radiac.net

Today's my birthday! Leela and I are taking the day off, and she has cunning plans, the details of which are top secret. More later!

Only a week late, but better late than never! Work, journeys, meetings; a busy week. And now I have the weekend to catch up.

As I mentioned in my post last week, Leela had cunning plans for my birthday, which were top secret. I had to test my car, so as I drove and she directed it turned out that we were going to Bath! Hurrah!

We had lunch up in the Slug and Lettuce - it's moved to where RSVP used to be, evoking memories of pub crawls and t-shirts and Kate. But it's all shiny and decorated nicely now, and there were no signs of drunk girls wielding board markers.

Leela had arranged another surprise: Tristan, who arrived in time for food. I had wondered why Leela had been stalling the waitress; I don't think I'm very intelligent sometimes. We ate, and then all wandered off to ShakeAway (hurrah!), went for a wander, and then had to say goodbye to Tristan, as he had to go off to Bristol. Leela and I then went and watched Hot Fuzz. I thought it was great, but she wasn't so impressed - she fell asleep halfway through...

That was the day itself; however, no entry about a birthday would be complete without thanking people for cards and birthday wishes, and bragging about my neato presents. Tristan gave me a loaded Starbucks card (now partially depleted, mmm), my dad paid for one of the latest rounds in the garage, and Leela's mum gave me a DVD and books. There was much chocolate from Leela, as well as several books and DVDs. Oh yes, and a Wii...

Some useful things that I learnt last week:

• My expensive Sony laptop can survive a 3 foot drop. Onto tiles. Lid first. While powered on. And writing to the hard drive.
• It's a bad thing when someone else's server accidentally gets assigned your APC reboot port. And they want to reboot their server. And they live by the motto If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again. Especially when you are trying to demo a site for a client, with whom you have a money back reliability agreement.
• People don't like it when you tell them you put your prices up. Even though you gave them a 2 year (!) buffer period, and it is still less than the standard. People like things for free, I guess.
• Cars suck. Petrol, oil, time, good will, and always money. Two months income later, my car still isn't working, and is going to be rather tricky to fix. But because I now know that, I can no longer afford to get a new one.
• CPAN module authors are amazing. They write exactly the module you need, and then make sure that there are just enough obscure bugs to make it take longer to use and fix than it would have taken you to write your own in the first place. Damn you, SQL::Statement.
• Staff in Game don't find Wii jokes as amusing as I do.

Woah! What's this, another update? Four posts so far this month, and we're only just into the last week. You are lucky.

As I have alluded to in previous posts, I have a Wii, which Leela bought me for my birthday. I feel I need to give it an entry of its own, because it's so utterly awesome - half of the entry is sitting in my drafts, but I just can't seem to get the other half finished. I will endeavour to post some more information shortly, but suffice it to say it is a lot of fun. All those who own a Wii can now nod in agreement, and send me their friends codes.

I have finally managed to find an excuse to do something interesting in my day-to-day work; I implemented a fancy Google map of tonbschl. I've also re-written my flash streaming media player (example here) - it's just like YouTube! Only without the angst-ridden teen cam whores. I have also written a nifty little postfix queue manager script, which I'll tidy up and put online when I get some free time.

My framework is still my biggest project at the moment; it's suffered from lack of time over the past few weeks, but the first release is now in sight. The URL dispatching system needs to support one more thing, the templating language needs a couple more features, and the relational database is still lacking, err, the relational bits. But the ground work is all done, it's just a matter of writing the code to glue it all together, and then it'll be time for testing. Exciting! This will be the 6th time I've actually finished it, but the first time I will release it. And, after about 7 years of on-and-mostly-off development, it at last has a name. Do keep an eye on my site; with several of my long-term projects nearing completion, I'm hoping the next few months will be quite interesting.

In other news, my car now seems to be fixed, and my nose is not really any better - I have my follow up appointment next week, so we'll see what they say. I also still seem to be quite good at FPS games, having come top in DoD:S on several rounds on several servers over the weekend. I don't like to brag, but then I did break 100 kills in a single match for the first time since my Quake 2 days. </smug>

I'm also in the market for a VoIP provider who offers an incoming landline gateway, with call divert and failover to landline and mobile - if anyone has any recommendations, do let me know and I'll add them to the list. I need a new number for work, so this has to be reliable. I have considered running my own asterisk-based forwarding system, but I don't think I'll have the bandwidth. My only question is, 01***/02** geographical, or 08** number - and if so, 0845, or 08-something else? If you were a potential or existing customer, would you really care - or even notice?