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June's Journal
03/07/2009
[16:25] Rather than go straight into town after work yesterday I left a little
early and went home to put up the tent in the garden. with the door facing
away from the driveway it felt very private inside, which was exactly the
feeling I was going for. It was also the first time I've put the tent up on
my own, strangely. Still, having helped put up about seven almost identical
ones (sometimes on my own) at the Peterborough Regatta just a few weeks
previously it didn't take too long, even in the heat. I was perspiring quite
heavily afterwards, especially after I'd humped down rollmats, blankets,
towels, a duvet and pillows to make it a reasonable place to sleep. After a
quick shower and a change into smart clothes I rushed off to get into town in
time to meet Kris and pretend I'd come straight from work. Having to turn
back and get the voucher for Loch Fyne meant I had to cycle even faster to get
to the bar in time. Luckily she was a little late so I could mop most of me
dry and try to look at least a little debonair.
We had a lovely cocktail each sitting on high bar chairs and chatting about
the day and then wandered down the street to the Loch Fyne restaurant where we
devoured the appetiser bread in minutes as we sat in the outside seating area
enjoying the shade and the hum of quiet conversation around us. The starters
and mains (I had my first ever oyster, opinion: salty) were delicious, as was
the single glass of wine I had (more alcohol in one night than I think I've
had in the last three months). We walked and then cycled home to give
ourselves time to digest, chatting and smiling all the while until Kris
noticed the tent in the garden. Cue excited noises and a happy lady. After
plenty of water to drink we retired to the tent for the night.
While a perfect evening, the thing about sleeping on the floor is that it can
never be as comfortable as an expensive mattress (which is what I have, told
as I was by a clever person a long time ago that given the amount of time you
spend in bed a good mattress is essential to a happy life). As a
result I didn't sleep terrifically well, but I was lovely and cool. It also
rained in the night, which is always great to experience from inside a
waterproof tent.
After waking for the last time this morning we enjoyed the feeling of the
great outdoors before getting up and on with our days. Kris stayed home today
to put on the inordinate amount of washing we appear to have accumulated in
the last week (I blame the heat and lots of exercise). I headed into work
where I spent a little bit of time working on an XML + SSL + Flash + IE issue
which I've been looking at on and off since the beginning of March. During my
8km run in what turned out to be much cooler weather (more rain too, which was
lovely) someone I'd mentioned the problem to came up with a URL which allowed
me to create a two-line 'response' rule for our Zeus ZXTM load balancers to
set the Cache-Control and Pragma headers to useful values. With that one
minute's worth of work: success! Hurrah for me (and people on the web who had
already run into and solved the same problem in another guise or two). That,
coupled with the previous 12 hours and the minute or so I took off my 8km time
has made for a very good day.
I'm now just half an hour away from going home, doing a bit of housework and
then going out for a row in what should be a rather good 4+ outing with some
better-than-usual rowers. Roast chicken and potatoes for dinner... and then
it's the weekend on top of that! I might just go and see the new Transformers
film while Kris is at a girly night tomorrow. No rowing on account of many of
the club heading down to see the Henley Royal Regatta tomorrow and Sunday. I
think I'll get some cycling in.
Tell a lie, it's Friday! I'm out of here in five minutes!
02/07/2009
[16:30] Eurgh! Early morning outing this morning. It was... interesting.
Someone who normally sits at the 2 seat was stroke for the boat. Not
something I would have decided on in terms of crew order, I tell you. Still,
couple that with last night's 4+ outing and yesterday's 8km run and we have a
reasonable amount of exercise in the last 24 hours. What I don't have this
evening is any exercise or social activities planned so I'm getting the
opportunity to take Kris out for our delayed date from Tuesday. With luck and
a following wind it's going to be a lovely evening with a mini-surprise at the
end which will either be brilliant fun or no trouble at all. Just so long as
it doesn't rain.
Work today has been pretty much empty with just a few patches to test and
install. We've reached a trough between project work at the moment so it's
really more a case of keeping things running and tidying up bits we haven't
had time to deal with before. That and pushing the web team to get off the
servers we wanted to decommision more than two and a half years ago and onto
the shiny new Xen boxes I built.
01/07/2009
[16:45] Frustration abounded this morning Kris as she suffered a bit of a
disappointment. Hopefully I was helpful in showing her that it wasn't
anything to do with her but all about the person who made the decision.
Something like that anyway.
Work has been quiet but with the occasional oddity here and there. One
machine's RAID subsystem went psychoschizoid overnight and refused to believe
all the disks in its RAID5 were supposed to be there. Only after rebooting
the whole box and telling it to accept that the 'new' disk was in fact
supposed to be part of the array was it able to rebuild onto it and get on
with doing its job.
I went for another hot and tiring 8km run at lunch time (something like 26degC
according to the BBC weather) and managed to knock perhaps fifteen seconds off
my time. This is actually quite promising for when the air temperature drops
a few more degrees or so. I'm rowing this evening. If the weather is
anything like it was last night when it turned out I was going to be in the
stroke seat for a bow-rigged 4+ rather than the 8+ I'd assumed we'd be in I'll
be dripping wet by the time we get to to lock. I was rather angry to find
that not only could I have not turned up and those people who had turned up
could have still had an outing, but that it was probably down to our crew
organiser not getting himself in gear and contacting people a little more in
advance. As it was Kris and I were extremely upset to have missed our date
evening/celebratino of her getting her third (of five) chapter of her Ph.D
submitted to her supervisor. Still, I did go home an hour early so we could
have iced chocolate drinkies on the lawn and calm down a bit from the
excitement and heat of the day. Same routine this evening for me, except that
I'll be washing up. Kris is out running. I don't envy her as the weather's
supposed to get even hotter around about 19:00 tonight. At least I'll be near
water.