Things have been really hectic and busy round here the past couple of days so I’ve not really had a chance to blog much. As I mentioned earlier, our section of the company was sold off over the weekend, so Thursday and Friday last week was very stressful as I was trying to juggle responsibilities of the old job with planning the merger of the two companies and their networks, in particular trying to plan for an email migration with the minimum downtime and user hassle. Tomorrow the big switch over will take place and we will be cut off from our old company network and we’ll be joined to the new one….so yet more stress 🙂
Saturday evening we went out with some friends of ours to Old Orleans which neither of us had been to before. The evening was different as we were greeted by an extremely hairy chested, back and legged wait(e)r(ess) wearing a dress as it was their 20th birthday and so all the staff were in fancy dress. It really was a mistake in allowing a hairy guy to wear a dress and seat people at their tables and bring the food over – it really was a sickening experience. If we hadn’t have booked a table or been on our own I think I’d have left the restaurant. We had a magician come over to the table and do some card tricks,smutty innuendo’s and balloon puppetry. Kristen kept trying to be clever in the cards, as they were all different shapes and sizes and didn’t do too badly although she pulled the king of hearts out when it should have been the queen of hearts. Credit to the clown though, he carried on without pausing in his patter and took her heckling in his stride. The funniest thing is that he was incredibly hard to understand and our friend had a really hard time. Whenever she was asked a question there was a pause, followed by a “errrmm” and then the answer. It really looked like she was trying to think up a fake answer to her name or where she had come from. The rest of the time we were served by a playboy bunny (with matching outfit) who did a good job of apologising for the delay in the food as apparently “everyone had ordered the main courses at once”. When the food came it wasn’t very good and there was quite a lot of food left on the plates. I did manage to eat all my alligator though (tastes like chicken with the consistency of tuna steak) so thats another exotic meat I’ve tried. Note this was NOT eaten at Jamie Oliver’s Dad’s pub, I do not know Jamie Oliver and can’t come to your school for cookery demonstrations or get you a tv break.
Monday I went to see the Doctor about my knees as they’ve been really hurting since we did a 6 geocache hike and he told me that it was just the knees not being used to the amount of exercise and I’ve got to take Ibuprofen for a week.
Today I had my cancer checkup and was given the all clear, which as usual is good news.
Also managed to clear out the broken glass in the barbeque outside so we had steaks on the grill tonight and they were delicious. Thanks luv!
Month: March 2004
The good thing about not being able to make any calls since Monday is that our phone bill will be substantially cheaper. The bad news is that the mobile bill will be substantially higher. We’re still without dial out access from home, but can receive calls. BT’s automated “looseyouinaqueueofbuttonpressinguselessness”(TM) phone system is currently stating a fix time of 68 hours. Add that to the 36 hours and we’re hopefully looking at a nice lot of line rental rebate.
For ages now, I’ve been getting the error message “MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x83a8228) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2420.” when I post a blog entry. It doesn’t always happen but only sometimes. The last couple of posts are examples of where it happens. This morning I did a bit more digging and apparently it occurs when there is a problem with pings. I’ll do a bit more digging later but at least it doesn’t mean “error out of cheese, formatting hard disk”
Thanks to Neils post on Terrakt I’ve spent some time reading the articles at Code Fish Spam Watch where they run through their analysis of phishing scams they’ve received. Some interesting, although fairly technical, reading – and pretty scary too when you consider how vulnerable and easy these pages are to install on peoples machines.
There was/is a major fire in tunnels underneath Manchester yesterday which seemed to only affect BT phone lines. BT said it would affect a wider network and yesterday we were unable to receive calls at home although we were able to make them. Same thing at the doctors. Apparently the pharmacy opposite the doctors and the job centre had no phones or data lines either. Fortunately our broadband access was not affected 🙂
The company that I worked for completed a buyout to another company so as of Saturday night I now work for Azur Group.
I wondered why I had seen a post on Microsofts site for a new upload for Activesync, version 3.7.1 but when I checked my current version I saw this was the version I already had! The Pocket PC Thoughts descibes the bug fixes in this particulare version of ActiveSync 3.7.1, which includes a problem that I get – explorer shows an empty directory when you browse the Axim.
Why they didn’t release it as 3.7.2 or 3.7.1a but it would have been handy.
Apparently NVU 0.2 is out according to Fun With Wordage but none of these pages actually say what NVU is. I think its some sort of web editing program but whether it is like frontpage, notepad or dreamweaver I don’t know. I think there is a windows binary available so I’ll download it and try it.
A Microsoft guy writes a good article on why they are encouraging users to Instant Messaging at Work instead of email. I guess they have to use it at MS as they wrote a corporate version to go with exchange (and to reduce the load on their servers) but it still makes good reading. We use it internally too as its great for contacting the home workers when you want to find out the answer to a quick question or even if they are at their computer.
An amusing (I hope its tongue in cheek) post about management roles at Microsoft on one of the Exchange blogs. Sadly I can see how much of it is true (from real life experience!)