radiac.net

It is now 7 years since the year 2000. I mean I know that makes perfect mathematical sense, but... 7 years?! It can't be?

Happy New Year!

At some point between 09:23 and 09:25, my phone line went down. Guess who has a two-minute cron job ;)

After donning my deerstalker and popping my pipe into my mouth, I followed the trail of clues to the BT van parked in the driveway. I eventually located the driver of the van, just as he coming out of one of the upstairs flats.

"Good day to you sir! My telephone appears to have malfunctioned whilst you were in its vicinity! Might the two be connected?"

"No. F*** off."

Well, ok, neither of us used exactly those words, but I think that the ones I have selected better convey the level of politeness used by both parties.

Disgruntled, I spent 10 minutes locating the telephone book, eventually finding it in the first place I should have looked. I rang BT faults, and they promised to have someone out to me by Friday.

Dismay! Here was I, at 10:06 in the morning, facing the rest of the week without an internet connection? This is the stuff nightmares are made of! And flashbacks.

I decided that there was only one thing for it - I would have to commit myself to an action that would cause fate to bring the BT engineer at an inconvenient time. I could have gone to Starbucks, but that's a long walk back when a BT engineer is standing outside, so I did the next best thing - I put a quiche in the oven.

Sure enough, about 10 minutes later (with five quiche minutes remaining), my phone rang. The BT engineer was outside!

Hurrah! The nice BT engineer was very polite and friendly - the ones I get always are - and he traced the problem back to where the engineer from this morning had accidentally disconnected my cable at the box.

"Not my fault" my ass. You shall be hearing from my complaints secretary! As soon as she gets home from work - she has a late night at the dispensary today.

And now, if you will excuse me, it is time to return to my quiche.

If you walk around in shorts and flip-flops in the middle of winter, everyone will smile at you.

Last year I had lots of new year resolutions. I successfully completed 2 (work more), 4 (play more) and 5 (stay awesome), but didn't really touch the rest.

This year I am going to focus on resolution 6 from last year - keep in touch. When a friend e-mails me, no longer shall I put it to one side to reply to "when I have more time", because I will never have more time - I still have an e-mail here I've been meaning to reply to since July. Two years ago.

I will also try to start conversations with friends I haven't spoken to in a while, and maybe even attempt to meet up with a lucky few ;)

But equally if you are sitting there thinking "oh, I haven't heard from that Richard in ages", maybe I've lost your details. Leave me a comment, send me an e-mail, get in touch and say hi. Doesn't have to be much, just a "hi" and I'll do the rest.

And if you know some of my other friends who I may have lost touch with, tell them to come here and say hi! I'm thinking OTs and spods mostly, haven't lost touch with uni friends just yet!

And as I said a few days ago, I hope you all have a happy new year, may it be better than the last - even if last year was awesome ;)

Oh, and my second new years resolution: use smilies less frequently in my diary posts...

;)

Hiya everybody! I'm off to hospital in a bit to be de-adenoided - after a long process I might soon be able to breathe through my nose and smell things! Hurrah! It's a general anaesthetic so I think they want to keep me in over night - but I'll be back tomorrow!

P.S. looks like I am going into a ward "where dignity and confidentiality is maintain" - but apparently where punctuation and grammar are not ;)

Well, that was fun. Went in at mid-day yesterday, met doctors, and went down to theatre at 4. They stuck a needle in my hand, turned on the anaesthetic, and I just had enough time to explain to everyone present that I make websites for a living before I fell asleep. Odd, it's usually the other way around.

I woke up about 45 minutes later to find that they had decided not to remove my adenoids - instead, they had just trimmed the tubinates a bit. Oh well, I won't complain as long as it helps - makes for much less pain and bleeding.

They took me up to the ward, and told me they'd let me go home. They told Leela when she rang that I'd be ready to go in a few minutes, so she dashed over to Gloucester straight from the gym, without having had any tea. But they had lied. Two hours later, they removed the needle from my hand, and we headed home for tea.

So now I just have a sore throat that's bleeding a little bit. And my nose won't stop running, but I'm not allowed to blow it - most frustrating. But apart from that, it wasn't too bad, and I had a good excuse to take the half day off work.

My nose is still dripping, 3 days after the operation. Well, dripping is a slight misnomer - it's a veritable deluge. On the rare occasion that it pauses, it merely seems to gather for a renewed assault; I have just under one second of warning before it it pours from my nostril, down my face, and flows from my chin. This, ladies and gentlemen, is mucus on a mission.

But it does pause from time to time, and I have had several moments of clarity where a nostril opens up, air flows down through my nose, and, in those rare moments, I think, I have smelt. Today I think I might have smelt bacon.

But it didn't last, and I am left wondering if its intensity was due to true improvement, or merely a lucky sniff as in the past, intensified by the past few days of total blockage. It's a bit like tearing a corner of wrapping paper off a Christmas present and seeing the letters 'Wi' - when it comes to Christmas, will I unwrap it to find a Wii, or "Winnie the Pooh" socks again?

I have no idea how long my dripping nose will last; I haven't seen a doctor since before the operation, and the ward nurses were about as informative as a whiteboard at a RNIB convention. But I can put up with the dripping, I just want to know - will I be able to smell?

Quick update on the nose - 6 days and still dripping. It's gradually getting better, but I wish the doctors had told me something about what was going to happen afterwards - I assume this is normal, but then Wikipedia does little to reassure. Bad Google.

Work, on the other hand, seems to be going well; I'm going to launch another new client site today that has been in development for some time, and so am gradually clearing the board to leave some time in the day to develop personal projects and to branch out a bit. Apologies if that sounds rather cryptic, but hopefully the next few months will see some of my ideas come to life.

In that spirit, having finished the latest incarnation of my framework and CMS, I've yet again gone back to the drawing board, and have decided to move back to using Perl. I figure with Ruby and Python becoming increasingly popular for web dev, most of my arguments for moving to PHP have gone out of the window, and I can no longer stand to ignore some of the things in PHP that annoy me. So it is with much relief that I'm heading back to Perl, and hope that my framework will live up to expectations (or mine, at least). And, perhaps, that at last I might be able to start releasing some code. Still needs a name though...

As most regular contact with clients is by e-mail, I don't often get many phone calls, unless there's something urgent. In fact, weeks can go by without getting a call. Even so, I never turn my phone off.

Last night though, my nose had decided it didn't like me, was being very uncomfortable and had given me a splitting headache, so I went to bed early and turned the phone off for a good nights sleep. So of course, this morning I forgot to turn it back on, and when I did there were answerphone messages from three different people. Oops.

In other news, the launch of the site yesterday went well - 300 e-mails sent (solicited, not spam!), and more than 50 of those visited and logged in during the first hour - not too bad. Meanwhile I'm still transferring my sites over from the old server, and only have four left. Today I transferred and tidied up my guides. They are green. Very green. Ick?

Are you bored? Adventure Time!

Great. Thanks, whoever pointed me at neave.tv - that ate my lunchtime.

But hey, it's Friday. If you've got a few minutes to spare, start watching at Mr Deja Vu, An Eye For Annai or Dance, Monkeys, Dance. Have a nice afternoon :)

Hope you're all having a good weekend. For those wondering what to have for tea, I've put up a few new recipes in my guide to cooking; things like Macaroni Cheese, Strawberry Crumble (although you could always swap the fruit to something more seasonal), and my ever-popular Chocolate Fridge Cake.

Enjoy!