Banished to the Garage

I've been a bit slack in the last few days with the blog. Sorry about that. The fact that people are actually sending in comments does actually clear up the little nagging doubt in the back of my mind - at least somebody other than me reads this drivel. In mitigation of the lack of output recently, I can report that Thursday was rather unspectacular and not blog worthy in any way unless anyone's really interested in what I had for breakfast. I'm not that interested and even less interested in writing about it, so you'll all have to use your imagination.

Friday was a bit more entertaining. I was in a bit of a grump since I'm used to having my own room to do my own thing, and this just isn't possible in this house, as we have but one living area with an en-suite kitchen. It's too small for a desk once the table and the lounge suite is in, and bedrooms have no space for anything interesting (watch it!). Having whined about the ambient level of noise and general wittering on, I was summarily banished to the garage, which is quite capable of housing both desks. I managed to locate the wireless access point which is supposed to function as a repeater, but sadly it wouldn't plays with WPA2 security on the router. Not being inclined to turn off security, I've had to move back into the living room when wanting to run operating systems other than Windoze, which is the only way I can get any real work done.

Rhiannon (AKA Madam) was due back from her week long camp trip to Wellington. I got a garbled call on the mobile at around 6 saying "my phone is about to die", so I took this to mean come and get me. Having made the mistake of going to the first entrance, I went to the furthest one, the one with the bus stop, which is where I left her. She wasn't there. After a minute wait while it became apparent that everyone was gone or going, and after asking a teacher, I went to the other entrance. No sign. I rang her mobile which went straight to voice mail. Nothing for it but to go back home, and then of course I found her half way home. Not in the best of humours by this point, Madam refused to get in the car, so I left her to it. I was of course not fit to be trodden on by the time Madam got home. Later it emerged that her phone was low because it had been confiscated by a teacher on Thursday night since all the kids were texting each other and thus she was unable to charge it up. She didn't know her way home from the bus stop entrance, so walked through the school and out of the other entrance, which is why I missed her. After she'd calmed down I was forgiven (really, and there I was thinking this would last for at least a fortnight) and peace was restored.

Saturday I got sucked in to some of the admin for the West Sussex Guitar Festival. Such are the tendrils of the club that I cannot completely escape, even 12,000 miles away. Apparently my sooper-dooper excel spreadsheets with tonnes of VLOOKUPs were too much to handle and no one could make them behave. Even me, it seems. Some really quite odd effects trying to sort rows, which just refused to do as instructed. This was a result I suspect of the interaction of Openoffice and Excel which seem to save data in ever so slightly different ways. OO seems to think something's a number until you sort on it, when it decides it isn't. Grr. Add to this all the "late" entries and multiple versions from different people each competing for the prize of the "latest" version, conspired to do my head in and persuaded me to dust off my PHP coding skills and implement the spreadsheets as a web based application, which I've just about finished as of Monday afternoon. This was all good practice for the Zend Certification I'm intending to take in the next few weeks. Talking of which, I've had a sniff of a vacancy for a PHP/MySQL programmer which I'm hoping to hear something about this week.

Everybody else went to the beach, while I continued to nerd about. However at about 3:30 I wandered off down that way too, and lazed about watching the kids run amok and generally tried to pretend they weren't mine. Rhiannon was playing troglodyte, and spent most of the weekend in her room glued to her laptop with the blinds shut. Apparently a week away from the Internet was too much, although it did help her get to know some of her mates a bit better.

Sunday we ended up at Vicky and Wayne's place. Wayne was feeling fragile on account of a post match celebration. Apparently he'd managed to return figures of 24-2 off 8 overs and the team won the match, so much beer was consumed. He tried to talk me into joining, but as I've not played or tried to play cricket since the age of nine, and I have all the natural coordination of a cross legged pig on acid, I suspect that even the standards of the fourth team would be beyond me. I'm a bit of a Monty, but I can't bowl. Although I have plenty of variation, the safest place is invariably in front of the stumps. V&W have apparently "agreed" that the house a few doors down from ours is the place to be, so we will I suspect be seeing even more of them than we do now. Bonus.

This morning I had a visit from another expat, Tim, who has a broken PC. He popped it round and we had a chat about various things while I prodded it and kicked the tyres with no obvious effect. A little later I decided the PSU was OK, and it was a motherboard fault. (For reference folks, short the PSU green lead (14) with the adjacent black (15) and the PSU will fire up with a suitable load i.e. a hard drive, attached). Spares are available on fleabay for a modest outlay, but it's worth fixing as it has a 1G of ram and a 2.8GHz P4 processor.

And hot off the presses, we have the news that Di has managed to win a double pass to the 2009 Gartshore Tauranga Wine and Food Festival, held on the 6th of December. These tickets are $25 a pop, so I'm guessing that there will be at least some free booze to be had. Huzzah!