Archives for: January 2007

Poor I cooked Penne with Vodka. The flame lasted for only a couple of seconds. Very disappointing.

Poor The pain at the back of my ankle might be my Achilles tendon sending me warning signals.

Better Two ibuprofen seem to have helped.

Bad Woke to find I'd had a seizure. The second, to the best of my knowledge, of my life. This is bad. Very bad. Let's ignore the fact it demonstrates my body doesn't work properly. While I may have been allowed to walk away after fainting at work, I'm certain I'll lose my driving license for a year after this.

I've found a bus to race: the number 3. A couple of days ago I did quite well. The bus passed me at the beginning of Nicolson Street and then stuttered its way from bus stops to traffic lights and back to bus stops. I hadn't caught it as it crossed the Royal Mile and that should have been that, but the driver kindly stopped just before Princes Street and waited. Waited until I passed him. Then waited some more.

I need something to drag me the next step. A bus in the distance may not be cool, or professional, but if it gets me to run another block then I'll use it.

Today was different. The bus passed as I reached Clerk Street. The driver waited again before Princes Street, so I did pass it for a couple of stops. That bus must just sit there for 10-minutes.

Why the difference? I'd drunk IPA and then gone home to pizza last night. I was dragging more than my usual quantity of fat along the road and felt sluggish. As I approached the end of the run, I turned to take in the three extra blocks I've added to my route, did half a block then turned around and headed home.

Not all feeds are bad: Tapestry Comics provide feeds for Dilbert and Get Fuzzy (including the Sunday comics).

The caller wanted the task done on Thursday, but asked, "are you okay with Thursday?"

"Uh-hu, why not?"

"Well, it's your wedding anniversary and I just thought..."

"You think I'd be any less grumpy?"

Since any actual facts have been declared confidential, let's say the rumour the part of GBU is to be split off are true. Let's say that approximately 19% of GBU's staff are to leave to form an independent company. To many in GBU that will have little impact. Much like an earthquake in Scotland, there'll be those woken at night by the event, but little more than talk the morning after. While these people may share the same clients as the newly formed company, the immediate effect will not be a loss of clients (although, of course, that may come later).

There are those within the firm who will lose clients. These are the management-speak clients of internal services - the people who move mail around the office, stock stationary, maintain the office equipment, and (oh yeah) those in IT. These people are going to lose about a fifth of their clients. They will surely find themselves overstaffed with a potential for job losses.

To be honest, the IT department at GBU is already overstaffed. There are four people in a department that should only need three.

A week of announcements at GBU. Thursday's rumoured announcement ended with a paragraph explaining it was confidential. A bit late - rumour has it that one of the associates was told by his friend (not a GBU employee) that he'd been called in as a consultant while they were making this decision. Edinburgh's like that.

There was also an announcement that the firm is going to move building at some time in the next two years.

Today I arrived at work late to the sound of grumbling. Today's announcements was about holidays. It seems we must all take a full week off between Christmas and New Year. Sounds good, but we lose part of our holiday entitlement. Same total number of days off work in the year, but fewer of them can be taken when we choose. That shouldn't really have any impact on me. I mean, every year I find myself trying to use up my holiday entitlement before I lose them at the turn of the year.

Latest rumour is that someone who left might be coming back. Just goes to show you shouldn't put much faith in rumours.

The last time I was at my sister's her sprogs were watching a trailer for Disney's Ratatouille. Towards the end of the trailer a fat rat says, "you know, if you can sort of muscle your way past the gag reflex all kinds of food possibilities open up."

I can't remember being taught that as a child.

I woke this morning with that "I can't face it" feeling. I had to get up, go for a run, go to work, feign surprise when the announcement that another part of the firm is being split off is made, work through the noise, come home to a fridge without cheese...

Oh, the life of a First World male at the start of the 21C is tough!

...and then go to bed recognising that nothing's different from yesterday and tomorrow's just going to be the same. It was dark, cold and lightly raining outside. Bed was comfortable and Chota was using me as a pillow. Getting up and facing the day ahead seemed too difficult.

The important thing wasn't to face the day. The important thing was to get up. Just get up. I got up.

Sure it looked miserable outside, but that wasn't important. All that was important was putting on my running clothes. Nothing else, nothing after that mattered. I wasn't going running, I was putting on the clothes in which I run. I put on my running clothes.

Next, go outside. I wasn't going for a run. I was just going outside. Maybe I'd come straight back inside. I went outside.

Start running. It didn't need to be a set route. The goal was just to start running ... just get to the end of the Meadows ... just get to that downhill section a couple of blocks further ... just get to the next downhill section ... just get to Princes Street...

Right, now the goal is to change into my work clothes, "you're not going to work. You're just changing into the clothes you wear to work."

I used to have the disk of my work PC partitioned into two drives: a C-drive for "code" and a D-drive for "data". Yeah, I am that [b|s]ad.

Batman's now imposed "Desktop Authority" on those in IT. That has a number of impacts: 1) logging on to the network now takes two minutes; 2) we're being watched; 3) the D-drive isn't as easy as a double-click to access. Accessing the D-drive isn't difficult. It's just not as easy as it should be.

My computer had problems before Batman forced "Desktop Authority" upon us. I installed XP on that machine in March 2004. Three years ago? That's probably some kind of record. The machine had problems and one of those problems was the size of my partitions wasn't right. I had a C-drive that I struggled to keep even 1Gb of space free and a D-drive with tumbleweeds. I needed to take some of the space I'd given to my D-drive and add it to my C-drive.

The problem was none of my Windows tools would allow me to change the way I split the disk. It wouldn't resize the partitions during a reboot and (prompted by the interweb) looking for faults on my disk didn't help. Maybe it was the fact I had so little space left on my C-drive, but more likely it was the fact I hadn't re-installed XP in three years ... think not changing the oil in your car for that long.

I need to change the partition sizes on my disk, but all I was getting was errors. Thankfully, there was a pointer to an alternative. I already had a Knoppix boot CD and everything important on my D-drive was backed-up, so I had nothing to lose. A reboot, select qtparted from the System menu (rather than, as suggested, the terminal), and resizing the partitions was as easy as dragging and dropping.

Okay, Linux had nothing to do with it. I just needed a boot disk with a tool for playing with partitions. I could've used MS-DOS (and, by God, would that have booted fast).

I have a terrible memory. I must write everything down. PINs - how many of them do we have? There's the one for our current account, the one for our credit card, the one that opens the door to the office, the one ... um ... I don't remember, but I'm sure there's more. Disobeying the first rule of password protection, I had those PINs written down. In my defense, I used a Caesar Cypher, but that's about as strong a defense as saying, "the dog ate my homework."

Anyone with a couple of brain cells and about 10-minutes could've taken my note and emptied my bank account.

Want to know how my PIN is now written? OEPW.

Go ahead and break it. Okay, there are only a thousand possible combinations, but at least letters I've written down don't give you a clue. On the other hand, I can turn those letters back into digits in about 15-seconds.

How does it work?

Choose a word, or phrase with at least ten distinct letters. A poor example would be "ABCDEFGHIJ". A, slightly, better example would be "THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE".

Throw away the spaces and take the first ten distinct letters: "THECOMPL" plus "W" then "R".

Now assign the digits 0 to 9 to those first ten distinct letters. For each digit in the PIN simply replace with the letter assigned to that digit.

Not well explained? Okay, here's a worked example:

1) We choose a phrase with ten distinct letters ... um, how about, "CHOOSE A PHRASE WITH TEN DISTINCT LETTERS".

2) Throw away the spaces to get "CHOOSEAPHRASEWITHTENDISTINCTLETTERS".

3) Assign the digits 0 to 9 to the first ten distinct letters:
CHOOSEAPHRASEWITHTENDISTINCTLETTERS
012.3456.7...89

4) Replace the digits in the PIN with the assigned letters: a PIN of 2468 would become OEPW.

Oh yeah, when I said OEPW was my PIN ... well, you didn't think I was actually going to give you my PIN did you?

The Office Of National Statistics have provided a personal inflation calculator that allows you to compare your spending's inflation rate against the official rate. I don't think such a brute force calculator can work. It ignores the fact that what we buy changes over time.

Not that many years ago I would look at sandwiches in Boots and concentrate on the price sticker. Could I afford the sandwich costing almost £2, or should go for the £1.20 one? These days the price sticker isn't the most important factor in my budget. These days I'm budgeting on the nutritional information: can I afford to consume this many calories? Today I bought a "Bugsy" sandwich costing £2.20. I really wanted the Cheese and Onion one costing just £1.40, but it cost 150 calories more.

Yeah, I know. If I'd saved 6 pints of Baltika then I could've bought all the Cheese and Onion sandwiches I wanted.

Saturday arrived in Lothian Road style - one of the building's cleaners asking me to go to the binstore and wake someone who'd chosen to spend the night. Then a quick cycle to my sister's to find that rucksack full of components and CD I'd brought to fix her computer failed to include the one item required.

Every month, or so I meet up with MarkD for a couple of pints on a Saturday lunchtime. It's usually a quiet event: two grumpy old men sitting, nursing their pints, and moaning that things aren't the way they should be. This Saturday was different: 1) a different pub with different beer. I ended up drinking something called Baltika that, after a couple of pints, the barman told me was, "quite strong."

I think that may've been polite barman talk for, "don't you think you've had enough?"

Difference 2: I hadn't eaten all day. Even a couple of pints on an empty stomach is a bad thing, but on Saturday I had six.

I walked home from the pub (not bad, considering), walked into Sainsbury's to buy some food (a little late, but still positive), and danced my way around the aisles. At the time I thought the woman in the queue was laughing with me, but on sober reflection...

BoE's interest rate is to rise to 5.25%! This is shocking! I look like a complete an utter idiot, 'cause I thought the BBC was saying they'd hit 5.25 in February. OMG, what a shock!

If you can't afford the loan then would you take it out? No.

If you can't afford the loan if interests rates rose 1% ... forget the recent 0.75% ... then ask yourself how likely it is that rates will rise by 1% AND DON'T TAKE THE LOAN OUT!

One word: flagged.

(Oh yeah, bought a house on the coast? DON'T F~CKIN' MOAN WHEN SEA LEVELS RISE!)

I went for the first run of the year. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much (especially since it was only a 25-minute run), but it was important. A's left Edinburgh and Sean's too busy (something about the end of the tax year). I didn't think I could do it on my own. This morning's run was just to prove to myself that I could do it alone.

The hardest part was getting out of the flat. Being passed twice by the same woman on my loop of central Edinburgh wasn't too pleasant either.

What did I learn today?

1. I can run without A, or Sean (but I'd prefer not to).
2. Even in the cold and wet, Scott's plastic pants have no use other than housework.

I limped into work with my right leg crying for mercy.

Sometimes I feel there must be more to life than being a drone. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to cure a terrible disease, write a great work of literature, or go off to some Third World country to help people. I just want the to see a purpose rather than slow decay. At times like these I find watching a non-Hollywood movie is as good as taking two pills and going to bed, so I went off to watch a movie about a middle-class French couple being sent video tapes of their own life. A film that won numerous awards.

Okay, I went to see a film that had Juliette Binoche in it, 'cause she's hot and I'm one step from buying a raincoat.

"...recognises that a garden wall is of little practical use."

It was a Sunday afternoon, so I'd hoped the cinema would be near empty. Instead it packed around me. People were arriving, trying to find seats, even after the film had started. Why do people arrive late at cinemas, forced to look for a seat here and there?

The film was too long for my short attention span.

"...the briefest flash of insight."

"Fine, you've shown the audience that they're unaware what's the film and what's film within the film. Now let's move on. Um, is that a camera up there?"

Perhaps it's to hide the message, but I found some of the film too blatant. I mean, we returned to the corridor, but the camera angle was reversed. In an action movie we'd surely smirk at the director's mistake, but here it can't be mistake ... ah yes, the observed is also the observer. Perhaps we should have watched another hour of his grief.

"...a demonstration that those brought up on Willis and Chase need more than subtitles."

That's not to say I didn't walk out of the cinema with questions unanswered. Why does the observer sit between us?

What are we to learn from this movie? That the past cannot be Stalinised? That we are alone even when together? That while we may grow older, the new youth will use our bitterness against us? Or that I should stick to watching Bruce Willis movies?

Everyone stayed seated while the credits rolled.

Back to work after almost 2-weeks holiday. There's a good side to not taking your holidays until the last time possible: you appreciate the time off. There's a bad side: you go back to work and realise it's a year until you're next off. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I carried 5-days forward and have to take them by the end of March.

So, what's happened at GBU in the 2-weeks I've been off? Another of my plants has died. Not really surprising since I only went in to water them once.

Pay reviews are announced at the end of January, but the CEO's already sent out a "difficult year" e-mail like he did last year. Are we looking at another sub-inflation pay rise?

My Staff Representative (as close as GBU allows to a union rep') has reached the end of her term and a new rep' had to be found. I'd done the job before and was considering standing again. (The shame, the shame, I've played the part of a union rep.) Fine, but the CEO's e-mail also included an announcement that my area now had a new Staff Rep. We do? Did I miss the election? Who stood against the winning candidate? A quick talk to an incumbent revealed that members of staff no longer select their own Representative. Surely you must give people the impression that they have some control. Staff Rep's never had any power, but the employees chose them.

It could be worse: B&Q have prospective employees dancing before they're interviewed.

Word around the water cooler is that LMCK's been asked to come back.