Rob's Ego Trip!

Reasons for the decline in music sales include, they suggest, "poor macroeconomic conditions, a reduction in the number of album releases, growing competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games and DVDs - video game graphics have improved and the price of DVD players and movies have sharply fallen - [and] a reduction in music variety stemming from the large consolidation in radio along with the rise of independent promoter fees to gain airplay".

From The Register

It's a pain that Fedora comes with MySQL 3.23.x. I ended up compiling MySQL, Apache, Perl, mod_perl and a million and one Perl modules in order to get RT working. I started by trying to get mod_fastcgi working, but I couldn't get RT to work with it reliably, so went the mod_perl way.

I was marginally suprised how easy it all was, even if it did take a while. Now all I need to do is patch Fedora to the latest versions :)

The new sofa suite arrived today!

Here's Jon showing off the seat:

Spent most of the day sorting out the garage and putting some stuff up in the loft. We have a charity coming round on Monday to take away furniture we don't need which will really clear up some space in the garage. There's still lots of boxes in there though which will take a while to sort through!

In other news, we have the complete planning forms for the exension sorted now, just need to post them and wait!

If AOL can blanket the entire world with free CDs for their dial-up service, Microsoft can do the same with something a bit more useful like a Security Update CD.

The Register has an interesting article about security patches with a dial up modem. When you think about it, it's quite obvious why noone bothers: 102MB to update Windows2000? Just can't be done on my dial up!

It's bad enough having to patch SWG and I want to do that one cos I play the game :)

Pub last night with Tim :)

"Abusive monopolist" is how the EU competition people have described Microsoft according to this article.

The funniest bit is:

Microsoft claims that it should not be fined at all because it did not know its behaviour would breach EU law.

I bet we all wish we could use that defense!

Georgina's out partying with friends, so I'm putting up a border in the nursery :)

I was using Microsoft's Project Central today to try and feed back information to our production director and it's a dog! It's a good idea done so badly! I can only assume that it was for this reason that it's been dropped and replaced with Project Server :) So now I'm on a quest to improve my task tracking software so that it can replace the little bit of MS Project that we actually use...

We ended up at The Nightingale pub for lunch today and very very nice it was too! It was very busy what with being Mothers' day and all that, but the service was fast and friendly. The food was also really good and I especially enjoyed my spotted dick with custard!

Skirting boards now done. Georgina has also decided that we need yet another pushchair/pram thingy, so has bought one on ebay.

Would have blogged yesterday, but spent all evening playing SWG instead :)

Michael Howard has a good phrase here to go with Teflon Tony... Introducing the credit card chancellor! Apparently our government will be borrowing ?37 billion this year - 25% more than he estimated. Then, to add to the insult, borrowing's going to remain high. I suppose that we'll all be paying for the "improved" public services for some time to come.

Having read through it all though I can't actually see what he's actually done other than tweak a few odds and sods around the edges. Did I miss something or is this year's budget a non-event for the average person?

To misquote some famous lyrics:

"I'm cycling in the rain
Just cycling in the rain
What a glorious feeling
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for work
For work
Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I'll ride down the lane
With a happy refrain
Cycling, cycling in the rain
In the rain."

Here at work we try to schedule our tasks for each day. Well, when I say we, I mean my boss! In general it works reasonably well, but not today... Today I got sidetracked by a HelpDesk enquiry that on further investigation showed that a section of the admin system hadn't been working since the site went live!

oops.

Still, I'll just mark the rest of today's tasks as "to be done tomorrow" :)

We had Sunday lunch at Lucy & Si's and it was very nice. Si cooked up a treat with lamb, potatoes and lots of veg. Ella is an absolutely gorgeous little girl too.

What a contrast! Today dawned bright and sunny and by the afternoon, I was cutting the grass! Also got a second coat of paint on Ben's walls which was good.

Georgina & Jon have been making apple turnover this afternoon and it smells absolutely gorgeous!

I thought Spring was coming...

Jacky & Sam came over today after their trip to USA & Austrailia. Jon was thrilled because they brought a cuddly kangeroo for him!

Fascinating read.

This cycling lark is killing me! It's not the going, it's the coming back because of The Hill^TM...

I painted the rooms of the nursery green yesterday. When covering the entire room, it looks like a completely different colour than the patch we created using the "tester" pot... Georgina wasn't sure at all that it's the right colour, so I'm not going to paint the second coat until she's sure!

It's Saturday and I have a brush and roller in my hand again :) I've done the ceiling for the nursery and now need to do the undercoat on the walls.

We took a client out to lunch at a local pub today. Was very nice. That's been two trips to the pub on the company this week! Darren and I will have to collude and come up with more excuses to make this a regular occurence...

Discovered today that noone at the company picks up mail to "root" on our post server... 58000(ish) emails were the cause of it running out of disk space...

Sorted it out eventually and now redirect all mail to root to a real email box :)

Update: missed a zero out - there were fifty eight thousand emails to sort out..

Today was one of those non-days. I seemed to work fairly hard all day and had nothing to show for it by the end. I think it's related to having a meeting halfway through the day which buggers up my train of thought for the entire afternoon.

We did work out how we are going to do web site stats for our customers though which is good. I think the information we will be providing will actually be quite useful to them too.

Seems that there may be a potential problem with acids in Georgina's bloodstream :(

As a result she's going to have to go to the hospital twice a week for tests to ensure everything's ok. Not good news.

My conclusion about cycling so far is that every road and cycle path is going either up or down a hill... I had quite a good journey each way though and didn't actually have to stop and have a breather going up "big hill"!