The Light Fantastic

It was there, this morning.

An almost imperceptible glow that tinged the horizon ever so slightly red against the black of the night sky. After the long dark winter months the light was coming back into the world.

I know that I won’t see a proper sunrise for another two or three weeks and that the last of the winter weather is still to come but that hint of colour has lifted my spirits. Soon there will be birdsong to greet the dawn, green shoots will start to poke through the loam and not long after that the wood will be transformed by the bluebells and snowdrops.

Spring is on the way …

I don't like Mondays ...

Ms Dogwood was on fine form this morning.

Of course she had packed her bag last night, she assured me, so therefore her hairbrush must have escaped of its own volition. Of course her room was tidy, she assured me, and the stack of videos teetering in the middle of the floor didn’t count because they were stacked neatly and she was going to sort them out when she had time, and no, she hadn’t had time at the weekend because she had been busy with other things on the computer.

Aren’t teenagers fun?

Jaws

All change

Mrs Dogwood is redecorating the lounge, so it's a case of tin hat on and batten down the hatches. I don't mind change, as long as I'm not involved. Mrs Dogwood has an impeccable eye for design and I know the end result will be fantastic, but the process of moving things around makes me inexplicably anxious for some reason. Still, it should all be done soon and we can settle down again, at least until the next time ...

D&D miniatures - a fearsome line up

The chieftain readies his war band for battle ...

CNPS update

In a sequence that will be familiar to all devotees of CNPS, yesterday I saw the following sequence in the space of five minutes : 61, 60, 62, 61, 61. Needless to say, I was looking for 60, so yesterday was a two number plate day rather than the three that it could have been. Still, I did see another 62 today, so all was not lost. Praise be, to the gods of cnps ...

ID Cards update #2

You may remember that I faxed my mp before Christmas to express my concerns about EDS possibly getting the contract for the ID cards system (original post here). Well, I've now had a letter back from Des Brown in the Home Office assuring me that the process will include an examination of the track record of any company tendering, and he mentions the CSA and DWP systems as "recent problems". Further news, as it happens ...

Incidentally, the slogan for the Home Office is "Building a Safe, Just and Tolerant Society" - is it me, or does that sound a bit sinister coming from the same people who still want to bang up people without charge or trial if they can get away with it?

Random Stupidity

The shortcomings of the timesheets system becoma ever more apparent the further down the road we go with it. The big boss wants to create the invoice transactions for on site support, overnight stays and travel expenses directly from the system. Fine, OK, we can do that but ...

• we don't hold the expense rates on the contracts in the system anywhere
• people travelling to a site the night before have been booking their time to 'ADMIN' rather than the contract for the customer they are going to
• weekend work is being recorded in a totally different place to everything else making it impossible to tie the two together in any meaningful way

In other words, business as usual ...

Oh, and just to brighten the day, the receptionist at Leeds has just sent round an email saying that a sandwich company called "Taste Quizine" have just arrived, and apparently somebody has lost their swipe card that they need to "excess" the building ...

Mud

I'm fighting a battle. A losing battle.

Just about every day, or so it seems, I clean the kitchen floor. Hoover (well, to be strictly accurate Dyson) up the collected detritus, shake the mats in the utility room and then run over it with the mop to shine it up.

It doesn't last.

The dog is the worst culprit. He has short stubby legs that kick up splashes of mud from the ground in such a way that coats his rotund body before he even gets out of the gate, never mind around the field, through the woods and back. Oh, I can wipe his paws when we get in, but short of giving him a bath there is no way to remove the accumulated muck. I can shut him in the utility room for a while, but he starts wuffing and scratching at the bottom of the door until I relent and let him in, to distribute the dried on mud through the kitchen.

He's not the only one, though. The cat also leaves a trail of little muddy prints through the house, usually in a straight line to our bedroom where he snoozes the day away leaving a cat shaped outline of dirt and hairs. Master Dogwood also has a habit of playing out in the garden and then coming back looking as if he's just spent six weeks on the Somme re-enacting the first world war.

What's to be done? I really don't know, other than to keep mopping the floor like a modern day Hercules in the Augean stables.

Roll on summer.

Northern Lights

One day, I would like to see the Northern Lights but in the meantime these stunning photos will do ...

Ruby Tuesday

I awoke from apocolyptic dreams of escaping from a burning church and watching planes crashing into Hillsborough to the sound of the alarm just before six. I really struggled to get moving this morning, although I did get out of the house for half past seven. Not that it did me much good, as the motorway was the usual slog. An accident just before Chesterfield and a stranded lorry a little further on caused a tailback, and I'd travelled less than twenty miles in an hour.

Fun fun fun.

Still, I got a confirmed 57 and 58 on the way - I had seen a glimpse of a 57 last night, but it's nice to be certain. Work was reasonably productive, although I've got a patch to apply to the accounts system tomorrow, which should in theory be straightforward but has the potential to cock things up big time if I don't do it properly. Oh joy.

The boss was in a meeting, so I snuck out at four o'clock and had a good journey home listening to Radio 2. The business news came on at half past five with a warning that Alders were under threat of going bust. Hmmm ....

"Mrs Dogwood, you know that sofa you just ordered today? You didn't buy it from Alders did you?"

Luckily they didn't make too much of a fuss about cancelling the order ...

One of those days

You know those days, just a string of one niggly annoying thing after another. A problem with the accounts server turned out to be a lack of disk space on one of the partitions. My boss is in year end crunch mode again, which means more time in Birmingham for hand holding purposes. Oh, and we had the micro saga of Ms Dogwood's cash point card.

She doesn't use it very often, and sometime between Christmas and now it has gone missing, probably in the apocalyptic fallout zone that is her room. So, to be in the safe side we rang up to cancel it and order a new one. We then realised that her address is still showing as her mother's old house, and we need to contact the branch to deal with that. I rang the handy local branch number (which of course is redirected to an anonymous call center somewhere) and I ask about what she needs to do. They can only send out a card to the registered address, which is fair enough, but how do we change the address? Only problem is, the branch is only open when Ms is at school, and apparently she needs to go in, in person to register the change of address. She is too young to register for telephone or internet banking, and so we've no way of knowing if there have been any transactions on her account since the last time she used the card.

Grrrr.

Seconda guardia

Prima guardia

Don't fear the reaper

From Uncle SteveR

Beowulf

I know that I shouldn't get excited about films that haven't been made yet, but a cgi version of Beowulf scripted by Neil Gaiman could be very good indeed.

Duel Redux

Secondé gardé
Rapier to quarte and beat
Disengage to strike

Counter cavatione
Slope pace left
Punta Reversa

Match the slope pace left
Void the punta reversa
Retreating a pace

Half pass back then lunge
Stramazone cut to exposed wrist
Touché! First blood spilt

Ouch! What a bugger!
My arm was exposed again
Change my guard to tierce

Time to finish this duel
Attack the reverse diagonal
Mornington Crescent!



The italics are my friend Rachel from my rapier group, the bold text is me, and the haikus are pretty much what we did last time we fenced each other.

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks

Well, crack something, at any rate. The winds were gusting something fierce last night and the wood was littered with broken branches this morning. I kept looking around nervously at any sound of creaking, but I didn't get hit by anything. A couple of ridge tiles had blown off the house at the end of the street, leaving shattered bits of red tile spread across the road. I don't know if it hit the car that's normally parked there or not.

It was Master Dogwood's turn to be poorly again today, and I brought home after I'd dropped Ms off, with only a diversion via the garage for some extortionately priced Nurofen for kids sachets. He'd perked up lunchtime, and then I got a call from Ms on the way home from school because the roof had blown off one of the buildings. No idea if the school will be open tomorrow, or for which age groups yet.

55

Another early start on a damp and bitterly cold morning. It was still dark as I headed towards the motorway and I wasn't really paying attention to the traffic coming the other way. Out of the corner of my eye I clocked a plate - it looked like a 55 but I wasn't really sure. I didn't get a clear view of it, and it was muddy as well, so I decided to not count it as a proper spot.

I was in mortal fear of spotting a 56 which would have given me a real dilemma, but as I approached the M6 coming into Birmingham I saw another fleeting glimpse of a 55. This was getting silly. I stuck to my guns and didn't count that one either. I was rewarded for my faith with a clear and unambiguous spot of a 55 just before I got to the office, and another one as I went to get a sandwich at lunchtime (they had Cheese and Tomato - yay!). All hail the gods of CNPS.

Bizarre sight of the day : a kitchen sink on the inside lane of the motorway.

Compare and Contrast

Go and have a look at today's post on nada mas respira ...

The weather here, in contrast, is cold, wet and miserable.

The picture below doesn't really show it, but there is currently some sharp, bitingly cold sleet falling from the sky. Ms Dogwood is at home today with a cold, and we've just had some chilli noodles with peanut butter and west indian hot pepper sauce to try and warm us up a bit. Time to turn the central heating up a notch, I think ...

Wet

Cold

Ray of Light

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Music Videos

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Softy!

My Cat is a Wuss

Oh, sure, he acts tough. He bullies the dog, nipping his ears, whilst waiting for his tea. He sometimes has a go at the venerable Biddy, if he wanders into her space by mistake. He'll bring in the occasional field mouse or dim witted bird that wasn't paying attention to the fat lump with the claws hiding in the long grass.

When it comes to a proper scrap though, he is pathetic.

There's a white cat that lives up at the end of the road, ten or so houses away, so you'd expect their territiorial boundaries to be somewhere around the lamp post half way. Coming back from the walk this morning, I saw Frank scrabbling up the fence persued by Lisa the white cat. Once on the safe side of the fence, he tried to act all nonchalent again, but I've rumbled his little game now.

He's just a big softy!

The Unsung Hero

It could so easily have gone wrong. Read this article and marvel at the ingenuity of a Swedish engineer who had a hunch that all might not be well with the Cassini-Huygens communication systems.

Sounds of an alien world

I went to this page to listen to some of the sound samples from the Huygens probe, and for reasons that I can't really explain I found tears welling up in my eyes.

Tired

I had another restless night. Ms was due to see her mother for the first time in six weeks, and it was making me anxious. I just made a cup of tea and was about to settle down to look at the latest Huygens pictures when the power went off. I rang the electricity company and a recorded message told me that it was the whole of our postcode area that was affected.

Great.

I boiled some water on the stove to wash with and set about getting the kids ready to go out. I felt very irritable - a vicious circle of tiredness and stress and I was really struggling to keep calm. Fortunately the power came back on in time for us to get showers and a cup of coffee before we were due to go out, but a last minute hunt for Ms' mobile just before we left was another straw upon this particular camel's back.

Once we were in the car and moving I calmed down a bit, and in the end Ms only spent about an hour and a half with her mother. Enough time for something to eat and a look around some shops without any major arguments, and it seems that it is now accepted that Ms will live here permanently and see her mother every couple of weeks, which is a weight off my mind.

50, 51, 52, 53, 54

Need I say more? All hail the gods of CNPS ...

Things normal children don't say #6

"I've just found this clip from the Dutch version of 'Phantom of the Opera' - do you want to hear it?"

CNPS update

After a veritable drought stretching back to before Christmas I finally saw a 48 last night, followed by a 49 this morning. It's taken me nearly six months to get this far, which puts my completion time nearly ten years in the future. That's probably being a bit optimistic too, given that the old number plates are becoming less common as time goes by.

Curse you Richard Herrings, for making me spot numbers this way!

Non stop

5:58, the alarm went off this morning. I snoozed for a few minutes to listen to the weather forecast - cold, wet and stormy. Hmmm. Downstairs to walk the dog, who cared not one jot what the weather outside was like, feed the cats who were yowling like they'd not not been fed for a week, and put the kettle on for a cup of tea for Mrs Dogwood. I levered Ms Dogwood out of bed and switched Master Dogwood's light on, and went to prepare their respective breakfasts (coffee and yoghurt for Ms, Weetabix for Master).

With a little strategic nagging, Ms was out of the door for a quarter to eight, and after dropping her off at the bus stop I headed north for Leeds for a day in our office there. It was windy on the M1, and on some stretches lorries were starting to sway in some of the gusts. Not as bad as driving back during the 87 hurricaine when I passed half a dozen lorries on their sides, but a little hairy none the less.

Work was busy - a mix of meetings (with a report spec genuinely written on the back of an envelope), catch up on admin work (tidy email inbox and pending files), trying new things (reading data from sql 2000 into olap cubes for excel pivot tables), and answering stupid queries ('how do I print this report?' 'Press 'P', click on file, print or the little printer icon would do it' not adding 'like every other windows program ever ...').

I treated myself to a walk into Leeds at lunchtime - takeaway sushi from Little Tokyo (tasty) and a box of D&D miniatures from Travelling Man (excellent!) - and then back for some more work before sneaking out at four o'clock to get home in time for Ms's parents' evening (or should that be parent's (singular) evening?)

Mrs Dogwood had been held up in a meeting, so Master Dogwood came with us with his GBA to keep him amused and we made it with a couple of minutes to spare before the first appointment with the maths teacher. Apparently Ms is in the top third of the the top maths set, and the rest of the teachers were similarly complimentary, with just one or two complaints about organization and asking for help when she gets stuck, but it just confirms the good things in the report.

Back home, and two things to do for work. Post a journal that was in the wrong format and send a backup of the accounts reference file to the support people for our accounts system to see if they can unpick a problem that we've been having. Working on the dial up was s - l - o - w but I got it done for eight o'clock and came down to an excellent curry cooked by Mrs Dogwood and a nice cold beer.

Makes it all worth while. I love you, Mrs Dogwood!

A cheese sandwich don't come for free

I felt a strange sense of foreboding this morning.

I didn't sleep very well, and I was tired when I hit the motorway a little after half past seven. The sky was an apocalyptic vision as I crossed the viaduct - inky black clouds scudded in front of the high cirrus stained an angry red by the rising sun. Shepherds warning indeed.

The traffic was noticeably heavier than last week - do people really take the week after new year as a holiday as well? Maybe so, but the net effect added another half hour onto my journey time compared to last week. I've a nasty feeling that the return journey tonight will be worse - the weather is limbering up for a storm of epic proportions.

Lunchtime saw me going to the local Tescos for a sandwich, as usual. The only problem was that they didn't have any. Oh, there were a few limp 'Healthy Option' salad sandwiches, but none of my usual choice of Cheese and Tomato. The world's simplest sandwich (apart from maybe cheese or tomato, on their own without their accompanying sandwichmate). I'm not asking for cheese from tibetan goats tended by buddhist monks, or tomatoes grown in hydroponic pods on the moon. Just bog standard processed cheese and the cheapest tomatoes money can buy, between two slices of normal white bread (no, not bread transmitted through a space warp from five minutes in the future for added freshness). Just an ordinary cheese and tomato sarnie, please and thank you.

Big up - respec' due

Ms Dogwood has had her report from school. She only remembered it on Sunday night ... hmm, is she hiding something I wondered as I opened the envelope? No worries though - she is well on target with good level fives and sixes in just about everything and similarly mostly A or B for effort. Considering the kerfuffle throughout all of the Autumn term, I think she has done extremely well and I am very proud of her.

Take a bow, Ms Dogwood!

Jerry Springer

Well, for the record I enjoyed it. Funny, thought provoking and with some excellent performances. I can't really see what people found to get so offended by, to be honest. The swearing was in context and the idea that 30 people swearing is somehow 30 times as bad as one person swearing is ludicrous. Jesus wore a loin cloth, not a nappy, and if the idea that he might be a "bit gay" because he loves everybody bothers you but the idea of people being condemned to burn in hell forever by God doesn't then there is something wrong with your sense of proportion. It's been reported that a christian website has published the home addresses of the BBC2 controller responsible, and that he has now received death threats - what wonderful, loving and forgiving people those christians are.

If you really want to be offended then some of the stories in the bible put anything in the show to shame:

"I offered to let a crowd rape my virgin daughters"
"I wouldn't have sex with my dead brother's wife so God killed me"
"God told me to kill my son"
"I sent my best friend to die in the army so I could sleep with his wife"
"We didn't give all our money to the church so God killed us"

Ahhhh

It's the second saturday of the month so that means Rapier workshop, and by golly it was a good one. I really feel that I am making progress each month as the different elements come together - the footwork, the wards, the parries and the cuts. We are now able to help each other and spot and correct some of our weaknesses and I think that the Sheffield chapter has a solid core from which to develop.

I really could have done without the phone call at six o'clock this morning (which I will blog about elsewhere), but as soon as I picked up my sword today, all was right with the world. I'm now back at home, tired but very happy. I've just had a walk with the dog, followed by a hot bath with a G&T. Life doesn't get any better ...

Tales from Homeward

If you ever read the Uncle books by J P Martin, then you might be interested in Tales from Homeward. Perhaps not as funny as usual this month, but worth reading all the same.

Save Our Swords Petition

There is a proposal before the Scottish parliament to outlaw the sale of swords in Scotland and carrying of swords in public places. This is a bit of political grandstanding from the 'something must be done' school, and is a massive overreaction to the violence of the knife culture in much the same way that the legislation banning all handguns was rushed through in the wake of the Dunblane massacre. If it goes through in Scotland, then Westminster will not be far behind.

If you have read any of my blog posts about fencing then you will know how passionate I am about this sport. It is the quintessential martial art - the perfect balance of physicality and mental rigour, to outwit your opponent and win the day. There is nothing else quite like it.

Please go and sign the Save Our Swords Petition.

Thank you.

Good News - Bad News

Bad News Roundup

• The vpn connection that I was using was disabled today and using a dial-up is like wading through treacle
• I had an email referring to the 'Sitelog' system as 'Shitelog'
• I really need to sort out my pension
  
• The dog has a sore eye
• Blimey, but it's windy round here
• Ask me on messenger about the latest ex-file ...
  

Good News

• I'm getting my work line put in next Friday
• Celebrity Big Brother looks like fun - Germaine Greer to win!
• We've got our monthly Rapier workshop tomorrow
• It's Friday night, so that means pizza and beer - yay!
  

Busy

I've been providing support for the new timesheets system today, and I've sent twenty emails to various people that are all subtly different variations on the message 'Read the fabulous manual'. I've had to explain that it is not a time recording system down to the last minute of every day, that it doesn't take account of weekend work (that has to be agreed in advance by a manager in any case) and that the activity code for travel is, not surprisingly, 'Travel', which you can see if you click on the drop down box. Sigh.

In other news, the IT bods don't want to have VPN connections on the new domain, so my manager is going to have to spend about £500 to get a phone line, adsl connection and pre-configured router for me to connect to the office in much the same way as I do now, in a way that doesn't cost the company anything and if they bothered to set up an IPSEC connection would be more secure. I can still connect to the old domain, so I'm hoping that nobody spots that before I get my new line.

Angry

For my last couple of trips to Birmingham I've been listening to the BBC radio adaptation of Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. An excellent adaptation, although some of the complexities of the third book are lost in the translation to a two and a half hour drama. Nevertheless, it is an impassioned attack on the brutal cynicism of religion and the christian church in particular. There was a news story before christmas that said that any references to god and the church were to be dropped from a proposed film adaptation of the books, to avoid offending any cinema going christians.

How the hell can christians be offended by the ideas in a work of fiction and not be offended by the catholic church paying out $100,000,000 to people sexually abused by their priests. Never mind the nature of the abuse, the church conspired for years to cover it up and move abusers to new parishes to escape prosecution. Some religious commentators have said that the tsunami is a test of their faith - if they had any faith at all, shouldn't they be donating the billion dollars that the sex abuse compensation claims will cost them rather than covering their own backs whilst they continue to abuse people?

A pox on the lot of 'em.

The Ex Files

I'd returned from a knackering day at work and headed straight out for a walk with the dog. I got back in and was in the process of wiping some very muddy paws when my phone rang, so I let it go onto the voicemail. It was the ex, and now she is accusing me of keeping Ms Dogwood away from her. Never mind that after all of the kerfuffle at Christmas with one call from her mother in two weeks (to cancel a planned meal out with Ms' Grandad and Uncle), Ms was not exactly in the mood to talk to her, never mind to arrange another meeting.

Still, I refer the honourable reader to my new years resolution ...

Contrasts

The first day back after the holidays is always a tricky one. I had been forewarned of problems with the domain transfer by my boss, so I set off at half past seven and got to Birmingham at a quarter past nine - my best journey by a long margin, I reckon.

The problems were all to do with permissions on directory structures inherited from the old, shall we say 'ad hoc', system of granting permissions to individual users rather than groups. I didn't get permissions to change anything under my own user id until after eleven o'clock whilst my boss was getting steadily more frantic as her staff couldn't get to the files that they needed. I had a conversation with the IT manager in Leeds whilst he was trying to sort things out that mostly consisted of him saying confidence inspiring things such as 'That's odd', 'Shouldn't be doing that', 'Never seen that error before' and finally 'Oh bugger - I'll call you back'.

It did get sorted eventually, although I've got to go down tomorrow for a bit more hand holding whilst they run their first set of invoices for 2005. Oh happy happy, joy joy ...

Live in Leeds

The last day of my Christmas hols and time for a day out in Leeds. As is our wont, we parked at the Royal Armouries car park and I took the kids for a mooch around the museum whilst Mrs Dogwood went to hit the sales (although what the sales had ever done to her, I don't know).

The highlight of the day was the demonstration of Elizabethan swordplay using scenes from Romeo and Juliet as an illustration. The two interpreters put on a good show of backsword, buckler, main gauche and transitional rapier although it was fairly obviously stage combat rather than any particular techniques from the treatises of Silver and Saviolo. More interesting was the chance to chat to one of them afterwards and have a go with one of the rapiers (pointy and sharp ... mmmm).

After a quick (and expensive) sandwich in the restaurent we walked into town for a quick look at the shops. Travelling Man was out of the D&D miniatures that I had been looking for, but Master Dogwood found a game for his gamecube in the Gamestation sale, Ms Dogwood picked up a historical romance from an author she likes and Mrs Dogwood was happy with a new Radley bag and some tops.

All in all, a grand day out.

Tower of Steel

... and through the arched window ...

My kingdom for a horse!

Swords and Christmas Cake

No, not an undiscovered Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novel, but rather how I have spent most of today. We had use of a church hall in Chesterfield today, so an impromptu meeting of the Society for the Study of Swordsmanship (Sheffield Chapter) was called for a bit of swash and buckle fun.

Sue from the Leeds group was down for the day and got us started on some blade control work with a drill where you would try and hit a target held in different positions by somebody as many times as possible in a minute. We initially tried using a spare mask, but it got rather, errm, dented so a buckler was substituted and proved to be a much more satisfying target.

It wasn't a formal training day so we took things at a more sedate pace than our normal workshop sessions and during the various breaks in the day we made a good dent in my mum's rather tasty christmas cake. It was a good opportunity to chill out and listen to yet more of Rick and Sue's army tales ... :-)

We finished the day with a game of British Bulldog (with the twist that everybody was armed with a sword) and a spot of freeplay to put the earlier blade control and footwork exercises into practice, before retiring to the pub for a well earned coke.

Do I need to say that it was an all round fun day? Probably not ... :-)

Resolutions

I'm not a great one for New Year's resolutions, to be honest. Last year, I resolved to do something about my level of fitness and health, and taking up the rapier seems to have done the trick. This year I'm making two resolutions :

• To say "yes" to the kids more often than I say "no"
• To not take any notice of anything the ex says to me

That's all ...