Diary December 2001

Monday 31

Went to Oxfrod for a party.

Saturday 29

Went to see Harry Potter, eventually. Absolutely fantastic. Much much better than Lord of the Rings. Good enough that I think I'm going to have to go and see it again sometime.

Friday 28

Went for a walk. It was bloody freezing.

Thursday 27

Went back home for the afternoon so the garage could collect the car. Which they did. Other than that, an extremely unexciting day.

Wednesday 26

Er. Usual Boxing day stuff.

Tuesday 25

Um. Usual Christmas stuff.

Monday 24

Got in touch with the garage who will be fixing my car. They can't collect it until Thursday. Ho hum. Spent most of the day watching TV and vaguely packing. Brother gave me a lift to parent's, got there about midnight.

Sunday 23

Spent most of the day on the phone to the guy who hit me, my insurance company, my brother and my parents. Hopefully I'll be able to get the car to a garage tomorrow and have it all fixed and sorted out by the time I get back. Not likely, but possible. The garage is meant to be contacting me tommorrow. Ho hum. There goes 350 quid excess, and no doubt a chunky price hike on next year's insurance.

Saturday 22

Spent most of the morning in bed, shaking off the cold. Went to see Lord of the Rings. It is too long. The hobbits are too human. Other than that it was a really good film, thoroughly recommended. On the way from the cinema to the pub for dinner, some idiot in a red celica decided to turn right accross me without bothering to look. My emergency stop was not, unfortunately, quick enough. One new bumper and one new wing required. Luckily nobody was hurt. GRRR.

Thursday 20, Friday 21

Spent the day working at home due to excessive lazyness and a fast developing cold.

Wednesday 19

Car went in for its 37.5k service. Cost just over 200 quid, but it did actually sound a bit healthier afterwards.

Monday 17

Band carols in the middle of Romsey, competing against Natwest's burgler alarm. This was bloody freezing again, although not literally this time, as it rained a little.

Saturday 15

Drove to Colden Common to pick up some fence posts. They turned out to be rather long to fit conveniently in my car, although they just about went in with the seats down. Housemate drove into the back of somebody who turns out to be a friend of our landlord. While they were parked.

Tuesday 11

Boring day at work learning about UDDI. Band in the evening at the Newport Inn. Bloody freezing, quite literally.

Monday 10

Discovered that I need to know about webservices. Quickly. Got as far as finding out what one is. I think.

Sunday 9

Spent the morning sleeping, the afternoon debugging the car (it turned out to be a kindof cardboard flappy thing that was wobbling around making noises) and the evening catching up on email.

Saturday 8

Another party with an almost entirely different set of relatives and friends of relatives almost none of which I knew in the afternoon. Then my brother's fiance turned up to get a lift home (there was some logic in this somewhere, I think...). Finally got home, still with the squeak, at about 11pm. It was foggy and icy and generally not nice.

Friday 7

Up at the crack of dawn for a *huge* cooked breakfast. Got a taxi up the road to the palace to watch mother getting given her MBE by Prince Charles. The ceremony took about 2hours all told, and wasn't particularly exciting. Still, got to see inside buck palace for free :) Spent the afternoon at a party with various relatives almost all of whom I actually vaguely knew. This was almost as boring. Spent the evening and night with a grandmother and her dog (to which both me and father are mildly allergic). Didn't get a significant amount of sleep.

Thursday 6

Left work, had a hurried sandwich and set off for London via my brother's. Got as far as Petersfield before my brother realised he had forgotten his shirt, so we had to turn round and go back. My car developed an annoying squeaky sortof rattly sound at all speeds above 65mph for no apparent reason. Didn't sound too serious so I ignored it. Eventually got there, got checked in to a rather nice hotel in Buckingham Palace Road, had a couple of beers and went to bed.

Monday 3 - Wednesday 5

Very little of interest happened. No, really, it didn't.

Sunday 2

Spent most of the day asleep. Added NTP support to SendIP. This wasn't as easy as it sounds. 64bit fixxed point numbers are not the easiest thing in the world to generate. Still haven't quite figured out how to do the linking properly as ntp.so needs -lm but nothing else does.

Saturday 1

Band contest in Poole. Left home at 7:30am, and got back at about 7:30pm very knackered and not totally sober. We did win though :) By the time I'd caught up on email I was too knackered to do anything else.