radiac.net

Just realised there have been no entries for a while - well, I've been busy. I'm in the middle of emptying my home; it's being sold in a couple of weeks, and the house needs a bit of work on some little things to "address the issues raised by the surveyor". Little things like 'removing and rebuilding the roof' and 'replacing the electricity and lighting circuits'. Of course for that to happen the house needs to be empty, so I'm knee high in old papers and clothes and assorted random things that have been collecting here since they first moved in over 27 years ago. Not quite sure what I'm going to do with it all, but hey.

This comes at busy season for the tonbschl website (back to school time), and coincides with self-imposed deadlines for development of the second flash CD and the first stage of my CMS. Halfway through the house now, so at least it's getting there, and hopefully when it's all finished I can get back some kind of normality.

And you know you go to a restaurant too much when the waitress greets you by name and asks you if you'd like your normal table and large lemonade...

Well, I keep finding rooms that I've forgotten about - I've just spent the morning emptying the converted coal shed outside, and now there's an extra 7 bags of rubbish and three containers full of miscellaneous items destined for a car boot sale. It had also become a storage area for wine and beer, which was all well past its best, so it went down the drain; beer that is "Best Before 1997" smells really really bad. I feel very sick.

While I've been doing that, an army of workmen have been through the house - the roof is half off, a bedroom door has been removed, and the carpeted staircase has been undressed and the hand rails removed. Add to that the total chaos after I've been emptying drawers and cupboards, and the house is a complete mess. The only rooms that are currently unaffected are my bedroom and computer room, but not for much longer. I would put up photos, but I don't have my digital camera here.

And in other news, I have been informed by a member of my crack team of medical wizardry that I am in need of surgery. My doctor says I need to have a wisdom tooth removed - I guess that's just natures way of telling me that I'm not as smart as I think I am.

Hope everyone is getting on well - diaries/journals/blogs are generally rather quiet at the moment. Must be that time of year.

A classic story, with a picture at the bottom guaranteed to brighten up anyones day.

I'm back in Sevenoaks again after an eventful weekend in Cornwall.

Having spent all week going through spider-infested cupboards and drawers and sorting through thousands of bits of paper, I was relieved to get away back down to Cornwall on Thursday. Friday and Monday were spent catching up on the work that I should have been doing during the week before, and then I headed back to Sevenoaks yesterday, getting in at 4pm before developing a crippling headache and starting to feel very sick, which led to me heading to bed at about 9pm. However, I awoke this morning feeling fit and well, and have started to catch up on the work I should have done yesterday evening when I got in.

I've been working for a couple of hours now - the workmen arrived at 8, and I'm now working in a building site. People are banging nails into the roof above me, people are hammering out walls behind me, and people are drilling and screwing bits of wood into the staircase at my side. Oh, and there's no cold water tank, so I have no water supply apart from the cold tap in the kitchen - that means that the toilets can only be flushed if they are refilled by bucket. Fun. Still, all helps the concentration...

However, I will pause for a moment to relay the tale of Clare's Wedding.

Clare is a girl that Leela went to uni with and now works with, and she was getting married on Friday. We had been invited to her reception in the evening, as had Aimee, who came down on Friday and stayed with us for a couple of days.

Clare lives on the Lizard Peninsula. Now, for those of you who don't know Cornwall very well, the Lizard has no main or named roads, its towns consist of three or four buildings, and so its postcodes stretch for miles. Perhaps, therefore, it was not the best idea to try to navigate there using my sat nav gadget, which relies on named roads or postcodes.

So there we were, at 9pm, driving around the tiny winding mud tracks of the Lizard, in the dark. It became apparent that we were quite clearly lost when we found ourselves on the wrong side of the peninsular, and when we came across a holiday park in Mullion we thought it would be a good idea to pop out and ask for directions. Leela went out to try to find someone to ask, but needless to say, there was nobody. Eventually though, we found it on our own, parked and got out to leave.

It was at that point that Leela couldn't find her phone.

Earlier, she had been using it to read the map as we drove along, so we knew it wasn't at home. I got out the torch, went over all of the car in the hope it had dropped somewhere inside, but it hadn't. It could only be in one place - the holiday park.

Before I continue, perhaps I should say a little more about Cornwall holiday parks. They are mostly inhabited by the scum of the earth. Apologies to those of you reading this who have gone to these aforementioned holiday parks - I'm sure very nice people go to them too, and I'm sure that you're one of them. However, the rest of the people who go to them, especially to the Mullion trailer park serviced accomodation, seem to be mostly scummers.

So Leela and I returned to Mullion, hoping, but knowing realistically our chances were pretty slim. We decided what must have happened - in the dark, the mobile must have been left on the map and fell out with Leela. Everyone's done it, but in the dark she couldn't see anything on the ground in the car park. When we got back, we found the space and had a look around with the torch, but couldn't find it. I went off and asked some people nearby if they'd seen anything, but no. I went into the bar and asked if they'd had anything handed in, but no. I got their phone number and we rang the next day to see if it had been handed in, but no.

So, somebody must have walked past, said 'ooh, a phone', and taken it. It's now barred and the sim is disabled so it's no use to them, but Leela lost her texts, her phone numbers and over a years-worth of photos, and had the inconvenience of having to sort out a new phone. What a waste. Luckily Leela was at the end of her contract so could 'upgrade' to a new one for free with the same number, but still. Makes you wonder at human nature - theft, mugging, robbery, looting... whatever it is, what kind of people do things like that? Oh, wait, I already answered that one two paragraphs up.

Anyway, we made it back to the wedding reception at nearly 11pm, just in time for the dancing, which went on well into the night. I met many interesting people and the rest of the evening was fun, but we left early and used the navigator to get us home before it got too late.

All in all, quite an eventful weekend. But now I must return to my work, and then to packing up my house.

So, yesterday I posted a mini ZIPB tutorial for the Voyager 205 on a forum, and someone replied with a post:

I WISH I WAS A NERD - 13.09.05 2:51 pm
No really i do!!! i cant understand any of that.

I think they have a point *hangs head in shame*

Oh well!

For the first time in as long as I can remember, my tonbschl e-mail folder is now cleared of unresolved e-mails! Admittedly I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but there are always e-mails in there, sitting waiting for attention for months while the slow wheels of large organisations move. But now they have all been resolved, one way or another, so that's great. Free at last! Until the next e-mail, of course. I predict it will arrive within 10 minutes.

Well I knew the white list wouldn't be a permanent solution, but at least I'm only getting about 20 spams through a day. I can handle that, and maybe SpamAssassin will be able to handle it too, if I ever get round to trying it again. I'm still getting 5000+ spams a day that don't make it through the whitelist, mind you.

However, what I don't like is comment spam. I've been pretty lucky until recently - then they started on one particular entry, so I disabled that one, then they started hitting me randomly, so now I've blocked commenting on all old entries until I have time to sort out a better solution.

Work is going slowly, as is house emptying. The slowness on each side is due to the other - I could work a lot faster if I wasn't leaving the room every hour or so to go back to packing, and I could pack a lot faster if I wasn't getting rung up every hour by people wanting websites. But hey, I mustn't complain - work is money, and money is food. And DVDs.

So today's Saturday, right? I figure I can have a lie in, nobody will be showing up to work on the house today? Wrong. Was woken up 20 minutes ago by people talking loudly outside my window. Great.

Is it just me or is the new Sainsbury's slogan the worst rebranding ever? "Try something new today" - the only thing I'll be trying where Sainsbury's is concerned is different ways of grimacing every time their adverts come on telly. Oh wait, they said new - we've all been doing that for 5 years since they hired Jamie Oliver. Hey Sainsbury's, here's an idea - if you want to improve profits, start by finding a new celebrity chef.

From now on, I'm going to get someone way better looking to pose for my ID card photos.

I'm in the process of stumbling around the internet checking rough values of things, affecting whether I chuck them, keep them or sell them.

Anyway, went to Maplin today - here's a lesson in why you should tailor front page article summaries, rather than just cutting the article to the first few words:

The Robosapien rocked our world with its release in 2003, and now the Robosapien V2 is going to blow...

Well, I'm sold.

Today was the last full day I'll ever spend in my home of 22.58 years. Quite sad, but hey, life goes on. As I've mentioned before, I've been packing for the past few weeks - going through old bits of paper and sorting out what stuff I want to keep, and whether the stuff I don't is worth sending off to auction.

This whole thing would have probably been a bit easier if it wasn't for the builders all over the house. For example, today when I wanted to go get a box from my bedroom and take it to my temporary packing room, I looked out of the door and saw 8 builders blocking my path. Or, to be specific, one foreman, one plumber, one chippy, one bricky, two electricians, a decorator and a bloke called 'Magic' who does whatever the others tell him. At one point there were 11 of us in the hall. Quite how I'm supposed to be carrying things around the house with that lot in the way I don't know.

Anyway, I'm nearly finished now, and I'm just packing up the last bits of the house - the computers. For the second time - I did this last night, but then unpacked them again when it became apparent I wasn't going to get away. Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow - with any luck, I will now mostly be offline until tomorrow evening.