.

I'm looking forward to the end of the panto now. I think there's only 16 shows left, so not too long to go.

Boik. I seem to have a bout of tour belly at the moment. :/

I'm one of the 7 techs that operate the flying carpet in the panto. This review was stapled to the board this morning, from The Stage, which is the trade paper for all things stage/entertainments/etc.

"Theatrical magic is an oft-used phrase but magic is the only way I can explain how Matt Baker's personable and delightful Aladdin flies his enchanted carpet so spectacularly and convincingly, with no apparent means of support.

That is the most jaw-dropping moment but there is plenty else to ravish the eye in this sumptuous show, full of stunning sets and costumes. From the moment that Charlotte Gooch.s ethereal Slave of the Ring rises through the stage to the glamorous finale, this must be one of the most beautiful pantos anywhere this year.

[...]

This really is a terrific pantomime."

Praise indeed.

It's starting to get slightly monotonous. When you know the jokes inside out. The feeling of "What day is it? Which show is this? When do I go home? What scene is this?" is creeping in more and more. The fit ups and rehearsals weren't too bad, and I'm pretty much solid on my cues now (after one major cockup).
Today saw the start of the school week, where pretty much all of the performances are for school kids. Tripping off their tits on orange and ice cream... it's a slightly different crowd to the other performances, shall we say.

Saturday night was... well, Sunday morning was worse. I'm still recovering from it. I think I got in sometime around 0400. Fights with beer mats being thrown like death stars (and nearly as lethal in the hands of one of the crew). Some interesting text messages being shown which have changed my view on some people. This is what panto is all about, really. The tally for last week came in at 42 hours at the theatre, and about 12 doing University work. Needless to say, a day off on Sunday was well needed. I monged out and did very little.

Soon be January.

I consider myself cynical enough now to be able to, more often than not spot the real reasons behind those decisions which are made by outside consultants, and have people asking "Why?".
Problem is, I really can't fathom why a suggestion has been made for something.

An important document exists (we'll call it The Development Plan, or TDP - name changed slightly). Currently, the TDP is a 10 (or so) page Word document. The layout for the document is 5 columns wide, by say 40 odd rows.
An outside consultant who is tasked with trying to improve the overall work of the department in question has made various recommendations, one of which is that the TDP is stored in an Access database.

My first comment was "Why?" - I cannot come up with any logical reason to have a single document stored in an Access DB. It just... isn't right. It's like buying a filing cabinet to keep a single piece of paper in.
I consider myself pretty adept at explaining technical issues to non-techies. Problem being is that being as it's not wrong, nor is it right, I was struggling to explain why I thought it was such a bad idea.
My current thinking is that this could morph into a pretty poorly designed CMS/DMS. I've forewarned them of this and told them not to even consider doing anything like this, as it would put the whole setup on a very shaky base. Access just isn't meant for that type of thing.

Quite simply, I'm really not sure what he's trying to do, and it's got me scratching my head a bit.

Various blog entries have probably alluded to me not being quite right at the moment. I'm still not sure what's causing it, but today I had a whole raft of nice things happen which have cheered me up somewhat.

Firstly, I had an e-mail today about one of my contracts which is due to finish next Thursday asking if I'd be interested in continuing for another semester (about 3 more months), since they're impressed with the quality of the work I'm doing. This is rather nice, as I was preparing myself for the financial drop associated with this. I've asked for further details (as it would involve a slight change to times that I do stuff), but they've prepared to get a contract out immediately. Which is nice.

Secondly, I put an e-mail out yesterday asking for cashmoneyplease for work I did on another contract 6 weeks ago. Reply within a few hours saying something like "Oops, forgot! Want more work?" - obviously, I shall wait for payment from the first lot of work first, but it's good that I had an immediately (near enough) reply, and also that I'm being offered more work here.

Thirdly, I spoke to someone in another department at the University who is extremely interested in some of the work I'm doing within the University, and wants to use my work elsewhere. This gave me a good push to get my code tidied up so that it's ready to go live shortly. I've got to write in the error catching, but then I'm happy that it's good to go to bug testing/beta. I'm quite pleased and proud that someone is prepared to take my work on for pretty wide usage. Whilst it's not paid work (I've got enough of that at the moment, to be honest), I'll be getting my name spread around, which is perhaps more useful to me.

Fourthly, arriving home elicited a nice surprise in the shape of a cheque from my secret project, with an e-mail later on in the evening leading me to expect another one. It's all rather woo.

I was wanting to go in on the bike to the University tomorrow, but with the weather being like it is at the moment, I'm really not going to risk it. The car was getting blown around horifically on the way home tonight. This week is probably going to be one of the last chances before Christmas with the panto coming up.

In other news, probably one of the few times that I'll ever be picked first for a team (remember when you were at school all the sporty kids got picked first for football?) - I'll be representing the University Snooker & Pool Club at a match on Sunday night, which I'm rather looking forward to.

I also now have a standard answer to When did you last take a day off?"

When I first started working here, Payroll managed to (via HR) cockup my pay for the first two months. Then when I started another smaller technical post, yet again, they messed it up. Once - forgiveable. Twice - an irritation. Three times, and I'm sure they're out to get me.
I checked my bank balance this morning and found to my delight that I'd been paid - quite a significant amount, but less than I was expecting. I'd obviously got carried away in working out what I'd be paid with my new job.
#My pay slip turns up - and, no, I was actually right. They've done it again. I'm 250 short.

They've got something against me. I'm sure of it.

...or wave goodbye to December, since I've just had my call sheet. Effectively, December won't exist for me. Woo. Going on last year, I'll come out of it about a stone lighter, a lot richer, and absolutely knackered. Hopefully I'll have the mistakes made buying a certain person a Christmas present ironed out as well, this time around.

Steve & Marie visited us over the weekend - we went out on Friday night to Bangor where, conveniently, the Snooker & Pool Club (University Society) were having a social which we tagged on to for a while, before splitting off and doing our own thang.

Saturday was a day of getting Steve's suit sorted out before mooching around Conwy, then heading into town where there was a Celtic Festival on. Saturday night I was doing the out for Amazing Grace which didn't go too badly, nor take too long - I was in bed for 1.

Sunday - Steve & Marie left pretty early on, so I had a relaxing day - wound down after work the previous night. Today was another theatre day - Status Quo (and all their associated fans). As mentioned above, I've also got my panto shifts sorted out.

I'm also starting to feel old as I've found myself listening to Radio 2 increasingly over the last couple of days. This isn't a good sign.

Busy busy busy.

Whatever it was that has been irritating me for the last month or so seems to slowly be disappearing. I've still got no idea what it is/was, but it really was getting to me and making me rather unhappy.

In other news my new gaffer keeps throwing interesting projects at me which I'm rather enjoying as I'm having to think about how I'm going to handle them, and how to integrate them into the wider scheme of things for the new department. I've already been put into interesting positions involving me having to put my foot down and explain why having lots of individual little Access databases kicking around really isn't a good idea, and let's hold off and do things properly, eh?

I'm kind of at a crossroads at the moment where I really need to get an official line on things before I can go any further - we've not yet bought the basic but essential domain name, so things that are requiring a web presence immediately are being hosted under personal domain names, which isn't very good. University decision making was never a fast process at the best of times...

The job I've just moved from has been advertised (finally). If anyone is interested in a database jockey job (unfortunately working with a bespoke database) - good knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, Crystal Reports v10 required - and would like to work for a University in North Wales, then let me know.
If you're prepared to do XP desktop support (don't worry, nothing mind-stretching - just the usual "Can you install my new printer for me?"-esque queries, and know what a patch panel looks like, then you'd be right at home.
I'll be on the interview panel, so I'll be weeding out those who're obviously flying a kite :-)

Ok, it's woo. It's very woo. I've remembered the advantage of having my own office - I've got my music on. I'm not wearing cans, either. It's rather nice.
I've had a meeting with the new gaffer this morning and - to say it was promising is an understatement. I'm really looking forward to some of the things I'll be doing as they're really going to challenge me in a good way.

This is one of the rare times you'll see me smile.

Kicked off with my new job this morning. It's strange not sharing an office with anybody again. The last time I had my own office was in London, some 4 years ago now. The whole building has just been taken over by the department I'm working for - it's all been newly decorated, although we're still waiting for new desks, chairs, and so on.
I'm currently using my own laptop (my computer hasn't been delivered yet) on an old wooden desk, sat on a chair with a wheel missing. Rock on.
The view from my office isn't to be sniffed at, though - I've got one of the front facing rooms, looking out on to the Menai Straits, where the University boat is moored.

I'm still waiting to be allowed network access at the moment, so probably most of the day will be spent using Orange's 3G offering for interweb access. So far I've met my new boss, and also our office manager who seems to be rather chatty.

I've been trying to work out how to set up my office so that my monitor won't be facing the door or the window - one thing I really don't like is people being able to see what I'm doing. Not because I've got anything to hide, but because I'm dealing with people's personal data. Although the office isn't tiny, it's a pain because of where sockets are, and so on. I might hold off on that decision until all of my furniture has been delivered.

The building itself is well off the beaten track, which I don't like that much. I consider myself to be a city boy and a techie. I like background noise, things like the noise of traffic, or the noise of a load of fans in a rack. Anything but silence.

All in all? Reserving judgement at the moment.

Be sat at 0100 on a Sunday morning, rebuilding a collapsed flight case. Mm, rock star lifestyle, me.

In all seriousness, I do love my work sometimes.

Dozing off in bed last night, I was rudely nudged and asked "What's that noise?" by Her. The UPS in the rack upstairs was having a fit because I'd not replaced the batteries and had set its alarm off. Great. Off I toddle to the office and get the batteries (which I'd bought, but not fitted) and set about installing them.
Would it be easy? Nope. The batteries that were in the unit weren't tied together, nor was there a draw string to get them out. My knuckles are rather sore today after gradually pulling the first of the pack of four out, so that I could get at the cable. I've left the new battery pack on the floor for now. Job for the weekend: Get the rest of the batteries out of the chassis, and properly install the new ones.

Got in to work this morning to find the Windows 2000 Server I babysit having crapped itself. Crux of it was that IIS (one of the primary reasons for the existance of the server) didn't exist any more. After about 30 minutes of trying to get to the bottom of the problem (thanks to the extremely verbose error messages that Windows can generate sometimes), I set about sorting the situation out. I got IIS reinstalled sometime around 1115. From then until 1415, the support guys from our bespoke software providers were fighting with the fresh install of IIS, ASP.NET and permissions trying to get the whole lot to talk to each other properly.

Nearly six hours of downtime.

I hate computers.

I hate doing updates from the CLI ona a database. They always make my heart go that bit faster. Especially those that seem to take far too long. Then you have the "Er, have I just overwritten the whole table?" moment.

Query OK, 15 rows affected (46.20 sec)

Hanging a 42" NEC plasma screen from a 30ft high perch on a length of rope as it swings precariously close to a load of metal scaffolding tubes sticking out of the wall.

If anyone knows any staff at the University of Wales, Bangor, then please try and swing them round to the idea of voting for me!

There's a position on the University Council, which I'm running for. I'm up against three others.

Vote Gary!

I've been given a laptop to tidy up today which has the usual symptoms of "Running slowly" and "It's got a virus". It seems to have a tendancy to:
A) Open IE at intervals, going to http://antispyweb.net/?aff=242
B) Producing popup bubbles in the system tray at intervals saying things like "Caution! Spyware attack detected... Security Protection Center indicates high possibility of spyware attack! Update Windows antispyware protection (sic)"
And
"Warning! Possible spyware infection detected... Your computer may be infected with dangerous spyware! Update your antispyware immediately"

Problem being is that, as any good techie will do in a possible virus/spyware situation, it wasn't connected to the network. Very good.

So, setting about removal. The exe that seems to produce all of the popup bubbles in the system tray is msmapi32.exe, which is located in windowssystem32 - removal of this file requires safe mode usage, or one of the tools which are freely available to do this for you. An access denied error will be presented if you try to remove it from the command line in normal usage, for example.
Then open a can of HiJackThis on it, and delete the following entries (yes, there's loads of them):
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {00110011-4b0b-44d5-9718-90c88817369b} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {086ae192-23a6-48d6-96ec-715f53797e85} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {11904ce8-632a-4856-a7cc-00b33fe71bd8} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {150fa160-130d-451f-b863-b655061432ba} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {15ACE85C-0BB1-42d1-9E32-07EB0506675A} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {17da0c9e-4a27-4ac5-bb75-5d24b8cdb972} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1b68470c-2def-493b-8a4a-8e2d81be4ea5} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1c4da27d-4d52-4465-a089-98e01bb725ca} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1f48aa48-c53a-4e21-85e7-ac7cc6b5ffb1} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1f48aa48-c53a-4e21-85e7-ac7cc6b5ffb2} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {202a961f-23ae-42b1-9505-ffe3c818d717} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2d38a51a-23c9-48a1-a33c-48675aa2b494} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2e246fae-8420-11d9-870d-000c2917de7f} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2e9caff6-30c7-4208-8807-e79d4ec6f806} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {479fd0cf-5be9-4c63-8cda-b6d371c67bd5} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {5753791b-f607-48ca-814e-91c14d081f9e} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {7070a8f9-08a4-ca47-0ab0-1eb9e4ee1f3b} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {746455fe-d059-47e7-af0e-140e03f5a447} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {7a7e6d97-b492-4884-9abb-c31281dcc4f2} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {860c2f6b-ca82-4282-9187-beccbb66f0af} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {87185e78-a61b-4db3-965a-3235bbd7a622} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {8dc8f96d-34f7-1501-a2a4-631341aa3ac1} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {9c5875b8-93f3-429d-ff34-660b206d897a} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {a2595f37-48d0-46a1-9b51-478591a97764} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {a6f42cad-2559-48df-af30-89e480af5dfa} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {b212d577-05b7-4963-911e-4a8588160dfa} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {CA0E28FA-1AFD-4C21-A8DC-70EB5BE2F076} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {cf021f40-3e14-23a5-cba2-717765721306} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {d1ac752e-883f-4ed8-8828-b618c3a72152} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e2b2b5a1-b48c-4886-a318-723916a01024} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e2ddf680-9905-4dee-8c64-0a5de7fe133c} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e3eebbe8-9cab-4c76-b26a-747e25ebb4c6} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e6d5237d-a6c7-4c83-a67f-f9f15586fa62} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e7afff2a-1b57-49c7-bf6b-e5123394c970} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fcaddc14-bd46-408a-9842-cdbe1c6d37eb} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fd9bc004-8331-4457-b830-4759ff704c22} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fe2d25c1-c1db-4b5e-9390-af1cb5302f32} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {ff1bf4c7-4e08-4a28-a43f-9d60a9f7a880} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} - (no file)

Seems to have solved it.

When I order 30 machines and 30 monitors (totalling 60 heavy boxes), it is not funny to send them loose. A pallet or two would've made a whole world of difference, especially when it's chucking it down and the lorry driver has had to park about 250 yards away from my office. I'm sure the driver will be having words with you himself as he himself was not amused.

Lots of love,

Gary

Kev visited this weekend, which was a somewhat welcome relief after a hair raising week last week, for various reasons.

o One of my old contracts (finished in February) e-mailed me asking me to do more work for them
o My current employer has said they want 4 hours per week from me after I move departments. More money, but more hassle.
o Human resources contacted me and said something like "You do realise you're not being seconded, and that this is a two year contract?". My response was pretty simple: "I'm pulling out". This, obviously, put the cat among the pigeons and it was sorted out pretty quickly. My contract for this arrived yesterday morning, detailing everything as I expected.
o Various bits of money are starting to turn up now, which is a welcome relief. I've sunk a fair bit of cash into a new project which is starting to come to fruition now. There was a period last week which was getting quite desparate, but, as I say, it's coming good now.

So, with all that, it was a nice break to do very little. The Conwy Food Festival was taking place this weekend. After picking Kev up from the train station, we went for a drive around and I showed him the local area - the seafront, and so on. We then headed back to the house to drop stuff off, before heading over to the snooker club for a couple of frames. From here, we went back out again. There wasn't much happening to do with the festival on Friday evening, but we stopped off at a pub in Conwy, before mooching back over to The Killer a bit closer to home.

Saturday was a bit odd weather wise when we got up - it went from raining heavily to nice and sunny three times in an hour. Me & Kevin took our chances and walked over to Conwy, primarily because I knew it'd be a real pain to park anywhere with the food festival - it's difficult at the best of times, but it'd be like nothing ever seen before. I was quite right. The whole town was absolutely packed. First thing we needed to do was get him measured up for a suit for the wedding. This was all done pretty quickly. We had a look around the festival and I got a few photos, whilst Kev bought a couple of bits and bobs. Back home again, and I decided to take Kev for a look around some of the lesser known (ie off the tourist beaten track) areas to see what some of the areas of beauty are like around here, which he seemed quite impressed with. His train out was at 1400, so that was pretty much it.
Fran, one of Sioned's friends (and bridesmaids) turned up just before Kev left. She stayed around for most of the afternoon whilst we did a few wedding bits and bobs.

Sioned and Fran nipped off in to town, so I took a bit of time out to sort out some more relaxing things - recompiling the kernel on profile (web server/login server/etc), tidying up some bits on sourcefour (fileserver) which needed doing, and making sure the UPS was happy and fed after it had a flid about its batteries recently.

Today has been a day of doing very little. We managed to get up at about 1130, before I sat doing nothing. The Snooker Grand Prix in Aberdeen started this weekend, so I've been catching up on the output from that, as well as The Brazilian Grand Prix taking place this weekend. I recorded the qualifying last night and watched that this morning over breakfast.

That's pretty much about it - as I say - a bit hair raising.

It's still dark at 0528 at this time of year. Unfortunately that's when I was woken up by security ringing me to tell me that the alarm in one of our offices was going off.

I feel cold. And I'm tired. I want my nice warm bed.

Instead, since I'd only have about half an hour, I'm sat in my office, which is rather cold at the moment. :(

As I'd mentioned previously about this new job I'm taking, I've received a lot of good advice from people close to me, and people that I trust. There's very few people that fit into those categories, so the things that those people say to me go a long way. One of the concerns I had was that I felt I wasn't really ready for where I was heading.

"It's called the Peter Principle". I popped the words into google, and it matches my feelings at the moment: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Today has mainly been dealing with lots money that's owed to me - actually getting invoices and other paperwork out. I like the companies and organisations that just send me money straight away (like a council I work for - the money just appears in my bank account. That's how it should always work :-) )
Having said that, I made a huge cockup yesterday which meant that some money which should've been arriving either today or tomorrow will be delayed at least a week now. Sigh.

I'm looking at treating myself to another car. Not that I need one, but I fancy something to go alongside the Saab. Just not sure what at the moment. I was thinking about buying a Jaguar (probably an S-Type) since they look rather nice, but the engine is too big for me to justify at the moment (3.0 V6). A Lotus might fit the bill. Will have to consider that one.

Yesterday, I was in court defending a speeding charge brought by Arrive Alive/North Wales Police against me. I won - not guilty, and I've been awarded costs. The case relied on a technical defence in so far as the Notice of Intended Prosecution documents that they'd sent did not comply with Section 1 of the Road Traffic Offences Act 1988 (RTOA), and also that their documentation did not comply with Young vs Day where it was found, and held upon appeal that a location given on a Notice of Intended Prosecution should hold specific detail to allow the defendant to locate the offence to within at least four miles.
The legal advisor at Court asked if I'd defend myself in any other way other than the above. "No, unless the prosecution springs something on me". Guess what the prosecution did? Needless to say, they weren't pleased when I defended myself (successfully). "Sneaky bastard", he said afterwards. This made me smile :-)

Congratulations must go to the people that helped me and advised me on this - although I represented myself in court, there've been people advising me and helping me along the way. Thanks everyone!

I'm physically and mentally knackered now. Really, beyond all belief. I've not been like this for some time. I mentioned in my previous entry about a meeting I'd had which could see me changing a lot of the things I'm working on. I had a call offering me a new position - I'll be a manager within the University I work at. This is a daunting offer, and certainly not something I'd actually gave any great consideration to. Why did I go for it then? Pretty much every job I've been to interview for I've been offered (all of them bar one has seen this happen). I guess I've been so busy, I've not been able to sit and think "What if?". I certainly think that I've done a lot of good work in developing systems and procedures where I am now - the thing is, I really do not see myself, nor consider myself as management. It's almost a dirty word to me.
The University have openly admitted that they cannot afford to lose me, and as such have made me a very attractive offer - not just in financial terms, but on every front. They've covered all of the possible bases.
But it still doesn't stop the questions in my own head. I've had a lot of advice from people that I respect about this, and as always, it's still my own decision. Do I want to be the techie that really knows what he's doing in a niche market, was offered the management position but didn't take it? Or do I want to
It's a difficult decision. People that know me personally will know that this is a hugely difficult decision for me. I hate suits. They make me itch. I like to be on the front line. The title "Manager" does not sit well with me. But, as many people have said - I can't have it all ways. Will I regret it if I don't take it? Probably.
After all, since the University have offered me the ultimate package - one of the details being that I can go back to my old job, then I've not really got anything to lose, have I?

As well as this, I've been working back in the theatre this week. There's not been much going on there recently because a lot of building work has been taking place, adding a new arena to the complex. There's only been a couple of shows over the summer, but it's really kicked off again this week. Due to this my fitness level seems to have dropped slightly - so, with all of this having happened in the last week, it's understandable that today I've just been totally drained. I need some more energy.

Across yesterday and today I've managed to blitz a whole pile of stuff that needed doing. Whole blocks of stuff have gone off the list, which has made me feel a bit better. There's still a few bits outstanding, but these are major projects which are going to take weeks, if not months.
Monday I spent a few minutes starting on another project I'm doing. Also ordered the kit I need for it. I've got another couple of hours work to do on that, ideally before Thursday.
It's rather nice clearing stuff off my plate, as I think things are going to get a lot worse between now and the end of the year. More money, but a lot more hassle.

...But it's still not over. We had a very brief power outage yesterday morning. I suspect that it was actually a brownout more than anything, but my logging isn't that verbose. The UPS fell to battery 06:20:40 and power was back by 06:20:43. One of the machines here isn't on the UPS (the webserver cum other-bits-and-bobs box, router, AP and switch is, the file server wasn't), so I took the opportunity to move that machine over to the UPS (I can't think why I'd not done so before). I've also took a lot of time to generally tidy stuff up on the two servers here, and the one in Leicester. I've upgraded the kernel on the fileserver. It didn't need it from a security point of view as it was only one minor revision out from the current Debian stable version, but I needed to add a few things that had been bugging me for a while. I've also tidied some of the startup scripts up on the machines, as well.
ntpdate has been checked and installed on all of the machines, as well as normalising the MRTG output from them. All in all, cleaning up and making things a bit nicer.
The same kernel upgrade as I did to the fileserver will need to be done to the other box here at some point soon - although I'm not in any great rush to do that at the moment. Whilst the reasons I performed the upgrade on the fileserver would be useful on the other machine, they're certainly not essential. They're merely performance enhancement, which, being as that box is far more powerful than the fileserver, isn't a requirement at the moment.

Sioned has spent a lot of time at the hospital over the weekend visiting her Mum, hence me having so much time to do the above. This has been useful in some ways, as it's meant I can work in the office unhindered for as long as I've needed to.

This morning I was woken up early by the phone ringing. I vaguely remember it being before 0800. On a Sunday morning. That time shouldn't exist unless it involves lots of money. One of Sioned's friends had a baby at some ridiculous time this morning. Sioned - being a woman, was overjoyed with this. I, being a man, managed to get back to sleep pretty quickly and stayed in this state until just before 11, before getting up and watching the Chinese Grand Prix which I'd Sky+'d from the live output earlier in the morning.
Crickey. What a race. What a changing track. MSchu really is going to go out in style if he pulls banzai runs like that in the next two races. It's going to be close.

I'm hoping that the week ahead is going to pretty quiet. I've still got a lot of stuff on my plate which I need to get out of the way quickly. I reckon I should be able to clear a lot of that by the middle of Tuesday, with perhaps a couple of small bits falling into later-on-Tuesday. Beyond that, I think things will start to get back to normal and my head will be back above water.

I have to say, I thought that it would be more difficult...

This past week has seen one of the places I work for (the one that pays a significant amount of my wage each month) inspected by Estyn. Before this week, it's not a process I'd come across, so only had stories from other to go by. By all accounts, it was going to be something which would see late nights, early starts, and me jumping through hoops to provide them with the information they would need.
Except it didn't really happen.
The first morning - Monday - I started out at one of our other offices at 0600 as I needed to get a couple of bits done there before starting out proper. Starting this early meant I'd get to my main office at a reasonable time, too. The inspection team were scheduled to arrive at about 1130 - which most of them did. There was a brief stampede to my door with questions from people, but pretty much what I was expecting. I stayed in late doing odds and sods and got home at around 2100. A respectable amount of time off built up.

Tuesday was pretty reasonable. Started at 0800 and... well, it was all rather quiet. Not what I was expecting at all. A few bits here and there, but it wasn't as taxing as I'd imagined it to be. I honestly thought I'd have no time to myself. I was back home before 1800.

The rest of the week was much the same, to the point that Thursday I only needed to spend about an hour doing work for the inspection team. As I say - not anywhere near as bad as it'd been billed.

At the debrief today, we were told our provisional grades - these are, apparently, confidential for now. However, due to the work that I'd done with the inspectors, such as answering their queries quickly and efficiently, as well as making provisions for them (such as making a wireless network available), I received special praise. This was rather nice, and also recognised by my own managers.

I'm taking Monday off next week as I'm physically knackered. The lead up to this week, and also the time spent has pretty much exhausted me and I'm looking forward to a rest.

Mum & Laura (and possibly Dad) are coming over tomorrow for a few hours, mainly so that Laura can be measured up for her bridesmaid dress. Hopefully this weekend is going to be, other than that, very quiet. I rather need it.

Yesterday saw me working on the new Nortel BCM that'd been installed at one of our offices. There's a list of things I need to do with it, two of which are pretty much sorted: All of the staff that are permanently based at the office now have their own mailbox on the voicemail side of things, and I've got the first part of the IVR via the BCM's CCR setup. Only problem being is that the IVR needs to be bilingual, what with this being Wales and all. Fear not, though - it won't be a monstrosity. The BCM is capable of handling two languages quite easily, which is a relief.

The next part involves setting up an couple of IP extensions in another office, so that when the receptionist is not available in the office where the BCM is, calls may be routed down to the IP phones (still following me?). Due to a minor cockup involving the IP address I was provided (ie it was on the wrong subnet), I didn't get this done yesterday, so a job for another time.

Unfortunately this morning I was told that I need to add another couple of mailboxes to the voicemail part - except I've run out of licences. Sigh. That won't be cheap then.

Last night Sioned & me headed out to the place where we're having the wedding reception and sorted out a few more things there, clarified other bits and whatnot. Other than that, pretty quiet at the moment.

Fy radio newydd for the Cisco access point (the 802.11B/G one) arrived today which I promptly installed after getting home. All up and running. I've also ordered esgidiau newydd since my old ones are falling apart. Hopefully they'll be delivered in the next few days.

Went out to the Killer for a meal tonight which was quite interesting. The service wasn't what we're usually used to - slow, and we were overcharged. The table next to us had slightly worse service - their starter, of prawn cocktail was off. It was rather niffy, all things considered. They immediately skipped to the main course (through no choice of their own) which was... cold. Oh dear. The chap in the couple kicked off though, which probably won no favours with the kitchen staff.

The last few days have all been rather busy. I've got a nice hefty new project at work which is going to take a good couple of weeks, doing interesting things in getting Excel to talk to an MS SQL database and do automated data analysis. Not really the right tool for the job in some senses, but perfected in other jobs. Unfortunately I don't know any other way around it.
Tuesday was spent tidying up the last of the hangovers from the problems experienced during the last week-and-a-bit, and documenting where we are and what's happened as a result and so on. In other work related stuff, I've been given a pay rise. Which is nice.

#I had information about a contract in South London punted my way which is pretty close to what I'm doing for 300 a day. Unfortunately it's sixth months, which is pretty bad timing since that brings us horribly close to the wedding day. It'd have been nice to take, but as I say - it's at the wrong time.

Reading news.bbc.co.uk yesterday, there was mention that CNN are re-running their coverage of the September 11 2001 incidents. This made me realise that, quite strangely, one of my close friends - Kev, has moved down to London almost five years to the day that I did. I think it was about two days difference. If there's another terrorist incident in the next couple of weeks, I'll be starting to get extremely concerned.

The weekend & Monday were rather nice, all things said. Did pretty close to nothing, although a few things have cropped up which need doing: The guttering definitely needs clearing out around the whole house being the main one. We've had some pretty heavy rain here recently which has seen water pouring over the edges of the guttering. Poo. I'm sure it wasn't that long ago I did it last.

I've not really had a chance to stop this week. Work has been rather stressful due to the problems documented in my previous entry. It's seen me working late a couple of times and being so knackered when I made it home that I wasn't really in a position to do much. I did, however, take the bike out for a run - something I've not done for far too long, and it was rather nice to have done so. Again - it's finding the time and the round tuits to do things like this.

I really do need to get some of the stuff off my chest about the problems at work though, and also so that I've got a reasonably useful brain dump should something like this jump up and bite again. Essentially it boiled down to a pair of security problems. My previous blog entry mentioned that it may be to do with a "sell by date" in part of the software - this wasn't in fact the case.
The software provider connected to our server and found that the data in the back end DB was actually corrupt. This lead to some headscratching as the corruption was covering approximately 66% of the data held within the table. Either this problem was something that had been going on for some time - not an option as we regularly export our data and the data was only corrupt on the most recent export. That, or part of the software itself wasn't functioning correctly. There was a real oddity here. The field in question is a counter, relative to another part of the database. When a new record is entered, the field increments by one on the previous record. Nice and simple. Except it wasn't working. Each record had this field set as 1. This is handled by the web front end, by a business rules DLL.
The provider had connected to our server at 1130 on Wednesday, and were still working on it when I left at 1645. They themselves finished up about an hour later after running a total reinstallation of their own software, the .Net2 framework, and also IIS. No dice.
Thursday rolled around and they recommenced their work at around 0915. I had to go to an operational meeting from 1000, which I was stuck in for about 90 minutes. I received a phone call pretty much immediately on returning to my desk saying that they'd found the source of the problem. A slightly wonky connection string between the database and the front end application (ODBC) and also a permissions problem on many of the directories - all of which should've been handled by installers and so on. Ho hum. To a point it's poor programming as the errors weren't caught.
This was only part of the problem. What had been solved at this point is why the problem was occuring. We still had the non-too-trivial issue of a rather knackered database. Well, let's just go from a backup shall we? We could do, but that's not going to be an easy job either. Due to an unknown in terms of when the corruption occurred, it'd mean searching through a fair few backups (taken every 6 hours), and the greater problem that all data that had been entered since the failure would also be corrupt and require at least manual changes, or, at worst, a full re-entry of the entire record.
Due to the nature of the field, it was decided that we could repopulate the field by means of a relatively simple SQL script that wrote the field as God intended, following chronological order. Nice and simple.

This seems to have solved most things. I've spoken, again, at length with my contact within the Government who has taken an export of our data made today to check it with their software to see if it causes any issues. If not, then we're go. There's still some small lingering problems - probably about 200 records which I've found problems with which seem to have been caused by data corruption, but it's a lot better than it was.

As I say - a stressful time, certainly. I bought myself a new Cisco radio (a combined B/G unit) for my Aironet AP here yesterday, primarily cause I sort of needed cheering up, and also because it's cheap. I'm considering re-starting my "Ooh, I want that" list because when I need some retail therapy, I'm sometimes a little short on things that I want. I'm a bit odd like that. I'll quite often have the money to buy something, want to buy something, but not know what I want to get. Other times, I'll not have the money, but really want something. Pfeh.

On the subject of which, I've found I can easily afford the insurance for a Yamaha R1 - the bike I've been lusting after for many years now. I think this is the type of thing you're meant to buy and say "I've wanted one of these all of my life". I don't really do that (ie want something for my entire life), so I guess it's the closest I can get to that.

Sioned is out tonight, at a club in Mold. She asked me (numerous times) to go, but quite frankly I'm wrecked after this past week. I drove her & a friend out there (and obviously, myself back) earlier on - a nice 70 mile round trip which gave me a chance to wind down a bit. I'll have a nice relaxing bank holiday, please. Hopefully we'll have a good race this weekend (from Turkey). I'm tired.

In the line of work I'm in now, August is the start of a new contract provided by the Government. Last year saw some huge issues which were primarily down to bad advice given to us by our software provider on how to handle the changes necessary. The procedure is called a contract rollover. All of the data that is still relevant to the new contract is effectively carried over, leaving the data which is no longer required behind, effectively.
#This year, we didn't experience problems of the same nature, but we still encountered a rather interesting issue which has seen about 80k go missing due to an undocumented "sell by date" on part of the software.
Speaking with the software developers today, apparently we've fallen foul of an issue whereby it's not possible to send our data to the Government after the contract has expired and the new one has started. Let me put this in to context: The contract for the previous year expired on 31 July 2006, and the new one started on 01 August 2006. The Government, though, give us a leeway and allow us to send the data for a few days after the contract has expired as paperwork often takes a day or two to make it onto the computers. The deadline for the receipt of the final dataset being midday on 03 August 2006.
The software provider advised me today that any datasets created by the software after the end of the contract year wouldn't provide a true reflection on the data held within the database. When asked why this was, I was told it was to prevent confusion over which exporting software to use. This is because the dataset definitions change from year to year. Fine. Normally, I'd accept this explanation - except for the fact that they only released the new export software on 13 August.

Sheer genius. So our options for exporting the data in that period in between? Oh dear.

The problem I have is that I'm going to need to recommend this type of software to another organisation quite shortly. Unfortunately, the software provider in question are likely to be the best candidates for the job. That really worries me.

The relief comes because Friday saw the Government statistics released for the data that I'd sent at the beginning of August. I wasn't aware that we'd be so far down - it came as a bit of a shock, shall we say. After I'd made the phone call to the gaffer explaining that - somewhere, somehow, there was about 80 grand missing, and no, I couldn't explain how, and that this might somehow be my fault and I've cocked something up somewhere - the relief was that it wasn't actually down to me. A weight off my shoulders.
As I say, though - if I have to recommend this software to another organisation and this type of thing happens again, then I'm going to be a lot more accountable.

I'm home. Tired, but home. We got another recording in at the Eisteddfod quite late on, meaning we left the site at about 1630. After heading back to the car, which was parked miles away (on the furthest park and ride away), I needed to drop my colleague off as he is staying on for a few more days. This required dropping him off a bit further east on the M4 at Brigend. Now, I tapped in my postcode to the GPS at the park and ride site and it reckoned on 3.5 hours and about 180 miles to get home. Not too shabby all things in, and so we headed off to his new hotel.

About an hour later (!!) we arrived and I dropped him off. The GPS now reckoned on over 4 hours driving, and 258 miles. Good god. I really wasn't expecting that. Something much shorter would've been better.

I stopped for some food, and also used a slightly better route (in my eyes) than the one the GPS suggested, which saw me home at 2130, even after having picked up a works car from St Asaph.

Stopped at home for 45 minutes or so, then headed over to Bangor to collect the UPS for installation at St Asaph. This job went suprisingly well - the leased line gear all resync'd within about 5 minutes, and - as Barry Scott would say. Bang! The techie was gone!

I slept very well - it was very well needed. I think I'll head in to work in about an hour or so. I'll certainly need a few quiet days to recover from all of this.

Yesterday the BBC had a huge amount of staff on site here - speaking to one of their people today this has been reduced dramatically, with staff being moved to Cardiff airport and the like covering the naughty people wanting to blow up planes.

The Eisteddfod itself is a lot quieter - it's very obvious how few people there are here today compared to yesterday. The weather doesn't help matters - it's very overcast and we're having rain showers quite regularly.

Got another recording in this morning, although that seems to have dried up now. I'd much rather get at least another one - preferably another two in, but that seems unlikely now.

I had a wander around earlier and looked around backstage at the pavillion, where the main acts take place. The tech side of things isn't that large - certainly not on the scale of a large outdoor festival, aside from the default foldback desk and so on.

Hopefully I'll be gone from here by fiveish, then home for a bit before doing a UPS installation in St Asaph.

I've not been to Swansea before - our digs are in Mount Pleasant (photos to follow - the decorative tastes of the owner are certainly eclectic). Swansea is an odd little place. I'm not really sure how to describe it. It seems to be quite poor economically and socially. Only having been here for a few hours I've already come across some quite open inhabitants. I don't think I'd be too comfortable living here, to be honest. I'll put it another way - I'm concerned that the car might not be there in the morning.
I've never seen hills like they have around here - driving from the Eisteddfod to our digs took us up a hill which on first look seemed almost vertical. Walking back from the pub just now left me out of breath - I'd certainly have some good muscles in my legs if I lived around here.

Life on the road certainly has its pros and cons. On the one hand, expenses are good. We spent 20 quid at the pub tonight which can all be claimed back. Depending on your own taste, never knowing where you'll be is either a good thing or a bad thing.

It used to be that I quite liked this type of thing, constantly flitting about up and down the country. Does it mean I'm getting old if I'd prefer to be back at home?

We ended up getting a couple of people recorded today, which is the reason I'm actually here. I'm quite pleased we've got at least something to show for our time. Hopefully we'll get a lot more tomorrow - another four recordings would be fantastic, but I think that might be being a bit hopeful.

I've checked out the route home and it seems far better. Longer (Just under 200 miles - the journey down was about 140, I think), but the roads certainly look a lot nicer - my route straddles the Wales/England border for most of the way.

I had quite a relaxing night. The guy I'm working with and myself went out and had a pub meal, and then found a Riley's snooker & pool hall, where we got 10 games of pool in. I have to say, he's a fantastic player, although I only just managed to scrape a win at 6-4.

Guess I should try and get a good night sleep.

Well, we're here. The GPS took us on some... interesting roads. I may have to investigate my options for the journey home tomorrow as it was certainly one of the more challenging drives I've had to do.

I'm currently sat in the office at the Bangor stand. I went around and took some photos earlier and also found that I'm able to use the press area if I need to, although that doesn't really offer many benefits, so I'll probably not bother with that.

I have to admit - not being Welsh, I'm (again) struggling to see the point of most of what goes on here. Fair enough with the competitions and so on - that's fine, but the rest of it seems just to be publicity for various relatively large companies, and also for public bodies and Government organisations. I've spotted a whole raft of people walking around with DVLA bags, and Food Standards Agency stuff - what's the point? Why do organisations and agencies like this need to be here?

Organisations like Universities, colleges, fine - student recruitment. Totally understandable, as are organisations like the BBC, and the Welsh Rugby Union.

The Eisteddfod is regularly having financial struggles, and have often said that they're considering their options as regards putting on the next one. If I wasn't working here, it would've cost me a tenner to get in - if I had an average family, it would've cost £30. Maybe it's just me not being Welsh, but that seems a lot of money for what's happening here - I'm certainly not getting much out of it. As I say, a lot of it seems to be a PR event for larger organisations - I certainly wouldn't want to pay to have adverts thrown at me. Maybe the entertainment in the Maes makes up for it...

I'm still rather tired after yesterday at the moment - I rolled up to one of the University sites horribly early yesterday morning (about 0600) to have another look at the poorly PBX that I'd mentioned previously. It still wasn't a happy camper. I sat in the server room until 0830 when the first staff started turning up, with a monitor plugged in to it and googled for the symptoms. The equipment is a Nortel BCM (Business Communication Manager) 1000. The problem I was seeing was that any attempt to use the management network interface (NIC) - either through the web interface or telnet promptly resulted in the machine hanging, rebooting, or both. Google did produce some knowledge of the symptoms, but it didn't match the model number exactly (it had previously been seen in BCM200s and so on) - the capacitors on the base tray start to bulge and effectively render the x86 side of the unit useless - the MSC (Media Services Card) will still run fine, so general telephony services are good, but anything beyond that (ie voicemail and other features) are stuffed.
I phoned BT Business Support later on in the day and the guy said "Ah, we've come across this numerous times". I asked if it was due to knackered capacitors leaking their magic everywhere and he suggested that this was more than likely the case.

I finished early due to being a bit tired and went and did some food shopping.
Me and food shopping don't really go together. Sioned had helpfully given me a list. Potatoes. Baking potatotes? New potatoes? I picked two of each and hoped for the best. Ham. What type? Pick one. Variety is the spice of life. I hate supermarkets.

I picked up a few other bits as it's Sioned's birthday today, and then pootled home to watch the race that I'd Sky+'d over the weekend. What a *fantastic* race. Certainly the best one I've seen for a long time, with absolutely everything you could ask for. And Hungary is a bad circuit for overtaking?! Jenson well deserved that win - it was... entertaining to see M Schu have to retire. Williams' new driver is certainly going to make a name for himself if he carries on driving like that, but it was a shame to see his result disallowed due to a technical infringement.

This morning saw me going over to Llanberris to pick up a UPS for the site with the telecoms problems. I didn't realise the APC 3KVA jobbies are so heavy. Struggled to get that one out of the boot. I'll be working there late on Thursday night installing that and putting the BT NTEs onto it.

Tomorrow sees me driving down to the Eisteddfod in Morriston. I'm staying there overnight and then coming back at some point on Thursday - not sure when yet. I might take a day off in lieu on Friday since I'm likely to be just about dead.

A recent story on the BBC mentioned a hotel which is somewhat of a landmark around here - the 70 Degrees Hotel as it's known, which sits above the A55 as you approach Colwyn Bay. Intrigued by this, I had a google around and found details of various other interesting buildings, one of which was Hafodunos Hall. It's an absolutely gorgeous gothic hall, out at Llangernyw, about 25 miles from where we live. It was gutted by fire (arson) in 2004. It's a beautiful, emotive place and really needs to be restored. If I had the money myself, there's no way about it - I'd do it. It does need a lot of work doing and probably is well beyond economic repair, but even so - a place like this deserves to, at whatever cost, be brought to life again. Photos here.

On the work side of things, today is the start of our new contract at Bangor. Suprisingly, the changeover went quite well, which is is contrast to last year, where it was pretty disasterous. Good to see I've learnt not to trust suppliers. I've also ordered a couple of gig of RAM for the server which seems to be running rather slowly. Keeping an eye on it showed that it was occasionally dipping down to 4mb of RAM free, and stable at 10mb free - the SQL service was also using most of what it'd grabbed for itself. Hopefully this should sort things out. I ordered yesterday so it should arrive tomorrow.

Snooker tonight. Ace.

I've started waking up ridiculously early. Even though I'm still getting to sleep at 2330ish, I've been finding myself awake at about 0530-0600ish, yet not really feeling tired during the day. Maybe it's just this warm weather we're having at the moment.

I hauled myself out of bed at 0730 this morning - the alarm was set for 8, but I wanted to get in a bit early and make a start after the complications of yesterday. In the rush I forgot to grab my lunch, so headed over to the shop across the road. It's a little corner-esque shop (except it's not on a corner). I go there and grab my lunch occasionally, but do go over there every day and pick up a drink. They're a) the cheapest and b) the nearest shop to the office. Except they're closing down for good at the August bank holiday. :-(

Dell have delivered another laptop for me to build for a new member of staff which is currently having it's installation done. I've also got the final stuff I need to do after the report which wasn't what was required yesterday - fortunately this one is relatively easy and I can manipulate a lot of what I did yesterday, so it's not a total loss. Yay for weekend!

I had a well needed geeking out session last night. I'd ordered some replacement batteries for the UPS in the rack, which it turns out I don't really need. I did a runtime calibration on it last night and, well, let's just say it calibrated itself well. I decided to rewire the power side of things and put the switch, AP and router on to the UPS. I also put a little more load on (it was reading as 0% with the comms gear on), and put a Compaq DL320 on as well - it ran for half an hour and still had 80% left, which was nice. I tidied up some of the other cabling as well, and also gave the whole rack a chance to cool off a bit (50 Celsius ambient in the rack isn't good).

The whole week so far has been extremely busy. Today I've been arguing with Crystal Reports and generally feeling my brain melt. Once I'd got the report finished (5 hours work) I drove over to St Asaph and found out that I'd been talking at cross purposes, and hence it's all wrong.

The software supplier that provided the upgrade which went live on Friday (never do