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It did rain a little bit during the night. Most of the clouds are gone before the sunrise can catch them, a few of the slow movers are set ablaze though. Once the burned out carcasses are blown away we're in for another perfect day. with a hazy red sunset in the evening.
Current temp is 22.1°C in and 4.2°C out.
Perfect weather for a perfectly lazy day. Yo!
Dinner is a couple of mini pizza.
Sunday 2005-09-25 (Remarks about 86 words)
It looks good in the morning but there are bands of cloud passing by. Nice and white or light grey but they do indicate that the autumn will be here soon.
Yep, the afternoon is rather overcast. Still dry and warm though. And with the clouds it's probably going to stay reasonably warm tonight.
Current temp is 21.4°C in and 11.3°C out.
Some of the meat on the mini pizza must have been bad. It's been keeping me awake for most of the night. So now I feel like a 'zombie at work'. Well, even the coffee doesn't taste well ...
Support isn't hot so I can slack off on the normal SAP work. On top of that SAP work we get news from the client that they delay their side of the process a bit. We are supposed to keep to the deadline. The result though is that they will not send any test orders before the deadline. My bet is that they will not get ready in time, then try to blame us (won't work though) and finally cut a new deadline.
Dinner is fresh-cut pork, stir fried and served with rice and sweet-sour sauce. Well, I got beans -haricots- but not enough for a normal portion. So I cook them lightly, add some tomatoes some shopped carrot and half an onion to it. After simmering for about ten minutes I add some brown sugar and a dash of Sherry vinegar. Best ever sweet-sour sauce. OK, maybe not best but certainly superior to the standard comedial stuff.
Monday 2005-09-26 ( Remarks about 279 words)
A very nice autumn morning. Mostly black and overcast but with a few orange-yellow gashes in the east. Once the sun is up the gaps and cracks dissolve in the general greyness of the day. With a bit of rain, soft almost drizzle, in the late evening and into the night.
Current temp is 20.4°C in and 12.2°C out.
Just a couple of simple support calls. Of course when you get a couple of them you get them all together. During lunch break. Sapification changes are done but with R testing some problems are cropping up. Thing is every individual program seems to work as it should but things like fetching default values and field validations are not all pointing in the same direction. Not unexpected of course because only today the idea of actually restricting the entered values came up. Every time I asked it was not a problem cause the values always come from the client. Of course they do. Most of the time even by EDI link. Sometimes though it's by telephone or FAX or, gasp, paper. Which means user-entry and that means user-errors. So the "no problem" suddenly turns into a "yes, validate the input" a mere week before the deadline (our side). Of course, when I ask "validate against what criterium?" the answer is "Heu, ... yes, what? heu ... "
I think that to some people "deadline" will become "planned heart attack".
Dinner is lasagne. But don't you try to get my lasagne in a shop of restaurant.
OK. I don't make the sheets of pasta myself cause that takes a lot of time and the right type of flour which is not generally available. So I buy dry sheets of pasta. The tomato sauce though is self made with tomatoes and onions and some herbs -I made a few jars last weekend- with fresh garlic. The trick is long cooking and leaving it bottled up for at least a couple of days before use. This time I make meat lasagne but in stead of buying minced meat -they only had pork and pork/veal I bring back a real steak and 'mince' it with my cleaver, takes time but I know everything I add to it -just ginger and paprika powder, thyme, rosemary- and I get just the right coarseness I want. I also use a mixture of cheeses, soft gruiere inside, some cheddar as well and the harder parmesan on top. And I add a fistfull of black olives.And I eat too much of it.
Tuesday 2005-09-27 ( Remarks about 431 words)
More grey stuff and drizzling rain in the morning. Around noon the clouds break up though, leaven plenty of sun slip trough. OK, plenty as in just enough to dry the ground, most of the sky remains dull grey.
Current temp is 20.7°C in and 10.6°C out.
We begin with a downed internet. And later at noon all the Citrix servers need a reboot. Hmm, smells like autumn cobwebs creeping into the Windows servers
I should have done some more conversion programs but in stead I have been busy solving problems before they become bugs.
And just when I want to leave at 18:00 I get a shower of support calls. *sigh* how do they know?
More culinary recreation for dinner. I am out-doing myself this week. But then it was about the best tuna I ever saw in the shop so I let the fishmonger cut me an extra thick slice. So fresh it didn't actually smell like fish but had more of a sea aroma. So I bake it hard and fast with no spicing or seasoning, just the fish some top quality olive oil and a hot pan. Served with rice with chopped carrots and parsley cooked along.
O_O
Best marketing for the firm I guess. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004012.php Just making sure you realise you are a pirate.
It's always nice to see theories getting busted. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/28/weird_big_galaxy/ Caus that usually leads to newer and better theories and sometimes flaring up of SF.
Wednesday 2005-09-28 ( Remarks about 275 words)
All is wet and grey and drizzling in the morning. When I reach the office though there are a couple of outbreaks of sun. Most of the day remains the way. With lost of bulbous bulging cloud castles floating in a light blue sky. Very good weather although most people are now coming with thicker coats and jackets.
Current temp is 19.4°C in and 5.0°C out.
I am still fixing problems and even discussing possible solutions while I should be creating conversion programs. Unless we hit some major problem though the first switch, from Dev to Tst is scheduled for next Tuesday. So everything must be ready by then. The biggest problem will be data. Typically the Tst environment is as corrupt as a government or worse. So we gone clean that up first copying in real data.
Running in much better weather. It's still warm but not as hot as a couple of weeks ago and it isn't as wet either. You can breath in deeply without the risk of drowning. The result is that I run much better.
Standard Thursday dinner. Rice with ham and leeks and stuff. Not the best stuff in the world but still good. And it's hard to beat the 4 minutes microwave and no dish-washing routine. ^_^
O_O
Playing hard ball. ( www.theinquirer.net/?article=26504 and one of the reasons why www.theinquirer.net/?article=26537) If they actually play it hard they will loose a huge part of the market. So there is only a very small chance of that.
Sure it will be options, most likely turned on by default but still disablable either by the user or by some upgrade mechanism. If not they leave the upgrade market to others, and it will be rather cold in hell before they do that.
Not only memory leaks but soon you'll have to be careful with fuel leaks as well. ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/29/lg_chem_fuel_cell/ ) Finally coming.
Thursday 2005-09-29 ( Remarks about 343 words)
Great sky in the morning. All black rolling clouds with a pale 2° gap on the eastern horizon. As the sun asses the gap in it's climbing the clouds flicker and glimmer for a moment with a kaleidoscope of reds and yellows. Most of the day end up covered under rolling clouds with the odd break of drizzle and a few downpours of sunlight.
Current temp is 20.6°C in and 4.2°C out.
Just a few minor support things, nothing serious enough to break my rush on the conversion. Not that I get it finished though.
Dinner is bacon with peace. Or were that peas? Nah, tasted good either way.
Friday 2005-09-30 ( Remarks about 122 words)
It's a rainy day, grey and wet. It doesn't rain all day of course, we just have a procession of drizzly, rainy showers with dry spells in between. In the afternoon there are more dry spells, some are even sunny. The clouds do keep the temperatures up. Especially at night.
Current temp is 18.9°C in and 8.2°C out.
Shopping. Wine and fruit and groceries. The usual. I also buy a DVD with 2001 a Space Odyssey. I normally don't buy products from the film and music maffia but this is a classic in SF.
I am taking advantage of the nice weather to exterminate some more weeds and clear out part of the leaf-beats as they are getting stingy and though. Way over their prime.
Dinner is rice with carrots and parsley. I have been eating too much during the week so a bit less won't hurt.
Saturday 2005-10-01 ( Remarks about 158 words)
It gets clear in the morning but most of the night was overcast so we don't have nightly frost yet. Not only the morning but most of the day is clear. With just a few bands of clouds passing over. With just two short showers, hardly worth being called showers at that, it's a fine day.
Current temp is 3.1°C in and 18.4°C out.
It's nice enough in the morning so I do some more garden play. Pruning the Tamarix and cutting back some of the holly and fire thorn.
Dinner is haddock, marinated in red wine for an hour, with chicory and potatoes and tomatoes. All cooked in a deep oven dish. Very good. Curious to see red haddock but it tastes great. Yeah I know the rule about fish and white wine but I think I am good enough a cook to break the rules.
Sunday 2005-10-02 ( Remarks about 165 words)
It's a real patchwork out there. Lots of clouds, bright patches of blue, wet splaterings of rain and blinding outbreaks of sunlight. In the afternoon the clouds end their show and leave the heavenly stage bare and blue.
Current temp is 18.5°C in and 4.9°C out.
First day for a new developer (K) on the team. Three months later than planned but better late than never. She has got a lot of experience but it's been a few years since she did AS400 stuff. So I let her in and keep her busy till W comes in.
There is only one support call, an easy one. And an emergency with the incoming orders. Both handled promptly so I can hammer out the last kink in the in scanning routine.
Easy day? Well actually not difficult. But long.
After the last programming stuff I clear out the test environment and start restoring the production data into the development environment. The problem is that I first have to delete everything from the current test before copying in the production data. There is not enough storage on the system to hold both at the same time. Even with test empty I got to clean up old data as it gets restored to make sure we don't hit the ceiling. (If you go over 90% on the AS400 the system starts to shut down services, the 90% rule can be adapted but if you ever hit 100% the machine locks up completely requiring the equivalent of a disk-formatting. Trust me, you don't ever want to do that on a live system.)
Because the restoring eats up so much performance I start it at around four to make sure I don't interrupt the others.
So a late dinner of rice with shrimp. simple and good. aka simply good.
Monday 2005-10-03 ( Remarks about 317 words)
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