tefkas

So why break the silence on tefkas now?

Well, it's a slow start to this morning, because I've got an appointment with an orthopaedic consultant at 9, in town, to look at my leg/ankle, all as part of the ongoing insurance thing relating to this entry's tag.

And I decided it made sense to keep all the bike crash posts together on the same journal, should I ever need to refer back to things at a later date.

So how's things with the leg? Not bad, really - obviously, it helps that I've been walking 10 - 12 miles a day on it, and I do believe that the joint is getting freer, still, but there are certain things I still can't do (can't run, properly, can't twist the ankle in certain ways, it isn't happy with too much stress).

So we'll see what the consultant says.

23 months on, would I have another motorbike? Yes, I would - the crash didn't put me off the things, but I've got a dog in addition to being a weekend dad, and there's simply no time to make full use of such a machine (it'd literally be Sunday afternoons, only - very clichéd, 'tis true, but that's not sufficient usage to justify the expenditure. Not for me).

I'm going to take a break from LJ for a little while, I think, and see how it goes.

LJ's front page has the number of posts made in the last 24 hours: today it's reading at a smidgen under 184,000, whereas during the week that figure seems to hover somewhere around 250,000. Which is, of course, what you'd expect.

Except for the vague suspicion I have that, back when LJ was approaching 8m users, the post count per day was about 250,000, and that count hasn't upped even when the site passed 10m users.

Speaking of which, that 10m users mark was passed a little while back, but it's 'only' crept up to 10½m at the time of writing/typing (I'm reasonably certain that there was a spike in new registrations at c9.9m, as people tried to get the exact 10 millionth account, but even so, I have a feeling that growth's levelling off).

Network cables tend to work so much better if both ends of the cable are attached to something.

*ahem*

It's a beautiful day out there, so shame all the more than we're going to spend the best part of it inside a practically windowless room. When I say 'practically windowless', I don't mean it's got a teeny-tiny window: one side of the room has normal sized windows down its full length. Unfortunately, these are all glazed with translucent frosted glass, so we can't see a thing of the outside world, we just get this vague glow permeating the training room.

*slight pause as I try to remember my username/password combination for the t-mobile site*

*mild surprise - oh, it's that one. Weird*

Following on from yesterday's post, I suspect I need to find a water bowl for the doggin that's Even More Impossible to tip than the current 'Non-Tip' bowl ;-) I s'pose, strictly speaking/writing/typing, you don't normally come across degrees of impossibility, but Mali's 'Non-tip' bowl, er, isn't :-) (not a surprise - after all, I know that I have an extremely talented dog)

Anyway, it's Friday, and the last day of our course. It's given the week a weird flavour - being away from the desk, but still on-site all week has completely thrown my sense of what day it's been. It has, as a side issue, also meant that I've not been able to keep as close an eye on LJ as I might, normally, but I'll try and catch up with people as best I can.

No post yesterday - posting in the evenings wasn't working so well for me, so I've swapped back to morning updates. After, I have to confess, wrestling with the idea of not updating at all. But I think this place has too strong a hold on me for that.

Training seems to be going well - we're wading into ever deeper water at the moment, and the old trick of mapping new stuff onto existing knowledge is starting to prove more of a hinderance now, and it's way past the time I should be relying on those crutches. I've been reading Code Complete in the evenings - a slightly scary read, to be honest, because I'm currently reading the Requirements, Design and Architecture sections, which aren't actually areas the book addresses fully - but the level of detail of exactly what we're not currently doing is, um, intimidating.

Every day, recently, I go home at lunchtime to check on the Mali-dog, and every lunchtime, I discover that he's wrestled his water bowl, and it's lying upside down somewhere creative. And the hound is parched. Today he's got his 'non-tip' water bowl, which is 'impossible' to upturn. Oh yes. No more upended water bowls and parched dogs at lunchtimes for me from now on! :-)

I'm pondering swapping my electricity supplier to Ecotricity - they're an energy supplier that invests in renewable energy and the like. There's no actual cost (dis)advantage to making the switch, but their web site seems quite flaky, and I don't know much else about them. So I'm investigating.

Meanwhile, I'm doing my best to minimise energy consumption at home: I think I'm approaching minimal configuration, but I'm sure there's more I could do. So I'm using the PC, TV and HiFi less, and trying to be diligent about not leaving things in standby mode, either.

Training went well this evening. There were five dogs tonight, but I think the main reason that Mali's calmer is that the warmer weather makes him pace himself a little more sensibly.

I said 'a little'. :-P

Work wise, the training moved up a gear today, and we were doing a lot more work inside Visual Studio, and I think I'm getting my heard around the concepts of how it organises your work and stuff a little better now. Which is good - certainly, I can see myself actually managing to produce stuff™ therein, whereas previously the plethora of windows, toolbars and panes had been a little bit offputting compared to OpenROAD, which is the environment we currently work with.

Thanks, all, for participating in this morning's poll, which appears to have confirmed that I'm dead common, me: three rings on the keyring is the popular choice. FWIW, mine are:

• Front door key


• Car key


• Office key.

The above trio are kept company by a glow-in-the-dark blue, radioactive (no, I'm not joking: it's a very mild radioactivity, though) keyfob thingy. Mine's blue, partly because they were out of stock of green when I ordered it.

06/06/06 - it can only mean it's morganmuffle's birthday!!!! :D

Happy Birthday, morganmuffle - I hope the day lives up to its portents!

One of my colleagues opened the office door yesterday, and forgot to collect his keys when he wandered down the corridor to his own office. Which allowed me to marvel at the sheer weight of his key ring - there must at least a dozen keys on there, all told, and the thing weighs a tonne^*! Which got me wondering:



* - this is not intended to be a precise measurement.

That's 'cool' as in 'distinctly chilly', rather than 'unspeakably hip'.

As mentioned previously in these pages, the whole department (pretty much) is on a .NET/C# training course this week, so, obviously, it follows that today was the first day. Things didn't get off to a great start when I picked the only non-functioning PC in the room, and, to be honest, we didn't really use the machines until this afternoon, and even then, only briefly.

We're promised that the course gets more technical, and more hands-on, as the week progresses, but in the meantime I was sufficiently inspired by the trainers' plaudits for Code Complete, 2nd Edition that I nipped across to Waterstones at lunchtime to procure a copy. At £34, it wasn't exactly cheap, but then such tomes never are, are they?

And given that my career at this point seems pretty rooted in programming, it will probably serve me well to do some technical reading around the subject. There's been a pretty significant sea-change in the departmental attitude towards Micro$oft's products, and it seems that we're going to move away from Ingres and towards SQL Server as and when circumstances allow. Me, I'll code with whatever tools I'm given, but I have to confess that I'm a little disappointed we didn't go the Open Source route and embrace Java - but that's more personal politics getting in the way of business logic. For what we want, and need, to do, it seems like .NET is the best option.

Although today started off chilly (and after an excellent weekend), it warmed up (or else I got acclimatised to the training fridge, and everything seemed more or less tropical once we emerged/defrosted), and this evening's walk was in shirt sleeves. This does present problems, as at least with my jackets I have a multitude of pockets for dog treats, nappy liners (for cleaning up) and other bits and pieces, whereas when I'm just in jeans and t-shirt, you have to be a bit more strategic in how you stock up for the trip.

Anyway, Mali and I had two long walks this evening, which was good, although the second was slightly longer than planned, because we had to avoid a couple of aggressive dogs and so ended up doubling back on ourselves for a little while.

Whilst we were out, ex left a message on the mobile (which was in the kitchen, charging, since otherwise it would've been with me): they're having problems with their firewall and email. In theory, it should be straightforward to fix, but trying to talk such problems through over the phone is rarely successful - especially since they're on dial up, and will need to hang up to connect to test and then disconnect and ring back etc etc. So probably I'll talk them through the whole thing next time I'm up, because at least that way they should be better informed for the next time the firewall blocks something they want to use.

Really not much to relay this evening - Mali and I have just got in from walking up and down the Avenues. It's a bit chillier compared to the afternoon's sunshine, but most definitely summerish.

Workwise, we're all on a .NET/C# training course this coming week - rather weirdly, one of the trainers is a member of The House (the group of students I shared a house with waaaaaaaaay back at York). Anyway, that's probably going to keep us occupied (and, not un-notably, offline) for the most part, so I possibly might not keep quite on top of my flist as I might like. I'll try, though.