BOFHJournal - July 2009

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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.