Rob's Ego Trip!

Started decorating Ben's room today. For some reason I have been a little under the weather today and it was a real struggle to get anything done. However, by dinner time, I had managed to strip the border, fill holes, remove the radiator and generally get the room ready to do "proper" work on it next week.

Georgina has uploaded a picture of me on my bike :)

There was an item on Today this morning about Gosport (I think) council revamping the library and renaming it to a "discovery centre". Now, I'm a big fan of books and libraries in general and think that anything to encourage new people to visit the library is good.

But... "discovery centre"?!?!?! What were they thinking? That's just stupid rebranding that won't last 10 years!

Two punctures on the way to work today! The second one was my fault as I didn't notices the thorn in the tyre after fixing the first one. Very annoying and it took a total of one and a half hours to get to work today.

I'm also a bit saddle sore and my knees don't know what's hit them! I'm sure that these issues will sort themselves out as I get used to cycling. At least I hope so!

Got an email today from Blackstar:

Dear Rob Allen,

We thought you might like to know that we shipped a parcel today to:
Rob Allen
XXXXXXXXX
Worcester
XXX XXX
United Kingdom


containing:
Blake's 7 - Series 1 (Five Discs) (DVD) (Region 2)

I never thought it was going to ever be released!

Picked up the new bike this evening... going to have to ride it tomorrow... will I still remember how ?!

Went up to Blackburn for a family get together to celebrate Tim's 30th. We all had a good time, Jon especially. It took a while for Jon to get the confidence to leave Georgina and me, probably because there was so many people there. Once he did though, he and Leah were chasing around all over the place!

I've orderd a bike from Halfords; I pick it up on Tuesday. The idea is to cycle to and from work each day in order to actually get some exercise done in my life. I'm quite looking forward to it though I'm sure that the first few weeks are going to be hell!

Also today, I got to see next door's extension. It's really nice and we want one :) Going to talk to the Natwest and see if we can increase our mortgage. If we can, we'll get a bigger kitchen, a new dining room and a new breakfast room! This will give us much more living space and, most importantly, room for a wine rack!

The cable to the starter motor had come off!

I do like the RAC!

Something's gone wrong with my car :(

It appears that the immobiliser doesn't turn itself off... whatever it is, I couldn't get it to start when I left work this evening. I'm pretty sure it's not the battery as the interior light is nice and bright, the radio works as does the headlights. It's not even turning over the engine which is fairly suspicious.

RAC tomorrow I think!

I have to admire Jenny Tong for standing up and saying that blindly condemning the palestinians isn't going to solve anything and if anything's going to change, then understanding where both sides are coming from is a must. She took a lot of flak for saying stuff about understanding the thought processes of Palestinian suicide bombers and this week took up the Today program's offer of going to the West Bank and to Israel to talk to people on both sides. It was very interesting to hear her reports and at the end of her inteview today back in Britian, she said that the worst thing was the negativity there. It's really depressing that nothing is being done to sort this out. Not that I think there's an easy answer, but I don't see George and Tony putting in the effort that they promised they would before we occupied Iraq .

Always check in IE before shipping...

... stupid browser...

Interesting piece on the Today program this morning about Cambridge council buying one way tickets to other towns for their homeless people. The presenter introduced the piece as saying that the the other towns were unhappy and implying that Cambridge was just moving the problem onto other town. Then the guest came on. She was the executive of Cambridge council and corrected him! Basically, she was saying that Cambridge only pay for a ticket when they have verified that there is a bed at the other end and that the person is happy with going.

Seems quite reasonable to me and certainly took the wind out of the presenter's sails!

I drove down to "The Allens' long term storage facility" (aka, "The Mother-in-Law's Attic") with Jon. We returned with baby stuff: pushchair, car seat, rocking chair, baby bath, cloth books, etc... The good news is that that car seat fits in the Micra, so we didn't have anything to worry about on that score. Georgina also checked that the Grako pushchair fits in the Micra and it does! (providing she doesn't want to get anything else into the boot!)

So all in all, quite a positive day and I'm starting to feel that we are getting organised for Ben's arrival.

We spent the afternoon getting a handle on what we needed for the new baby in terms of funiture, car seat and pushchair. We need to find a closer Mothercare World than Leamington too! We've decided that a changing table with drawers underneath it would be good, but at ?200, it seems a tad expensive... A lightweight buggy that lets baby lie flat and fits into the Micra would be nice, but we can't find one cheap enough for the little amount of use it would get. As for a baby seat, the assistant advised us to double check the one we currently have as she thought it should fit (even though we were sure it didn't!). What a nice lady - she saved us from buying anything that we were considering! Jon did get some new jumpers though!

We had a site go belly up today. For some reason the sessions stopped working properly. Was very frustrating trying to troubleshoot it at gone 5pm on a Friday evening! Suddenly I remember that I'd put in some 404 error handling into the apache server just after lunch and sure enough, that was the problem... The only trouble now is that I've no idea why!

Something for Monday I think...

Picked up some butter for Georgina at Tescos this lunchtime. In the St Peter's Tesco, they have self-service checkouts and very nice they are too. As you would expect of new technolgy, there was no queue, so I just breezed up and started tapping the screen... it was dead easy: click start, then scan each item's barcode past the little glass window. Note that you need to put the item onto the conveyor belt, otherwise it doesn't accept that you've finished with it! This caught me out for a while as I just put the butter down on a handy surface after scanning it... Then it was just a case of swiping my clubcard & switch card through and I was done.

Definitely going to use that system again!

Topup fees for primary schools

Angel tonight was rubbish! I dunno, but to me the characters didn't gel very well and the plot was paper thin! The scariest bit was the trailer for a new show with Alicia Silverstone in it! It sounded terrible and shows just how low actors/actresses will go for work...

The lightweight Mozilla browser has been renamed to Firefox and a new version has been released. Looks good too!

The big plan for the weekend was a suprise trip to London to celebrate Georgina's birthday. I had planned a meal and then a show followed by meeting friends. I booked with lastminute.com and when we got to the restaurant, the restaurant had no record of our booking and checked with the Theatre who also had no record. :(

The manager of the Rock Garden restaurant was wonderful and gave us a very large discount on our meal there to make our day special. We were very very impressed and will definitely be goin back there! The meal was really good too with great service and finely cooked food, so the day wasn't a disaster fortunately.

I am very unhappy with lastminute.com though and now need to get a refund out of them!

It's Friday! I ended the week on a high with us meeting a deadline and getting a prototype to the customer. The main focus of this week's work was a search system and I have to say that it works remarkably well. What I'm most pleased about is that I didn't do it! All I did was spec up the workings and ship it out to our developers in India who then returned code that I integrated. Very nice, on time and gave me time to ensure that the site that went live yesterday worked as the customer intended.

Today is Georgina's birthday! Jon thought it was his though and wanted to open Georgina's cards for her.

Cutest moment of the day was Jon singing Happy Birthday!

Got my new Linux desktop actually doing stuff today and have been almost productive. I've installed Mozilla Firebird so have a decent web browser :) I looked at Konqueror, the default browser that comes with KDE and was quite impressed, but it has no password manager...

I've looked at Quanta for my development needs; it looks quite good, but I'm not sure if it's not just easier to use Emacs ;)

I've installed Linux on my work PC. It's been a while since I've used Linux on the desktop and it's certainly come a long way since fvwm!

Obviously, having had time to think about it, Chris Lightfoot has put together a very well thought out piece on our old friend Hutton. I think I'll read this blog more often - nice to see some balance out there in blogland.

It's been a "bitty" day where stuff has got done, but I don't feel like I've been very productive :(

One highlight was that Jon got a new ball today that needed inflating. However we don't have a pump to do that, so I went down to Halfords to buy one. The nice man if Halfords offered to just inflate the ball though, so that was nice and easy and didn't require any expenditure :)

I put up a border around the top of Jon's new room today and steamed-cleaned the carpet. It's all done bar moving his furniture in :)