BOFHJournal - March 2004

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31/03/2004 [11:10] Late due to an appointment this morning. No worries, nothing happened. There was the fact that while I was in the shower this morning I missed a delivery from Initial CityLink (which means I'm going to have to be in tomorrow morning for who knows how long to wait for them to redeliver). Hopefully they will come at the same time and I'll be ready. This is a microphone for Elaine's laptop so we can both use Skype. I was pretty sure that her laptop'd have one on the case somewhere but we're damned if we can find it. Once it's up and running I'm considering getting my parents to install it as it seems to give pretty good quality from what I could hear when I Skyped to Elaine and heard myself over the phone. Once she has a microphone we should be set. [11:30] Today I'll be building a Windows 2000 image for the library and doing lots of Ghosting exercises, I hope. Climbing tonight I think, too. It's the last day of the month so I need to remember to put in the monthly tapes and do some small housekeeping tasks. Today's funny thing of right now is the news article <[email protected]> which just tickled me for some reason. [16:50] I'm thinking about moving the journal to Movable Type. As a result I'm experimenting with MySQL for the first time in a while. There are some oddities to deal with given how old the box is I'm working on, but it's certainly interesting. Unfortunately I'm also trying to build a very important image box for a Ghosting and that takes priority.

30/03/2004 [11:25] Just off to take part in an experimental psychology experiment. Back later. [13:05] Well, I earned my five pounds anyway. Staring at lots of almost identical black and white images of a face where the eyes or the mouth or the positions of same changed, and sometime they were inverted and then getting them flashed up and registering whether I thought they'd changed or not was more tiring than I thought. Still, five pounds. [17:15] I'm an idiot. I've realised that I've made the C: drive on two W2K servers 4GB rather than 8GB. It's not a critical mistake, but it's going to be annoying in the long term. I think I can mitigate most of the issues by getting rid of the small bits of bloat which have accumulated and making sure we stay on top of the DB pruning we have in place for ARCserve. [17:50] Brain-dead from server configuration. Home time.

29/03/2004 [10:40] Friday was cool. Andy and Andy turned up pretty much on time, we caught up and then went to Tesco to get some food for the night as well as some long-term shopping for me. Andy and Andy bought me a great casserole thingy so I have no excuse for not making some now. Andy and I headed over to the station to pick Elaine up while Andrea finished off some garlic bread and spag bol. Elaine was quite tired from the week but I think the flowers did some good in cheering her up. What really cheered everyone up was watching Charlie's Angels and Charlie's Angels 2 back to back while drinking wine. [10:55] Saturday was pretty good too. Andy and Andy left and we got dropped in town where we met up with bride-to-be Jenny who made sure I was hiring the right morning suit stuff. Then she bought me a tie. I must remember to get a white shirt before the day. And get my dinner jacket dry-cleaned for the ball in June. Anyway, once she'd headed off we walked home (rather than get the bus) and had a good talk. Oh, I bought a DECT phone too. The manual is really complicated, even for me. I'm sure I'll figure it out in time though. We forgot about the clocks going forward on Sunday morning. I really didn't want to get up this morning and in the end didn't get out of bed until 09:00. I don't really count this as a problem given that I was in work for 07:00 on Friday morning. The servers seem fine after being given all that extra RAM (although one of the backups failed on Friday). I'm looking forward to reading up on Ghost 7.5 this week in preparation for using our newly usable rollout server (also does HFNetChkPro). [12:35] Completely failed to read more than a page of the Ghost documentation thus far, and I have a meeting all of this afternoon which I fully intend to say nothing whatsoever at. I'm then going to go home early and play with Skype. [13:30] Particularly impressed today with 48W solar panels and NASA's Mach 7 test flight.

26/03/2004 [07:00] Yes, I'm in this early. Mostly to do some RAM installations before anyone else gets in. Best get to it before someone needs the servers. [07:50] Just waiting on the last server to boot now. Had a small worry that all the sticks Crucial sent me were the same, but it looks like that's how it's supposed to be, even though they have the same part numbers. [12:30] Sewers have collapsed due to building work nearby and I need to go home anyway to prepare for this evening, so I'm going to. Nothing usually happens on a Friday afternoon most of the time. Everyone have a nice weekend. I need to relax and unwind.

25/03/2004 [12:00] I'm at home today having the new shower and extractor fan fitted. I wasn't going to do a journal entry today but I thought it was worth doing at least one day (if not tomorrow's if I need to stay home then too) so as not to fall too far behind. The electrician, the plumber (brothers) and their apprentice arrived at around 08:45 and got to work straight away working out how to run the cable for extractor and shower from the garage (where the fusebox is) through the kitchen/garage wall, up through the airing cupboard in the kitchen into the boxing in bedroom three and across the loft and down the stud wall between bathroom and bedroom one. Once that was done the plumber (Gareth) started removing the old shower and attaching the new one. Luckily the old shower was attached after the tiles were fitted so there was no gap behind the old shower unit when it was removed. The fun came when Brin (electrician) started up the masonry drill and put a guide hole through the wall and then pulled out the diamond-tipped cookie-cutter. I now have a crumbling core sample of the wall of my house. There's also a dog next door that won't ever go need the wall of a house ever again. At the moment the apprentice is making up the pipework to have the cold pipe recessed into the wall as much as possible while Gareth heads off to another job and Brin goes to get some final fixtures and fittings. Once he's back he'll start fitting the extractor, ducting and externals and the apprentice (James, I think) and Gareth will connect up and test the shower. It might be finished today, but they doubt it. There'll be pictures up as soon as the whole process is finished. Actually no. I'll put some up now. [12:20] You can see the work being done at http://gallery.bofhcam.org/bathroom-mar-2004. If you want.

24/03/2004 [10:15] I got in to work this morning to find that the covered cycle parking has been demolished. Admittedly it's because it's right next to and now on a building site, but I really hope they put it back. I'm going to start asking around to find out what's happening. This is the day Crucial are supposed to be filling our RAM order. With luck all the stuff we want will arrive on or before Monday of next week. [11:55] Bah, why won't this Dell GX1 accept magic packets? [14:55] After a lunch and a Google for a US-centric Dell Service Tag I've been able to download a version of the 3Com NIC Diagnostics application that should apparently work with the 3C918 embedded NIC on these Dell GX1 machines. Once I've done the necessary I think we may be in business. Let's see... [15:00] Hmm, well it works with Magic Packet but not the Perl-scripted version I have. Maybe it needs the ARP flag setting as well. [15:10] Yes. Sweet. Now to track down the remaining Dell GX1 machines in the building. [16:30] All GX1 machines in the building now magic packet and ARP packet aware. This is good. We're now on course for building-wide remote wakeup so I can schedule all manner of things from home and on the weekend and be pretty sure they're going to happen.

23/03/2004 [24/03/2004 - 10:10] I didn't even get to sleep in this morning. I had to be in town for 09:00 for an optician appointment. While I got there early, was dealt with early and it only cost a tenner I wasn't totally happy to hear that my eyesight has degraded by a further half dioptre so I'm going to need new lenses at some point and my contact presecription frobbed too. Ah well. Once out I wandered town for a short time before heading over to the dentist. The wait was a little longer and while the actual appointment didn't take long and my teeth were in perfect order the cleaning was painful and the stuff he used to floss a few of my gums with was excruciating. Still, no problems apparently. I headed home and got the house in order for the window people who were due at 13:00. Oddly they too turned up early. I watched them tear chunks out of my window frames to pack them into a shape that would mean the windows made better seals with the frames and thought about the replastering, filling and painting I'd have to do later. Once they'd gone I settled down to watch too much Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1 and stuff like that. For some reason Cormac wasn't answering emails so I didn't go climbing. I did make a meal for myself in the evening but made a bit of a mess of the marinating process. The meat was edible, but not one of my better efforts. I got an early night for once.

22/03/2004 [13:00] The meeting on Friday was very interesting. Off the back of it I have a few URLs of information, have sent a speculative email and feel more certain than ever that this place is one of the better run subnets of machines in the Institution. The discussion on how we try to enforce patched and protected machines was difficult and informative. I don't think we really came to a satisfactory conclusion but it certainly made for a nice end to the day. Elaine arrived on time in the evening and after some getting to know one another again (damn these weekend-only times we have together) we went to bed. Saturday was a day or interesting conversations and a decision to miss out on Gary's housewarming due to illness and basically needed to sleep in a proper bed and get some decent sleep. To offset some of the annoyance at missing the party we decided to head over to Shaun and Linda's instead and after walking a few miles to save on some expensive bus fares we stood in the gales-force winds and laughed at ourselves for being blown inside out while waiting for the bus. The driver was full of dark warnings about buses being taken off the roads because of the dangers of falling trees but we still managed to get where we were going without incident. Conversation, relaxation and playing with Tom ensued before Shaun and I took a trip to town to get some chinese takeaway. When we returned Elaine had been helping Linda bath Tom, which was pretty fun apparently. The bus home was on time, the walk through the darkness perfectly enjoyable and the sleep welcome. Sunday was all about talking about the future, organising where we'd be for the next few weekends and making sure Elaine had something to eat before we took her to the station and she headed back up to Sheffield for another day at the coalface. We got a lot sorted yesterday and a lot of worries, miscommunications and stress was relieved. I like where we're going 'cause it's being done with our eyes fully open and aware of how and why things are as they are. I slept well but not for long enough last night but was still full of enthusiasm for this morning. I've alreayd organised a dentist appointment, an optician's appointment and reconfirmed the time time window people are coming back tomorrow, I've rung Chubb who should be coming out to take another look at our doors and tried to get some joy on why our new copy of Ghost 7.5 won't register with Norton/Symantec. Speaking of which I should ring them again now and find out what's happening. [13:15] Oh, I spent some time re-routing my NTL telephone socket once I'd come back from taking Elaine to the train station. I first tried installing an extension then realised this was going to be more time an effort than unbinding the old one and redoing it. Naturally the cable was about fifty centimeters too short so I spliced in a bit more (messy join for the moment) and everything seems fine. I do need some new phones (DECT possibly) but I'm not sure how much I want to spend for the moment. Suggestions for a pair/triple pack would be appreciated. Potentially with caller-id that works with NTL would be nice. [16:35] Admin staffer has sent us a list (as mail merged labels) of users who need removing from a database. Only she's removed the labels of the people she wants removing as 'obviously they're not here any more'.

19/03/2004 [10:25] I've got a 740MB and 950MB pair of database files I need to get transfered to someone else in a little while. Obviously they won't fit on CD, Zip or anything like that. I don't have a DVD burner so I'm waiting for the people who want them to open up an FTP (or preferably) SCP/SFTP account for me to send them over the net. Oddly this'll probably be the most data I've sent over the internet for the reasons the internet was created in the entire time I've been online. [12:30] I'm copying about a gig of data from one server to another at the moment. Once that's done I can start installing the new version of Ghost that just arrived as well as consolidating the bits of data that should be in the same place for a certain subject. I've just installed a gig of RAM in one of the main servers (taking it to 1GB as one of the 256MB matched DIMMs was giving errors). One of the spare DIMMs has now gone into another server taking it to 1GB too. I'll keep an eye on that one to watch for memory errors. In a fit of productivity I've ordered RAM for all the other servers to bring them up to a sensible 1GB level all round. Those sticks should arrive some time early next week I think. [14:30] Hmm, I can't register my copy of Ghost. Seems there is some thing I have to do in conjunction with Central before I can. Email despatched anyway. And my wireless router from the very kind Mr Disco has turned up. After a bit of oddness where arping to configure it wouldn't work it seems to be up and running and I've configured it for home and packed it away again. Happily I've been given an adapter that does 100-240V (rather than the normal 110V only that US-centric products tend to do) so in conjunction with a US->UK plug converter I'm up and running. [14:45] Anyway, meeting time. Have a good weekend.

18/03/2004 [14:50] Another slow news day today. I completely failed to do the bathroom last night so will be attempting to do it tonight. The uplighters Elaine has generously given me have given two of the rooms a bit more style. Thursday this evening so the standard group of people will be coming round for some relaxation, DVD watching and general unwinding. I'm still quite proud of the Thursday: institution and what it's spawned and am glad I helped start it way back in 1998 or so. Hopefully we'll get back to the kind of numbers we enjoyed in the heyday but times have changed, people have moved on and my lounge is a bit smaller than once it was. The PFY are just about to place the three long-overdue machines in the library where they were supposed to go over a year ago. Once they're out we'll have a bit more room in here to deal with the two new images we need to do to get rid of the last of the NT4.0, as I said. I'm getting a bit more interested in LDAP recently as it looks like there's a project to get it going Institution-wide in a while. It could lead to some cool implementations in which we don't have to handle user registration/deregistration any more, which has been one of the banes of our life here. [16:35] We'd just finished with installing the machines when I realised that I'd forgotten probably the most important part of the Group Policy; stopping the users from running applications that we don't want them to. However, in an amazing feat of it-worked'edness, one modification to the GPO for those machines fixed it utterly. First time. I'm bound to pay for it somehow, somewhere.

17/03/2004 [16:15] I ordered the new version of Norton/Symnatec Ghost this afternoon. With luck we'll get it some time towards the beginning of next week. This will herald the beginning of the final phase of the much-delayed move to Windows 2000 for the two clusters of NT4.0 still left in the building. Also to go will be the two remaining NT4.0 servers which have done sterling service but need to be moved to W2K too and then it'll be time to start looking at DFS, and the upgrade to W2k3 or whatever's next. We went climbing last night and the place was packed. I think it's the fairer weather bringing people out of the woodwork. That and there being no other decent climbing for miles.

16/03/2004 [12:45] Today is a Slow News Day. Happy birthday to my brother though! [14:15] I've just 'proven' the Monty Hall Problem to myself and it still bugs the hell out of me. [15:05] And now I've just proved that I haven't proved it. [15:18] And now that I have again, only with a bit less certainly, but more accuracy.

15/03/2004 [12:50] Am I reading this wrong or is the Government in the shape of David Blunkett even more shit that I thought? It's almost unbelievable. My weekend was really rather excellent. The train journey was up was fine and I had no problem with Elaine's bike. We spent Friday evening relaxing and eating ham and cheese and bread and stuff. Saturday morning was climbing at The Edge. A good time was had by all and I managed to climb some 6a routes although I don't think much of The Edge's grading. Once we'd spent some time looking at rock boots and stuff we headed over to Meadowhall for some food and then found we could watch the new Starsky & Hutch film. It was... OK, but a bit oddly paced in places. Once we got home in the evening we relaxed a bit more and then headed to bed. Sunday morning was more on the relaxation front followed by an opportunity to keep up on exercising. While Elaine did something I had a go at keeping in shape a bit more. Following that we went out for a walk in the fresh air and then zipped in to Tesco before it closed to get some food for us before I had to head off. Scrambled eggs with bacon in them and milk set me up for the evening. The train journey home was uneventful and it was nice to be driven home the last few miles by Andrea who stayed over last night so she was closer to the place she's training today. Over the weekend and especially at Doncaster station I'd been thinking about the changes to the antivirus software here to make sure that we don't clog up Eudora's email while we scan it for viruses. I left early this morning and after picking up some padlocks to secure a few more machines got in to put the changes in to effect. Thus far everything seems to be working well and we'll leave things as they are if things keep working as they are. [17:20] Nothing new to report this afternoon. The antivirus changes don't seem to be getting tested at the moment. Oddly it just seems to be in the morning that we get viruses, rather than throughout the day. I went to be measured for a morning suit at lunch time. It's a bit hard to get stuff that fits a 41in chest and 29in waist.

12/03/2004 [12:20] Thus far this morning I've tracked down a lost laptop, found none of my machines need patching this month and banished the last of Virus Scan 4.5.1 from the building. We've had some problems with more viruses in the spool folders for Eudora but the PFY and I will be thinking about the possible solution I thought up yesterday over the weekend with a view to implementing it next week. I'm off to Sheffield this afternoon to see my fine lady and try to forget about the strife and woes of the last week and just have some fun. Hopefully we'll be climbing at The Edge tomorrow and getting some good down-time in the rest of the time. I'm taking Elaine's bike back today (she left it here a while ago and then was too ill to take it back) so that should be interesting. I'm also heading back on Sunday to meet with Andrea part of the way home so she can drive us the rest of the way and then sleep over to be closer to the place she has an appointment at on Monday. Monday also means installation of new clients for certain bits of software the Institution has floating about. Now we know most of the wrinkles to do with them and their installation we should be fine, though.

11/03/2004 [11:20] Had a terrible night's sleep last night. The mattress arrived on time about thirty minutes after Cormac and I got back from Ridgeons with some peg board (yay!). I spent the afternoon tidying the house and generally getting on with things that needed doing before settling down with the last few DVDs of The West Wing. I really am enjoying the series and will be Most Put Out when I run out of episodes. Anyway I was drinking squash all evening but still woke up with a terrible headache this morning. Keith's suggested that perhaps it's something to do with the new mattress and possibly fumes of some kind coming off it. He could be right, I had headaches after the first (wrong) mattress arrived and they faded away after a few nights. I think I'll let the thing air out this afternoon while the window people are there, again (bet they don't bring all the right hinges, or tools or something) and then over the weekend while I'm in Sheffield. I've had an idea for stopping having to deal with viruses getting deleted in the spool folders for Eudora and therefore throwing Eudora's processing list out of whack. I'm going to run through the implications in my head for a few days and then put it in to action on Monday if everything seems to work out.

10/03/2004 [11:15] There was a minor problem with the antivirus installations I pushed out this morning. A quick word with my friend Joe and some reduction of stupidity at this end and everything's fine again. The only machines still on VS451 are those that're unplugged. They'll be dealt with in short order as soon as the damned padlocks arrive. [11:40] I'm out of here at 12:30 to get the pegboard (finally!) for the bed and then have the mattress delivered some time after 13:30 with luck. Depending on what time they arrive I may or may not go back to work. As things stand I'm quite knackered and could do with an afternoon off to be honest.

09/03/2004 [12:45] It's another day so it must mean another DAT from NAI. That's right; 4335 is now out. We've got most machines up to date now and will do the rest this afternoon. This is annoying. Hopefully nothing'll happen on Wednesday if I'm off in the morning for the bed, or on Thursday when I've got the windows being done. I think having afternoons off is better than mornings to be honest as it allows me to get things done here, deal with the morning rush and end up sorted before I head off. It also gives me a deadline which is very useful. [17:55] Decided to roll out Enterprise 7.0 to most of the machines this evening. Having the latest DAT and Engine in the install package (played with Install Designer this morning) means that I don't have to worry about them being out of date out of the box as it were. Of course there'll be a new DAT release tonight but I can deal with that in the morning. Off climbing now.

08/03/2004 [14:35] Fun morning. The cooler for my graphics card arrived with no instructions (second hand) so I've got to go from web instructions which should be doable but still non-optimal. Elaine's dad had multiple infections on his laptop including but not limited to a regedit killer, a virus scan killer and a self-replicating trojan of some kind. I'm pretty sure we've managed to clean the entire set of them off and get him clean but something's happened to his Demon dialup (which might have been me). Other than that small snafu I think it was really rather successful. Doing something technical like that took away some of the nervousness of it being the first time I've ever spoken to the man. In other news we got some new fans through this morning for PIII CPUs. Only Dell (in their infinite wisdom) use different fan power sockets to the standard. Cue snipping and stripping of wires and some educated guesswork on which of three cables to connect to which to get the new fan working with the remains of the old cable and plug. With some help from Elaine's dad everything is now up and running. Another NAI DAT file's come out this morning 4334. It doesn't contain support for some new Gaobot variant that's out there but I think we're safe due to the fact that all the machines on my network are patched up to date and unless something odd happens always will be. I think it's time to do some Ghosting. [15:40] No time for Ghosting, I've got other things to do and then I'm going to get out of here some time after 16:00 to get some of this peg board for the mattress which should arrive on Wednesday. Hopefully the PFY'll be in tomorrow so we can get some things straight in terms of what's happening this week. I've managed to pin the window people down to coming back on Thursday afternoon this week. Whether or not this'll be the end of it I don't know but with luck I'll get some of my hinges replaced before I head off this weekend coming.

05/03/2004 [12:00] Window people arrived at 09:30. We quickly established that they didn't have enough hinges to do all of the windows. We then realised that they would have to come back again. This turned out to be not such a terrible waste of time when (on returning with tea and coffee for the two people) I was told that the hinges had been mounted using pop rivets and they didn't have a way to a) remove them and b) put any new ones (which they didn't have) back in with the few new hinges they did have. I smiled and asked them to perhaps seal around all of the windows with sealant (as most of them were leaking). Unsurprisingly, being a bit embarassed but too gitworthy to show it, they agreed so at least I have windows and trim that don't a) leak or b) fall out at random moments. I was on the phone while the guys were packing up trying to arrange a new appointment. Apparently I'm going to be either rung or emailed back some time today to work out when they're going to try again. Yeah, right. I cycled in to work and found that happily no-one had had any virus warnings this morning so there was no panic to deal with. Two Dells have arrived so I've got something to do for the rest of the day. [15:15] These Dell SX270 USFF machines take up very little room, and they're spanky too. Wish I could have a couple at home. [16:55] The other machine I have to set up is all plugged in and stuff. I don't think I'm going to start on it right now. No. I'm going to go home at a sensible time instead and begin the weekend of cleaning and tidying the house before the sky actually gets dark.

04/03/2004 [15:00] More antivirus updates. Happily owing to being super-prepared for something like this all of my machines were up to date well before anyone got in this morning. This didn't stop a good few new viruses getting in this morning. Luckily none of them seemed to cause any problems with Eudora as before which is good. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow morning when I'm at home waiting for the window people to arrive and do their stuff. I hope they do a good job and don't leave me with the same problems I have already and stick on all the trim that's coming off. There's not been much happening today. The PFY is off for a while as she's got a few things to deal with. Hopefully she'll be back on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. Maybe Thursday given that she's not normally in on a Wednesday. I need to do some image creation and stuff some time soon and place a few orders. I've decided that it's the fan on my graphics card that needs replacing soon as it's kicking out the most noise. From what I can see the best thing for the moment is the Zalman ZM80C which looks like it'll do the business. I'm not sure where to order one from though so I'm seeing if someone else can get me one on the cheap first. I think I may be able to get a ZM80A from someone at a reduced price. I'm not going to Sheffield and Elaine's not coming here this weekend. I think we both have rather a lot of things to do and I can't keep having her come here when she's got a house of her own in Sheffield that needs some upkeep. We'll both use the time well I think and it means that the weekend after this should be really good. If nothing else I'll have my proper mattress by then and we can get a better night's sleep. [16:15] I'd just like to say thanks to Ben (another one) for this image of one of my T-shirts signed by Tim O'Reilly himself. I've taken a copy of it and stored locally to save on Ben's bandwidth charges. Thanks Ben, that's great.

03/03/2004 [17:00] I was going to go climbing this evening but I'm so wiped out by spending most of the day working on Fotopic support tickets that I'm going to go home instead and spend the entire evening watching The West Wing on DVD and trying to unwind. It's not that it's hard, or that the users are any different to those you'd find anywhere else (and you know what that means), it's just that there are a few people around who are in the same situation as me who could have done some too, maybe. It doesn't really matter, I had the time (work's slack at the moment) and they needed doing, but still. More DAT files out again. Making sure machines try to update twice a day, now. [17:35] Also found something to perhaps once and for all deal with the problem of Windows 2000 Profiles not being unloaded correctly from machines when users log off. If you want the URL of the (Microsoft approved) application that may be the solution to our woes then give me a shout.

02/03/2004 [16:30] An odd day today. Busy in places, slack in others. I've been trying to work out how to fit a second hard drive in to an old-style Optiplex Gn+ chassis (for the linux router at home) to give me more off-site storage space. I think I can secure the thing to at least one screw in the 5.25" CD-ROM bay, but that's an imperfect solution in anyone's book. I don't ever use the CD-ROM but one screw does not a secure attachment make. In other news I've been getting good vibes on a possible new job in a while, at the same time as getting less good news about other people's opportunities. I'm sure something will work out for everyone concerned in time. After a week's break I should be going climbing this evening. I feel like I'm losing fitness every day as my diet's not great at the moment so I'll be trying to push myself this evening a bit and then (or beforehand) have a decent meal which is good for me rather than being filled with fats and sugars. I started exercising again this morning after a break of a few weeks. If nothing else it certainly gets the blood flowing in the morning. That and having the phone ring at 08:00. [17:40] Have to leave for climbing in a second but I thought I'd just mention that I found an old Travan tape drive with 5.25" mounting plates which has allowed me to securely mount the silent 10GB Seagate I just found in the CD-ROM bay of the machine I have. Huzzah. Time to go climbing.

01/03/2004 [12:10] There was an outbreak of Bagle.[c|d|e|f|g] within the Institution over Sunday afternoon. This meant that when I came in this morning I was early in an attempt to stop anyone doing anything silly. But back to Friday... I got home on Friday and pottered around the house until the bed delivery people arrived. Arrive they duly did at around 14:30 which was nice. I shifted everything upstairs myself and was amazed at the size of the mattress. When Elaine arrived we spent the evening constructing the bed and only at the point when we placed the mattress on the bed did we realise that it was a double mattress. Most pissed off I was in a vague mood for the rest of the evening. In the morning I got up early and cycled to the bed shop to raise some hell. It seems that although the mattress was labeled as a five footer, even though it wasn't. [12:45] The bed shop reckon I'll get the right mattress a week on Wednesday, which is a bit poo, but it means I can hold off on getting the peg board I need to support the pocket springs, and in the meantime I get the double to sleep on. Anyway, we went out to get some paint from Homebase to do the walls in bedroom one but went in to town first. It was cold, went and full in town but we had a nice time bimbling around looking at things and stuff. Over at Homebase I got some paint mixed especially for the walls (a nice bluey grey) and then we cycled home. After some relaxation we started painting and realised that the paint was slightly more blue than the colour card but still quite nice. [12:50] The bed was covered in a deep burgundy coloured sheet, duvet cover and pillow cases and looks really quite stunning against the pale pine of the bed frame and the colour of the walls. I can't wait for the proper mattress to arrive. I am very glad that Elaine was here this weekend. It was marvellous to have her here again and I don't think the house would be in anywhere near as good a state as it is now. I can't wait for her to come back and we can try out the full five feet of pocket-sprung glory. I said goodbye to Elaine this morning and left for work. I was trying to get in before anyone downloaded Bagle. No such luck. The only saving grace is that the one user who was silly enough to open the email and try to open the zip file was put off by the WinZip setup screens. We're all clear here and while most machines are now covered by the A/V DAT the filter on the mail servers is now in place and we shouldn't get any more in for the moment. Things are slowly getting better in my head as I work more things out with regard to my remaining issues. I'm very hopeful that as I grow up I'll learn to appreciate much more fully what I've been given.