Rambling update

I'm a bit sub-optimal today. I awoke with a very nasty headache, which is always a bad sign. Paracetamol didn't really touch it, so I've raided our medicine cabinet for some codeine, which has helped a lot more. I'm a bit spaced out now, probably a combination of the drug and the vice wrapped around my head.

Fortunately, work is very quiet this morning. A bus bar melted in the server room at the weekend, which caused all manner of nasty problems then. The result now is that the server room is running on reduced power, so all the development boxes have been switched off till the power situation can be sorted out. There are electricians in there now, apparently. Possibly dressed in red shirts and climbing up tubes and going "the engines cannea tek much more of this, captain." My desktop machines are all OK, but with no development boxes to connect to there's little work that I can do. I've already done "clearing out my Inbox" and "answering emails I've been avoiding for weeks." I might have to write some documentation soon!

I had a reasonably relaxing Bank Holiday weekend. Boro beat Portsmouth 2-0 to ensure Premiership football next season. Trash and I generally take it in turns to see Boro play, and looking back it seems I'm the "lucky charm" as I see the wins and draws, and she just sees the losses!

The sun came out yesterday and evie_petrol spent the day playing outside with all her little friends on the cul-de-sac where we live. This will be encouraged as the summer continues, as it's slacker parenting for us and gets her to learn play and negotiation skills ;-)

My M3100 went very downhill at Whitby, and even a complete hard reset and re-install (hey, it *is* Windows) failed to fix it, so it's going to be replaced tomorrow. While it was out of action I set myself up with a Sony Ericsson P1i for the weekend. It was odd going back to Symbian after so long in Micro$oft Windows for Mobile Phones land. Symbian is nice, but there's one unavoidable fact about using a phone running a Microsoft O/S connected to a PC running a Microsoft O/S: the syncing with Outlook is rock solid. Syncing the P1i to my PC lead to really odd little failures for no immediately apparent reason. For example, I completely lost my contact details for rosamicula. She just didn't make it to my phone. Perhaps Sony don't approve of her? :-) This was sad 'cos I wanted to send her a picture of all the soldiers at the Riverside on Saturday. I thought she might like that *grin* This morning I fiddled about and discovered that *something* in the synch/Symbian/P1i combo doesn't like brackets in a contact's name. WTF?

My motorbike is also slightly broken. I hit a false neutral last week and kicked it up a gear a little harshly. It looks like I've stripped some splines on the gear lever, and now it will change up but it leaves the gear lever kinda stuck in the up position. You have to tap it back down before you can change up again. Not a huge problem, but it makes for rubbish high speed gear changes. Getting away from traffic lights is much slower, and happens at slowness approaching that of a *car*. How crap is that? She will be seeing the man that takes care of her on Thursday for some TLC.