Daily Post - Tuesday

I woke up a little after five this morning with my left eye stinging. On closer examination in the bathroom mirror I found that I had an eyelash trapped under my lower lid which was causing more than a little irritation. After I had fished it out, there wasn’t any point trying to get back to sleep so I just read until the alarm went off at six, and then it was back into the usual routine of cat feeding, dog walking, pet bowl washing up, cup of tea making (and then drinking), showering and then driving to work.

Strange weather today – lovely sun this morning, then encroaching gloom throughout the day and then around four o’clock the heaviest downpour I have seen in years. It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was spectacular – the top of the office block across from where I work was lost in the clouds and rain was shooting up from the gutter pipes on the building next door. Less than half an hour later then sun was out again.

Today I’ve been dealing with a particularly tricky problem. It’s something that should be straightforward at first glance, but on second and subsequent glances turns out to be not so simple. Setting dates for monthly pay runs should just be a case of adding a month on each time, but the difficulty comes when you have a start date around the end of a month and the next month has fewer days. Our particularly crufty bit of code seems to use several different methods at random for calculating start and end dates which causes some subtle and difficult to test errors in part month arrears calculations. Lovely. I think I know what I need to do to fix it, but implementing a workable bit of code and then testing it is going to take a while.

Following a trawl through the lower reaches of the electronic programme guide on the Topfield, I noticed that an old episode of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s version of Jeeves and Wooster was on, and I enjoyed watching the deliciously constructed farce unfold. I now have an urge to read some more PG Woodhouse – I’m sure that there must be some that I haven’t read or seen dramatised in one form or another.

Podcast of the day was Freethought Radio, the radio show of the Freedom From Religion Foundation which I had recommended to an aspiring young lawyer with an interest in constitutional issues over in another place. This edition had news of a success story in getting a church sponsored school programme that gave credit for time spent in religious activities amended. It surprised me, although I suppose that it shouldn't have, that the school board were actually paying the church to run the programme with no evidence that it actually had any benefit for the students involved. It was also slightly worrying to hear that the Obama Whitehouse is just as keen on so-called Faith Based Initiatives as the previous lot, so groups like the FFRF are as needed as ever.

The big news of the day is that the xbox is home from its trans European odyssey safe and sound. I reattached the hard drive, plugged everything in and re-synced the controller and all is back to normal. A week turnaround, including a bank holiday, is pretty good going I think, and the box even came with a month free Live time included. I'm now downloading the first episode of The Guild season 3 to watch. Hurrah!