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June 2001| |
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Current entry Archive June 2001 |
I suspect that it's going to be a few weeks before I settle into the new job enough to get back to regular diary entries. Right now, although there's nothing specifically traumatic or difficult about the new job, it appears to cause a high stress level anyway. Certainly I don't feel like doing much when I get home.
End of week number three in the new job. No more Texans, which is a relief (just to end the babysitting), but not much accomplished, either. I need to set up another server to run backups of the NetWare servers, but the server spec hasn't been agreed upon and therefore hasn't been ordered yet. Even if it had, I couldn't set it up anyway, because we don't have any installation media (the Texans brought their own) and we won't get any until we select a reseller, which requires getting three bids and then getting approval from the US. The servers need to be put in their final homes, but that won't happen until Paul returns (another week and a half anyway) because other equipment has to be moved around to make room. I haven't been able to start working on the actual GroupWise system because the Texans have had some trouble with granting me admin rights to my part of the tree. This finally appears to have come through--at about 4:00 on Friday afternoon. But with that in place, next week I might actually do something useful! (Not that I'm grumbling; it'll just take a while to get things sorted out, that's all.)
Meanwhile, an astonishing thing happened on Friday. An email went out in the morning explaining that the annual state-of-the-company address was approaching, and, "as in years past", there would be a video included, and the camera crew were in the Manchester office today, so please cooperate if they wished to speak with you. When the camera crew came wandering through, David was helping a user, and Bob and I were both looking at our computer screens (thus probably looking less immediately occupied), so we both got drafted. They set up in the lobby (a strange decision, given that they had to stop every few seconds to wait for passers-by to go away, or the reception phone to stop ringing, or conversations at the reception desk to end; but they said the background in the lobby was "more interesting") with the full spread: a light reflector, massive video camera with interrogation lamp, and fluff-coated microphone-onna-stick. They told us where to stand, how to angle ourselves, and asked us questions. When answering, we were to restate the question (obviously so our comments could be used by themselves, without including the question). When my turn came, some of the questions were absurd--"Where do you see the company in ten years?" Having been there only three weeks, I don't know where the company is right now! But the most astonishing thing of all was that they told us what to say! They had an obsession with the word "communication", and wanted it worked into everything. They actually told Bob to say "Not only do we have to understand the technology, we have to be able to communicate it". I remember what they told him to say because they made him go through it five times until they were sure they had a version they liked. They wanted me to say "We're the communications department in the communications company", but I flat refused, because, well, we're not. They settled for something like "As a communications company, we understand the importance of internal communications as well". Hmm, are we a communications company? I don't think we really are! Ye gods, I hope I end up on the cutting-room floor, because if any of it makes it into the final video, anyone who knows I've only been with the company such a short time is going to think I'm the most fatuous ass who ever lived, making such pronouncements from a position of such complete ignorance. I rest my hopes on one thing: I talked at my usual speed, so everything I said will, with any luck, be far too fast to use.
Enough about work. Drum roll please: I scheduled the driving theory test! Monday, the 25th of June, at 9:45 AM. This is something of a forced self-motivation; I haven't really looked at the material for the theory test at all. Having a test date will force me to do so. In fact it's already working; I have already gone through the first two chapters of sample questions in the AA book we picked up a few weeks back.
On more serious topics: Today has not been a good day, bad-news-wise. This morning there was an email to H&A staff (which I still get) to the effect that one of the engineers, whom I've known since 1990, died in hospital on Friday night. I knew that he'd been in and out of the hospital for the last few months with cancer, but the updates that were sent out had been uniformly optimistic, so even though I knew things probably weren't good, I wasn't really expecting this. It was, not surprisingly, most upsetting news. Once I had myself straightened out again, though, my first thought was for Dave--he was much closer to Bill than I was, and of course he wouldn't have known about the ongoing cancer battle (not getting H&A emails any more). This is the first time I've been annoyed by no longer having access to him directly; I had to ask Linda and Tom to take care of notifying him instead of doing it myself. Well, at least it got done, and in time for him to attend the funeral if he wants to, which he probably will.
And yet more bad news: my uncle George, who had bypass surgery a little over a week ago, is apparently not doing well. There may have been a stroke during the surgery, and there has been some level of damage. I don't know much more than that yet.
It feels damned insensitive to try to go about a normal day with things like this going on.
Created at 23:32
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Today I had a proper day at work! I did things! News at 11!
In yesterday's entry, I forgot to mention the day's main event. The whole reason we were out driving around at all was that we went to an appliance shop to buy an electric mixer. (All the better to make meringues with, my dear.) It would seem that whatever afflicted us in York hasn't worn off yet. We found a mixer, all right. Then we found a small desktop fan. Then we found an even smaller fan that clips to things with (essentially) an enormous clothes-pin! And then we found a pocket sandwich maker! (We could have bought a Wallace & Gromit one, featuring Shaun, but it was only a single sandwich maker. Sigh.) And then I bought an electric toothbrush! And then we got a power strip! We looked quite silly, I'm sure, each of us with a big box tucked under each arm as we stumbled around looking at the various other electrical delights.
I also forgot to mention Friday's much-ado-about-nothing. Friday morning, the cable modem had A Flashing Light. This is not good. It meant it couldn't establish a connection to...er, whatever is at the other end of the cable. No problem, temporary outage. Except it was still doing it when we got home. So I called blueyonder tech support. The tech said that a blinking receive light almost always means a hardware problem, so he'd have to schedule someone to come look at it. Earliest available appointment: Tuesday night.
Tuesday night?! Auuughhh! But...but...it's the start of the weekend! That's five days of down-time!
Amazing how dependent you can get on internet service. Anyway, since the blueyonder guy hadn't been interested in doing any actual troubleshooting, we did some ourselves. Could we determine whether it was the cable modem or the cable itself? We looked at the modem's diagnostics but learned nothing. We disconnected the modem from the cable entirely to see whether it behaved any differently, which it didn't, thus lending credence to the idea that we either had a dead modem or a cable break. Uh oh, the neighbours had completely weeded their front garden since yesterday. Could their weeding have nicked our cable?
I called blueyonder back to tell them our findings, because we were worried that Tuesday's (Tuesday! Aaaaugh!) technician visit would go something like this: "Your modem's fine. Must be the cable. We'll have to have a cable team come look at it. How's a year from September?" I got a different tech on the phone, who was more helpful but agreed with the first tech that it was almost certainly a hardware problem and while he was sympathetic, Tuesday it would have to be.
Then, Saturday morning, it was fine again, and has been ever since. I'm afraid to cancel the technician visit, though, because you just know that the second I hang up the phone that receive light is going to start flashing again.
And now, how about some photos? These are from our trip to York over the bank holiday weekend.
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The Shambles (112 KB). York still has many streets with medieval origins in its city centre. They're a little tangle of streets with great names, with a strange mixture of buildings from all ages--1300s beside 1600s beside ugly concrete 1900s. The Shambles is a particularly well-preserved street; it still has houses from the time when property taxes were based on the building's ground footprint. People built upper storeys that jut out over lower storeys, thus getting more space without additional tax liability. There's one pair of opposing houses where people with long arms could probably have passed objects from one window to the other. However, the houses have since sagged and drooped in all directions, so the upper-storey windows don't line up quite like they used to. |
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Chocolate mice (134 KB). You just have to love a country that has tea shops where you can get, in addition to any of a zillion other sinful delights, chocolate mice. (Or chocolate cauliflower, for that matter.) |
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Monks on the side of York Minster (167 KB). York Minster is huge (one of the largest cathedrals in Europe) and it's absolutely covered with gargoyles and gingerbread and guys like these, standing in little niches on the wall. They're cool enough at first glance, but when you look closer they really get interesting. (I've left this photo bigger than I usually do, so you can see the detail.) Look at their toes, for example. I love their toes sticking out over the edge. And one of them looks like he's walking out of his niche. And then have a look at the far left side of the photo--beside the left-most monk, there are a cluster of fantastic gargoyles. I especially like the one with his hands over his mouth.
Also, looking at these monks it seems clear to me that they've been restored. (Bits of York Minster are always being restored. It's very old. Parts of it date back to the Normans.) Their edges are far too crisp for them to be original. Plus look at the monk clutching books to his chest--he looks like he's wearing a cucumber anti-aging masque. I think the lighter-coloured areas all new material. |
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Stained glass detail (186 KB). This is one small panel (maybe a foot wide) from the tennis-court-sized stained glass window in the eastern end (choir) of York Minster. The entire window consists of tiny panels like this, rendering it very busy-looking overall. Its enormity and detail are all the more impressive considering that the window dates from 1405-8.
Just wow. |
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Ruins of Kirkham Priory (165 KB). We weren't even trying to find this; it was just there, beside the road, on our way from York to try to find Wharram Percy.
Stuff like this is everywhere. |
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Kilburn White Horse (84 KB). This horse figure was created by clearing an area of the hillside and covering the space with chalk pebbles. There are apparently many such figures still remaining in Britain. This one isn't especially old, but it's still impressive. |
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Kilburn White Horse - unzoomed (84 KB). OK, now I have to crow a bit. When we spotted the horse, we were still quite far from it (obviously you have to be a fair distance away to see it at all). My new camera has quite a good zoom, so I used my maximum optical zoom to take the previous picture. I then took this picture, just for comparison, while standing in the same place. How about that zoom! |
Created at 22:57
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It seems like the more that is going on, the less inclined I am to write diary entries about it.
The recent high diary-entry sparseness index is no doubt mostly due to settling in at the new job. I find that I have an over-inflated sense of rush now--I feel as though there is no time. Presumably I got used to the extremely laid-back work-at-home life, and now I'm feeling the loss of the commute time from the day. The funny thing is, I'm actually spending about the same amount of time on work, including commute, as I did before; when I was working at home, I tended not to stop until Mike got home (or even later), whereas now there are definite starting and stopping points to the workday, and they're at nearly the same times. I did also used to get things like dishes and laundry done during the course of the day, but they don't really add up to all that much time. So the sense of rush is mostly psychological, but it's there nonetheless, so I tend to think that I don't have time to do an entry.
Tenuous as that excuse may be, I have none at all for the weekend. It was a pure relaxation weekend. I got a lot read in the first two Gormenghast books, worked through a bit more of the theory test material, and not much else. We tended to get up between 6:00 and 7:00...Eastern time. But I am unapologetic--it felt really good.
Within the last two weeks I've had some very pleasing feedback about this site, specifically the US-to-UK page. I had an email from a site called Brits in the US, which is a resource for people going (or already have gone) in the other direction, telling me that they planned to add a link to my US-to-UK page, as indeed they have done. I also had an email from an American who is just embarking on this process, who said she found the page very helpful. This all makes me quite happy--the whole idea of the page was to post information that might be useful to others, so it's nice that it has already been useful to someone.
All of which rekindled my curiosity about my web site statistics. XCalibre provides stock reports and graphs to customers, but naturally I'd like to see the data organised differently. Unfortunately the usage logs are not natively in a very usable format, so this led me to fiddle around with writing a parser. It's not finished yet (and who knows whether it ever will be).
Meanwhile, the best news I've heard in a long time: My uncle has spontaneously made a completely unexpected recovery. It's as if he suddenly woke up. I have no idea why or how this happened and I probably don't really care, as long as it's permanent.
...Whoops, it would seem that blueyonder is down. Looks like I won't be able to post this until tomorrow morning.
Much, much, much later...
We still had no internet this morning. Or this evening! But a few minutes' investigation established that it actually wasn't the cable modem at all, but rather the NetGear box. For reasons best known to itself, it was still working fine as a hub, but couldn't be pinged and wasn't providing internet access. A reboot fixed it, so we aren't in any danger of finding out why it was unhappy in the first place. Anyway, here finally is this much belated entry.
Created at 23:39
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My goodness, these site access logs are fun stuff! They contain a lot of information, including the basic stuff you'd expect (what page they hit, what IP they came from), but also showing what search terms brought them there, if they came from a search engine. The search terms that bring people to me run the gamut from expected to startling to a bit worrying:
(The log parser is done, as you might have guessed.)
Actually all the fiddling with the parser was earlier this week, not this weekend at all. Yesterday, on the grounds that I really wanted a trip to a bookshop, we went into Liverpool for the afternoon. Books I did indeed get, such that the reading queue has popped above 80 for the first time since its inception. In fact it's worse than that, because Mike has at least 10 recent book purchases that ought to be in there as well, but I haven't had the heart to add them yet. I think I'm at about a 4:1 buy-to-read ratio at the moment.
I'm not doing myself any favours, either, because among yesterday's loot was a book I've meant to buy for a while, about PHP and MySql. Veterans may remember that at the dawn of time, when I knew nothing about HTML, I created this site using...<ahem>...FrontPage. Oh, the shame of it! Well, anyway, I soon moved beyond that, ditched FrontPage and started manual HTML editing. But I lost something at that point: I'd been using ASP to deliver the various book/music/movie lists directly from a database, as queries. Since then I've had to update those pages manually, which can get to be quite tricky and something of a chore at times. PHP is another server-side scripting language, and MySql is a database that PHP can interact with. So, since early yesterday evening, I've gone from completely manual and static book/music/movie lists, to having a working MySql database, with PHP code in the book/music/movie list pages querying that database and supplying their content on the fly. I have dynamic content again! Hooray! No more manual page updates! All I have to do now is update the database itself, and the pages will automatically show the new content.
Dipping my toes into PHP has, not surprisingly, exploded the to-do list for the site. For example, I'd like to put back pages where the user can do their own query against the book/music/movie database. I'd hoped to get to that tonight, but it's not looking very likely.
As long as we were in town anyway, we also paid a visit to some other shops. I bought a couple of CDs and DVDs. We had a fun few moments at lunch, while looking at my loot, when Mike noticed that one of the DVDs had a sticker that said "Empty case--Bring to counter" or words to that effect. Ack! An empty case! So we brought it back right after lunch. Would you believe, there really was a DVD in it? They just put the sticker on to discourage shoplifting. Seems a questionable tactic to me--a shoplifter only has to buy one once (or know someone who has bought one) to find out that they really do contain DVDs. So we thought silly us, we should have opened it and looked. But the sticker was on the plastic wrapping--if we'd unwrapped it, and there really was no DVD inside, we'd have had no proof that we hadn't just taken the DVD out of the case. Ah well.
Oh, and someone who shall remain nameless bought a guitar...
At work, things proceed slowly; I'm still waiting on quite a few prerequisites before we can reasonably migrate users to GW. Right now I still don't have a backup server, so none of the GroupWise system gets backed up; and the Help Desk isn't prepared to handle user questions and system problems. Next week I'm going to migrate the rest of the IT staff (even without any backup in place), so they can all get a few weeks' practice with it before we begin migrating everyone else.
My first staff meeting at the new job was held Friday, from 8:00-11:00. Ewwwww, 8:00! Well, no matter; I got there in time, with possibly as much as one entire cylinder firing. Good thing too, because first thing on the agenda turned out to be...me, giving an overview of the GW project current state and rollout plans. In the end I didn't stop talking until about 10:00 (with much time taken up by questions and comments). I was quite pleased with how it went; I haven't done such a long presentation in a while, so it was good to see that I can still stand up and talk extemporaneously, with complete confidence.
Created at 23:32
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Another gap, sigh.
Part of my problem is that I keep wanting to achieve expository completeness, which can make the prospect of beginning an entry rather daunting, especially after I've missed a few days. Way back in the beginning I used to be content with comparatively short entries; these days I seem to end up with a page or two every time. If I just threw out a few highlights of the day, it'd be much easier to do entries more often because they'd be shorter. So...maybe I'll try to do that.
Some weeks ago Mike found the BBC's production of Gormenghast on DVD and grabbed it. This was the impetus that caused me to get around to reading them. This week I finished reading the first two books (which is what the BBC production covers) and we've been watching it during the evenings this week, finishing last night. It's about 4 hours long, divided up into four one-hour episodes. Quite impressive, I must say, especially the casting, which is critical because the characters in Gormenghast are just so bizarre. Even their names are strange--Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Steerpike, Swelter, Flay--giving the sense that they are more a description than a name, which adds to the surreal atmosphere of the place and the story. Imagine a story set in a castle that covers several square miles, whole wings of which have been forgotten for centuries, and in which the centre of everyone's existence is the Earl, whose primary function is to participate in an endless series of bizarre observances (whose intricacy is matched only by their pointlessness) simply because they're traditional. Fascinating, bizarre, thought-provoking, and quite spectacularly done; I recommend it in either medium.
This week I started migrating the IT staff to GroupWise, only to hit trouble right away. In a nutshell, the migration of their existing messages out of the Exchange information store is what's causing the trouble. Regardless of the method I use, the process fails after just a few messages. This makes the migration of a large mailbox an extremely time-consuming process. It may be tricky to figure out what is causing the problem, which I'd like to do before I run out of IT staff; it won't do to have migrations of non-guinea-pig staff taking as long as these problematic ones have.
This morning I had to go to work--my servers got moved to their final homes. They've all been at the other building up to now. Not a lot involving me, except to make sure the right ones got moved and that they all started up again properly.
All this afternoon and evening I've been fiddling with PHP again. I now have a rudimentary custom query page for the Books database.
That's it for now. A nice short entry, see? I'm sure that just as soon as I post this, I'll think of a hundred things I meant to include; oh well.
Created at 20:35
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There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in,
But they're ever so small
Which is why rain is thin.
--Spike Milligan Silly Verse for Kids
Went to look at some old stuff today. Of course you can't drive down the road without seeing Things of Historical Significance anyway ("Was that a thatched roof?!" "Yep."), but this was a deliberate outing. We got together with Mike's mum and her friend Arnie and went to Rufford Old Hall. It's a grand old house, complete with medieval Great Hall attached to a "new" wing (1660), accessorised with 17th century chairs, tapestries and armour. You wouldn't know it from the photos I ended up with, but there actually is a house and a garden. Somehow all my photos are close-up details of the shrubbery and walls, such that you can't get any overall idea.
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Topiary (187 KB). Can you work out what this bush is carved to resemble? |
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Spiral Topiary (207 KB). They had quite a lot of excellent topiary, in case you hadn't worked that out for yourself yet. |
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Mullion Reflections (143 KB). I quite like how this one came out--nicely abstract. |
At the gift shop, I'm afraid we ended up with more books, including the Spike Milligan that the quote above came from. Mike also spotted a delightful book about mazes--hedge mazes, parquet floors done in mazes, etc.
I've been having an ongoing war with the laundry, which I must confess I haven't been winning. Laundry, along with most maintenance-related topics, isn't exactly one of my areas of expertise. About the most science I've ever managed to apply to it is the idea of separating things into vague colour categories, and also sometimes by weight because otherwise the dryer gets confused. My general process is the same regardless of the type of laundry, though:
This system has had to be adjusted somewhat for life in England, because most people use their dryers only rarely. Instead they have a thing called an airing cupboard, which is basically a closet in which you hang or otherwise place clothing to let it dry. This is no big deal; it basically means the Fold step happens while things are still a bit damp.
But since I've begun work in the real world again, I have run into a problem. Business-casual clothing has come out of the laundry as wrinkled as a prune. I call them wrinkles, but the word doesn't really do them justice; they're more like canyons, or maybe rift valleys. They make the clothing curl upward in defiance of gravity. They're the kind of wrinkles that would still be faintly visible even after extensive ironing. Eeeew, I said the i-word! That is, of course, the whole problem here: I was suddenly facing the horrifying prospect of having to iron, after successfully avoiding it for my entire adult life.
So did I dash right out and buy an iron? I think not.
My first troubleshooting attempt was to run the affected items through the dryer, on the grounds that this approach always yielded wrinkle-free clothing in the past. No such luck. If anything, this merely made them set like concrete. I must confess I was somewhat distraught. The iron loomed ever nearer. Who really wants to spend ten times as much time on a task they don't like in the first place, just to achieve the same results they had beforehand?
So what, I wondered, was the difference between doing laundry here and in the US? Why did the same process yield such divergent results? The trouble is, trying to isolate the source of the problem would probably be a lot like troubleshooting a modem problem. There are dozens of adjustable parameters, each with a continuum of possible settings, and it may be a combination of several that is required to produce the desired result. You therefore can't effectively use the time-honoured troubleshooting method of adjusting one thing, observing results, putting it back the way it was, adjusting another thing, lather, rinse, repeat. With a modem, you might never get to the solution this way, because the problem isn't a single setting, it's an interaction synergy between many settings. Similarly with the laundry process. There are cycles and water temperatures and detergents and many other things all interacting together. There is even the possibility that it's simply due to design differences--washing machines here are almost all front-loading, and don't proceed in a simple continuous churning process like they do in the US; rather, they go for a bit and then pause. Perhaps those pauses, during which the clothing sits in a pile, are the origin of the wrinkle problem.
Then I thought, eureka! Rather than try to solve it myself from first principles, I'll ask people who have done laundry here all their lives. They must have a method that works! So I asked some of my new co-workers how they handle the problem. This may have been a mistake, as there are now several British women severely pissed off that there is a place on this planet where you can get away without ironing. (Of course maybe they would iron anyway; their definition of a wrinkle may be more stringent than mine. Indeed I considered the possibility of just ignoring the wrinkling, as I've always ignored minor wrinkles because I just don't care. But these go beyond my threshold of ignorability--these clothes look like something dug up by an archaeological expedition.)
So that was no help. But I already had two fallback plans:
But today (yes, there's a point in this story somewhere, and we're now creeping up on it), on the grounds that it didn't really matter how it came out anyway because of my two fallback plans, I included some problematic items in the wash. This time I ran it on a very minimalist cycle with a "delicate spin". Things came out completely soaked, but barely wrinkled at all. Hah! This is definitely a good sign. If those wrinkles drop out during drying, I may have a solution after all. That would be nice, because I don't enjoy clothes-shopping and Mel isn't here to tell me what to buy.
Whoops. I was doing short entries now, wasn't I? Well, this is what happens when I get going.
Created at 23:00
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Your intrepid reporter passed her driving theory test this morning! Wheee! One more hurdle jumped!
The theory test was, as expected, not a big deal. Apparently the contents are not a big secret; I bought a book of practice tests that turned out to be all 837 official test questions. The 35 questions on the real test are all drawn from those official questions. I actually did answer all 837 questions from the test book, which has turned out to be quite a valuable if frustrating exercise, because the questions often were based on rules or conventions I didn't know about (but do now).
Amusingly, the test is administered by...Sylvan Prometric! Which means absolutely nothing to any of you! Sylvan Prometric, and their predecessor the infamous Drake, is the company that administers all the CNE and MCSE testing. Therefore, although there were touch screens, the format of the test was, shall we say, quite familiar to me.
As soon as I got to work I called to book the practical test. I'm not ready to take it, but that's OK because there's a 7-week backlog. My test is scheduled for the 20th of August. This should give me plenty of time to procrastinate and avoid getting ready for the test.
Interestingly, there is such a strong presumption here that you will take your practical test in your driving-lesson car that because I'm not, I'm required to provide a mirror for the examiner to clip to the visor. (Driving-lesson cars would all have one already.)
One benefit of my new employment is a mobile phone, and access to the BT Cellnet traffic reports. They're quite cleverly done; they deduce where you are, presumably based on what cell tower is handling your transmissions, and tailor the traffic report accordingly. This means I can experience the joy of hearing: "You are in...Warrington. M62 west-bound: There are 9 miles of stationery traffic. Expect a 40-minute delay." Eeearrrgh! And today was warm, although not by my old standards--only high 70s or so, but in stop-and-go traffic, in direct sunlight, in a non-air-conditioned car...it quickly gets rather warm. Fortunately it would appear that I joined the traffic in the middle of the queue, because my delay was only about 25 minutes.
Created at 22:37
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Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all.
--Steven Fry, Paperweight
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday, about when I was stuck in traffic.
Shortly after I joined the queue, we began to creep past cars that had pulled off the road because their radiators had overheated. Lots of them. There was one every few hundred yards at least. Our queue was a herd of slow-moving animals, leaving the sick and weak behind where they fell. You could almost hear them gasping, "Go on with out me! I'm done for!"
It wasn't that hot yesterday--maybe high 70s. The traffic was no worse than other queues I've been stuck in. And yet, I think I saw more overheated cars on that one stretch of road than I have in my entire prior commuting experience. Now, I know lots of people who know a lot more about cars than I do. One of you car-knowledgeable-types should know the answer to my question: Why should British cars apparently overheat so much more easily than their American counterparts? Or, to put it another way, why don't cars in American queues overheat, even when the weather is much hotter?
Yet another not-really-optional social gathering at work. Apparently it's customary, when the sales figures come in at the end of each quarter, to have a little party at a nearby pub. It must be the end of a quarter, because today such a bash was announced, to be held Friday afternoon at 3:00. Simon even sent the department an email saying that he'd like to see an "IT presence" at it. Fortunately for me, we already have plans; we're going to Justin's for the weekend, so I'm afraid I just cannot make it.
Created at 23:20
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Just a short entry to mention that we're going to Justin's straight from work tomorrow, so no entries over the weekend...
Created at 22:46
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