The Lair of the SlowFox

I may have mentioned before that Work II's heating installation is a little sub-optimal. Indeed, it doesn't even seem to be a digital installation (it'd be either ON or OFF). Oh no, my friends. We get ALL HEAT ALL THE TIME.

Colleague S has grown a little concerned about this, fearing that spending all day in a slow-cooker isn't the most comfortable of accommodations, so he's brought in a nursery thermometer, so that it's possible to keep an eye on things.

Which is how I know that the office was 24°C this morning, which after the walk in through an admittedly mild December morn, felt plenty baking enough, thank you.

I have therefore taken the executive decision to activate the cooling cycle by opening the window. Unfortunately, the windows don't like being open, so we have to prop the thing using a spare PCI riser card (Geeks R Us™) - colleagues similarly afflicted elsewhere in the building use empty milk cartons, magazine racks or screwdrivers. There's an irony to the fact that we have mumble-thousand pounds worth of kit strewn hither and yon, yet we have to prop open the windows (to compensate for the lack of operational thermostats) with whatever junk we can find to avoid melting into pools of goo at our desks.

Today is one of those days where, from about lunchtime onwards, everything needs to run exactly to schedule if I'm going to achieve everything in time.

I've got my appraisal this afternoon, which is a little bit weird, because it's going to be with New Boss, who still doesn't really know what I do day to day, nor has he been in touch with Old Boss/Effectively Still Acting as Boss to find out said. Hmm.

Anyway, that's scheduled to end at 4pm. Which is fortunate, because I then need to pick P up from school, so that I can get the two of us back to Castle Fox to walk Mali, eat (speed dining FTW!), possibly take Mali out for Walk 3, and then amble across to the KC to watch Hull City take on the mighty Everton in what will be P's first evening match.

I've only been to one floodlit game before now, which had a less than optimal outcome for the Tigers, so I'm kinda hoping for better things tonight.

I'm currently reading Rachel Caine's second Morganville Vampires book, Dead Girls' Dance, which is... not quite as much fun as the first instalment, but is certainly readable. Proper review to follow on completion.

It's the Residents' Association AGM this evening - for the 2008/2009 year; yes, it's a tad late, principally because the initial such was abandoned when hardly anybody turned up. My hopes for a significantly higher turnout today are not that great; once the one-way system had been implemented around the Dukeries, interest in the Residents' Association didn't so much dwindle as collapse.

Somewhat over-busy at work - I do find, though, that in general I'm more productive over here in Work II than in the former location, and that's no bad thing, for sure.

Have made a start on Haruki Murakami's After Dark, which seems pretty good, so far, and has the same feel as Hard Boiled Wonderland, A Wild Sheep Chase and some of the others.

Because I need to remote desktop into work machines from home, and work don't support doing so from within Linux, I've had to install Windows 7 on Ione, the home nettop/pc, which is basically a netbook masquerading as a desktop PC. Work only had the Windows 7 upgrade media - the trick with a clean install, then, is to do an initial clean install from the upgrade disc, but not to type in the product key.

Log into Win 7, then run the installation's Setup from the DVD, to 'upgrade' your Windows 7 installation to, er, Windows 7. And then you put in your product key. So far, this seems to have worked, but I haven't risked online activation yet - I want to see whether Ione actually has enough power to realistically run 7 before committing the product key to it.

ETA: props to glittertine for the linkage, Top Gear S14 Trailer is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D :D

Kinda screwed up at work, through, um, misprioritising some work, and through a further misunderstanding between me and boss, the fallout sort of escalated way high before coming back down.

Not irrecoverable, but decidedly unfortunate - it galls me to be remembered for the things I get wrong.

I can barely think straight - have been working more or less flat out since 8am this morning (lunch excepted), trying to write a collection of 12 user reports that have never been done quite this way before.

The urgency stems from the fact that they were requested on 5 October, but Project Manager didn't pass them on to me until 5pm on Monday. They were due on Tuesday, which quite simply couldn't be done.

Anyway. They're done now, 24 hours late. User not impressed.

My brain is fried.

This entry comes to y'all from my brand new different office. Yep, yesterday finally saw the phone line being connected in my target abode, so I shifted across to take up residence in the new office. The transition's been mostly seamless: still awaiting the phone extension to be mapped - the phone itself is live, but has a different extension to my old office. A request is in for the latter to be mapped to the former, so that I end up with no change, but for the time being I'm coping with the lack of telephonic contact, rest assured.

The new building being at the opposite end of the site to Castle Fox, walking home and back during lunch to check on Mali has become impractical - it was borderline before, but the extra 5+ mins each way pushes the logistics firmly into indulgent territory, so I'm back on the bike. However, secure parking is something of an issue, and I may need to investigate my options on that score (I'm explicitly forbidden from bringing the bike into the building {Reg 4(e) applies}).

The only other downside is the lack of a printer. Since we are hardly ever required to print, and really I only ever print out the daily Killers, I'm not sure how much fuss I can legitimately make... might make more sense to get a printer for Castle Fox, but the trouble then is that I find that any printer gets such insufficient use that the cartridges dry up before they run out.

In other news (quite literally), congratulations clearly due to yvi on the 300 support points that dw_news announced in the weekly update! :D

My unwatched DVDs are starting to build up: I've got BSG S4 and Prison Break S3 to watch, plus True Blood S1 should be arriving next week - Comradette K DVR'd the first episode of True Blood for me a couple of weeks back, and that on top of the bookses constituted sufficient evidence for me to plump for the discs there and then. Flicking back to BSG and Prison Break, both of those will then have only a single season outstanding for me before canon is closed, so it sort of makes sense to complete the set...</justification>

Huh. Overnight jobs failed to find the destination FTP server, which means that the payment files weren't downloaded and processed.

This may, or may not, be related to the server dying yesterday, so waiting to mug the DBA upon arrival...

In anticipation of our office move, we've been clearing out the vast accumulation of papers that both ourselves and our predescessors had built up in the office. The record, so far, would seem to be a set of papers from 1988... 21 years old, I'm figuring that they can be safely shredded/recycled.

Dust everywhere, and although we seem to have broken the back of the task, now, there's still a fair bit more to do. And unlike home, for example, where clearing out has a sort of therapeutic feel to it, the office just looks more and more impersonal the more stuff we excise...

Work's busy and I'm not here tomorrow because I'm going to old school friend's funeral :-( So I haven't caught up with my flist/reading page, but hope to manage to do so somewhen.

We had our first rain for what feels like a while today, although it's cleared up somewhat now, and remains surprisingly warm. Our office move has been pushed back to 'the end of the month', or possibly November. Was over at The New Accommodation for a meeting just now, and saw that the desks were being built and cables were being routed, so it's looking like the logistics are being sorted.

However, we've still got to weed out the current office, which isn't a task that particularly fills any of us with glee. At least the drift towards online documentation means that some of the manuals can be junked without a second thought (the one I picked up this morning was dated 1991 - that's eighteen years ago).

Colleagues H and J are both off on holiday whilst it's looking like Colleague N's off ill.

So 's just me in here for the duration.