The way of the pin

So yeah, I called up my step-mother this morning, she's nurse you see. And she said I needed to go to the hospital, which scared me not a little! So I went to work to find someone to go to hospital with me and they said that I should call up my GP first so that then I wouldn't have to sit in A&E forever! I started calling the GP and couldn't get through for more than an hour and my stomach is getting pretty painful by this point so I go tell my boss who then rings them up and gets through immediately. Of course. Anyway doc says don't go to the hospital, come see me... in two and a half hours... So in the meantime I am told to eat some Ontbijtkoek which should wrap round the pin and stop it spiking me and help me pass it etc. I go to the doctor and he said "Yeeeeeeah, it'll be fine, you'll just have to wait". So at the end of the day I was completely right to just let it get on with it! Lol, but this way I didn't have to do much work so that was cool!

Not much else is happening. Still talking to people on IRC and one of the guys that I'm going to meet at FOSDEM is being fairly flirty with me so my inner flirt is responding. And my friend told me he was a little jealous bless him lol. But I explained that I couldn't help it and I think he was a bit mollified lol.

Night night

Wednesday

Nothing much happened today. The canal outside work is freezing over. Oh! And I swallowed a sewing pin!

I was making my friend's bag and I was holding a couple of pins in my mouth, as you do, but then I stabbed my leg and inhaled... Yeah, not sure if I should see someone about it or not, I don't often swallow much stuff I'm not supposed to! We'll see what happens I guess!

Ummm not much else. Found other reasons to dislike Sietse, so it goes.

Realised that I might actually have finished one bit of coding though it wasn't specifically a part I was supposed to do yet. I may have to do more code moving etc. Bleugh

Night night

Oh noes!

I almost posted last night but I was distracted before I clicked the Publish button then closed Firefox without clicking it - d'oh!

So, yesterday: I got my screen! (It's so shiny) I also got fabric to turn into goodie bags for FOSDEM. It's going to be lots of fun.

I cleared all my desk and wiped it down and plugged my computer together (the externals) then I realised I'd left my power-cable at work... Ah well, I haven't actually turned it on today either, just never did lol. I'll turn it on tomorrow hehehehe.

I finished my prototype drawstring gift bag, it's pretty darn cool actually! I'm now making my friend's one then I'll get on with making my other friend's then mine :D They're easier to make than stockings ^^ You don't need to bother with a pattern for one thing.

Nothing much else is happening, work is being crappy again but I'm making lots of new aber friends so it's all good.

Oh! My friend had his skin graft yesterday and it all went well apparently, hopefully he'll be back in aber by the end of the week :D

Night night

Vintage Black and White

Today was photo shoot day! Here's the link to the pictures that have been uploaded so far, not sure when mine will make it up, developing and scanning yet to be done! It was really good fun and we had beautiful weather.

Very sleepy now - bed time!

And again

It's been a bad week for blogging. This is technically my blog for the 24th but it's late *again* So what happened this week? I made a new friend! He was supposed to be going to this FOSDEM conference with some Aber people and we were gonna meet there, but then he had his leg horrible broken and is gonna have crutches for six months so, yeah, he ain't coming! But he encouraged me to join the Aber IRC chatroom and I have since made lotsa new friends :)

Whoops got distracted...

So yeah - geeky conference, geeky friends :)

Work was going OK, didn't do much on Wednesday, felt sick on Thursday then I get in on Friday and decide to check out some of our test tracking numbers as I do about once a week, just to see what's going on. Turns out DHL have very kindly completely changed their layout which means the screenscraping isn't going to work. I still have no idea how to start deploying on my local machine again and besides I just changed the whole freaking setup so I'd have to check out an older edition which sucks ass. So I emailed the DHL people about their API and it seems that they're changing that too so I've upped the JIRA issue priority and maybe I'll get on that thought I still need to finish the REST stuff - nyark!

Photography tomorrow!! Woop woop! I'm looking forward to it thought I think it might be wet, real wet. So I'll keep an eye for emails - see if it gets called off - I don't want to turn up by myself!

Over the next few days I have a new sewing project. My injured friend would like us to bring him back lots of freebies so I'm going to make him a bag! There was the possibility of a book-bag style bag but I figured he'd never really use it so I'm going to make him a - much simpler - drawstring bag. It seems pretty easy hehe, maybe I'll make a dinky one first then make him a bigger one to hold all the free stuff :D

Ummm... it's ten past two, g'night! xx

I did it again...

Yup, turned off the computer before I blogged - whoops!

So I did a major recycling run for work today, about three crates of paper and *lots* of boxes. It wasn't fun. But I learnt one thing; never get personalised stationery. At least, not if you're a company and so you'll get lots in at one time. Then change your logo. I'm so glad it was recycling because there must have been hundreds and hundreds of pages of unused company-logo paper. It was such a waste but then it's not like it can go back in the printer. It was so sad :(

Hum hum hum what else? Oh! I'm going to a totally geeky conference in Brussels on the 6th of February woo! It's all about OpenSource development and stuff. Should be good! Hopefully at least Matthias will come with me and maybe Ewout too. I asked everyone else via email but they haven't gotten back to me so whatever! We'll see what happens...

I'm sure I should have more to say... Just a short one it is!

Confusion

Yeah, I'm confused right now. You know how, when you're on your dashboard, there's a little counter that says how many posts you've... posted? Mine says 79 but I only have 64 "year in posts" tagged posts and five posts prior to that. I think I may have mis-tagged a couple since I started because I have more posts since I started the daily posting than are tagged as such. But only two. so that gets me to 71. Eight posts seems a pretty big discrepancy... Do comments count as posts? This is my theory but I'm not sure!

Anyway yeah, so that's confusing. Also I think the whole internet is on the blink, either I or various of my friends are signing in and out of msn. Now if we were all in the same place it'd be different. Obviously it's not possible but it's a scarily amusing theory.

Oh! I promised reviews! Bother, I have a few stacked up now. In reverse order then:

The Andromeda Strain
I thought this was great, very tense, I swear only read it half properly because I wanted to find out what happened. Very "scary" in the it-could-happen kind of scary way. If you're in to sci-fi I do recommend it! Having said that the ending was a bit of a let down. Given all the tension and the unknowns that people had to deal with and the bizarre and crazy deaths and stuff I thought something at least "vaguely" catastrophic was gonna happen. There were often times when it was mentioned that "It was 48 hours before he realised his mistake" as if this mistake was somehow crucial. Which it was... sort of. At least you thought so. Hopefully I haven't given away too much to make it not worth the read lol!

The Great Gatsby
This was an... odd story. It was, frustrating mostly, it didn't really seem to have much of a point to it I must admit. Some of the scenes were very interestingly described but yeah, not overly interesting. There were many occasions when dramatic stuff could happen, but something else half as dramatic happened instead. There were a couple of really big things but they weren't given due attention. I kinda ended up disliking the narrator for being so... non-committal about certain situations. And he has a vague love interest that fizzles out, most of the book just fizzled. That's how I felt it went anyways.

Argh! There was a third one I was supposed to give you but I've forgotten it!

I was slightly annoyed over something to do with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I was the first one to finish it in my online book club but that's fine 'cos I can just make a thread for the book and start talking. So I wrote a great big long post about the things I felt were interesting, what was important. All that jazz. And the next person to finish - and possibly the only person who will read the story - said "My friends say I'm a robot".

Now, OK, this forum is a bit of a weird one. It's pretty eclectic and that comment isn't particularly out of place. But *she's* the person who set up the book club so we could discuss books and that's *all* she has to say about this one? OK, so I wrote a *lot* about that book but fine, ignore what I wrote! Write your own stuff, talk about the book at least. But no, that was her *only* comment. ARGH! People are frustrating! *looks miffed*