The Lair of the SlowFox

I have been trying to retrain myself to use WINDOWS+E to launch Windows Explorer, rather than Right Clicking on Start, partly because the latter means that Explorer is launched within your profile, rather than at the Computer level, which is usually fractionally closer to where I want to be.

Anyway, by pure accident, this morning I discovered that WINDOWS+R is a shortcut to the Run... dialogue, which is good news, because I use that a lot (it's faster to type 'excel' or 'iexplore' {for those rare occasions where I need IE} than it is to navigate Start/Programs/Microsoft Office/etc...).

Was offline over the weekend - doubly frustrating because I'd arranged to play Forza 3 online against my brother over XBox Live on the Sunday. Alack, alas, not to be. Some other time, then.

On Saturday evening, P and I teamed up with cynthia_black and her family to watch Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief; overall, I don't think it did justice to the books, and was mostly an underwhelming piece of cinema.

Work is busy, and not particularly good right now.

All the electrical equipment in the office carries safety stickers as a consequence of PAT (Portable Appliance Testing). Said stickers are printed in two flavours: 'warning orange' or 'extreme danger red', and it's the latter that festoons the plug to our wine-bar refugee mood lighter uplighter, which we use to offset the fact that we've disabled 40% of the fluourescent striplights.

When I say 'disabled', what I actually mean is that, having undertaken all appropriate risk assessment measures and the like, Colleague Unnamed balanced on the swivel chair to twist the fluourescent tubes in their holders until they broke contact, and thus switched off. Because there's a ... difference of opinion within these four walls as to exactly how floodlit the illumination has to be to constitute 'sufficient', and yet all ten tubes are controlled by a single switch.

Anyway, since this 40%/60% split in lighting did end up making half of the office look something like an unlit cave (as opposed to the illuminated sort, obviously), we then compensated for the two steps back with a forward pace in the form of an uplighter which, even if it looks as though it was nabbed from some early 90s wine bar in Islington, does declare itself by means of an embossed sticker affixed to its base to be, indeed, the property of our employer.

The PAT sticker on the plug for our North London bistro reject sternly declares to all and sundry:
DO NOT USE AFTER 14/01/10^*

It has occurred to me, as I wantonly flick the switch each morning, that in so doing I'm taking my life in my hands, and should the whole thing go up in flames and/or electrocute me, I'll have no comeback, having clearly disregarded (as this post is testament) direct orders to the contrary.

But hey, I'll take the risk.

* note to readers in the Colonies: our date format makes sense.

You'd have thought, perhaps, that when finding it hard work looking at the monitors (both home and work), I might have investigated the brightness settings perhaps a couple of months earlier than, er, today, wouldn't you?

Both screens were set to 100, and so I've toned them right down, which is making things a lot easier on the eye. So yay for that.

Blech.

Back at work, after what turned out to be a pretty mild case of 'flu, if my previous experience is anything to go by. Mostly better now, although I have some freshly brewed lemsip on the desk to try and keep me functional for the rest of the day.

Anyway, thanks to all for the good wishes and stuff - Castle Fox was offline for the duration, which means that this is the first chance I've had to check back in on Dreamwidth. The ISP thing is something I'll have to sort out eventually, but I wasn't really feeling up to it (or anything, really) just then.

Right now I'm slightly perturbed by the fact that Outlook is projecting that it's going to take 13 minutes to update my Inbox with the emails from Thursday. That doesn't bode well.

I was over at one of the user's offices yesterday to sort out (a trivial, as it happened) problem she was having with Word (which is a whole separate story, because I'm not Word support).

Anyway, said colleague was wearing an absolutely fantastic short, short skirt, of which I highly approved, but decided it was probably better to say nothing of her wardrobe choices for fear of ... if not exactly being misinterpreted, at least being inappropriate.

Discretion's the better part of valour, right? ;-P

Overall, I was somewhat unimpressed with the two days' training - the instructor was personable, the group I was in were good, but the actual knowledge transfer thing was pretty limited.

I confess, the course did help demystify the deification of the triangle a little (I'm now campaigning for a reclassification of this as a quadrangle, with limited success so far, but it's early days), and there were some fun elements across the two days.

But was it worth missing two days' work for this? Absolutely not.

A couple of us were lamenting missed opportunities - we collectively felt that the course would've benefitted greatly from a quad-bike-paintballing session as a team building exercise. Sadly, neither paintball nor quad-bike were proferred, so we had to make do instead with rhapsodizing over scented flipchart pens.

Lighting, as keen scholars of these pages will be aware, tends to be something of a contentious issue amongst us code monkeys.

We've been trying to come to an effective compromise with the lighting in here, both natural and artificial, and Friday saw us shuffling the desks around so that we can open the blinds on some of the windows without having monitors backlit by the resultant glare (hey, there's a world out there!).

Yesterday we decided to try out Colleague S's wine-bar-stylee uplighter, rather than have the serried ranks of overhead fluourescents flood the place.

And, y'know... it's actually better this way, I think. We could possibly do with a little more candlepower somewhere, but I certainly find it preferable to the floodlit alternative.

After gingerly walking in through the Snap! Crackle! and Pop! of a thin layer of ice over yesterday's snow dusting, I'm back at the Office (II), and was very much looking forward to warming my gloveless (they went missing over the festive period - must replace. Seriously must) hands opn a mug of boiling water (for I am still coffee-free™), to discover that our 'instant' boiling water machine isn't producing forth vast torrents of instant boiling water... more what you might call lukewarm-ish.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly - the beast has been switched off over the Christmas break, and needs some time to get back up to operating temperature. Of course, since we have instant hot water on tap, we don't have a kettle...

I've got some background processes running on the PC which would've been much better run over the Christmas break, but that only occurred to me once I was home, and I'd powered down the work PC, so I couldn't remote desktop in to set things in motion. So that was a bit shortsighted of me, but nothing terminal.

DVD-wise, The Wire continues to prove rivetting viewing - the cinematography in the penultimate episode of S3 (the showdown in the empty house with Omar and Brother Mouzone) is awesome (Omar rocks), whilst in matters literary, Rachel Caine's Carpe Corpus, Morganville VI is looking set to be my first book of 2010 - I'm about half way through at the moment, but keep getting distracted by both The Wire and Assassin's Creed II.

Work formally closes at lunchtime today, so it's just a morning stint at the desk, and then the day is mine!

It rained a little last night, so the snow turned to slush turned to ice as night gave way to morning - walking Mali this morning was a little hairy in a couple of places, but I remained upright, so all good on that front.

I set a new PB on Pacifism mode in Geometry Wars² last night; 12,500,000, which beat my previous high by a factor of 6 (which sounds impressive, but because of the nature of the game's score multiplier collection thing, the points rack up increasingly quickly the longer you survive). To put that into perspective, the current global top score for Pacifism is apparently around the 7 billion mark, so I have a looooooong ways to go. I'd like to break in to the nine digit score range, though...

I switched to Geometry Wars² after playing a little more Assassin's Creed 2 - a beautiful, beautiful looking game, but I'm finding it hard, er, finding each respective quest's target. Still, it's absorbing, but I'm thinking that Ezio (the Assassin you play) definitely makes different life-choices to me on a day-to-day basis.

Forgot to mention, have received Christmas cards from aome, carolanne5, cynthia_black and uninvitedcat, so thank you muchly, y'all, for those! <3

After lunch with cynthia_black yesterday, I got back into work only for parts of my vision to start dropping out... the critical, dead-centre parts, naturally, and with such migraines, experience has taught me that all I can do is go for a forced reboot, and crawl into bed.

So I came home, walked Mali, and was in bed by 4pm. Although I got up a few times, and let Mali out into the yard for good measure, I didn't get up properly until 6.30 this morning, feeling mostly better, but still a bit woozy.

As a result, I've avoided the PC until this evening, hence the slightly odd update time for this post.

The migraine threw a few things out, actually - aside from missing an afternoon's work, I also had to postpone a vets' appointment for Mali (kennel cough vaccination - been and done this afternoon instead), and had to put off picking P up from the Farm, too :-/

I also had a plumber returning to look at a leak under the sink - the stopcock got replaced last week, and now, by the power of PFTE tape, I think I've finally reclaimed use of the undersink cupboard. Which is nice.

Anyway, because the plumber had fixed the time as 'Saturday morning', and I had a vets' appointment for Mali at 2.30pm (the only available slot I could shift to from Friday at such short notice), that meant I couldn't reliably pick P up any earlier than 5.

It snowed a little, the last couple of days - this is always bad news around the Dukeries, because the snow compacts, converts to slush, then freezes, and the roads become ice-rinks. The drive up to the Farm gets better once we're onto the main arterial routes through Hull, but once onto the winding roads past Beverley, conditions got just a little slippery once again, and I could feel the car squirming around as we pootled rather gingerly along.

Not pootling fast enough for the BMW (what else?) driver, who roared past on the return flit, though.

By the time we got back to Castle Fox, the Snow Proper started to fall - we don't get much of the stuff, so when it does fall (and, more importantly, settle), it's a Big Thing. More amusingly, Mali turns into a sort of inverse dalmatian when we're out walking in it - the flakes creating white spots on the predominantly black coat.