Ouch! and Ouch! again.

A couple of weeks ago we woke up to find that our car had been vandalised, along with about 30 or so cars in the immediate area. Some idiot(s) had gone around in the late/early hours scoring a number deep scratches into every vehicle in the neigbourhood.

Yesterday I put our car in for repair. I was given a courtesy car which I had to reverse out of a tight car park. Unfortunately one of the managers of the repair shop had parked his long Silver Mercedes in one of the courtesy car parking bays. This being far too big for the bay resulted in a chicane to negotiate, and with me reversing a car I'm not used to I totally misjudged it and clipped the rear wing on my courtesy car, and his Merc.

Quote from the manager of the repair shop - "Let's just see which one you've hit. Oh No! It's mine!".

Ouch! Sorted it out with the insurance, so the excess payment is now twice what it was going to be. Ouch again!

Artist at Work

I love this picture. It's an artist friend of mine at work in his "studio". If ever a photo summed up what his work is all about, then this is the one.



More about him and his work here

Rain Gods?

A couple of weeks ago...

I bought a Stockade Playhouse that needs a level base preparing, painting and assembling outside in the garden.

Novelist Supermum bought a new clothes line/dryer.

And then the heavens opened... it's all our fault isn't it?

Crazy Nights

An old friend, who I haven't seen for a few years (but have known for about 26!) surprised me with an email today, just as I was about to leave work to fetch Frodo from school.

He's down from Glasgow to attend a conference tomorrow, so I managed to get a "pass out" from home to go out for a few beers with him at short notice tonight.

I'm really glad that I did, as it was truly great to see him again. Lots of catching up and reminiscing. Beer, burgers and chips at Blue in the Albert Dock.

(He went to see KISS in Mannheim last week - hence the title of this post).

Air Guitar that really works!

here and here

Invisible Guinea Pig

Samwise has invented himself a new pet - an invisible guinea pig. He takes it for walks on an imaginary lead. It sits on the spare seat in the car, and wears an invisible seat belt. It wears invisible pyjamas, and has pretend pizza for tea!

I'm going to have to make an imaginary hutch for it.

Guess who'll be left to feed it and change the invisible straw when his imagination gives up on it :)

Floating Hotel - Grand Princess

This monstrous vessel arrived early this morning and moored outside of the office.

It's a bit like having a block of flats suddenly appear overnight.

The extra bits of superstructure at each end make it look like it should be floating in outer space, rather than the high seas. Perhaps it's on it's way to Fhloston Paradise?

HMS Ark Royal

Another battleship anchored outside of work today. HMS Ark Royal visiting Liverpool

It was supposed to be here in September, however the Royal Navy was too afraid to dock at the new landing stage until it had passed a safety check!

It's no wonder that we don't "Rule the Waves" anymore...

Aaaarrrgh!

Finished work at 03:00 with a successful release in the bag, after resolving a few problems encountered during the implementation.

Got back home around 03:30 feeling a bit too wound up to go to bed immediately, so with the dawn breaking and the dawn chorus birdies tweeting I spent about half an hour reading the second of Charlie Higson's Young Bond books.

Went to sleep at 04:00 and was woken up at 10:30 by the phone ringing. A heads up warning that a development/test server had a fault, and could I go in to escort the engineer into the secure server room when he and the part arrived?

14:00 and I was back in work. 15:00 and the engineer arrived, but he only had 1 part and needed 2. 17:15 the part arrived. Installed, tested and server booted and at 18:00 he left. 18:10 and the server crashed again. We managed to get it back up by disabling a memory board. The Engineer will be back next week.

I managed to bring up all of the environments on the server and dashed back home to arrive at 20:10, having missed the first 10 minutes of the Dr Who repeat (the first showing of which I of course had completely missed last night).

Then I found this response to my complaint to Orange in my Inbox...

Customer Service wrote:
> Hello [DarkDwarf],
>
> Thank you for your email.
>
> We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to you.
>
> We request you to follow the steps given below in order to improve the
> slow connection speed:
>
> Check if the equipment is setup correctly and connected to the master BT
> socket. Follow the link below for help:
>
> http://help.orange.co.uk/sessionBegin.do?solutionId=kb327
>
> http://help.orange.co.uk/sessionBegin.do?solutionId=kb264
>
> Follow the link below to perform diagnostics:
>
> http://help.orange.co.uk/sessionBegin.do?solutionId=kb165
>
> Follow the link below to reset your Livebox:
>
> http://help.orange.co.uk/sessionBegin.do?solutionId=kb18901
>
> If the issue persists then swap the filters as is possible that the
> filters could be corrupt and provide us with the following information:
>
> * Status of @ light?
> * Status of ! light?
> * Status of >> light?
> * Status of telephone light?
> * Status of antenna light?
> * Do you have Wired or Wireless connection?
> * What is the make of the Wireless adapter (speedtouch 121g adapter,
> speedtouch 122g or inventel adapter)?
> * Brief description of when problem occurred and time it affects the
> most?
> * Have you made any recent changes on your computer or internal wiring
> of your house?
> * Do you have Antivirus/firewall installed on your computer?
> * How many BT sockets do you have in use?
> * Do you have a splitter or an extension cable(If yes, specify the
> length)?
> * Is the equipment connected to the main BT socket?
> * Are the device filtered?
> * Do you have additional telephony devices like sky tv, digital phone,
> fax machine, etc?
>
> As soon as we hear back from you we can sort the problem out.
>
> If you wish to make a complain, we request you to contact our Broadband
> Customer Support Team on the number 0844 873 8586(IVR options 1-4) (they
> are open 7am -11pm, 7 days a week, calls are charged at National rate.)
>
> If you have any further queries then please do not hesitate to get in
> contact with us again.
>
> Kind Regards,
> Shraddha
>
> Broadband Support
> REF:WOOBB

3 Haircuts

I'm in for a long night at work tonight watching and praying that a couple of database building processes run to completion...

I took Frodo and Samwise for a back-to-school half termly haircut this morning - and had mine chopped at the same time too. They really know the routine at the barbers, so aren't at all fazed by it, like other kids are that I've seen. I've always thought that it's a good exercise in social interaction, so I've been taking them since they were young. They also get a much better haircut than any that I could do, armed with a pudding basin and a pair of shears ;)

My brother popped in for a cup of tea, on his way back to Blackburn. His wife had entered some sort of cookery competition that was being judged at St Georges Hall this morning. Unfortunately the judging lasted longer than they anticipated, so I only got to see them for 5 minutes before I had to dash off to work.

Indiana Jones and the Lost Broadband Connection II

I've sent off a four page letter of complaint to Orange after being back online for 10 days, followed by another outage of 5 days before coming back online again, but at a much reduced download speed.

I've got a 12.5 hour or so release to do at work on Saturday afternoon/evening/Sunday morning. I reckon that I might find the time to do a "catch up" blog post on Sunday night - assuming that our internet connection stays for that long...

Meanwhile we went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the local fleapit yesterday afternoon.
From what I'd heard from the critics I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Not as good as Raiders, or Last Crusade, but probably better than Temple of Doom.

I know that there's no way the hero should survive most of the things that happen to him in a flick like this, but there was one scene in particular that I thought - absolutely no way!

Harrison Ford plays an ageing, but has-still-got-what-it-takes Indy, although he's got to be the most destructive archaeologist since Auguste Mariette used dynamite to help locate the Apis Bulls.

Back Online

3 Week Outage!

I've lost count of the daily phone calls to Orange with them saying that the line should be OK, but with no internet connection at our end.

Eventually they agreed to send an engineer round to our house. He was due this afternoon. Mysteriously at 6am our internet connection came back!

I called Tech Support around 9am and asked them to update the case with this information. They said that the engineer would call anyway.

I called again at 10am to check that the case had been updated. No it hadn't. The engineer is coming at no charge... I insisted that they still update the case (getting paranoid here, but I didn't trust them not to claim that the chap fixed it our end when he turns up).

The engineer came at 3 or 4pm. He told Novelist Supermum that our setup was perfectly OK and that somebody had definitely fixed something at the exchange - but he wasn't allowed to say who or what.

I'm now too busy composing my letter of complaint to Orange Customer Services to be able to blog further.

Orange Outage

Not much blogging here of late.

Partly due to much family activity going on around the time of Samwise' Birthday - I'll catchup with an update on this at a later date.

Mainly due to having no Broadband at home for over a week!! 4 frustrating calls to a call centre in Mumbai, plus one to BT to confirm that there's nothing wrong with the line, until I finally got an operative that knew what they were talking about.
Basically Orange have been doing some maintenance work, and they've botched the job, resulting in no internet access for us.

I could understand this, but the frustrating thing was the lies that I was given during the first 4 calls. They said they were doing a line check, but in the meantime could I just try resetting my router?
I went through this activity four times. The last operative said that in fact no line check had been made, so the router resets were just a stalling tactic, based on a supposition that most problems are at the user end.

I was told that in fact Orange had carried out maintenance activities at 3 different times over the past week. Looks like they still haven't got it right.
I've got the name of the last operative, who has made a lot of re-assuring noises, and will be calling me back with a status update whilst further maintenance activities are carried out to repair the problem.

(As you might guess I'm not blogging from home right now).

Hopefully we'll be back online soon - although there is a Bank Holiday coming up - what's the bet it won't be resolved until after Monday?

Everything until now has been shit.

A much used line in Omid Djalili's stand up show.
I went to see him tonight with Novelist Supermum and impworks, who has posted a mini review

An hour and a half of laughter. He gets away with a lot that other comedians can't.
He's also the world's greatest "Dad Dancer".

Another Place (Again)

Brother, his family and Sister paid us a visit yesterday - prior to Samwise' Birthday. We went for a trip to Crosby beach for another viewing of Antony Gormley's Another Place (we've seen it before, but they hadn't".

Despite the day starting with a couple of showers of hail, the sun came out by the time we got to the beach in the afternoon.

Took a couple of snaps of Brother, Sister and an Iron Man (plus an artistically placed branch, that someone else had planted earlier). Brother and Sister are the one's who look like they're dressed for an expedition to the Gobi Desert.



They insisted on posing for the second snap, but I think I prefer the first one.



The kids enjoyed the beach - despite the big windmills in the sea that were making the wind blow - at least that's what I told them ;-)



Samwise' cousins gave him a remote controlled crane for his Birthday present.



It has a working winch which can be moved back and forth along the gantry, it also rotates. You also need to add counterweight ballast, as with a real crane, to stop it from toppling over with a heavy load.

Samwise, Frodo and his cousins quickly got the hang of it, but they must have been giving it some abuse because today the winch stopped moving back and forth along the gantry. Frodo initially got the blame for this, since he'd tried to move the winch along the gantry - had to apologise to him later as although he'd done the wrong thing, it wasn't his fault.

I spent about 3.5 hours this afternoon dismantling various pieces, and tracing the fault. I discovered that a weak solder joint on a connector in the rotating base had caused a wire to snap off from the connector.

I took my trusty soldering iron to the rescue, and now it's fully functional again.
I can now add crane repair man to my skill set :)

King Size Homer

What a night at work! I was asked to implement some software patches last night on the live system.

This usually involves starting around 16:00 and finishing about 21:30 (backups have to be taken, the system stopped, brought up for patching, patches applied, system brought down and restarted, tests and checks carried out).

I was told that I couldn't start the patching until an email arrived that contains files to be processed by the software that was being patched.

The email is automated and was expected to arrive around 17:15 - but not guaranteed.
Apparently it was not possible to arrange to have a person at the other end send the email through.

I spent 5.5 hours waiting for the email arrived, before the release manager asked me to abandon the work and restart the system.

I had to check the mailbox every 5 minutes or so - I could have really done with King Size Homer's drinking bird to press a 'check mail' button. I ended up devising a shell script loop to do the job for me, which whiled away about 10 minutes or so.

Net result - missed the first episode of the latest Dr Who series for 8 hours of tediom. At least I get paid "ovies" for it - and I caught up with "The Doctor" tonight on BBC3

Poisson D'Avril

"We are talking jape of the century..."

A day early perhaps, but a good one all the same.

Yesterday one of the chaps at work used AT&T Labs Text to Speech tool to create some sound files containing various wind up voice messages. He loaded these into a mobile phone and used them to make some calls.

We have a support call logging desk that is based in Mumbai (yes to ask the person who sits on the next desk to do something for us, we have to call Bombay!), so the "Anjali" voice was used.

e.g.
"Please close you're call now".
"Why have you not closed your call yet?".
"Please stop disrespecting me and close your call".
etc gradually getting more abusive (and more obviously a wind up).

Three of us were in on the wheeze, and had difficulty keeping a straight face whilst the two chosen victims took the bait, hook line and sinker. On the final call they were demanding to know the name of the person who was calling them, and who their manager was.

Then they looked up and noticed the sniggering....I'm half expecting some form of retribution today - nothing so far...

Knee Pads

A long time ago I bought a set of knee pads to help minimise skateboarding injuries.

Every now and again they turn up, usually when I'm looking for something else.

I've got no idea where they are right now, but I could really use them - I'm busy laying some oak flooring, which involves a lot of kneeling on a hard surface.

Perhaps I'll just strap on a couple of cushions?

Bitstrips

You can blame cha0tic for this post
Another truly great way to waste hours of your time on the internet...

Proof of the Existence of God 2

Further proof of the existence of god, or at least, that is, of the God of Vending Machines...

Doing some night time system patching at work tonight, and one of the code patches failed to stitch itself onto the system. Waiting for an on-call developer to show up, so I decided to purchase some sustainance (spelling?) from a nearby vending machine.

I selected and paid for a packet of smoky bacon flavoured crisps. Two dropped down from the rack into the collection tray. An unexpected and welcome Twofor (Two For the price of one), or BOGOFF (Buy One, Get One Free)!

Felt like Hodges Lucky Day in CSI (around 00:50 in this clip).

I walked away from the machine whistling "Mr Blue Sky" :)