Diary December 2000

Sunday 31
Still snow on the ground in the morning. Started sleeting at around 3ish. Turned to rain by 4. Most of the snow melted, but some survives, complete with a lovely layer of ice where the rain hit it and froze. Lovely. Unpacked. Watched Wizard of Oz. Went to a party.
Saturday 30
Still snow on the ground. This is getting repetitive, ain't it? Went home. Interesting drive, involving black ice, not-so-black-ice and freezing fog all in large quantities. This biggest problem was that my screen wash (complete with antifreeze) froze, meaning that there was no way to get the ice off the windscreen without stopping.
Friday 29
Still snow on the ground. Next door decided not to go to Belgium so we don't have their dog to look after. Went for a walk in the snow.
Thursday 28
SNOW!!!!! *BOUNCE*. It snowed. Only about 1.5 inches, but still snow.
Wednesday 27
Took grandparent back to London, visited other grandparent in Amersham. This really did take almost all day.
Tuesday 26
Boxing day. Even less exciting.
Monday 25
Christmas day. Release sendip-1.4. Ho hum.
Sunday 24
Gran arrived at 3ish in the afternoon, brother at around 1am. Nothing interesting happened. Hacked around on SendIP a bit, started working on version 2 which will be cunning. Yes.
Saturday 23
Drove home leaving around 10:30. Went and alternative route that took around 2 hours, but would've been a lot quicker if I knew the road and it wasn't thick fog. Horribly thick fog. Bought a DJ. Reassembled oakley in its temporary new home.
My parents have some cool flashy outside lights on the garage.
oms now works. Almost. It plays a DVD fine, but the image is stretched vertically and I haven't persuaded it to go full screen.
Friday 22
Half day at work. Spent the afternoon tidying (a bit), packing (some) and hacking oms (mostly). Decided not to drive home due to it being gone 10pm before I was ready to leave.
Thursday 21
Feeling better than yesterday, but still not 100%. Worked 9 'til 4, but didn't actually achive a lot. oms now compiles, but doesn't work.
Wednesday 20
Bleugh. Bleugh, and bleugh again. Probably should've taken the day off work, but didn't. Feeling mildly better this evening though. Had a nother crack at getting my dvd player going. Some progress. Now all the dependencies compile, libtool is only broken in a small way. However, neither oms nor xine compile at the moment. I think my oms tree may be broken though. Made myself a nice hot chilli to use up the chillis before going home at the w/e, and to try and blast this bloody cold away. RedHotAnt are not as good now they are free. It has been second time connects every time now.
Tuesday 19
Walked to work, arriving at around 10ish, because my car was still there after last night. Had a fairly productive day, for a change. Free dialup available again. Yippee! Went to bed early due to feeling not exactly fantastic. This is due to a cold, not a hangover. No, really. It is.
Monday 18
Uncensored Offices Xmas parety. Wrokwdd 10 til 11. Got pissed. Wend to romsey m. mrysy mickelmerxhs silver mabnd . got pisseder. got reallye really bisyt.d. got a taxit home./ 20 2uid .. bisy[ep[ed piseed, even. piseeded. uest. yes. um. Censored Office Xmas lunch followed by pissup in Romsey. Joined a brass band we met in Romsey
Sunday 17
Tidied most of the flat. That took all day.
Friday 15, Saturday 16
Did basically nothing at work except hunt for a new ISP and investigate collocation. The conclusion was that I now have an account with RedHotAnt, and I can't afford collocation yet. We'll see if RHA are as good as they first seem. So far I have got connected first time every time I've tried and the bandwidth seems pretty good. It won't be free until thye get my money, which I need to post. Went to a party in Harpenden on Friday night, got home about 5ish, knackered. Gained a SPARC station. Spent the evening catching up with email.
Thursday 14
Aparently we might be going to get our deposit back. Maybe. My ISP sent me and email saying they cancelled my account yesterday because I was using it too much. Could be something to do with all the cvs getting I was doing. Or the mirroring of a few small parts of gnu.org. Anyway, I am still dialled up with them... My Estate Agent also phoned to say that I could not continue to have my flat on a month by month basis when the current 6 month tenancy expires as we had agreed. I'll either have to move out of have it for another 6 months. I thinik I'll keep it. Its a nice flat. And I can't be bothered. to look for another one. It was sunny today, most of the day. First time in over a month.
Wednesday 13
Definately going down with a cold, unless its the 'flu'. Ho hum. Upgraded all sorts of things on oakley in an effort to get oms to work. Failed. Went to a friend's for dinner and met an extremely good looking bouncy American MOS.
Tuesday 12
Got to work at 8:30. Left at 5. Got home after 7:30. It rained. And rained. And winded. And rained some more. Its a fucking joke. All the roads are closed. People appear to be completely stupid. Busses appear to think that just because they can drive through 2 foot of water they should do so at 50 to make sure the tidal wave goes over everybody coming the other way. Cars appear to think that if you take a run-up at a flood you will get through. Which, while true, is unhelpful when it means you add to the nice little pile of broken down and/or crashed cars at the exit to the flood. The police appear to think that just because most people are too stupid to get through a couple of inches of water they need to close the road to stop them trying. So. Instead of a 5 mile journey home, I had to go via Winchester.
Then I get home and read email to discover that our letting agents from last year in Oxford have changed their mind about trying to con us out of 190 quid for cleaning the property. Now they want to charge us for a bed, a chair, a burnt carpet, and who knows what else just because they never bothered to record the fact that they took the bed (it collapsed) and the chair, and the carpet was burnt when we moved in. Quite why they think they might get away with this, I'm not sure. It does make the letter claiming that they would endeavour to pay our deposit back within 21 days slightly laughable. Its only taken 4 months so far. Incompetant bastards.
Oh, and I think I am going down with a cold. And Channel 5 is broken. And it is still raining. And very windy.
No, I am not having a good day.
Saturday 9 & Sunday 10
Got car serviced. Black tie dinner in keble for people who got firsts and people who have given keble lots of money. Drunk a significant quantitiy of various varieties of alcohol, mainly port. Spent Sunday recovering. Yes. Stuff. Bleugh.
Friday 8
Worked 9 to 4:30, mainly trying to fix everything I broke yesterday, but with limited success. Humpph. Spent the evening sitting on IRC doing absolutely nothing of any use to man or beast. Went to look at some impressive floody things.
Thursday 7
Worked 9 to 5:30, during which time I learned an important lesson. Never say "Surely that should be trivial" when it might be interpretted as "I'll do it". 5 hours later, it quite definately isn't trivial. Little spanner-shaped light I never knew my car had came on on the way home. Did remarkably little in the evening except for catching up with mail and breaking 2.4.0-test9.
Wednesday 6
Worked from home mostly. Gave up by about 6ish, and spend the evening catching up with a rather large mail backlog, updating this, wibbling on IRC, catching up with sendip patches (and there are more of them than I know what to do with) and generally spodificating. Made up a new word.
Tuesday 5
Worked 10ishish to about 5ish. Had dinner with a friend.
Monday 4
Worked about 10ish to about 5:45ish, then when straight to Oxford for the OxIRC black tie dinner. Got back around 1am.
Sunday 3
Spent the afternoon in Oxford almost entirely without good reason. Got some interesting carpet burns. Got back around 3am.
Saturday 2
Er. Did almost nothing. Slept a lot.
Friday 1
Worked 8am to 7pm *again*. Still, things were working when I left, and that did include a 90 minute lunch break in the pub. Too knackered to do anything other than sit on irc and watch all evening.

Mike
Last modified: Sun Dec 31 16:13:37 GMT 2000