The Tip

I have spent my lunchtime taking rubbish down to the tip today. We have now cleared the garden of all the stuff that was accumulating as a result of us unpacking :)

The tip here is a little disorganised with people just parking willy-nilly all over the place. In Croydon people parked marked out bays so as to maximise the number of people that could unload at one time. Presumably they don’t have enough people here?

Talking About Money

or the lack of it! One of the side-effects of moving was that we cleared all our debts and have a clean slate. We did a rough budget and we are pretty sure that we can just live on my salary. However this month, that hasn’t worked. I think it’s because we over-spent at Homebase (buy shares – we are good customers!) getting stuff for the house. We also had a few one-off things that I didn’t account for. Next month should be better as a result.

It’s just a bit frustrating that we aren’t quite living the easy life yet…

Frustrating

Our Internet connection isn’t very good at the best of time, this is not the best of times… Today has been very frustrating because our Internet connection has been much worse than usual and has made dealing with our live server an excruciating experience.

MSBlast

MSBlast is an automated worm that is taking advantage of a MS RPC exploit. The main feature that you’ll notice if you get it is that your computer reboots all the time!

elke_tanzer has a good description of how to get rid of it if you have it.

Good luck to famousamy and everyone else who’s affected in getting rid of it.

Succinct

Interesting weather forcast on the radio today:

“Finally some fresh air”

And that was it! Then the presenter moved on to another subject!

Struggling

I’m struggling with SQL today. I’ve got a lookup table of a lookup table and can’t work out the SQL to do a search. As an example, consider the following:

Table 1 – books:

fields: book_id, price, title, author

example:

1, 2.99, ‘Life’, ‘A. Slug’

2, 4.99, ‘The Universe’, ‘A. Planet’

Table 2 – book_fields:

fields: field_id, field_name

example:

1, ‘cover_colour’

2, ‘cover_type’

Table 3 – book_field_lookup:

fields: book_id, field_id, field_value

1, 1, ‘blue’

1, 2, ‘hardback’

2, 1, ‘blue’

2, 2, ‘softback’

How do I find all hardback books that are blue?

Sunday Lunch

We had lunch out as we were still in Homebase at ten to 12 (Jon’s lunchtime is midday). So we popped into the local pub for a Sunday lunch. Unfortunately, whilst they serve food, they don’t do a Sunday roast :( Georgina’s roast would have been better anyway!

Visitors

Georgina’s Mother and her boyfriend are up for the day today. Jon’s thrilled of course that his Nana is here to play with him. Jacky made good her promise to buy me a barbeque for my birthday when we moved. It’s a swish gas-powered one and we fully intend to test it out tomorrow :)

The Commute

The commute is much easier this week. I think it’s because it’s the school holidays. The end result is that there is much less traffic on the roads when going to work at the moment. Very nice. It hasn’t really affected going home though. Presumably this is because I usually leave somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00pm and so the school traffic would have finished by then anyway.