Chaos-23

Wishing my migraine would go away & getting scared about my last day of employment tomorrow!

You’ve no doubt seen this already as it’s been dugg to death, but it’s really cool:

Xmas was poo as usual. But then when the family is forced to be together it’s bound to kick off I s’pose. Xmas Day went OK, but Boxing Day was just one big argument.

For Christmas Eve we went to the Rising… big mistake. I really don’t ever want to go back there until they get a proper full-time landlord. One that actually gives a shit. Why oh why did they piss about with Ollie & Danny. They were the best landlords that place had in years… Anyhoo, This time they were serving Coke from big store-bought bottles so they were flat & disgusting (I hate coke, but watered down pub Pepsi is OK), so then I went for Smirnoff Black Ice which tasted a bit odd, so I checked the best before date… best before AUGUST 06!!! Alcohol takes ages to go off, they must have had those bottle for years! When it was taken back to the bar they got another from out back & said “August 06? Is that OK?” No it’s not OK, you could get closed down you fuck-heads! You have no idea how tempting it is to report them for selling out of date beverages (it was clear all of the bottles were out of date & that they had no intention of disposing of them) and the state of the ladies loos and watch the place get shut down… Oh yeah & I forgot the laughable bit… they charged people £2 to get in. There were about 10 people in there FFS! Luckily we got in before that started happening. There is no way in hell I’d have paid for that.

So anyway, gifts. This year I got:

Rent paid for December | Bird Table | Bird Feeder | Air Plant | Zoundz | USB Cells (basically USB AA batteries) | a big fluffy (toy) rabbit called Horatio | lots of chocolate | a Baking Tray | QI General Ignorance book | PhD book? | Gloomy Bear slippers | Vanimal Zoo Human Gass figure | Invader Zim/Gir talking figure | a fluffy hat | Very Intelligent Pocket

For myself, I got a new mobile phone. I hadn’t upgraded in 2 years and I really wanted a wifi phone. I spent ages looking around, but t-mobile just doesn’t have the best range of phones. The only 2 wifi ones in my upgrade price range either didn’t have a camera (yeah I hated camera phones at first, but now I’d be lost without one. I use it for all sorts of things where I would once have written stuff down) or didn’t have vibrating alert (nothing dodgy ;op but if I didn’t have this I would never answer my phone or know I had messages. At loud gigs it is invaluable). So I’ve given up on a wifi phone for now (praying that the N93 or better is available for my upgrade next year). I settled on the BlackBerry Pearl (8100g). I know lots of people hate blackberries, but this one was the same size as my current phone so not too bulky, but still with a large screen (I hate small phones, I’d lose them). I ordered on-line on the Thursday, heard nothing at all, not even a confirmation so then I queried it with CS on the Friday & it was dispatched immediately & turned up on the Saturday. Woo!… except it didn’t work :o( The phone itself was OK, although it kept hanging whenever I did anything. The camera on the other hand was completely DOA. Every picture came out bright pink and green. I uploaded an example. Clearly a hardware error. So I e-mailed CS again & got told no-one would be able to answer my query until Monday at 08:00. *sigh* I waited until Monday & at 10:30 gave up and phoned t-mobile. I was told I could either get it fixed, or send it back & get a refund. There was no way I wanted it fixed. I’d ordered a new phone, not a refurbished one. So I e-mailed off an RMA form. Waited 3 days (damn Christmas post!) for a pre-paid SD bag to arrive and sent it back. I’d been told it would be 5 days (not working days) from them receiving my returned phone to being able to re-upgrade. So I swapped my Christmas leave with a colleague so that I would be in Reading on the 5th day, ready to go into the t-mobile shop this time & re-upgrade. After hanging around in the shop for an hour & a half I finally got my upgrade, free this time, and the camera works! It’s great, I really like the numberpad and shockingly I’m actually using SureType & not multi-tap. I’m not as fast at SureType as I am multi-tap yet, but I’m getting there. SureType beats T9 into a bloody pulp so far imo. I didn’t want to scratch my new little beauty so I bought a skin for it, shame the black one isn’t out til January. It currently looks like it’s wearing a pink condom. Poor thing. It has a nice little 2GB micro-SD inside though :oD

As I am now ill with festive germs, I will no doubt be spending NYE at home. I’ve gone through the pain of the sore-throat and the general acheyness, but now I am a snot factory. I have to go back to work on Tuesday too. That’s too soon!!

OK, I’ve been slack again. It seems whenever I actually do anything, I don’t have time to write in a blog. It isn’t ironic, it’s annoying.

Sooo… my iPod turned up I love it! I love it! I LOVE IT! Time on the Hexercyle flies by now I can listen to random stuff on full blast.

Gogol Bordello was AWESOME. We missed Disco Ensemble, but Danko Jones & Bedouin Soundclash were pretty good too. My feet were killing me as I’d been standing up in silly shoes for what seemed like hours (well, it was hours). Met quack from the bit forums :o) Sadly because Chris refuses to believe me when I say we need to go, we missed the last train back to Wokingham from Waterloo and had to go via Paddington and get a taxi back to mine from Reading. Gah! I also got called a “fucking Cossack” in Stockwell tube station by an Australian… not everyday that happens…

After much bitching around with Solio, I finally found out they’d had problems with their payment system. Which is apparently why they thought they’d shipped it to me in September when in fact they’d just taken my money & not sent me anything or any e-mails… When they deleted my last e-mail without it being read I sent them the snotty e-mail saying I would never buy from them again. Then I got an apology & a refund. Woo! So, because no-one else makes anything as cool as a Solio, I bought a black (I wanted hot pink) Solio from the Apple store. It got delivered the same day & I am now the proud owner of a solar charger that is carbon neutral & fucking rocks. I currently only have the iPod charger tip (cos I got it from Apple), so now I’ve put all the tips I want on my WishList just hoping I get them for Xmas.

Talking of my WishList, I finally got around to sorting it out a bit. I’ve added lightbox to it, makes it slightly more interesting than just a list of links. I’ve embedded all the lighbox stuff into the main xoops templates so I’ll probably use it in more of the modules now.

I also got the Ross Noble Randomist DVD delivered last week. Oh… My… God! It’s almost 10 hours long. TEN HOURS! It’s pretty awesome. The Mighty Boosh Live DVD comes out on Monday too. I have soooo much stuff to watch :oD

…has been getting in the way of blogging lately. I’m just so busy all the time. I don’t have much to show for it though, so it’s making it all a tad annoying.

At work I’m currently scripting and testing the roll-out of XP SP2. As soon as the end of life of XP SP1a was announced a big rush call came in to get this sorted. So far, it’s not a complete disaster. I had a few issues with it:

Hardware - Dell D410 laptops BSOD a lot, and I only have a D410 for initial testing;
Firewall - after installing SP2 and rebooting the firewall automatically kicks in, meaning we can’t remotely access anything (we are supporting over 5,000 machines, most of those remotely… so this is bad), hopefully got this sorted with a change in ActiveDirectory;
Windows Joy - for some reason you can’t enable the firewall service until you delete out a registry key…. at least I know how to script that;
Users - as this is a major change to the OS, we need people from all departments to test this out to make sure it doesn’t stop anyone from being able to work. So far the Business side have given me a grand total of 0 users for testing… grrrr
Timing - I have until Wednesday to get this into Live as a number of conferences are taking place from Thursday. These are ideal for installing patches, etc. onto laptops that rarely come into an office.

EEK!

Other than all that, I’ve bought myself a shiny new black Nintendo DS Lite. Yes, it gathers fingerprints like crazy, but who cares they also wipe off just as easily. If only Nintendo had released this in the first place, people wouldn’t have mocked my decision to get a DS as well as a PSP quite so much.

I have also bought a copy of Brain Age for the DS. It’s awesome! After only 1 day (of doing appallingly in the tests) I actually felt a bit more alert. I swam through the script writing. Writing the entire thing manually from scratch without using previous scripts for notes or any of the capture tools. I don’t expect it to work first time, but it looked pretty good and took me about 15 minutes. Compare this with the 2 weeks it took me to work out the intricacies of scripting some other patches… it’s an impressive improvement. My brain age has gone from 75 -> 64 -> 49 -> 37 as well. Not in it’s 20s yet, but I am remembering how to do mental arithmetic again. I’ve got so lazy what with calculators on my desktop, and my spelling is now awful because I rely so heavily on spell-checkers (F7!). Let’s see if I can’t claw some of it back ;o)

Brain Age also has Sudoku games on it. I’d never played before, as every time I had it explained to me it looked complicated and didn’t really make any sense. Using the basic training on the DS I now understand how to do it and my times for the individual games have gone from 28 minutes down to 4 minutes! Go me! :oD

I’m also doing pretty well with my eating. I’m not on a diet or anything, I just thought I’d see if I could cut down on chocolate and junk while I’m at work cos my eating at home is OK. It’s just when I’m at work and bored I end up snacking on total junk and feeling bloated. So I started taking in a tub of sliced vegetables & a low-fat dip every day & filling up a couple of pots with cashew nuts, pistachios, sunflower seeds, etc. Imagine my shock when I realised: it’s Saturday and I haven’t eaten ANY chocolate since Tuesday. Like I say, it’s not a diet, and I’ll probably still have a pizza tonight (or maybe a curry… mmmmm), but it’s not doing any harm and isn’t costing me any more money. If I lose weight by doing it, then that’s a bonus. I do seem to be sleeping better and I’m therefore more alert. That could just be down to the weather though as it’s cooled down a lot and I can sleep without the aircon on again now.

Well, I may not have posted anything for ages… but it’s bundled into one big one :oD

Work is very busy, but very dull right now. I’m Call manager all week which basically just means I have to go through all the calls that come in and assign them out to people and deal with any shit. Joy :o( I’m just not in the mood for it this week.

The Clearasil seems to be working. My skin is clearing up. Now I just have annoying pink marks on my chin though, I hope they go away soon. They’re easily covered up, but just annoying. When I use my micro-dermabrasion kit my skin looks fab and clear apart from my chin which is just pink and annoying. :o(

Also, got my hormonal spot treatment stuff from Comfort and Joy. Hopefully this will sort out the monthly chin breakout so I don’t have to worry about the pink marks fading again. I don’t get it, I didn’t have spots when I was a teenager…. I’m nearly 30 why do I have them now?!?!

Ah well, it could be worse I s’pose. At least having greasy skin means I don’t have any wrinkles, and my Mum is almost 60 and she doesn’t have any either so it’s looking good :oD

Oh and the nasty cyst on my head is very nearly gone \o/ I am cyst free for the first time in about 10 years!

At last, took my last Flucloxacillin this morning. Thank God! \o/ I feel slightly better already. I can understand why they mess with your stomach/digestive system, but I’m not sure why they gave me such intense headaches? :o( Ah well, today I am mostly trying to replenish my good bacteria (woo Yakult, Actimel, etc.) before the bad’uns get in there. Apparently you gell all kinds of nasties after Flucloxacillin being that it works mainly on skin & soft tissue. Oh yum. Anyhoo, the amount of probiotics I’ve bought there shouldn’t be much chance of that :oD

I am back at work again too :o( I had the past day & a half off as going back on the tablets was making me soooo ill again. I spent most of that time asleep though, which was a nice bonus :o) Now I have to work out if I can be bothered to go out tonight or not. If I do,I’ll probably have to leave early cos it’s a school-night… hmmmm… so undecided.

I have found out that there will be a few people out on Friday now which is good. I won’t be alone (annoying Tony) for the full night of me being back on the booze. :oD AND I get to try some of the Manuka Honey vodka I bought which smells divine! DIVINE! I TELLS THE!

I hate antibiotics, it’s a fact. I’m not taking the last 2 for today, instead I’ll continue with them tomorrow as I now feel so terrible I was considering not going to the Boosh.

This is so unfair, the cyst didn’t hurt as much as the side-effects of these things. *whimper*

I have a splitting headache and well, everything antibiotics can do to your stomach… they’re doing to mine. Hopefully as I had my last one at 12:00 and the Boosh isn’t until 20:00 I’ll feel a little more alive by then. It’s not even like post-poning 2 will make much difference to me anyway, I’ll still end up taking my last ones on Tuesday so I won’t even add an extra day to my pain & misery.

Gaaaah. Anyhoo, off to get ready. Going to the Turtle first I think. Let me know if you’re stopping off anywhere in town and I’ll pass on that CD if ya like. Otherwise I might be out on Wednesday just because I’ll be able to drink again! \o/

Well, if you were following… it burst :os

So far, so good. It’s actually just like a big spot and isn’t that painful right now…. I hope it stays that way!

Dr’s appointment tomorrow morning to have the cyst on my scalp looked at. For 10 years it’s just been like a teeny-weeny lump and not caused me any grief. For the past 2 weeks it’s been infected and I’m not able to sleep or move my head without muchos pain. :’o(

Unfortunately I know they can’t do anything about it while it’s infected, and so I’ll probably get antibiotics at first. Which is crap timing cos I didn’t want to be sober for The Mighty Boosh on Saturday :o/ I guess one night off them won’t hurt. Then, all going well, I’ll have to get it removed, which will mean shaving part of my head. Which sux…. I thought I’d been there, done that on the growing out of an undercut. Bleh… But still, at least the hair will grow back that way. If this cyst ruptures like the last 2 I had…. well, a hole the size of a 50p piece in my head covered in scar tissue just doesn’t warrant thinking about. *cries* I wish they’d just stick a needle in and drain off some of the badness, it hurts soooooo much.