Month: February 2008

It depends what you want from a car really. List what you need and then see what fits the bill adn then discard all that and go for one you like best!

Insert word as appropriate ! At the moment the appropriate word is “diet” and the reason is a combination of :

2 days of a steady diet of black coffee and biscuits
(to stay awake during testing!)
A 2 and a half hour drive home
A salt bomb

I had trouble finding somewhere to get food last night, so resorted to the local chippie 🙂 The sausage and chips is the salt bomb I refer to above. That’s the kind of food I like but I think next time I’ll be raiding the chinese instead … I have legs that are highly prone to cramping and they reminded me at about 2.30am 😉 Not a gentle reminder, this one was a howling “I gotta stand up and get my foot pointing the right way again !” cramp.

People need a certain amount of salt (Sodium) to keep their bodies functioning properly, which is why travellers in the desert will take salt tablets. But too much is also bad for you.

It’ll be fine in a couple of days and this time it wasn’t both calf muscles going bang on the way to a fitness test leading to me trudging around for a week with torn calf muscles 🙂

Lol – I should take better care of myself !

Oh – One thing about doing the washing up, all that standing up is very good for stretching off those tortured calf muscles 🙂

PS I also need a new car, gps receiver, telly, dvdplayer, laptop, speakers, pillows, books, relationship, hobbies and I could probably add more … I’ll settle for a new diet, although that will take a lot of effort plus another car to replace my 9 year old Puma. The car is a complex one as I really do have no clue whatsoever as to what to get next …

Lol – toys are good when they work – and trying to fix a gps unit while going at 75mph down the M4 is almost certainly a bad idea … I didn’t try poking it too long but losing the satnav made me realise how much I’ve become accustomed to being able to time my journeys to the ETA readout on the satnav.

I’m an information junkie and the satnav gives a few little snippets of info that help to feed that addiction. A replacement gps (the lead’s bust) will be either £65 or me tinkering for a weekend. The mad thing is that a Bluetooth wireless one costs less than one with a wire. So – I’ll be hunting one of these soon :

Testing went well, although I’m glad I’m not the one who’s there for the rest of the week. We don’t execute the tests, we watch the contractor demonstrating the functionality. A couple of days is about the limit before the brain starts to leak out through your ears and the other fella from our office is 2 days through a 4 day stint.

Now chilling out to iTunes music – currently All About Eve’s “The Pearl Fishermen”. Beautiful song that closes out their “Scarlet and Other Stories” album. It has Julianne Regan singing along to a couple of guitars.

PS It’s cold out there ! Gloves on all the way back tonight …

Currently hoping for an easy trip to London tomorrow. We’re testing some stuff that will see some heavy use over the next couple of months, so we’re kinda counting on it working well. The testing lasts for a couple of weeks but I’m only there for the next two. It helps to have fresh people for this testing, so we don’t go sleepy and miss bugs. So we spread the load around the techies in the office. I enjoy it, it’s a day or so out of the office and we get to see almost-real kit. And to a toy addict like me, that’s priceless.

Will be playing with two of my best toys tomorrow. Before I start the drive, I’ll be taking the aerial off the top of my Puma. Commercial radio jams a mini-FM transmitter I use to get my iPod music into the car speakers, removing the aerial stops the jamming. That’s kinda two toys but I’m counting it as one. Makes you wonder whether we get affected by all the stray EM Radiation out there if commercial radio on all the bands they use can jam a transmitter that’s supposed to have a 30 ft range. And then there’s all the other transmissions plus the mobile phones in people’s pockets that need a 3-5km range to the surrounding cell sites. We probably get more radiation watching a telly though … (not necessarily from a TFT flat screen)

Toy number two is one I’ve had a little longer, it’s a PDA running satellite navigation software. Not mentioning any manufacturer/software names there because although the software works well, neither PDA or software is as reliable as it should be. It gets me where I’m going though – and although I know the route 100% now, it gives me the ability to react instantly to roadblocks forcing a course change without getting lost.

So – hoping for some good driving tomorrow morning to some chilly out music and a really boring couple of days of testing. If the testing is boring, that means it’s going to plan and we have good software. If it’s interesting … well there’s an Asian curse that goes “May you live in Interesting Times.”

It’s one of those where the actors do their best to salvage something from a script that isn’t great 😉

Gotta be honest and say I was looking more at Rachel Bilson …

Should be some pretty useful poster material in there 🙂

Was Hayden Christensen good in this movie?

Staff reporting? I wonder what’s going on. I think the flu has got my head spinning. From michele’s.

I think we’ll probably need a couple of generations for the attitudes to die out though …

A lot of it is passed down in families, starting from the blueroom/pinkrooms of nurseries … I guess I’m lucky to have been brought up by people more open minded than that 🙂

Ah, but you should sleep well knowing that the silly size spaces to write in are all in the name of “fairness”. [cough].

Thanks for your comment(s) on my blog. The narrow minded attitude is starting to turn but anyone who thinks we are there yet is very much deluding themselves I’m afraid. Of course, when it comes down to individuals you cna meansure that from the truly enlightened right through to the pig ignorant bigot as on the TV program.

Good luck with the report writing.

I’ve noticed my posts being a little long … Plus it’s staff reporting season and we’ve got some rather strict limits on what we can put on the forms.

Silly limits too … We have a section where we can write about what we’ve done through the year. This section has about 4-5 inches of gap to write in but we’re only allowed 1350 characters. That’s not words – it’s characters, including spaces, full stops and carriage returns*. Even sillier is the section later on where we say whether we agree with what Da Management have to say. This one has about 2-3 inches of gap but we’re allowed around 1600 characters. This section is usually a robotic “I agree with Da Management” comment anyway.

I’ve managed to put in the evidence that I wanted to put in, mainly by writing one draft and savagely compressing it. It still looks readable … It’s important cos there’s enough cash riding on the reports to buy a telly or a computer. Not planning to do either in the near future but it’s good to have extra cash around, especially when it’s wrestled from the cold, undead hands of the people who control the money for the place I work for.

I’m getting close to that staff reporting limit now, so it’s time to turn back to listening to iTunes while having my Baldur’s Gate 2 party storm through a keep clearing out the squatters so I can take it over as my stronghold.

*(to show how much that spaces counting against the limit hurts, before I added this footnote, this post was 251 words, 1,112 characters with another 243 characters coming from spaces. Bring out the Big Long Words !)