Alex's Livejournal

Anyone fancy trying to decipher this message from my mother?

Ursula 27 October 2009
17:37 ew bteres nyt a hel

17:37 nt ckng ting up

I think I worked it out...

I swear I used to live in a nice neighbourhood... currently as it stands, I'm being tormented by my adjoining neighbour who appears to enjoy keeping me awake at night with his thumping noises, my other direct neighbour loves nothing other than getting up at 8am on a Sunday to work on the extension he's been building for nearly 2 years, and right now the burglar alarm on one of the two new houses built behind mine is going off for twenty minutes of every forty.

These, amongst other things, are driving me steadily insane. It's probably a sign I should just sell up and get the hell out of this place.

When you're reading the instructions for setting up your new hardware firewall and it goes,

"To set the mode at the CLI, see the ".

Fantastic, thanks.

I was liaising today with a bloke from Labvantage called "Crystóbal".

For some reason he didn't know in advance what I was going to ask him about.

Because it's too funny not to share

Seriously though kids, don't buy a house near Dingymess - I can't really go into the reasons why not.

Posted on our sports and social bulletin board:

"Looking for some furniture for my son, anything considered 6 tables and a chair and bedroom furniture especially."

Methinks someone hasn't quite taken to 12-hour shifts :D

Note to self: Your nose is not a suitable storage place for cayenne pepper.

Day Two of the outage rota and I'm absolutely shattered. You'd not have thought going to 10 hour days would be that much of a change, but it very much is when you're on the go for most of that time. Week running up to the outage is always hectic - today trying to sort out the cables for the cameras in containment and iron out the glitches in the back-end of the CCTV recording and display system. Bit of a nightmare, since the turbine hall cameras keep going wrong too (some bastard is unplugging them I'm sure of it).

Saturday will be fun - shutdown to mode 5 means it's a free-for-all in containment and I have to nail the cameras to the handrails on the 28m gantry, as well as dangling myself precariously into the reactor cavity to cable tie a dome camera to that for health physics.

( It looks a bit like this in there )

I think my brain works in mysterious ways, I see a headline such as "Sex attacker strikes in car park" and before clicking the link I have this image in my head of a seedy bloke, complete with moustache and sideburns, outside his place of work waving a placard that reads 'We Demand A Fair Pay Deal!'

Short one this, since I really should be in bed preparing for tomorrow's stuff.

America is just crazy. In Tennessee it's all about the hunting and the Jesus worship. In SF... well, to give an example I got off the mass transit and the first thing I saw when I got out into the main square - someone dropping trowel and taking a piss on the street right in front of me. Charming.

Thanks Bank of England - devalue our currency even more just prior to me travelling to the states.

Wankers.

Today I am attempting to prove it's possible to eat £7 worth of bakery produce (specifically: Greggs) in one day. More on the reasons why later, when my brain has stopped dribbling down my nose.

Just pre-ordered Windows 7 - £45 for the full version on Amazon today. Definitely worth it.

18:33:28 Littlest Miss Sunshine: i think i may have a heat stroke
18:33:39 Littlest Miss Sunshine: should i take a hot shower or a cold one?
18:35:57 Alex - Fortified with Vitriol and Irony: Neither. Put the oven on at least gas mark 9 (or 220 degrees celcius) and place your head within the oven opening.
18:36:29 Littlest Miss Sunshine: ...............
18:36:33 Littlest Miss Sunshine: i'm serious!!
18:36:35 Littlest Miss Sunshine: :(
18:37:11 Alex - Fortified with Vitriol and Irony: Oh dear lord.
18:37:22 Littlest Miss Sunshine: what!?!?! :'(
18:37:30 Littlest Miss Sunshine: you are being incredibly insensitive!!!!! :'(
18:37:35 Littlest Miss Sunshine: i might be seriously ill!!!!!



A HOT SHOWER? REALLY?

So, I'm off to London at the weekend, and last week for that trip I purchased online some train tickets, as you do. The idea is I pay money, and in exchange they send me, by post, some tokens I can use to permit passage on a train going in the direction of my choosing. Simple enough idea, I'd hope. Well, it'd been a week since I ordered the tickets for the trip, and with time running out I decided to give them a call to find out if and when they'd posted them to me. The helpful but rather too Geordie lady insisted that they had been posted on the 17th... Okay, so, we agreed that given first class post doesn't take that long they'd probably got lost in the post. I asked that they be resent - but no, apparently this wasn't going to be possible and she would, just especially for me, fax the departure station with the details and they'd be able to re-issue the tickets. Problem solved? Well, no...

As I pointed out to the slightly dim Newcastlian bird, Darsham station doesn't *have* a ticket office. At all. It's basically just a wedge of raised concrete on which one can stand to wait for one's railed public transportation vehicle. This caused the poor dear some consternation, since she couldn't quite understand the idea that it's possible to *not* have a ticket office at a station. Once I got that through to her we proceeded to check where the nearest ticket office *was*, investigating the stations en route. Well, to cut a longer story slightly less long, it turns out that the nearest ticket office, being as that was the only way of getting my tickets for the trip, was Ipswich. Which is an hour and a half round trip. 2 hours with the wait for the return train.

Once we established this, I have to say I wasn't overly happy. I basically have to go *half way* to London and back to pick up my tickets for London. Fortunately my initial plan of wasting an evening going to Ipswich and back didn't have to play out, since I could get the earlier train on Saturday, and having agreed with the bint on the phone, they'd refund that part of the journey I'd have to pay for to be able to go collect my tickets... This still was mightily inconvenient for me, so after finishing on the phone I spent a bit of time drafting a letter of complaint, which I have included for reference (but you probably won't want to read it)

( Yes, I wrote this in anticipation of the future )

So basically this wound me up for the whole day, the absurd inflexibility of their backward system. I don't think I got any work done at all... other than a few choice puns.*

I, therefore, can't quite work out whether it's more, or less annoying when I returned home to find my train tickets on the doormat.... after all that!


*My colleague asked me if I'd had enough of her lemon polenta cake - I said I'd had polenty, thanks

I'd also like to take this opportunity to mention how utterly shit BT are - I'm currently on hold while the poor Indian lass tries to find her way around the back streets of Bangalore looking for a computer that can access my account details correctly. I understand the loom she was trying to use wasn't quite doing the job. And the reason I'm on the phone? The useless bastards decided to start charging me more suddenly with no warning at all. I was on a 12 month contract whereby all I had to do was stay with BT to get preferential rates - and now I'm not. Without having left, to my knowledge. Oh, and I just noticed they took two payments this month off the direct debit instead of just the one, so I'm doubly jarred off and Sunita Jawal Talibani isn't getting me anywhere.

Two thumbs down. Sort yourselves out BT you useless shites.

Oh, now she's cut me off. Brilliant.

Earlier I decided it was such a nice day I'd take off for a little wander around some of the footpaths in the vicinity of the village, something I've largely neglected to do for the three years I've lived here. Very remiss of me. It was glorious - the easterly breeze kept the temperature down enough to fully enjoy the sunshine. Half way around my little walk, I discovered what appeared to be the perfect big old oak tree for climbing. So I did. Or at least, tried to. My pathetic lack of flexibility was quite telling in that after shimmying up all of 5 feet off the ground, I was left dangling from a branch using only the friction of the rough bark against my body to cling on, having promptly lost my foothold and been unable to get a purchase on anything. Figuring the situation was sub-optimal, and that the fall would likely be less painful than continuing to struggle with the branch, I let go of my new woody friend. Unfortunately I had neglected to assess the undergrowth properly prior to this arboreal misadventure, and promptly landed in knee-high stinging nettles. Genius.

The upshot of all this is that I now have what would appear to be about a hundred small cuts all the way along the length of my torso and upper arms. Rather luckily my hairy legs have protected me from the wrath of the nettles for the most part, but it's all fairly sore. I need a minder to keep me from trying 'exciting' things outside. Add to this the fact that since the whole walk was an hour and a half in the midday sun and as a result I now have mild sunburn on the back of my neck.

Still, good times...

I feel I should share this with anyone who was similarly amused and bemused by the fruitless 12 year development cycle of Duke Nukem Forever.

Weird, I think my aunt just added me on Facebook. I can't really be sure since I've never met her, spoken to her, or even seen a picture. She also didn't send an introductory message as part of the Facebook adding process so I've no idea. My dad absolutely hates both of his sisters, meaning I've never had anything to do with either of them or any of my cousins on his side of the family. However, I think it is probably her based on the fact the name sort of rings a bell, and she looks a lot like my nan.

*shrug*

*clicks ignore friend request*