Monitoring the Situation

Aber-eve

Well, off to aber in the morning, and as I sort of predicted, I am nowhere near finished packing, still got to sort out all my clothes, and I'm meeting up with someone from work tonight for a drink, it's all stress, not much time left.

Got a text today from si saying that they have dug up the road, so I hope I can acutally get access to the front of the house to drop off all my stuff! I'm not carrying it all down the road. Also just this second remembered I have to sort out contents insurance - Arse.

Got to go now, uberStress mode almost entered.

Indicating Failure

2 Days Until Aber - :-D

Well, I finally finished work on friday, seemed weird to be finishing for the 3rd time! Managed to make a suitable nuisance of myself when I left, asked for photocopies of everything that I had signed, don't think they were too impressed. Was a fairly quiet weekend, went shopping again, and yet again failed to find some shoes to go back to uni with, no-one seems to have anything acceptable in size 11 for some reason, I mean it's not like 11 is an usual size or anything, in fact quite common isn't it?

Went to aber for the day with mum to drop off the free washing machine, was an OK journey apart from being totally knackered from driving there and back in one day. Finally picked myself up some keys for the house, which means I don't feel quite so bad about paying rent on a house that I don't even have keys for! mental note: mum's car handles like an antique bus with a washer in the back.

Now, on to my rant for the day. Why is it that people are INCAPABLE of indicating properly on roundabouts? I am sick of tired of the following:

1) The dreamy people turning left, who decide that sufficient information is for them to flash the indicator bulb ONCE when they have already started leaving the roundabout

2) The inconsiderate prats who decided when turning right that they dont actually need to indicate more than once, and just indicate right, even as they are leaving the roundabout.
.
3) The brainless people who are simply incabable of using that stick thing attached to the steering weel.

What is this about? I guess that roundabouts were not covered until a certain date in the DSA sylabus, so another thing indicating that 5 year retests would be a very good idea. And if your not sure what an INDICATOR or a ROUNDABOUT is, I suggest you read here and fcuking learn it, look it even has a picture. *rage*

Gray Imports

9 Days Until Aber

Hmm wednesday, typical middle of the week day really, iIm now very tired after staying up till about 2.30am for many nights in a row, last night due to calling the states from my mobile, which I was quite impressed with acutally. Direct dial, no noticeable voice delay (I take it that this means landline as apposed to satellite?) and what is most annnoying, is it was cheaper to phone the states than it was to phone a mobile on another network in the UK!

Monday was the start of my last week at work, and to be honest it is dragging so far, spent a lot of time reading newsgroups, and just getting things finished off before I go. One thing i'm starting to consider again is converting the car to run off vegetable oil, aside from the technical side of getting a heated fuel filter and some othe things it seems there is a lot of red tape, for one you can't just take waste oil and put it in your car, you have to pay duty on it, and in order to do that, you have to technically be registered as an oil distributor! When I phoned Customs and Excise, they were very helpful, however he didnt seem to know if there was any mechanism for catching people who don't pay tax on their waste chip fat, so I really don't know what to think/do, think I'll put it off until next summer.... For the next project, the car needs a service, needs the shocks changing, and needs a new radiator that started leaking this week :

As usual I have not acutally bothered to put up any pictures, but for more info on Diesel-Veg oil conversions see : Goat industries

Off-White Goods

13 Days Until Aber

Firstly, I'm going to apologise for the last post, it was crap, I think somewhere the email acutally apologises/explains why it was nonsense, but even I am having difficulty making sense of it :o) Well, picked up the washing machine, it was in working order, but apparently leaks a bit, and it seemed a bit rusty, brought it home in mums car and on saturday night I started to try and remove some of the rust. Dismantled it, and had a go at it with some rust stabiliser I had, didn't try too hard as it only has to last a year longer, if that!

This morning went to a computer fair, it was a bit crap really, not many stalls, but picked up a new soldering iron, and my 4th computer, another P200, which I intend to convert to another linux server (i'm thinking Mandrake this time), maybe even some sort of cluster with dafad... dunno yet... Finished off the washing machine this afternoon, resprayed the front panel white (the whole thing was originally beige/brown/rust), as it was rusting loads anyway it acutally works! cor!

Tommorrow brings the start of my last week at work - cor :O then not long until aber :O Ive just been thinking its now over 2 years since I started my Year In Industry.. life seems to be passing so fast! Must remember to get cakes in the office before I leave, that always goes down well :)

This Title Is Intentionally Missing

14 Days Until Aber

Still not sure why I am tired, I've decided to put it down to the fact that I always get a bit strange around times when stuff is going to change/is changing, but in this case I know I definately am looking forward to this change. Can't wait to get back into the land of studenty slackerness, copious alcohol, and extreme madness, that is probably a statement potential/current/past employers wouldn't want to hear, so for them, here is the alternative version: "I can't wait back to university and apply myself wholly and fully to my course once more".

I've been moping around all week really, spent most days at work staring at the screen for inspiriation doing work in fits and starts, not as efficient as I was last year, but I'm going to put it down that I'm working pretty much under my own steam at the moment, not many people around to ask/tell me what to do, strange that. Car has been de-rusted, and as my mum put it, she looks like new again. To be honest, there was never really all that much wrong with her apart from the bits of rust on the front skirt, but now it's gone it makes a whole lot of difference, been contemplating getting a chrome exhaust cover thing, which I think would look good, but does that mean I am a boy-racer wannabe? If it does, can one be a boy racer in a normally-aspirated Diesel car?

Met up with kath last night, was good to see her, she seems to be in pretty much the same situation as me, she basically wants to be back at uni, and not stuck with parental units! James has arrived in the states in one piece, and pretty much seems to be getting on OK so far minus the jet lag!

Randomly looked on the newsgroups at work today, and as of tommorrow morning I will be the proud owner of a free washing machine for the house in aber, providing I can get it in mum's car! I'm starting to feel like i've done a lot more about the house than you should have to do when you move into a rented house, and I don't really think that's on, but I suppose it will be good to be in a fairly big house, in quite a nice location, even if the carpets are a bit iffy, and jaz' room smells like someone was running the weed equivelent of a tupperware party in there or something.

Ok, I know this blog isnt making much sense, and I know the maths doesn't add up with the "days until aber" either, but I don't care, It is 2am and my eyes are all blurry. Deal.
TTFN

Flying By

18 Days Until Aber
Hmm still knackered and got to decide about a lot of things at the moment :( Family all went manchester for the bank holiday weekend on sunday, saw all the relatives probably for the last time until xmas :| It was actually quite wierd to all go up at once as a family, not done it for ages.

On saturday I changed the firewall config so that it doesn't flood with messages, then reloaded and scanned for open ports, to my horror there were 5 open! arrgh! so spend the rest of the evening in a bit of a panic as to why this had happened, initially I thought it was a bug in my script causing wierd behaviour. In the end I decided to try and reset the firewall all together so flushed all the rules with me accessing from the outside and a default policy of drop, so I ended up without any means of connecting to the outside world. Great. Phoned bug and he reset the firewall for me while in a drunken state and I could get in the next morning and get all the services running agian. Until today [tuesday] I didn't realise what was causing me to think that the ports were open, it was Internet Connection Firewall for Windows XP on my parents machine i use as an internet gateway at home, according to a document I came to by chance, ICF uses proxies to allow connections to things like FTP and Netmeeting, so this was making my machine think that the port was open on my server when I scanned it. Great! In this document MS tells us that the Internet Connection Firewall is not a firewall, oh no, it's a "Security Experience" how noddy can you get? One of my colleagues said "An experience, yeah, like a roller coaster ride, ups, downs, and it makes you want to vomit" -hehe :) To their credit though, Securityfocus did some testing and it seems quite resilliant and suited to home users.
On monday the server crashed which was really annoying, possibly faulty ram, got to investigate. Car going in tommorrow to have the rust removed - that'll be another £130 gone :/

PS. Pictures are coming, honest, I've sorted them out, just not got around to resizing them, laptop battery died on the way home after showing relatives pictures on it.

Knackered

I'm bloody knackered at the moment, been running around like a blue arsed fly for the last couple of weeks... Went to petes, which was ok, minus the general stress, but we won't go into that here, went to the science museum in london, and got some really nice pictures of central london. ..I will get around to posting some pictures... honest! Had a big presentation on the monday where I was giving a demo, all went well, but I couldn't help but think that they wern't all that interested in what I had to say, ah well, it's all good experience I suppose isn't it! Spent the rest of the week recovering from all the preparation work I did, and then got my teeth back into what I should have been doing when i was preparing.

Last weekend I went to aber, the house is really taking shape now, new kitchen floor and two new fridges going in (the old ones have a permanant pack of ice in them that I warned the landlord would probably ruin the new laminate floor!). Took my mum's friend's steam cleaner and went around de-skanking the worst bits, even managed to get _all_ the paint off the hall floor, it's all looking like a different house to that we looked at a few months ago in horror!. Also sorted out the ram issue on the server and changed it to simms rather than dimms, which means that i can finally run online updates!

This coming weekend sees visit to family up in manchester - should be, er, fun, but a nessessary evil before I go back to uni....

Pictures will happen next week - I promise,

Interesting News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2175870.stm

Can you believe that people don't realise Groenig is taking the piss with the flanders family?

http://security.tombom.co.uk/shatter.html
Hmm, looks like the Windows have been broken again, fun fun fun - now wait for a massively wide-ranging explot!

Rage

This week has seen the mad rush at work to prepare for a big presentation, complete panick today when I realised how much I had to do, but lots of people helped me, and it got pretty much sorted in the end :o) Been fairly quiet otherwise, wrote an email to the uni the other night, quite long for me too, but the power went off *just* before I clicked send, VERY annoying. Also, the guy who won my second auction of my Palm III has not sent me any money 13 days later, herd nothing except a perplexing email asking me to tell him the difference between the product and another, I've emailed him with warnings of bad feedback if I don't hear anything by monday - RAGE! Phoned si at the house, apparently the little things with the house are not sorted yet - like no carpet in the kitchen! so im gonna go to aber next weekend and get a few bits sorted with the server, get a proper list of the things that are wrong, then talk to the landlord myself. Going to surrey this weekend to see pete, should be good =)

Pay Day

It was payday yesterday :)) Finally, I'm in the black! Had a bit of a quiet week or two as usual, main events were as follows. Got landed with the fact that I am going to be involved in a big presentation soon, yes, me as a lowly student, to a lot of people who have more years experience than I have been out of nappies, seems like I am going to have to do shitloads of practice making sure everything runs smoothly, I think this is a chance for me to show what I can do :) The roof in my room started leaking on wednesday during a heavy shower, fuck, it filled a coke glass in that shower, but the next day at work managed to get 4 litres in a bucket (luckily I was awake enough the next morning to think that it might overflow the glass) parents said that it should be sorted out soon :/