NaNoWriMo

Well, I didn't do it.

I started well, but my efforts got derailed as real life hassles consumed most of my time in the middle of November. I've still got some ideas as to how to continue my story, but I think I may leave it for a while and rework the basic premise a little. If anybody is interested, my central conceit was to have two fictional blogs running in parallel and relate the same events from two different perspectives. The work so far can be seen at Dev Null and Gabe's World

Zero

It was cold tonight.

Driving home from my fencing class tonight I watched the temperature drop by degrees as I navigated the empty streets towards the ring road. The lights were with me most of the way, until I came to one pedestrian crossing where I had to stop to allow a cyclist to cross. Bizarrely, he was riding a Raleigh Chopper - the most desirable bike to children of a certain generation, but painfully uncomfortable to ride on anything but a nice flat stretch of tarmac. Not the thing for a hill climb on a cold winter's night, I would have thought ...

Strange Days

Awake at five o'clock this morning, fit for nothing but to continue the game Baker's Solitaire I had started four and a half hours previously.

I had arranged to take my daughter, Ms Dogwood, to the local shopping mall to meet her mother in a reasonably public place. I felt stupidly anxious about it, but I knew that it had to be done. We sat and had a coffee (well, actually a Costa Coffee Chocalisimo which is a fantastic sensory overload), and made polite conversation for a while and then Ms wanted to look at books and goth jewellery as is her wont. Her mother put up with this for a bit, and then started complaining about being tired so Ms and I made our excuses and left.

By the time I got home, a wave of tiredness washed over me and I slept for over an hour to catch up on the sleep lost due to worry the previous night. Does the ex realise the effect that she has on me and her daughter? Somehow, I doubt it ...

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The Good

Mrs Dogwood has been shopping this afternoon and has returned with a bottle of Meantime Coffee Beer. You may remember me enthusing about their Chocolate beer a little while ago, and I have to tell you that this surpasses it. It is brewed from a dark malt combined with roasted coffee and, by golly, it does what is says on the tin. Rich, complex and not overly bitter but with the most astonishing coffee aftertaste, this is a beer to truely savour. Buy now, but leave some for me.

The Bad

Trapped.

A large chamber, curved by the shape of the structure to form an arc. The infection known as the flood had reached this place, and the abominations that were its victims were at my heels as I ran to find an exit.

A dead end.

I turned and looked at the weapons I had. A human sub machine gun - empty - and a sentinel beam with barely enough energy for one shot. I ran blindly through the attacking horde, leaping to a ledge and striking down one of the abominations. I grabbed its weapon - a shot gun - and cut a swath through three more as I leapt for a higher ledge. I watched as a sentinel appeared from the opening in the wall on the far side of the chamber. Could this be an answer? I took aim, and destroyed the ports one at a time, until the last one released the control mechanism for a door at the far end to a shaft containing one of the gargantuan pistons that formed the mechanism for the shield that it was my task to destroy.

Escape.

The Ugly

A phone call from the ex - abusive and threatening. Not good, not bad, just ugly.

If an infinite number of monkeys ...

... were to type for an infinite amount of time on an infinite number of typewriters they might produce something like this ...

There's something you don't see every day

Not only do bears shit in the woods, they have now been photographed pissing up a tree ... :-)

Busy

I find that starting documentation is a struggle, but once I've started I build up a bit of momentum and I just keep going until I've finished. That's why I've worked solidly until nearly half past seven tonight, but at least I've got the user guide for our time sheets system written up in html and sent to my boss for approval. Just the systems administrators guide to do now ...

Another world

Driving over the viaduct this morning was a uniquely surreal experience.

The air was still, and the mist was rising as I headed south on the motorway. As I approached the start of the viaduct along a sweeping curve I experienced a moment of utter dislocation. I took a second glance before realising that the iconic cooling towers that dominate the skyline were missing.

The carriageway itself was reasonably clear, but the banks of fog on either side had formed a pearlescent curtain that completely obscured the usual view. It was only as I passed by the side of the towers that I caught a brief glimpse of them through the swirling clouds.

Bright Light!

Long standing readers of this blog (who really should pull up a chair and rest their tired legs) may recall that I went for an eye test back in August and that the optician said that my retinas looked a bit dodgy. After taking the letter to my gp (who, in a supreme moment of irony, struggled to read the optician's hand writing) I got a referral to the eye clinic. What a kerfuffle.

As previously mentioned in the blog that dare not speak its name, the parking around the hospital is a nuggering nightmare and today was no exception. We left home at half past two, with Mrs Dogwood on driving duties, and got to the clinic at five past three with five minutes to spare.

I went up to the clinic reception desk and waited patiently (ho ho - pun intended, they always are). The receptionist was organising a file full of notes which she did by leafing backwards and forwards to the right place, un clipping the binders, inserting the page, carefully reclipping the binders and starting again. Why it didn't occur to her to take all of the pages out of the binder, sort them with the new pages and then put them all back at the same time is beyond me. She spent a good couple of minutes at this task, studiously ignoring me, whilst the queue steadily increased behind me. She finally closed the binder with a snap and put it in the shopping trolley behind her. Before I could wave my appointment letter at her and say 'excuse me' she vanished out of the side door for another couple of minutes, eventually returning only to send me round to the other side of the clinic following the large arrows pointed on the floor.

A twenty minute wait, and then my name was called for my vision to be checked, which just involved reading the traditional letters off a chart. The nurse then put two lots of eyedrops in my eyes, warning me that they would sting, and by jimminy they did. She told me that the drops would take twenty minutes to work, and that I would be called to see the consultant after that.

This was technically true, but it actually turned out to be more like an hour after before the consultant actually shone an excrutiatingly bright light into the back of my eyes and pronounced them to be fine, apart from a little degeneration around the edge of the retinas which was perfectly normal for somebody as short sighted as me.

We finally left the clinic at twenty to five, just in time to hit the evening rush hour and the road works by the university. The eye drops had caused my pupils to dilate making the lights of the cars almost unbearable to look at, but I did retain enough vision to spot a 37 coming the other way whilst we crawled along, so the day wasn't a complete dead loss.

Bits and Bobs

I can't really think of a coherant way to blog today, so it's going to be bullet points ...

• Good news! The temperature has jumped from -3 to +11
  
• Bad news! I changed the battery in the remote sensor on the weather station and the base unit can't see it any more
• Good news! I found some tapes from the library that needed to go back
• Bad news! They were from a branch library five miles away
• Good news! The local library down the road will take them back
• Bad news! They are overdue and there's a fine on them
• Good news! It's only £1.45
• Good news! The programmer is finally doing some work on the timesheets system
• Bad news! We've got a planning meeting on Wednesday and he hasn't finished yet
• Good news! I got up to level 2 on my Halo multiplayer score last night and won a match
• Bad news! I lost the next three and went back down to level 1
• Er
• That's it ...

0MG!! LAM3R N00B!!!

I was feeling pretty hacked off about Halo 2 last night. I played a couple of head to head slayer games against opponents who were supposedly matched to my skill level and, to put it mildly, I got creamed. 10-0 on one match and 10-1 on the next one, and I only got the kill in that by blowing us both up with a grenade. What am I doing wrong? If I'm skill level one why am I facing people who can run rings around me? I tried hiding in a corner, moving around stealthily and finally running round like a maniac and when I come face to face with somebody they kill me with one shot. What am I missing? Is there some really obvious tactic or bit of advice that I should follow, or does shooting an entire clip from the SMG at somebody really not kill them?

I played a bit more of the single player game this morning (still savouring it), and then got an invite to a game with a couple of the UGVX clan. This has restored my faith in the game. We started with some slayer games - the phantoms one was fantastic, and I got a couple of good kills sneaking up on people, oddball on Beaver Creek and then an excellent 3 vs 2 game of capture the flag on Coagulation which saw me doing my usual mind the flag duties and which we won 3-1.

Thanks guys!

Phobos

This picture of Phobos was taken by the Mars Express orbiter from a distance of about 200 km. Absolutely incredible, and there is a stereo version of the same image available if you have any red/blue 3d glasses.

Ice Ice Baby

The sky was clear this morning and I felt as if I could reach up into the darkness and touch the stars. The snow had frozen into a crust of ice that cracked and splintered as I walked through the piles of leaves. I didn't even attempt the top route to school - the road would not be gritted and would likely be dangerously icy. I followed the bus route around and dropped my daughter off on time, and got back in plenty of time to get her younger brother to school as well. A bit of an awkward round trip but comfortable enough in the new car - the quick defrost setting on the climate control saw its first serious use and cleared everything in a few minutes before settling down to a comfortable 22 degrees.

I wrote up my notes on the installation process for the tsg bods when they next need to do it with lots of screenshots for the hard of thinking. What's the betting that they still manage to cock it up and ignore the process all together? Still, I've cc'd the boss in on it, so they don't have an excuse.

Just when I thought things were going ok, I had a phone call from the ex. Actually several phone calls worth of abuse, but that's not really something to go into in detail here. Suffice it to say that it was very draining and not the ideal start to the weekend.

The North Wind doth blow

I left the office at five o'clock and an hour later I had travelled less than five miles. The rain turned to large, wet flakes of snow by the time I reached the M42. Driving through the blizzard was a little like being in the Millenium Falcon jumping into hyperspace, except that the Millenium Falcon was going considerably faster than the 40 miles per hour or so that I was doing. I eventually got home at a little after eight.

Sod's law redux

The contracts management system that we are implementing has a facility for increasing prices in a variety of ways, by percentages or flat amounts. We were being shown how to use it this afternoon when my boss pointed out that there was nothing to show you on the screen when a contract had had a price increase, how much it was or when it had happened.

Putting it mildly, this was a bit of a show stopper.

After a bit of head scratching we realised that price changes do get written to the audit log, so the data is there somewhere in the system but we don't have an easy way of getting to it. Also, we realised that the mechanism for creating discounted invoices with an early settlement option is not really working in the way that we expected.

Not good, and the extended discussion about the implications went on till after five, leaving me just in time to join the traffic jams of Birmingham.

3 AM Eternal

I woke up at three o'clock this morning, tangled in sweaty sheets with my throat on fire. I stumbled into the bathroom for a drink of water and splashed my face to try and cool down. The radiator in the bedroom wasn't on, but the room felt oppressively warm and dry. I opened the window to let some fresh air in.

I was still thirsty, so I pulled my jeans on over my pyjamas and went in search of something cold. I found a drinks machine on the second floor and bought an overpriced bottle of Ribena. I returned to my room and drank the Ribena whilst watching a documentary on snowboarding in Andorra. I still couldn't sleep, so I played solitaire on my palm until I finally won a game of Baker's Game after nearly an hour.

I snatched a hour or two of troubled sleep before the alarm woke me up again at half past six.

Groan.

Sod's law

There is a well known maxim that states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Today has been a perfect example of that maxim.

We have been having some training on our new accounts module today. We asked the technical support group bods to set up a room with some pcs that we could use, a not unreasonable request. However, when everybody tried to log in we noticed that everything was going slow and eventually the server ground to a shuddering halt. We called the TSG bod down to have a look and eventually we worked out that he had given us a 10Mbs hub to use rather than a 100Mbs switch, and that the resultant slow connections and timeouts had overloaded the server. Cue a reboot, and a swift replacement, and we restarted the training running only an hour late.

By the time lunchtime rolled around we decided to work through to make up the lost time. However the training room was rather hot with eight pcs, a switch and a projector running in a confined space. A prolonged discussion of invoicing periods on top of the early start this morning was all I needed to nearly send me into a coma, and I found myself nodding off until I found an excuse to open a window and drink several cups of strong coffee.

When the training for the day had finished the next task was to install the updated version of the query add in for Excel, so I went to get the disk from the TSG cupboard of software related delights upstairs. I picked one up and asked if it was the right one. 'Should be' was the response. However, the consultant looked at it and realised it was the old version not the new one that we needed, so at five to five I headed back up to look for the right one.

No sign of the TSG bod, and the cupboard was locked. Back down to find my boss and the spare key for the cupboard. Open the cupboard and find the case for the correct disk. Great. Unfortunately the case was empty. Damn.

Back downstairs and I eventually found the backup copy of the disk which had fallen down the back of my bosses desk drawer, so we set to installing from that copy, finishing most of the clients by a quarter to seven.

Epilogue - the missing disk was eventually found by a shame faced TSG bod in the drive of the server where it had been for several weeks. Very useful if we'd had a fire and needed to do a disaster recovery procedure.

The Darkness

By the time I come to walk the dog at half past five or so it is dark outside. Walking through the field is strange - security lights from the houses around the perimeter flash on and off at random and illuminate patches of grass in their 500 watt glare. Due to the strange slopes and bumps, the surface of the field is cast into strange relief in a most disconcerting way, as light and shade compete.

The woods are in complete darkness though. I had my mini maglite with me, but as I reached the halfway point the light began to dim and rapidly faded. The rechargeable batteries that I use have a tendancy to run out of power without warning if I don't keep them topped up. I paused for a moment to allow my eyes to get used to the gloom, and found that if I walked slowly I could just about pick out the path and I knew roughly where I was heading. I remembered just in time to duck where there is an overhanging treebranch at head height, and then the rest of the walk was plain sailing. It is strange how the sounds seemed to be magnified in the dark, and I'm fairly sure I heard an owl pass overhead at one point with a beating of soft wings.

High Anxiety

I was awake at five o'clock this morning.

In fact, I've been waking up around then pretty much every day since the clocks went back, and I'm starting to feel tired. There's a lot going on in my head at the moment and lying in the dark waiting for the alarm to go off is a recipe for anxious thoughts. I know in the cold light of day (and boy was it cold this morning) that the things that I am being blamed for are not my fault, and there is no way that they could remotely be my fault, but that doesn't stop my subconcious from worrying at the thoughts from different angles like a dog gnawing on a bone.

I'm going to talk to my gp tomorrow and perhaps that will give me a different perspective on things. More cogently I am going to bash some folk with a long pointy metal thing for two hours tonight which should tire me out and switch my brain off for a while.

Forever Autumn

Crimson Skies

Flag Day

What twist of fate had brought us to this desolate outpost and thrown together Human and Covenant in a common cause? I stared at the token that had become our reason for fighting - a scrap of cloth and a stick of wood that we would now defend with our lives. I looked at the two humans who were now my companions in this battle, with their curious red armour and projectile weapons that belonged to a different era. What drove them to fight, if not the Word of the Prophet?

My reverie was broken by the sound of the Banshee circling above the base. I readied my weapons - a plasma pistol and one of the human projectile weapons in my other hand. I was curious to see the effect it would have on those who were about to attack. Red dots on the radar signified an attacker on the roof above us, and then the tell tale clatter of grenades coming through the opening to the sky above.

"Fire in the hole!"

I ducked behind the curtain walls at the side of the room and silently counted to three. An flash of light and the shockwave buffeted me as I resumed my guard place. One of my human companions had died in the blast. No matter. The attacker appeared above me again, framed against the bright ring of the Halo. He leapt down, seeking to steal the flag, but I was prepared. I released the plasma bolt from my pistol, stripping the charge from his shield and then simultaneously unleased a stream of bullets into his now defenceless body. He was dead before he hit the ground.

"That is how you defend a base, human"

-----

That was last night's Capture the Flag game on the Coagulation map in Halo 2. A thirty minute game which we finally won, 1 - 0. Absolutely flipping fantastic.

Testing Testing 1 2 3

Last Friday the powers that be decided to implement a new procedure for service delivery orders under £25,000. Cue a mad panic to get yours truly to design a spreadsheet that they could use and get it sent out. I finished the work on it, and then sent them the template carefully explaining that it needed to be tested thoroughly as I had written it in a hurry.

Fast forward to today, and a phone call complaining that the title box that they need to fill in was locked.

"You know when I asked you to test it, and you said it was all fine?"

"Yes"

"You didn't actually test it, did you? As in following the procedure that a user would have to follow to fill in the spreadsheet?"

"No"

Sigh.

All this and Halo 2

A little before nine this morning I uttered these immortal words - a small, dvd sized package had landed on the door mat. The label said it was from play.com - oh, be still my beating heart, but not, er, *too* still if that's ok with you. I placed it carefully on top of the cabinet in the hall way and went back to work.

Five O'Clock eventually rolled around and I eagerly opened my parcel like a child on Christmas morning. Hot diggerty - Halo 2, in just about the coolest looking box I have ever seen a game arrive in. A little longer to wait though - I took Barney for a walk and helped Jan unpack the shopping and then slipped that saucy little silver disc into my xbox.

Oh. My.

The game opened with a cut scene of stunning grandeur. Vast, alien vistas and the leader of the Covenant Elite Guard on trial for heresy, intercut with scenes of the Master Chief receiving his campaign medals. Powerful stuff, and not surprisingly the game kicks into gear with a scrappy fire fight aboard a space station in a similar vein to the first Halo, but with a couple of "What the fu-" moments to shake things up a little. The graphics have been given a noticable polish and the AI has been beefed up as well - this is not going to be a cakewalk. I finished my first jaunt on the single player campaign with a trip down to the surface of Earth to a stunningly realised African city in the midst of an fully fledged invasion. Burning jeeps littered the rubble strewn streets, palm trees swayed in the breeze and gargantuan alien fighting machines passed overhead.

Wow.

After a hastily consumed curry, I logged into Live for a go at the multi-player. The interface was a little confusing, but it didn't take me too long to find some people I knew playing a beach assault level. I gradually clawed my way up the leader board with each game, until the numbers were reduced to just four in a 2vs2 skirmish. I was teamed with a Dutch guy but the two players we were facing were really good and I struggled to get the 3 kills that I did, as opposed to the 25 that they handed to us. I called it a night, but I will be back for more.

Oh yes.

Spooky

By the time I got back from Birmingham the night was as black as pitch, but the dog was still demanding a walk, so it was on with the coat and out with the maglite and off I went. I was feeling a little spooked, and the strange hootings and rustlings just increased my apprehension. I reached the corner of the woods and followed the path around the far edge. Without warning the dog started straining on his lead and made for the dry stone wall that marked the boundary of the wood. I had a sudden sense of a hulking shape in the darkness and I shone the torch to see what was there, my heart momentarily in my throat.

It was a cow, staring over the wall in mute incomprehension. It stared at us for a moment or two, and then lumbered off across the field into the gloom.

Ow, ow and thrice ow.

I tripped up the stairs at work today landing heavily on my left wrist. It wasn't too bad at the time apart from the shock at falling over but it has really started to hurt now. It doesn't feel bruised, but I get a real twinge every time I twist my forearm or bend my wrist.

In other news, I'm down in Dudley tonight so I've just been for a swim. Ten lengths, but then I was still tired from the Rapier class last night. I also had a strange dream about being on a shingle beach with Emma Kennedy and some of her script writing chums. They were writing a comedy sketch set in a trendy wine bar or night club in Leeds and I was offered the chance of being an extra just as long as I cut my toe nails. I looked down at my bare feet and saw that my toe nails were all manky, yellow and overgrown and when I started to clip them they crumbled to the quick in a rather disgusting fashion. Any ideas what that one was about?

Right, I'm off down to the bar to get a pie and pint of beer, and I'll have a go with the wireless internet doobry later on to see if I can post this.

Somewhere in the middle

I've just had a ranting, hysterical phone call from the ex - not to apologise for her recent behaviour, or to offer an explanation, but to complain that she can't get onto the internet on her laptop and that it is my daughter's fault and she should go over there and sort it out.

I don't think so.

Luckily when I get a stressfull incident like that I can just go and watch the cats snoozing on the bed for a few minutes, and calm is restored once more.

Jabba the cat

Low

I don't really want to go into too much detail about the events of today, but suffice it to say that my daughter is now living with us permanently. She will not be left alone with her mother again until she is an adult (my daughter that is, not my ex, although the same could well apply to her).

That's all.

High

Oh. My. God.

I've just finished my second Rapier workshop and I am on the biggest high of my life. The co-ordination of mind and body, and the clicking into place of some of the techniques that we've been practicing has just filled me with a complete sense of poise and purpose.

I met up with the mrs in the mall nearby after the lesson, and walking through the crowds felt like being in a matrix style bullet time. I was hyper aware of every single person in the space around me. I felt as if I was in complete control of myself and my environment. I felt like a gunslinger walking into Dodge City, or a superhero in civilian clothes mingling with the mundanes. It was an extraordinary feeling that I have not felt since the days when I used to go to live roleplaying games at Treasure Trap in Cheshire.

The moment where it all fell into place was when I landed a full strength Stoccata lunge on the Professor. If the sword hadn't been blunted, and he had not been wearing a kevlar vest, it would have been a killing blow. I should perhaps say that he invited the attack and did not attempt to parry or avoid it, but the the point at which the movement of the sword and the cohesion of the line of attack come together was supremely satisfying.

What a rush!

The ono second

There is a period of time defined as the ono second. There is a measureable difference between the actual duration of the ono second and the perceived duration that can be broken down as follows :

1. The point at which you do something stupid
2. The point at which you realize that you have done something stupid
3. The point at which you attempt to stop the conseqences of the stupid action
4. The point at which you realize that you have no chance of reversing your stupid action
5. The point at which the full consequences of action become plain
   

To an observer the sequence progresses rapidly from stage 1 to stage 5 (also called the oshit point)

Here is an example to illustrate the theory. This afternoon I had been extraordinarily busy working on a spreadsheet that had to be tested and distributed for 5:00 pm. At around 4:00 pm I had sent a working version to the contracts manager to test, so I knew I had about twenty minutes or so before the inevitable requests for last minute amendments and changes. I reckoned that I deserved a break so I went to get a glass of squash. I brought it back upstairs and put it on the desk. I turned around to look at something on the monitor and as I turned back again my arm caught the glass and tipped it over.

Ono!

Squash had gone all over the desk, soaked my notepad and a cd, spilt onto the floor and worst of all some had splashed onto my laptop which then made a couple of strangled odd sounding beeps.

Oshit!

I unplugged the laptop and shut it down quickly, and then grabbed a towel from the bathroom to mop up the deluge of squash. It didn't take too long to clear up the worst of it, and then wipe again with a damp cloth to get rid of the sticky residue. I carefully dried off the laptop, plugged it back and pressed the power button.

Nothing.

Ono!

I hadn't backed up my files recently, and especially not the spreadsheet I'd just been working on.

Oshit! Oshit Oshit!

I looked again at the laptop and noticed some squash still under the mouse buttons, so I took the battery out and held it upside down whilst carefully directing the output from the hairdryer into the empty slot. I reassembled everything and tried again. Success on a plate! Just in time for the next set of revisions before five o'clock, and then the 'Walks on water man!' email to make it all worthwhile.

Welcome back my friends, to the blog that never ends

Apologies for the sudden move ... I had the unpleasant experience of having my blog discovered by someone who I'd really rather wasn't reading it. I don't think that I put anything on my old blog that was untrue or particularly nasty, but an oblique reference to an unbelievably hurtful experience (ask me on instant messenger exactly what she said) seems to have rattled her cage.

I'm going to carry on, much the same as before but avoiding anything that might make this blog easy to find on google. I guess some of you will know the drill by now. Also, she has probably seen my blogroll as well, so can ask that you hold off on linking to me for a while, just in case? Thanks.

So, pull up a chair, make yourself a cup of coffee, don't mind the packing cases and settle down for Dogwood Tales ...

Anybody else having problems with blogger today?

... or is it just me?