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Nice clear blue skies, even before the sun gets up. Give a nice spectacle of showing the thinnest sliver of a waning moon in blue skies. Of course sun burning down and no clouds means the temperature shoots up. Now of course the night temperature is plummeting. At 19:10 my roof thermometer indicated 37.8°C which has gone done to 13.6°C at around 22:00 !!!
Current temp is 21.4°C in and 11.1°C out.
Support is nice if you can solve the problems. It would be nicer if users were capable of adequately explaining what their problems are. Nicer still, almost bearable, would be if they didn't corrupt the database by bypassing the programs. *sigh*
Another nice thing would be Italians that speak comprehensible English, especially if they already have problems explaining the problem in the first place. (Maybe it would be nice to understand Italian as an alternative. Maybe not. Part of the problem is that Italians talk fast and they try to talk fast in English too. And of course to understand an Italian you need to be able to see his expressions and gestures ... ^_^ )
A real luxury would be when people delivering data, and wanting an immediate response, to do so without confusing themselves by sending and re sending wrong data in various batches. I know the difference between , collect-aggregate-check-send and send-send-check-resend-collect-send is a subtle one. It typically is the difference between having very little time and using it and having no time and spilling it.
Nope, I am not shooting at anybody, at this time of year most people that are working have more balls to juggle than usually what with falling in for holiday taking colleagues and all. (I wonder how many balls I am dropping now.) But then, I actually like this type of stress where you find yourself suddenly playing a different game.
Dinner is pizza.
I have a problem here. Last time it was perfect. This time it was better.o_O
Patenting taking another wrong turn. www.boingboing.net/2005/08/02/monsanto_patents_pig.html Next time check the patent office before asking someone out for a date.
Nice to know those Nutzwerk guys. ( http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/02/antisoftwarepatent_s.html )
Tuesday 2005-08-02
It's all clear again with the sky slowly lighting up in pale blue watercolour. Nice cool night as well (6.2°C in the morn) so I did sleep well. Most of the morning is nice and sunny so the temperature slowly rises. Then around noon clouds move in, mostly white and bulging with a few dark under sides, along with hot humid air.
Current temp is 22.7°C in and 11.2°C out.
Bha, not a good day. Oh, there is some support needed but not much and not insurmountable. However almost all of the afternoon is telephone free and yet I am going very slow. That with easy programs to work on. Nope, the clock is just not ticking.
Dinner is rice with sweet-sour sauce with fish. I though it was a pack of tuna but it turned out to be red-bass strips, my own error cause I don't put labels on the fish I freeze in. Not that red-bas is bad, not at all. It just bakes different cause it's a much softer fish, it's almost impossible to stir-fry the thin strips so I bake them slow in a normal pan. Very tasty and good with just a little dab of black soy-sauce.
Wednesday 2005-08-03
Again all clear pale blue watercoloured skies. Again lasting till noon when clouds move in. But the clouds are different. It are huge simmering white packs with threatening dark bottoms. But also nice blue swats of open sky between them.
Current temp is 21.7°C in and 13.3°C out.
There is almost no support today. And I get back to normal speed. With some overdrive thrown in as well. Rater productive day which is more than making up for yesterday.
Running. Just a bit to hot for comfortable running and what wind there is doesn't reach far into the wood. Still doing two full rounds running slow but steady.
Dinner is rice with ham and leeks. Nothing special there.
My insurance company just almost killed me.
I got papers saying "As of today we inform you that your insurance policy number xxxx-yyyy-zz nanana has been canceled." A bit further they indicate they are happy to inform met that they now owe me 60€ Which they will deduct from the next bill or pay out in cash. Not sure about that happiness. And they add papers "to give to your future insurance agent" to indicate that I have had 0 accidents in the last five years with a bonus-malus rating of 00 (the best possible). So they canceled my car-insurance without giving a reason and without warning. Thank goodness I opened it after dinner and not before or during diner.Only after recovering from the shock I fetch the map with my insurance papers to check whether maybe I didn't pay in time. And that's when I re-read the notice that I see it's not for my car but for my father's car. I sold that more than a year ago and canceled the insurance for it. And received an acknowledgement for that about a week later -being a maniac keeping all those papers sometimes pays off- so I considered that finished and closed. I never checked whether they owed me money or not.
But that was more than a year ago and I had completely forgotten about it.
.
Thursday 2005-08-04
All clear in the west but the rising sun is blocked by clouds. The sun breaks trough though. And breaks trough again. And again. But each time the clouds move in to block the light. just like a good old game of space invaders.
Current temp is 22.0°C in and 16.3°C out.
Damn, I just broke off a part of a tooth. Why, it's just a one millimeter chip off yet now it feels I have a huge hole there. It doesn't hurt but it's annoying and the sharp edge of the tooth has already caused a sore and bloody spot on my tongue.
We got a hardware problem on the backup-tape device. Which means we have no backup for now AND no way to do a restore. Hmm, not very comfortable.
Strange thing is this is a dual drive auto loading tape drive. Typical solid IBM build quality with two layers of steel, and that's not aluminium-foil thickness, it's metal to make a humvee jealous. It has two power supplies, with independent cords, so I supposed the power supply would be redundant, possibly hot-swapable. Not so. It are two independent power supplies each having two PC style 5V drive connectors. One powers one drive the other powers the second drive and the auto loading mechanism. The second one broke reducing the whole box to a super paperweight (cause it's too heavy for a boat-anchor). I just don't understand why they put in two power supplies without going for redundancy. A single one with three leads would be cheaper and if you go to the effort of installing two units the extra balancing circuitry won't break the bank. *sigh*Good thing about IBM though is that they send in a technician and by noon we are all set and ready again.
That hardware hick up and some other thorny support issues wreck my productivity. Again.
Dinner is nothing. The last support issue kept me in the office till around 21:00. Too late to make anything for dinner.
/o-o/
I think paying for WiFi isn't bad but at the going rates today it's crazy. And understandable that Free comes in to cut the scandalous profit margins. news.com.com/Boston%20airport%20tries%20to%20kill%20free%20Wi-Fi%20node/2100-7351_3-5817482.html?tag=nefd.top
Friday 2005-08-05
Still warm and humid but the temperature is low enough to make it nice. With a bit of rain early in the morning and heavy cloud castles floating by people are running around with coats and umbrellas. Of course it is soon all dry and to warm to wear those things. Suddenly silly me in a t-shirt is not the silly one :)
Current temp is 21.8°C in and 15.6°C out.
Shopping. Wine and fruit and groceries. And COFFEEEEeeeeee!!!
yep they went on holiday and I ran out of coffee. Once you are used to top quality the regular warehouse junk really tastes awful.
Back home I do some intensive ... lazying. With some garden stuff to break the monotony of it :)
Dinner is lemon chicken. Phil and his Bitchtroll got me wanting for lemon chicken. But I don't have a recipe for it. Of course I don't let that hinder me. Lemon chicken is lemon chicken, right? Can't be too difficult now can it?
It probably looks different from their lemon chicken though.
First I do cut the chicken breasts up in thin slices, less than half a centimeter, and bake them fast and hard. Than I make a sauce, standard starch based, with a few handfuls of shredded and chopped lemon balm leaves and the zest of a lemon (fancy name for the shredded peel:) ) Once that is cooked in to a nice dense sauce consistency I mix the chicken in and let it simmer for ten minutes. It's like sunshine trough leaves, on a plate. Just what summer should be. With a glass of golden wine.
Saturday 2005-08-06
It's a lot cooler with lots of clouds sometimes with rain or 'almost rain'. The type of thing where you get five big drops and then nothing. But there are also nice breaks so we get sudden changes in light. Later in the afternoon a band of heavy rain passes. Once that moves on lighter showers follow.
Current temp is 19.8°C in and 9.6°C out.
Very good weather for the garden but not good for working in the garden. So I do some cleaning. Well, I start half heartedly as usual but after dropping a bottle of oil I get make a serious job out of it. After pulling some glass shards out of my feet. *damn*
Once in action I go on and finish my tax papers. Finally.
Dinner is beans. One problem with a garden is that you get your vegetable, if they succeed, in abundance. But only for a very short time. For the moment I have more beans than I can eat but that only lasts for a couple of weeks. In a forthright they will all be gone, either eaten or drying out for storage.
Sunday 2005-08-07
It's still raining in the early morning but once in the office it stops. With just a shower at around noon. And a bit of a drizzle when I go home. The rest of the day is dry. Very overcast but with a few peep holes for sun rays to pass. Nicely visible too.
Current temp is 20.4°C in and 13.2°C out.
Work is all hands on deck in the morning with support ticking over from one problem to the next. And then it's all wind-still in the afternoon. OK, there are a couple of calls but nothing worth mentioning. And with L back -half days only till the end of the month. Things are looking up. OK, just over half staffed but that is still a big improvement.
It also means I can make an appointment with the dentist for fixing my sharp broken tooth.
Dinner is chicken soup. Made from real chicken which has been hand-cut yesterday. And cooked for several hours. No extra stuff added -ok, a few twists of pepper, a small pinch of ginger and some vermichelli.
O_O
Nothing special, we have a group of cops here patrolling on inline-skates. ( http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1483578.htm ) Admittedly it's a smaller group but then Hasselt is smaller than Zurich. We also have police on mountain-bikes and a few officers on horse-back.
All you communications belong to us. That is U.S. of course. (news.com.com/FCC+schizo+on+DSL%2C+wiretapping/2010-1071_3-5821077.html)
Statistics never lie without help.
Monday 2005-08-08
There is a lot of blue clouds about but also big white gaps blocking the sun. The clouds and gaps are fighting all day and by evening the blue seems to be winning. And by a big margin, only some high thin cloud bands are hanging in, trying to survive.
Current temp is 20.7°C in and 13.3°C out.
There is almost no support. Just a few calls to prove there is no problem with the phone system. The result Is that I can set up a type of development environment on the Te-machine. That is an old box with an old OS release. So regular compiling on the normal development environment and sending over the objects doesn't work, we need to do some special previous-release compiling. If the development machine gets upgraded on more time we can't do even that anymore. An other problem is that the database is no longer upgraded either so even if compiling would keep on working the objects wouldn't be usable.
Now I moved the sources over and set up a mini development environment. It's not enough to let us do big changes on it but at least we can fix bugs and do minimal maintenance. And we get a lot of ballast out of the regular system.
Dinner is paella.
Well, I planned on cooking some rice but I didn't know what to add. So I pull open the freezer and pick up a pack of fish (unlabeled but probably red bass) While picking that up a pack of squid falls out (along with some BBQ sausages, a roast, cut up paprika, ... yes I know, one of the plastic covers is loose and sometimes it spills the content of the tray out onto the floor). While rounding up the escaped biomass and usher it back in, I decide to use the squid as well as the fish. Very good cause combining it all I can get rid of a pack of prawns that's past it's best before date for a few days now. And I have a tin can of past due cockles somewhere to add.So I chop up and dump an old tomato (still nice and firm) in a pan with some oil, after a couple of minutes I add a generous amount of rice (250g) mixing that with the oil. Just before the rice begins to pop I add two cups of chicken stock, with 250g of rice I need at least 3 cups but I prefer to add later cause it's easier to add a bit before the end then to remove it at the end. Once that's simmering I add some garlic and spices (ginger, cayenne, basil, thyme, ...). While that simmers I defrost the squid and fish, the squid is already pre-cut but strangely the fish isn't -I usually cut before freezing cause it's easier to cut fresh fish then fresh ice- so I cut it while half frozen. Once that's all ready most of the stock has bean absorbed so I add a third cup and mix in the fish, squid and cockels. I also at this point add the paella defining saffron. Ten minutes -and another half cup of stock and a handful of prawns- later I serve myself a wonderful plate of Spanish fiesta.
And what else can one serve with that but a cool Spanish white wine?
O_O
I suppoose they don't have 100x oversized 3d plasit moddel on display though. ( p://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/08/vaginas_r_us.html)
Tuesday 2005-08-09
Only high thin clouds but they do break the light. By noon that layer is hidden by a lower flying load of water. Rather dark stuff. The doesn't fall though so it is a nice and cool day. With everybody -except me- lamenting about the bad and cold summer. Phoeoe.
Current temp is 21.5°C in and 11.4°C out.
Fun at support is when one evening they ask to reset an order and the morning after they ask what happened to the order.
Oh well, some things went wrong without anybody seeing it, some things went right without people noticing. Nothing exceptional. Apart from the return from holiday of C. so we get pestered with a couple of thorny issues.
And I got my tooth refilled and patched up again. Free of charge because it was just a two month old filling that fell out because it didn't harden up the right way.
Dinner is paella. The rest, which still is plenty even though my brother ate half of it for lunch.
O_O
Are we tense or what? ( http://seattle.tribe.net/thread/a3fd56ac-33eb-432c-8f75-b69fc354eda3?tribeid=7c78f8c9-ffbc-4783-b63e-3ae624e47d1f&r=10302 )
Wednesday 2005-08-10
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