Quite a full house in the Coventry office today. Bodies everywhere. Nothing special going on just lots of people passing by, having meetings, etc. On the way out of Coventry I spotted a huge new Borders store with a Starbucks inside it. Looks like a much better venue for an after work drink than the local pub. Must mention it to Phil when he's back in the office. The other plus point is the Paperchase stuff in store, perfect for picking up a suprise for the wife.
The kids did great at swimming on Saturday morning. Harriet even got extra praise from Keith during Dylans lesson! Even though they both have the odd moan about going, I'm so proud of how well they're doing.
Saturday afternoon spent moving shelves and stuff in Harriets room so as to make room for a bigger desk for her. Need to give the room a lick of paint before we purchase the furniture.
Sunday has been a lazy day and very pleasant for it. We hid inside from the sun all day with all the windows and doors open trying to get a breeze through the house.
Jacq and I have been snatching the Potter book from each other all weekend. She's ahead of me of course. I've too many other things I like to dabble in. An ongoing task this weekend is the management of my mp3 archive ID3 tags. I did a big batch by hand within the limits of the Windows properties dialog, but by Sunday had upgraded to an mp3 tag editor to try and automate the process a little. It took quite a few downloads to find an editor I was comfortable with. Hopefully I'll get the task completed in the next few days and then I can move onto another item on my list.
Received a CD in the post yesterday from Fergus. Another on his 'Room Temperature' label. This was was titled 'Unmoor'. The music was impressive collage of industrial drones and scrapings. Intense listening. The music packaged in a cute 3" CDR in jewel case. Nice presentation. Inspiring. Wish I could channel that inspiration and generate some outputs of my own.
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince has just arrived via the postman. The doorbell rang and there was a scramble for the door. I was doing the washing up at the time so I didn't stand a chance. I did however manage to sneak a read of the first paragraph before t'wife got hold of it. We're going to be running two bookmarks this weekend!
Good news for the Bearwood Hight Street. It's rumoured that Tesco will be getting the keys for our local Safeway at the end of July readying for an October opening. Safeway has lain empty for months bringing the whole area down. We need our supermarket back and I'm glad it's Tesco.
Even better news is that Subway is opening a store on the high street just 5 mins walk from my front door. Yummy! I'm looking forward to chowing down on them there Veggie Delite sandwiches!
Been enjoying some more sightseeing around the mighty Google Earth. The Google Earth Hacks site provided this cool link to the 7 summits. It's really been an eye-opener to me being able to zoom and rotate around something like Everest. I've never been into geography much but it's brought more to life for me. Looking forward to even higher rez bitmaps in the years to come.
Bigging up a track that I'm into right now. It's not that new apparently, even the wife has heard it before me. The track is 1 Thing by Amerie. Check her site and you'll find it on there available for listening. A superb clash of tumbling go-go drum loops and guitar stabs with a repetitive vocal over the top. I always loved the Washington Go-Go scene but it never fully delivered its promise. Trouble Funk rocked hard for a while but unfortunately the scene mellowed out as soon as the world noticed it. The rest of Amerie's stuff seems pretty bland but this one track stands out for me. Have had it on repeat play all day on my iPod. Tripping.
Glancing back at the archive list made me realise that I'm well past the one year anniversary for this here blog. I'm pretty pleased with that. I've never meant to have a wide readership for this blog. In fact Phil is probably my only regular reader. It was mainly just a desire to record a period of time and have it secured in the archives of this internet thing. In the future, I'm sure the internet will appear as some sort of quaint experiment, but at least there will be some words of mine buried within the backup tapes. Not saying anything profound or important. But hopefully painting a picture of the inside of my head for a year or two. So I'll just keep going then.
It was a great course and the week has been enjoyable but it's still good to be back home. Got back before Jacq who was at her uncles funeral this morning. Great to see the kids in the playground. Harriet not happy about the upcoming sports day. Poor sweetie. Mom and Dad came over tonight. It was Dads birthday in the week and I couldn't think of a thing to get him. Must try and think of something to suprise him with later.
Post waiting for me. New CD from Michael Allen. Geniuser. Had a quick listen to some tracks. Sounds fantastic. Must do a copy for Mike.
Another good day on the course up at SWSH. Excellent to see Phil up here. Havn't seen him for ages. Cool rumour he heard about the Coventry office moving to Brums Mailbox building. It's obviously pie in the sky but it's nice to dream.
The superb atmosphere yesterday in the canteen when the Olympics were awarded to London contrasted with the depressing mood today as the news was full of bomb blasts in the capital. Bastards.
Finally managed to score a copy of PCS7 V6.1 last night but installation fell down due to requirement of SQL Server. Got that sorted today and completed installation. System running sweet on my machine. Top notch.
My first post from SWSH. Hopefully the first of many. Impressed with the setup my colleagues have up here. The first day of the PCS7 training course is over and is going quite well. I've moved over into the engineering department to pick up my mail and do some ods and sods. Attempts to secure V6.1 have faltered so far. The guy I asked had the box on his desk but some bugger had nicked the disk. Must keep on trying.
UPDATE: Geoff and I working here gone six and the 'Rider' just came past and stopped for a pleasant chat. Can't do any harm to the brownie points. Not yet in Phils league, but trying ;)
Off work today. Jacq got roped into doing the refreshments at Dylans assembly this morning so I helped out too. The assembly was nice. I'm always choked at these things. Left the school and went to see Batman Begins at the 10:45AM showing. Top movie. Christian Bale rocks. Dark and smart.
Back in the office today after a few days of site. Not much news. Pleased to see that all arrangements are in place for the PCS7 course next week up in Manchester. Looking forward to that. Replacement RAM turned up so my PC will be rocking with 2Gig. Need to get PCS7 installed and get into it. Trashing my engineering drive this afternoon.
After raving about Google Earth the other day, I haven't had much chance to play with it since. Servers seem down all the time. I guess lots of other people liked it too.
Lunchtime I met up with the guy who we sold Dads caravan awning to via eBay. Dodgy dealing in country pub car parks. So I've got a handful of folding to give to Dad tonight when they visit.
Taking tomorrow off without pay. Steve suggested it due to me being on waiting time and having just worked a weekend. Suits me fine. A long weekend before being away on the course next week.
Once again the vast scope of Google activities continues to amaze me with the launch of Google Earth. I downloaded it this morning and am simply ASTOUNDED by it. It's free, it's got the whole world on it, you can skip around the globe exploring, I've hardly scratched the surface. Brilliant. You do need quite a whizzy PC with good graphics and a broadband connection to run it, but so what? I got that. 'Ave it.
I think I've blogged before about a media catalog program by Delicious Monster that I thought looked very cool. Can't find the original post, must sort out how to search my own blog someday. Anyway, this cool program was unfortunately Mac only. Well, hurrah once again for Lifehacker as they linked me to MediaMan which on first view looks to be a very similar thing for PC's and it's free. I've just installed it and it's just the job. Top notch!
This has got to be one of the coolest tips I've ever read! I love to open links in new tabs in Firefox but I hate the way you have to right-click the link and choose new tab from the pop-up. Imagine then my delight in finding this tip whilst browsing through Lifehacker.
I'm loving Lifehacker right now.
Just spotted that Blogger now hosts pictures in the blog. What a splendid idea. So now I don't have to limit my blog pictures to just the ones I post up on Flickr. This is good news. So here's a picture of me at work in the Coventry office some months back taken with my phone. Can't remember who took it. Trapper or Dan I think.
Yet another weekend of site support down in Kent. Drove down Friday night for an early start on Saturday. The shift was uneventful and felt like forever. Got back to my hotel room and promptly fell asleep. Woke up feeling dreadful and hence couldn't be arsed to go for a swim. Back on site this morning and nothing happening that needs my attention. The pipe cooling process continues at its own pace. Can't wait to be driving up home tonight. A weekend sold off for cash. I hope we see the benefit.
Postscript: A desk, an internet connection and hey presto! Lots of blog postings! So at least I feel like I've done something positive in my day.
