June 2005 Archives

Gawd, I've had a busy few days. The new IT Manager started at work on Wednesday and so far it's going very well. He's getting the gist of what we want to achieve and he's remembering things from one day to the next, which always helps when a new colleague joins the department. We went out on Thursday and Friday to two of our branches to install the new order entry system, so he got a good idea of what we have to deal with (i.e. the system and the staff hehehe) The only little niggle I've got about him is that he doesn't switch his monitor off overnight, and I think that's just a waste of electricity. However at the end of the day it's not my electricity, but it still irks me. If that's the only problem I'm going to have with him, we'll get on fine.

He's already said he doesn't want to step on my toes, the last thing he wants to do is come in like a bull in a china shop and pull apart everything I've (helped to) set up over the last few years. He's also given me a big box full of Microsoft training materials for the courses he's taken in the past, so I can learn the stuff as well and get some certificates under my belt. I'm not arguing with that one little bit, anything that will help me get my career back on track is more than welcome. All in all, it's going well.

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I've not been out on my bike since last Monday, partly because it's been too damn hot (or too wet), and partly because I've been exhausted when getting back from work the last few days. It's cooled down a bit now and the sun is shining, so I'll go out later today, get the muscles working again.

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Just had a call from my parents asking me to go round to theirs later on to help them put some of my grandmother's stuff up onto eBay, so be warned I'm going to be advertising some auctions later heheh!

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My cousin's laptop is goosed. Something she did, some cleanup program, knackered one of the dll's or something, and she could no longer run any programs on it. It would boot up, we could see Windows Explorer, she could send files to the USB flash drive, but that was about it. I said "Bring it round to mine, I'll network it into my machine, and we'll transfer all your documents onto my PC down the network cable." Seemed like a good idea at the time. So I plugged her laptop into my network, gave it an IP address, and then went to share the folder I wanted to copy. Wouldn't share it. The option was greyed out, and the applications in the Control Panel weren't working. Shit.

We tried reinstalling Windows, but it wouldn't run rundll32.exe, so that was a no-go. Eventually we decided to go back to plan A which was to copy the data off it bit by bit using the flash drive, which was always going to work but we knew was going to be time-consuming. We'd managed to get that finished by 2am last night (or should that be 2am this morning?) but it sure was frustrating that nothing else I tried got us anywhere. It's quite happily reinstalling Windows here after a reformat, so I'm a bit happier about it now. We'll get the job done, even if we have to take a sledgehammer to it!

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I spent the afternoon with my son yesterday. His mum was not happy with him at all, he'd refused to get dressed yesterday morning and had a punching-biting-scratching-pinching hissy fit, and earned himself a one month TV ban. And computer ban. We spent the afternoon building lego models and eating junk food (don't tell the ex!) after he'd gotten over the shock of realising this TV ban extended to my house and my parents house as well. For yesterday, at least. Whether we'll carry on enforcing the ban over the next few weeks remains to be seen, but on the whole he was OK with it.

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So that's me, how are you?

I'm sweltering at the moment. It's nearly midnight, and the temperature gauge on my electic fan says 27.8 deg C. For the middle of the night that's way too hot! But I've not been sitting on my arse all this time, oh no. On Monday evening I went out on the bike and did another 9 and a half miles. Yay me! Didn't even feel tired at the end of it :-) The bike's looking well good, though, what with it's water bottle, snazzy little pump, trip computer, lights and liberal splashes of mud. It's actually looking like a used piece of equipment now, rather than something I bought because it looked impressive. Of course, I did buy it because it looked impressive, but that's beside the point.

Tuesday was a different day at work. The company is moving one of it retail outlets to new premises and I had to go down there to install the new computer equipment. I spent 5 hours in a rickety old van and 4 hours in the shop, of which half an hour was spent setting up the computer, ten minutes was spent having lunch, and the rest of the time was spent shifting boxes. Still, can't complain, got me out of the windowless stuffy office for a day!

Today the new IT Manager started. He had a quick look around at all the paperwork and printed emails left behind by the previous IT Manager, declared that anything more than three months old is no longer relevant and if it is, then someone will bring it to his attention in due course, and promptly binned the lot. "Tidy desk, tidy mind" is his motto. I think I'm going to like working with this guy. I'm far too busy and disorganised to tidy the office, heheh.

Anyway, it's too hot to think.

Went out this morning and bought a pump, a water bottle and a trip computer for the bike. So I can tell you with great confidence that I've just come back from cycling 16.3 miles, at an average speed of 10 miles per hour. On the hottest day of the year so far. I've just got out of the shower and I still haven't cooled down!

Right, well, dinner should be just about ready and then I'm off to see my son this evening. He's just come back from a week in Spain so I'm sure he'll have lots to tell me :-)

It's been a bit of a strange week. For those of you that don't know, I'm Jewish, and usually after someone dies there's a week-long period of mourning called "shiva" (pronounced "shiver"). But this week there wasn't, due to the fact that on Monday and Tuesday there was a Jewish holiday. I was expecting the shiva to start on Wednesday, but apparently not (I must admit I've never been all that observant but there's still soooo much about my religion I just don't know).

Anyway, during the shiva the family and friends gather together, say some prayers and then spend some time catching up on news and gossip, and reminiscing. And since this hasn't happened, I've not been doing much reminiscing about my grandma with other people. I've been going over lots of things in my head, trying to put together a "100 things about my grandparents" list, but it's not been as straightforward as I thought it would be. For a start, I lived away from home between the ages of 18 and 33, and before then I was busy getting an education and after that I was busy with my own family. So it turns out I didn't spend as much time with my grandparents as I thought I had.

I've been visiting my parents each night after work. However my family is crap at talking...... the conversation goes "Hi mum, how are you?" "I'm ok dear, tired, had a house full of people all day. How are you?" "Also tired, been manic at work as usual." And that's it. So when I spent some time with my cousin on Thursday evening I told her I was only halfway through my 100 things list and had hit a brick wall. We tried to come up with some more things, but as my cousin is from my dad's side of the family and we were talking about my mum's parents, we didn't really get very far.

I'll post something as and when I have it.

Last Friday I visited my grandmother in hospital. She'd been in there for a few weeks after falling out of the lift at her flat (that's "elevator at her apartment" for my American readers) and breaking a bone in her pelvis. The accident happened 8 weeks ago and she had been on the mend, improving enough to leave the hospital to spend a couple of weeks in a care home before returning to her own place.

On the first night in the care home she collapsed and had to be rushed back to the hospital. She'd caught an infection from somewhere and it knocked her for six. She was delerious for a few days, but by Thursday seemed to be more like her old self. When my mum visited her on Thursday she (mum) was admonished 3 times in the first 5 minutes by my grandmother, so she must have been improving!

I went to visit her in hospital on Friday, and she seemed weak and frustrated. She's always been an independent and opinionated woman, and being laid up in hospital attached to a drip would not have pleased her one little bit. Her words were slurred, and her breathing was laboured, but she was compos mentis enough to hold a conversation. She told me that she'd managed to get hold of some cloths, and she knew that if she let go of them the nurses would tidy them away and she'd struggle to get some more, so she wanted me to take them home and give them to my brother to bring back when he visited her the next day. Fair enough, I thought. She said "I hear you're losing your nephew to a camp for a few weeks." "Really?" I replied, "I didn't know about that. No-one tells me anything!" She asked for my brother to bring her a cheese and chive or tuna sandwich on brown bread tomorrow. I said I'd pass on the message.

Now, to be fair, not a lot happens when you're lying on your back in the hospital, so she was telling me about all the tubes in various parts of her body. She said they hurt like hell, then smiled at me and said "Still, never mind, eh?" Then, being the matriarch she is, declared visiting time over as she needed to sleep. I'd visited with her for half an hour.

She died at 4 o'clock Saturday morning. The funeral was today. About 120 people showed up to pay their respects, and afterwards a small group went back to my parents house where we sat and talked (and ate!) for a few hours. We talked about everything under the sun, from my grandmother (obviously) to eBay. At one point we were talking about some of my grandfather's paintings (he was a graphic designer and a keen artist, and loved painting ballet dancers. He passed away in 1997 and I spoke about him briefly in this post). One or two people were expressing interest in some of his paintings and basically my mum and aunt said "If you want anything in particular, speak up now and unless it's specifically destined to go somewhere else, it's yours." So there were various cries of "That tea set was very nice.." and "She and I had discussed her record collection..." Coming only four hours after we'd buried her this struck me as being a little weird, to say the least.

There were many laughs in this family gathering, I don't want to give the impression it was all doom and gloom, because it wasn't. One story I'd never heard before was how she got her middle name. Apparently her mother Jean's favourite name was Tony. Obviously she couldn't call a girl Tony, so she decided that if she had a son he'd be Tony and if she had a daughter she'd be Tonette. A girl dutifully arrived, so Jean packed her husband off to the office to register the birth. "Remember", she said "her names are Sybil, and Tonette."

Rest peacefully, Sybil Antoinette.

10:50pm, 4 second exposure, F7.1

I think this picture speaks for itself!

Last night I cycled somewhere between 14 and 15 miles. The weather was perfect, I was in the mood for a ride (first one for a week, slacker) and I felt really good doing it and wasn't too out of breath at the end. At one point I looked down and saw lots of insects caught in the hairs on my arms, which made me think, if I'd managed to catch that many on my arms, how many had I caught with my teeth??

Here's a summary of the weight reports over the last few weeks. It's not looking too good, and I'm not going to put them in a chart because it would only look like a big "V"!

17 April 228
26 April 227
11 May 226
18 May 225
01 June 227
8 June 228

Looks like I either have to do a lot lot lot more exercise.... or I have to eat a lot lot lot less. Personally I'm in favour of upping the exercise, as I don't like being hungry.

Back in the days when I had a girlfriend/wife/partner, I used to get home from work and she used to ask me how my day was. After a few weeks of pretending to be interested, she stopped asking. This is why:

This morning I received from the courier a PC from one of our branches. They phoned me last Friday to tell me it wasn't switching on when they pressed the power button. I asked them to send me the PC, but they said they didn't have a box to send it in. So we had to send them an empty box on Friday. They don't have a pick-up on Saturday, only a delivery, so they sent me the PC last night. I got it out of the box, plugged it in, pressed the power button and.... nothing. Now, I don't know if you've ever had to repair a broken power switch on a PC, but they are a bugger to get to. It's not like putting in some more memory or a bigger hard drive. You can get to the innards of the PC very easily - what you can't get to is the back of the front panel.

Some PC's also dismantle easier than others. With some, you can see exactly how they've been put together, which screw undoes what, and you can get the job done quickly. Not with this one. After half an hour trying to work out the best way to get the front panel off without breaking all the little tabs, I realise that the top bit (where the power button is) is a separate section of panel. All I had to do was remove the cd-rom drive and I could lever this panel off. Easy when you know how.

So then I could see the problem. The switch is held in place by a little plastic clip which had broken off. The broken bit was still inside the PC. When you pressed the switch, it moved the whole mecahnism instead of activating the circuit. No problem, I thought, I'll stick it back with a dab of glue, job's a good 'un.

Could I find the glue? Could I buggery. Another 20 minutes spent searching the entire building for some glue, and I'm starting to get a teensy bit pissed off here. This shop has been without a PC for four days now, and any orders placed since last Thursday haven't been processed yet. I have a closer look at the switch. I wonder if I can wedge something behind it to stop it moving? I have a look around the office. There aren't any centimetre-square bits of wood handy, and a bit of polystyrene wouldn't be strong enough.

I decide in the end to cut up some cardboard and wedge it behind the switch. It's while I'm doing this that someone comes in saying "Have you got any superglue?" I discard all the snide comebacks in favour of "no, I've been looking for it for the past half an hour myself!" (keeping my cool remarkably well, I thought). "Oh", he says, "Someone told me you had some." Well, someone was wrong. Anyway, cardboard jammed in, PC re-assembled and time for the moment of truth. This had better work, otherwise I'm going to throw the whole lot at the next person who comes in the door.

Fortunately the next person was safe, as the PC booted up normally. It switched on and off like a dream. So far I've fixed broken power switches with sticky tape, glue and now small pieces of cardboard. What next, I wonder? Ritual dances? Midnight sacrifices to the Great God Dell?

Time for lunch. Relax and breathe.

After lunch, phone another branch and try to sort out the problem they told me about yesterday morning, which I've only just got round to looking at. I can't work out from their description what the problem is, so I told them I'd connect to their computer and see the problem for myself.

I connected without any problem, but could I see their screen on mine? Could I buggery. So instead of looking into the problem with their system, I spend the next two hours trying to work out why PC Anywhere is only showing me a black screen instead of the user's desktop. I'm on the phone to the shop staff, telling them what to do on their screen. "Click here, select this, tell me what it says, change it to that, click OK" and we keep retrying the connection. Is it the modem speed? Is it the screen resolution? Is it the modem driver? No, no and thrice no. Of course, the situation wasn't helped by the fact that customers keep walking in to the shop and the staff have to hang up the phone to go deal with them. Bloody customers, always getting in the way of everything. Two hours later and I still can't see their screen, and I still don't know what's causing the error I was trying to look at in the first place. I can't pass the buck to someone else because there's no-one else in the department to pass it to.

Grrrr.

Still, it's not been a complete waste of the day. Just the afternoon. I wonder if the sun is shining? I could do with burning off some frustration on the bike this evening.

Ok I've found something work-related to have a rant about.

Why oh why oh why (oh why) can people never follow simple instructions? Without trying to give too much away about where I work, I'll just say that part of my job involves printing out letters for our customers basically inviting them to come back in to our stores and spend some more money. Each store maintains its own database of customers, and I get a backup of all their data once a fortnight and use it to print off the latest batch of letters. We print a main letter for customers due back in now, and a follow-up letter six weeks later if we still haven't heard from them.

Of course, over time people move, die and so on, so if a store receives notification that we're not to write to someone again, they should edit the customer record and replace the first line of the address with a row of X's.

After that, any customer with an address that starts with "XX" won't get another letter. Grieving widows are left to their grief, new householders aren't pestered with mail for people that don't live there any more, our data gets a bit more up to date and everyone's happy.

So how come when I print a second letter a few weeks later I have to sort them out and remove all the ones addressed to Mr Smith at ********** or X XXXX XXXXX or 22 XXXXX or ++++++++++ or any other combination of incomplete addresses?

Surely it's not that complicated, is it? Or am I living in la-la land expecting people to understand "replace the address with rows of X's"?

... the first line of your novel? If I were to write a novel, my first line would be:

The killer sat in the corner of the bar and casually picked out his nect victim.

Three questions for you (I'm sure I've seen that "three questions" idea somewhere before...)
1) What do you think of my first line?
2) Should I care what you think?
3) What would your first line be?

A couple of readers have asked me to blog more about work.... I must admit I'm a bit nervous about doing this, as you never know who is reading. But, if I don't mention anyone's name or the name of the company, and I don't mention anything too slanderous, I think I'll be ok.

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I wrote a few paragraphs about work, read them back to myself and even I was bored. To cut a long story short, I work hard, I work alone, I don't have any gossip, the inane chat I hear coming from the accounts department on my left and the factory floor on my right drives me nuts, and I'm still skint at the end of the month.

I'm committed to installing a third party system that has been incompletely specified, poorly written, and is hard to use. All the staff that will have to use it will hate it from the word go. The only redeeming part of it from my point of view is that I had nothing to do with the setup of this project in the first place. We've started training a handful of staff on how to use the new system; one of them has already left, and another is on maternity leave. I have a new boss starting in a couple of weeks, maybe that'll liven things up, but until then I'll keep work stuff between the hours of nine and five. And since I don't blog during work hours (much), then work is pretty much off-limits here too.

Unless you really really really want to hear it. If you're having trouble sleeping, or want to find that perfect excuse to go and top yourself, then I'll tell you. But I don't want to be responsible for "I couldn't take it any more, Dan's incessant posting about his tedious dull dreary job has driven me to end it all. Just reading about it has sapped me of the will to live, I shudder to think what it's doing to that poor bloke pictured at the top of the screen..."

Save yourselves from a fate worse than mind-numbing boredom. Don't ask me to blog about work again.

H'mmm...... first day of June, and guess what? It's raining. Been raining all day, so far. If it's not too breezy out later I might get the waterproofs on and do a few miles, although nowhere near as much as yesterday. I feel like I'm on a roll and don't want to let up at the moment. If it's too wet for cycling I'll lift some weights at home instead.

This morning's weigh-in came in at 16stone 3lbs (227lbs), so I'm still not managing to lose anything. I do feel good though, so I'm going to keep on convincing myself that I'm turning fat into muscle. If I keep this up then I should be able to see a visual difference in the size of my gut by the end of the summer (which, according to the length of the typical British summer, was this morning!)

Sorry I can't think of anything more interesting at the moment - I'm a bit obsessed with my weight it seems! And you don't want to hear about the tedium that is my job, do you?