So Much For The Weather

We were promised some shocking weather, and so far all we've seen is drizzle. Bah. Where're the hurricane winds and horizontal rain the media promised us? The MET Office really are utterly crap. It would seem that they only really report on the weather that will be hitting London. Well, perhaps I'll see some of it on the way to Newbury tonight. Yes, tonight. I've taken tomorrow of work so that I can help Liz move.

So, no blog until Monday at the earliest. You may have noticed that the blog is slowing down, what with not having a 'net connection. Hopefully I will soon be able to blog from my phone which should improve matters a little, however that feature won't be implemented until I've finished with the bucket-load of bits I am rewriting already. I'm hoping to be able to showcase a few new bits and pieces next week, but most of the work I have done has been in the underlying code to make the blog and LoweyPages a little more extensible.

It is a sad day

Anyone who has ever spent any time in Nottingham knows of the Xylophone Man. He was as much a part of Nottingham as the Square, the lions, Robin Hood, The Lace Market... Xylophone Man has been busking in Nottingham for 15 years, playing nothing but a little toy Xylophone. He lived in Cotgrave (which is just down the A52 from my parents) and there were stories that he actually had a lot of money from an inheritance.

He was one of those people who were happy with what they did and he always had a smile on his face. Throughout Nottingham he was known not for his musical talent, but lack there-of. And yet he always made the passers-by stop and smile. His real name was Frank Robinson, but most people just knew him as "Xylophone Man" or "Xylophone Guy". He made his mark in Nottingham and will be remembered for a very long time. Rest in peace, Xylophone Man.

BBC Nottingham's Tribute

An Interview with Xylophone Man, Frank Robinson

Weird Shit

I just did a Google Image Search for Dogtanian because I want a picture of Dogtanian to turn into an Avatar. Look at the last result. When I saw it I thought, "I wonder what that is" and clicked it. Then my head imploded when I saw my own blog.

It's too early for weird things like that.

L@@K!

The website is now running live on the webserver, but there are still some minor issues that need addressing and so the old website will still be the default site until the problems have all been corrected. I've arranged to go out for some beer tonight. I need it.

So Busy

I found out this morning that one of the most important assumptions made on the entire website was wrong but the only person who knew this failed to mention it. Now having to rewrite large chunks of the code so that it can live outside of the root directory of the website, changing links to point to various new locations, fixing broken images, hacking database values to point to the right places etc etc etc ...

My Mum had a fit last night because I went to bed pretty much straight after I got home. I was completely knackered after 9 hours of solid thinking, concentration and stress with the website launch. She woke me up after I'd been asleep for about an hour by ringing me, and got extremely angry that I wasn't particularly talkative. Neither would she be had she endured the kind of day I'd had.

The only reason I have the time to write this blog is because I can't currently edit anything as the database is in my boss's office being carefully changed to work correctly in its new home, and so I can't do anything that will modify the database until he has finished with it and sent it back to me.

It's Enough To Make Me Cry

ASP really does do some weird shit sometimes. It's making me angry and stressed at the same time. I feel sick, shakey and I'm having trouble thinking now. The website has to be live tomorrow and initial live tests on the webserver are proving ... flakey ... at the best of times. Currently I am contending with this interesting error message:

This error message usually appears when attempting to redirect the user to another page after writing something to the page already, or trying to write a cookie to the page after writing something or whatever. None of these things are happening in the code. In fact the line where it's complaining isn't even executed when it complains. I've even modified the code so that the line numbering is different and it still claims the error is on line 320, which is now an "else" statement. *sigh*

Earlier I spent an hour trying to fix an intermittent error with the database handling. Eventually on the off-chance we tried rebooting the DILS webserver and waddaya-know, it fixed it. I swear it does these things just to annoy me.

I don't think I'll be going home at any reasonable time tonight. Again.

Accommodation Granted

I've spoken to EW over the phone about getting accommodation for next year. She was actualy perfectly reasonable and polite (!) and is sending me the forms I need in order to apply for accommodation for next year. Good. Now to sort out some money to pay with it all (student loan, here I come).

Decaf Goodness

I've been drinking decaf tea this week. It seems alright, although I still react slightly to the tiny (0.02%) amount of caffeinne in it. Now that is caffeinne-sensitivity! ;)

Indescribably Cool

Shouldn't really be messing around on the web at the moment, much to do ... much to do ... but I needed a break from resizing pictures (mentally stimulating or what?) and so had a quick shufty through the Yakyak forums. Someone posted a link to possibly the best bit of Flash I have ever seen. 56k people beware, this probably won't work for you.

Break-dancing Transformers

I tried taking some screenshots for those who can't see the video, but it just doesn't ... work ... without the music and the animation.

T Minus 3 Days

3 days until the website has to go live. Things are getting tense.

Had a splendid weekend with Liz, but it went stupidly fast as usual. Liz bought the second DVD of Black Books and so we had a side-splittingly hilarious day of watching that. There were several moments that left me gasping for air and tears in my eyes I laughed so hard:

Bernard, holding up a picture of Danny the thug, says "Look at him! I'll bet his cornflakes try to crawl out of the bowl!"

Also the scene where Manny is in the bath using countless pieces of electrical equipment. Indescribably funny.

But this was the moment I was worried I might never breathe again:

Bernard and Manny are trying to turn the bookshop into a gourmet restaurant. Manny has made a bowl of soup. Bernard sees it and shouts "what is that?!"

"It's soup" Says Manny.

"Gourmet stuff is always piled up in towers. Get it in a tower man!" There then follows a ridiculous scene of Manny trying to get the soup into a tower. A little later Manny turns around revealing the soup in a splendid tall tower. I laughed so hard at the stupidity of this, but then Bernard says "You call that a tower? Where are the turrets?!" Oh dear god. I've not laughed that hard in a long time.

Suffice to say that I think everyone should own a copy of this DVD.

Sunday we began fixing Liz's outdoor tap that burst during the winter. We failed. Better luck next time, hopefully.

While I was outside dealing with the tap I decided to open the sunroof on the car and the passenger side window as it was so warm. I completely forgot about this when the heavens opened and water all but flooded my car. This meant I drove the distance from Newbury to Aberystwyth via Swansea on a sopping wet seat. Why did I go via Swansea? Because Shrink wanted Liz's coffee table which she is getting rid of and so I had to drive it to Swansea.

Right, must get on.

HAAA HAHAAA!

Just had a browse through the GMailSwap site and saw someone offering the Taj Mahal and to wear a picture of my choice on their T-shirt for a day. Sounded novel enough to me so I invited them. How cool must it be to have my picture walking around on someone's T-shirt for a day?

Pictures can be seen here and here but ... it gets stranger. After I'd invited him I noticed that he'd replied to my reply on the forum and it turns out ... get this, he's from Aberystwyth! HAR! Aberystwyth never ceases to amaze me.

ERK!

The server running my blog has been down most of the day as they managed to fill up their /var partition. D'oh. When I submitted my blog when it finally came back up something went tits-up and I ended up with only 1 blog left out of 229! ERK!

Anyway I've fixed it all now and I'm hoping it was a one-off. I'll scour my code when I get back home and see if I can replicate the problem.