I'm feeling a rather odd mix of annoyance and melancholy today. Mostly the annoyance is aimed at various services I have to use at work. But some of it is aimed at the same reason as the melancholy - a sudden change of circumstances at work.

So, firstly, last week our company announced that several people's positions were being made redundant at the company, including one of my underlings and one of my bosses. As the 'boss' has been there since I started (and was the main person to guide me through the company) it feels odd to see him leave... the company will feel very odd without. To all though whom are having to move onto pastures new, good luck :).

Also, 'Munchies' the sandwich shop I use daily for my lunch at work has moved outside of the town - too far to sensibly walk there and back in a lunch break. That sandwich shop had become part of my daily ritual, and it feels strange to walk down the high street and not turn into that shop. Given that I was introduced to the shop by the afore mentioned boss, life is suddenly going to feel very different in the coming weeks.

Hmmm, other news...

Dom has his 2X birthday last week, so the house went out for a very enjoyable meal at Old Orleans in the Lanes. Reasonable amounts of alcohol was consumed (Purple Rain cocktails are gorgeous!) and a good time was had by all. We've been trying to go out as a house more often recently, and I definitely think it's been improving the general mood of the house.

Not much else happening really. I've had a fair amount of rack mountable computer hardware come through the post, and I'm now looking into a server cabinet to house it all in (see my rant in the code section).

Oh, and I have found I have a liking for weird teas - I ended up ordering about 15 boxes of the stuff on Amazon.

Right, out of lunch time to write stuff, and out of stuff to write about, so I'll leave it here.

3 days to go...

Well, damn.

This post was going to be about both how much Virgin Media's 50mb service(which we have moved to) rocks, and how the house went out for a meal on saturday to the Open House and had much good food and drink.

Instead however, you will be getting a chronicling of my day so far.

So today:

• I spent half an hour looking around my room for my keys. Nope, they appear to be gone. Great.
• The ticket gates at Brighton station ate my weekly season ticket that I had just bought. Had to get the guards to dig it out for me.
• Got to work to work, where I have at least 3 separate projects that need to be tested and given to the client by the end of the day, to find all sorts of bugs and problems with the code - so I have been frantically patching things while I should be doing detailed testing. Also, they seem to be doing renovation work downstairs - the office is vibrating from all the power tools being used.
• Between myself and a colleague, we managed to break one of the live servers - it seems there are some problems with the newest stable release of PHP. Sigh.
• And finally, the nosepiece of my glasses fell off randomly.

4 hours to go. Wonder how many other deities I can piss off today...

Update 16:29 GMT

Also:

• Managed to break a Google Docs spreadsheet to the point that it didn't show column numbers and wouldn't allow anyone but myself and a specific colleague to edit it. I could give others permission to edit the file, but the permissions then reset about 30 secs later.
• Caused Smarty to create a compiled template with permissions such that it then couldn't recompile the template.

Sigh.

So, first off, Happy Birthday to Amy and KJ!

Secondly, KJ - I suck, I still haven't managed to send your birthday present, I will try and sent it tomorrow, I promise.

Finally, Woo, yet another couple of weeks without posting. Go Nik!

Right, with that out of the way.

Managed to get around to clearing out my room over the long weekend (and I hoovered it, Craig :P). This was long long over due, but it's finally done and the room does look a lot better for it. I still have some stacks of things to sort, but there is now floor space!

I have also managed to accidentally buy a server. To be fair, at £41 delivered, I can't complain - but I am very surprised that I managed to win it.

Anyway, other than that, not a lot has happened. Work is plodding away. The weather still can't make it's mind up. I should be rolling out an update to the site this week end which will include, among other things, a new style (that works with all versions of IE) and all the old posts from the old version of the site - I may not get around to adding the comments for these posts though.

Sigh.

Don't see it yet?

Dear Angry Balding Fat Man who drove past London Road Sainsburys at approx. 10:35am this morning.

I am sorry that I offended you so much that you felt the need to honk your horn at me and flip me off.

If you could let me know what it was about my behaviour or appearance that, in the one second you had to see me when you came round the corner, offended you so much, I will my utmost to improve that aspect of myself.

Yours, a concerned citizen

Not a good week. I spent Wed. and Thur. feeling like crap and throwing up and stuff, and then, when I went back to work on Friday, realised that the code that a colleague had written as part of one of the pieces of development I was working on was, whilst functional, not exactly fit for purpose and almost impossible to maintain (even for him). I think we've solved the issue, but I will admit that I possibly didn't handle the situation ideally as my mind was still recovering from being ill.

I think I'm definitely going to have to step up the code reviewing to try and stop this happening in the future (absence due to illness not withstanding). I don't want to have to be in a position again where I have to tell someone their work isn't good enough (at least, not if I can do something earlier to prevent it becoming an issue)

Blergh, I hate human management at the best of times...

Hopefully next week will be better...

I've finally gone ahead and bought myself a PSP (a preowned 2000 series). After my annoyance of having to expend last months savings on the Council tax, I decided to use this month to buy the last few expensive items I wanted for myself, so that I could concentrate my money on saving in the future. Yes, I know this logic is flawed, but it's a good excuse (well not good ... meh).

I must admit, I am pleasantly surprised by how good the PSP is. I have generally heard bad things of the PSP over the years, which is why it was sat at the end of my list of consoles to purchase. But the interface and games look good, the sound quality is great (especially over headphones), and the screen, whilst being fairly low resolution (480 x 272) is crisp and bright, and movies look really good - better than they should at this resolution. Any one who has played/seen Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core will know what I mean. I think my only major criticism is that the screen is very hard to see in bright sunlight

I've bought 3 games including FF7:CC and Every Extend Extra, an extension to a wonderful freeware game for the PC I played years ago. It is a lot of fun, and is very reminiscent of retro arcade games; though with updated graphics and music. How could I say no for £5?

Update: 21st March - now 7 games... oops.

Our landlord seems to be exceptionally unlucky when it comes to water - more accurately water in houses.

In the last week or so, not only has our shower broken to the point that it's always on, but it then started leaking through the kitchen ceiling. Craig's room also seems to have gotten a bit of damp around the closed off chimney - we reckon it was caused by the snow a few weeks back.

If on top of that you factor in the problems we had with water at the old house, and the rising damp problems he's had with another of his houses, I really do pity the guy.

As normal, he has been most helpful and responsive, and we now have a new shower (which is quite nice), and the shower floor has been resealed.

Hopefully nothing else water related will go wrong. *tempts fate*

In other news, yet another 2 train fatalities since my last post... sigh.

Since when has playing around on train tracks regained it's popularity? I have noticed a very marked increase in the number of deaths on the rail network recently - mostly because they keep making the trains I use late, but it's starting to get silly - In the last 7 days the London - Brighton line has had delays for 4 different fatalities. Come on people - repeat after me: "Stop playing on the railways".

Been a very disruptive week so far - I was off ill on Monday when my headaches worsened to the point of my whole body aching and, at one point, a loss of color perception. As is normal for me these days, a day off my feet seems to have cured me (though my sleeping pattern still seems to be screwed).

And now I'm at the start of my long weekend - I've taken today and tomorrow off for a well needed break. Work has been a little stressful lately due a number of factors and, combined with my general health last week, I admit to being a bit bitchy at work these past couple of days. Apologies to colleagues for my occasional shortness.

So, long weekend. I don't have too many plans - I have some work to do on this site, and my room needs a tidy (desperately) but I think my plan is just to laze around and relax.

In fact, on that thought - bugger. Badminton starts on the other side of town in half an hour, and having just woken up from an afternoon nap, I don't have the energy or motivation to go...

Bad Nick.