BOFHJournal - July 2008

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31/07/2008 [16:55] Up at 05:30 this morning we actually had a key for the boathouse (not like last night where we had to stand around for about half an hour before we could find someone to let us into the boat house). Last night's outing wasn't great. This morning's was a whole lot better, even if the whole boat feels really, really unset. I'm pretty sure it's down to me not being in the bow seat at the moment and two 'new' people in the crew, on the opposite side than they're used to. I have to admit I'm pretty much keen on getting back in the bow seat as soon as possible. I used to hate it but now, well, I love the ability to steer the boat (at least in one direction), the need to be fast and the ability to do my own part in setting the boat because of my view of it and everyone's oars. Here's hoping I'm back there after Peterborough. Work has been dull today. Which has been useful on one level as its been far too hot and muggy to actually concentrate on anything important. I have reset an SP on one of our Sun x4200 M2 servers which complained about a -12V rail problem, prodded Redhat about RHEL 4 Update 7 and written a ton of emails. It must be nearly time to go home.

30/07/2008 [16:45] Another beautiful day here. I started it, as I'm trying to (and have succeeded so far since I started last week), with some exercise. This nicely loosened my legs up again after the tightness in my muscles caused by my first trip back to the gym in quite a number of weeks. The gym session was rather good though, actually. I enjoyed it quite a lot and found I wasn't much off the strength I'd built up before I took my enforced break. Following that I cycled over to Cormac and Steph's to help them finish off the last of the party food and watch some Life on Mars episodes. It's cool enough at night that I'm still managing to sleep fairly well, not only that but I'm sleeping to a moderately sensible hour too. I think I have exercise and keeping the curtains mostly closed to thank though. I've no idea what kind of state I'd be in if I wasn't tired/relaxed enough to sleep long enough past sunrise. Aside from from quite interesting email conversation and some show and tell excitement the day has been fairly relaxed and moderately productive. I've tidied up a few httpd configuration files, organised my rowing for the next few days (tonight, so no climbing, and tomorrow morning) and had a constructive conversation about SSL certificates. As it is I should probably head home now and get ready to go out on the river. As I said the weather is pretty lovely here today so I'm actually looking forward to being out in a boat rather than inside on a wall. Now I think about it I wonder if there's going to be an opportunity to get out on some real rock this year. The weather has been so good recently it'd be a crying shame not to. I'll talk to Cormac and see what he says. I've a few weekends filled up with stuff coming up, but the weekend of 30th/31st August might be good.

29/07/2008 [17:05] After work I went to Tesco and did my 'bulky buy' run. This left me a little tired, but still with enough energy to attempt my standard run again. It was just as humid as Sunday but I managed it with only a stop for ablutions at a handily-located pub on the return leg. A definite improvement over the previous attempt but my legs haven't thanked me for it. Tough titties to them, they're going to have to learn. Especially as I'm not in the boat for the upcoming Peterborough Regatta (and therefore the training rows leading up to it). As a result I'm also heading off to the gym for the first time in ages to see if I can't get some of my other muscles back into shape. I'm pretty certain it's going to be a fairly painful and tiring session, but it's for my own good. Another thing which is most definitely for my own good is not looking at certain journals/blogs/web pages when I've been doing really rather well at getting my head in order. Silly; must remember not to do that again until I'm much further on with more important things. A conversation the likes of which I've been having more of again recently certainly got me back on track again but I shouldn't have come off the rails so much to begin with. The idea of transmuting regret into nostalgia sounds like a good one. I'll try that. Workwise the web developers managed to run the main web server out of memory twice in fairly quick succession today with badly formed CGI queries. I've prodded them (the machines and the developers) and things seem better now. The crowning moment of the day was when one of them emailed me and said "hey, why don't we do failovers to the standby boxes on a regular basis? You know, to test that everything works as it should?" If he'd been a girl, and pretty, and we'd both been single I'd have gone upstairs and kissed her. However none of the above is true, so I settled for emailing back an effusive affirmative and left it at that. Maybe he'll tell other people and the sysadmin job might not be quite so hard for other people.

28/07/2008 [15:50] Well, we bumped on Friday. Very quickly too, surprisingly. Possibly even faster than the night before. This means we got 'blades' which is rather funky. I'd explain, but I don't think you're actually that interested. What is amusing is that we probably rowed less than 130 strokes over the course of the week's races. In anger anyway. To be honest some of the rows back were more tiring than the actual races themselves. The party in the evening was pretty fun although I did leave at about 01:00 before the naked rowing took place (if it did). The early departure was so I could make something of the day on Saturday. With an early start I made it to Homebase and back with some pollyfiller, a filling knife, sandpaper, bathroom sealant, sealant gun mechanism and some paint brushes. My first ever go at filling then followed with me learning a lot rather quickly. Although I think I've done a good job I'm pretty sure I can do better the next time I need to do some filling. I'd fully intended to sand it down and paint it in the afternoon (it's quick drying stuff) but I'd forgotten that it was Cormac and Steph's house warming in the afternoon so I toddled over there instead and had a great old time with most of the people who'd come to Porlock a few weeks back (must get those photos up!) before leaving there and cycling home some time around midnight. Sunday I decided to get back on the exercise-other-than-rowing bike and went for a run. It was hot. Damned hot. Real hot. I didn't manager the full distance for ankle and energy reasons but I fully intend to go for a second attempt tonight once the temperature has dropped a little. After that there turned out to be something of a picnic with most of the people from the previous evening's party so I bought some food and headed out there to join them. That then turned into a laze about with Cormac at his house while Steph went shopping and then we all toddled over to the cinema to see Wall-E before going home, cooking some slightly out of date steak and going to bed happy, if not a little too hot. Today has been hot. Extremely hot. Most of the morning was spent walking to and from town to visit the two other server rooms to collect rack rails, install a switch and buy soap. Annoyingly Boots appear to have discontinued the oatmeal soap I've known and loved for the last fifteen years or so. This is deeply annoying as I liked it a lot and made my skin actually stop being spotty when I was a younger person than I am now. I don't know what I'm going to switch to now. Work this afternoon has been sparse and consists mainly of replying to emails (not all of them work), thinking about the reply to one specific email (yes, that one) and planning the next bit of Oracle-based work that I need to do. Tonight is a hot and sweatsome trip to Tesco and back with an airconditioned struggle through the aisles in the middle. I may then go for a run/jog depending on how hot/humid it is and how much I can be bothered.

25/07/2008 [14:10] Another bump last night. Our fastest yet. I think the boat in front caught a crab, but our bank party claims not. Either way we had them within 22 strokes. This time around it was me (at Bow) rather than Stuart at 2 who ended up beating up the cox of the bumped boat. Given she conceeded late it was just as much her fault as ours that I smacked her across the lower back with my loom while my guys were trying to hold up the boat. When the other boat rowed on they ended up dragging my blade back over her so she ended up with her head danging into the water in an attempt to get clear of it. I apologised, of course. She looked near to tears but I think it was the adrenaline of the race coupled with a good few beatings with an oar. This does, however, mean that we're on for 'blades' this evening. Blades (a painted oar in your club colours with your club's crest and the crew names painted on it) are awarded to any boat which bumps every day of Bumps. The fact that we bumped twice on the first day has no bearing on things unfortunately! There's no-one else in the office today which means I'm left to my own devices for once. This has meant I've been doing some work. Just perhaps not as much as I might. I'll get out of here at 16:30 today, head home and eat something before tonight's race. We have no idea if we'll catch the boat in front of us quickly or not this time. Theoretically they're not very good but we also have to worry about the boat we bumped last night being out for blood... A quick bump may be what we need if the boat behind looks like it may be catching us. This morning's conversation with Kris was lovely. Its been a while since we've been able to talk about things as concentratedly and in-depthly as that. Definitely a highlight to the day. I should get on with eating lunch and then go for a short walk outside with something to drink. It's another hot one here and I'd like to experience it more than just from inside a boat. We have a party at the boathouse this evening after Bumps. It may be a late one. Hopefully this weekend will see me getting back into running again. Perhaps even a trip to the gym. I certainly intend to get down to Homebase or B&Q for some polyfiller to start patching some holes in preparation for repainting parts of the entrance hall and kitchen. I'l let you know how that goes on Monday. As well as the Bumps result, of course.

24/07/2008 [16:55] We bumped again. This time in less distance than it took the previous night for the second bump. That's right, from the back (but one) of the division we still managed to bump the crew ahead before they'd reached the road bridge over the river. So concentrated on the boat in front was the cox of the boat we bumped that we had to hit her on the back with the blade loom of the number 2 seat before she'd conceed. Not that that wasn't amusing for us. It's just a shame that the few starts and practices we did on the way back weren't as clean and set up as the race had been. Tonight's bump is going to be extremely hard to achieve given who's ahead of us. It may be that we have to overbump as the boat in front of us stands a good chance of getting the boat in front of them quite quickly. This could mean we're rowing hard for close on the whole course before we potentially achieve a bump. It'd be nice to get one, that'd keep the pressure on for getting blades on Friday. After the race I was convinced to cycle back down the course with most of my crew to watch the higher divisions race. That was pretty great. Just as great was going home and having a nice pizza with a mass of vegetables and a tin of rice pudding (not at the same time) before relaxing for an hour or so and heading to bed. Exercise is brilliant. You really do sleep well at night and wake feeling all rested and a tiny bit achey and ready to face the day. Of course, when the day is a a work period of dullness, a hefty and filling lunch and an anticipation of the evening's activities it can tend to drag somewhat. I should head off and get myself ready for this evening. Here's hoping we do what we need to and no-one catches a crab. More tomorrow.

23/07/2008 [17:05] Hurrah, two wins last night! We're out of our division and into the one above now. Not only that but we're out of the sandwich boat position too. The first race was a little worrying at the start as we were close to getting caught right off the line but we pulled away and caught the boat in front in short order. The bump was quite light and the relief was strong when I felt the impact. The second bump was even better, despite a fluffed stroke/crab from Stroke we still managed to land a rather hefty thump on the boat in front and we cheered quite loudly in response. Oddly there wasn't much feeling of celebration for me once I got home. I think I was more tired than elated. Food was eaten and my mood improved slightly before I went to bed. Today I have been famished almost all the time. Breakfast, three quarters of a malt loaf, a bacon and sausage baguette, lunch... and I'm still hungry. I should go home and eat something else before the race at 18:45. Have a good evening and I'll tell you about tonight tomorrow.

22/07/2008 [15:30] I woke this morning feeling fairly good. Stuffing down two bowls of cereal was probably not the best thing I could have done but I really feel like I need to be as full of fuel as possible for this evening (and the next few days). The lunchtime burrito helped but I'm still feeling a little bit of stomach ache which is either remnants of last week, nervousness or overeating. Today's work has been light (happily), with just a bit of discussion about backup schemes and some Apex cogitation on top of the usual day-to-day things. I'm looking forward to getting out of here at 16:30, heading home and then to the boathouse for the first of (potentially two) races this evening. I'll let you know tomorrow how well (or badly) we did on day one.

21/07/2008 [17:05] I'm better, but not best, with regard to the stomach bug I had last week. Last night was probably the first night I've slept soundly and not felt I needed to go to bed at 20:30 just so I wasn't falling asleep on the sofa in the evening too. Not that that didn't mean I needed some pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon (which was pretty great, let me tell you). As for the weekend, both mornings was rowing training. One a late one and the other early. Both seemed to go quite well all things considered (what with me sometimes slamming a blade handle into my tender stomach) and were helpful considering we've been messing about with gate heights for the blades. I opted to do very little else in the day past some minor housework, washing up and tidying over the weekend. Hopefully this kind of slothful indolence (which gave me itchy feet) will have helped my body recover from the illness, the rowing exertions I put upon it and served as a great reminder that sitting still at the weekend is really, really dull. Still, Kate came over (being back in town for the week) on Saturday to say hi and catch up on this and that. Sunday I did my usual Tesco run but half way through contemplated just dumping the entire trolley and heading home, so overtaken by lethargy was I at that moment. I think my energy levels are on the rise again now, luckily. I should be careful for a few days, I think. Otherwise, tonight there's our last session before tomorrow's start to the week's racing. I imagine the river is going to be heaving this evening. We'll see. We were nearly hit by a women's boat from our own club on Sunday. That would have been embarrassing. Today's work has been struggling some more with Dell's OMSA, a PowerEdge 2650 and RHEL 5 as well as a smidgen of Apex stuff. I must remember to eat something before rowing tonight or I may just feel a little drained afterwards. I have to say generally that I don't feel as fit as I used to, recently. Once these races are over I hope to get back into some more regular climbing, running and gym so I don't feel quite so... I don't know... unfit.

18/07/2008 [17:00] I made it into work today despite a very tender and aching stomach. That kind of thing is not a reason to stay off work. I've tried to get some things done today but the discomfort has been fairly pervading. Still, better than sitting at home feeling sorry for myself and guilty that I wasn't sick enough to be there. PowerEdge 2650 servers feel very old these days. Especially when you're trying to install even slightly more recent software on them (Dell's OMSA 5.4 for example) and things go tits up when it comes to IPMI interfaces and the like. I'll take another look on Monday when the collective might of the mailing lists have pondered it and given me a solution. I really hope I'm mended by tomorrow morning or the outing is going to be... uncomfortable at best. See you all on Monday when hopefully things will be a little more interesting to read about than my gastrointestinal problems.

17/07/2008 [18/07/2008 - 11:15] When I woke at 05:00 I had about two seconds of simply feeling tired before my stomach began to feel really very odd. I don't know what caused it (possibly using a chopping board that I hadn't washed properly the previous night for my pizza, putting extra chorizo on said pizza or just a stomach bug) but by the time I got to the boat house I'd already had two incidents in the small room. The outing on the other hand was pretty brilliant. After all the time we'd spent re-rigging the boat, aside from a few people not completely keen on their gate heights, we had close to our best full-speed piece ever. And that with a replacement in the boat for the outing who wasn't very good. I came home after the outing, had a shower, emailed work to say I wouldn't be in today and went to bed. Happily I never actually vomited but I felt completely rotten all day and only drank water when I began to feel dehyrated and got the standard headache. By about 19:00 I felt I should have some food so cooked up some carrot and coriander soup and did two slices of bread and margarine. Pretty much straight after that I went to bed for the night. Cue another night of being alternately too hot or too cold and waking every 1.5 hours or so.

16/07/2008 [17:20] Another early morning outing. 'Luckily' I'm waking early anyway so that 05:00 is merely unfortunate rather than impossible. The outing was tolerable. We'd been out last night in one boat and then found we had the repaired part to fix our old boat. This necessitated a few of us volunteering to stay behind and spend about an hour swapping footplates around and rigging the boat to make it ready. Unfortunately the boat still needed a lot of adjustments which meant that this morning's outing saw us listing to the bow side almost all the time. Hopefully some work on it this evening will see it right for tomorrow's outing and future rows (like the races next week). Today there was something of a breakthrough (thanks Kris!) at work with regard to the Apex project I'm working on. It turns out that if our Apex developer(s) 'simply' turn off the login page in whatever application they create, the work I've done on plugging in our in-house authentication mechanism will be enough to provide them with a REMOTE_USER variable which they can use to say either a) you're a Joe User and you don't get any rights other than to use the application or, b) you're one of my bestest pals and you have rights above the ken of mortal men. The trick is now to find/create some sample code to give to the developers so that they can get on with doing what they need to and I can get on with the multitude of other task - big and small - which require my attention. For example, this afternoon was mostly spent in town realigning a wireless transmitter/receiver pair with the most acute line-of-sight angle I've ever seen... and then bringing a decommissioned PowerEdge 2650 back to recommission it as our new SNMPd trap server. Now though I'm off to the boat house to finish rerigging the boat and to hope that the person with the tools is going to be there with them. It's highly likely there will be all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in my future.

15/07/2008 [17:00] Some progress on the Apex stuff today. Nothing but some relaxation last night and I'm still tired today. I was tempted to go to the gym but erred on the side of caution in case tonight is a really tough outing. Anyway this Apex stuff is really annoying. With the help of a coworker I thought I'd made some real progress, but it turns out the problem is going to be much more complicated than previously thought and therefore a whole lot more work. We tried a new tack of analysing the POST URL sent back to the web server on successful login, and then modifying it to make it as simple and generic as possible. It turns out that this doesn't work when there's no session or page IDs previously set up. I know you don't really know what I'm going on about but it's useful to me to talk it out somewhat. Anyway, I'm not sure whether to carry on in this area or try something else. Either way it's the end of the day and I need to go home and eat something before the outing.

14/07/2008 [16:45] It's all about the rowing at the moment. Saturday and Sunday both had outings. For one of them I was in the 7 seat and the other at bow. All good stuff and we're really starting to come together as a crew now. The balance (or "set") to the boat is beginning to become more natural. Saturday evening one of my crew created a culinary curry masterpiece and fed 21 of us down at the boathouse before I managed to escape just before midnight. I heard tell on Sunday that others had stayed until 02:30. Sunday afternoon I was so ready to go for a run but ended up simply relaxing and eating (more 'grazing') for much of the afternoon before going out to see Kung Fu Panda with some of the usual crowd. We had a morning outing before work today. Up at 05:00 I was down to the boat house for 05:45 having even dome some chores and things. The outing was another man short again but we did some seriously useful technical work and were setting the boat better again. Work today has been completely different to what I was planning. Getting my head around the authentication/authorisation issue I had last week was the idea. What I've been doing instead is trying to figure out which Oracle applications are installed on some of the linux boxes here and how those that need to be can be upgraded with minimal downtime on the applications and databases they support given a bug in SQL*Plus to do with long system uptimes. An email about it all has been written and sent. Now there needs to be discussion and resolution before I start doing things. After that I can get back to the other thing I was doing. Or maybe do them both at the same time. Men can multitask just as well as anyone else. Hurrah for no rowing this evening. I might go to the gym, but probably not given I want to stay rested for rowing. Definitely after the races are over at the end of next week though.

11/07/2008 [16:45] I'm just a smidgen unhappy about how things are going with this project. There really isn't a clear path to get things working with our in-house authentication and the Oracle authorisation scheme (not the two different words there?) short of doing some actual Javascript which is run on the return from the external authorisation to load the page we should have gone to beforehand, stript some autogenerated values from the autogenerate HTML (probably from some bastard mix of XML, CGI, PHP and Oracle DB) create a POST string with some dummy username and password credentials, wrap all that up in some tags and send that to the Oracle (*cough* Apache *cough*) web server and break on through to the other side. Break on through to the other side. This stuff is actually really interesting. Really. I just wish I was smart enough to get my head around being able to do it. Still, I know what I need to do so I can be explicit and concise in the help I ask for on Monday. That, at least, will mean there's some more progress next week. Of course, I need to reread this entry on Monday so I can remember... There was a brief deluge (again) today, with associated thunder and lightning. Happily it seems to have stopped in time that we'll be able to get out for our outing at the proper time (ARA rules dictate that you should wait a period of time after a storm of that kind before venturing out on the water). Hurrah. I then need to get back, get clean and dry, make some food and do other important things with the evening. Naturally this weekend will contain more rowing, a curry at the boathouse and probably some kind of Sunday afternoon exercise too I'll be bound. It may be the gym (unless the weather is incredibly good) as I'm wasting my membership if I don't get back there now and then. Last night's Thursday was quiet. Just a few people and a single film. Still, nice to see Ian who hadn't come on the Porlock holiday with us. Oh, and finally it looks like the free RAM I got from a friend has been making my home desktop machine crash (possibly in conjunction with the filling up of the C: drive I did a few weeks back). I've swapped the RAM back out again until I can ascertain what the cause is. Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 is most definitely not a sensible thing to do right now. Having the box randomly reboot in the middle of applying that would be... Bad. Have a good weekend.

10/07/2008 [17:15] Rowing wasn't too brilliant last night. Everyone catches crabs now and then (although I think some of the crew haven't yet) but I caught two. The coach we had was pretty brilliant and taught us a whole lot of stuff. So much so I think that by the middle od the outing we were all a little tired and despite thinking we were "switched on" and concentrating our technique suffered a little. As a result we didn't go for our early morning outing this morning and instead are taking today as a rest day. I have to admit, I think we all need it, despite our complaints that we're all good to go. I know I enjoyed not getting up at 05:00 this morning. Today's work has mainly revolved around trying to get Oracle's Application Express to work with our in-house authentication mechanism for Apache. I have to say, it's not going well at all. There's so much php, cgi and plsql in there that I really don't know what the hell I'm doing. I don't hold out much hope that I'm going to be successful in getting things as they're required. I find this distinctly annoying as it's the first project I and the slightly junior DBA have been handed and we may not be able to deliver. We'll give it a good few more days though and see what we can rustle up. "Don't be afraid to ask for help" is going to be our motto I feel. So busy have I been today that I've barely had time to reply to any emails and only just managed a walk around the building at lunch to relieve the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day. Right now I'm going to try and finish at least one and then get on home to see if I can make an impression on the masses of crockery that needs washing up.

09/07/2008 [17:15] Kris went home today. She'll be back soon. I miss her. I now throw myself into my work, rowing and generally getting things done. Pretty much all the good things I can to keep occupied, busy and productive. Working with Oracle's Application Express software is distinctly counter to this decision as it seems to be a steaming pile of... well anyway. When you install the linux version on a linux box and then wonder if (given there's an apxs binary) you can add in another Apache module to the rebranded httpd in the web front end and find hardcoded references to perl modules along paths that don't exist and Sun compilers you know it's not going to be a good day. Hopefully I may have a solution, but we'll see tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow. I'm rowing at 06:00, have a dentist appointment at 08:00 and will then be in work and doing things hopefully by 09:00. I'm rowing this evening in less than two hours so I should probably head home and get ready. Of course it's raining, quite a lot. Still, mustn't grumble. At least not too loudly.

08/07/2008 [16:35] It was rather pleasant not to have to get up at the crack of dawn this morning and go down to the boat house. Especially when I had company. Instead I'm rowing this evening in a Head race through basically the twisty part of the river here in town. With luck we won't be subjected to torrential rain the likes of which we had yesterday for most of the day. Last night's relaxation consisted of watching the Top Gear from Sunday along with lashings of cheese, bread (home made), apple, vegetables and pate. Pretty much the best indoor picnic I've had in a good long time. And there was also beer. I still went to bed before 22:00 in an effort to recover some sleep from the deficit I amassed last week which meant that when I woke this morning I didn't actually feel too bad, aside from from stupid dreams. Today's work has consisted of install Sun compilers and compiling Apache modules for Solaris 10 Apache 1.3.x as well as working out what run away processes were bringing one of our linux boxes to its knees (stupid MGE UPS software). Lunch with Kris, Cormac, Shaun and co. was pretty lovely too, even if the last few minutes of it were rain-covered. Definitely nice to see Kris meeting another one of my friends and both sides telling me that they liked the other. Definitely something to be encouraged and a really positive aspect to things that hadn't always been in evidence previously. Kris heads off back to America tomorrow and I go back into batchelor mode with regards to nutrition, abode cleanliness and personal hygiene (just kidding). I will however miss her quite a bit and am looking forward to her return in August (especially as it gets me out of a loud overnight boatie drinking session in Peterborough). Must go, rowing to do.

07/07/2008 [16:10] Hallo there! Welcome back. You may not have noticed (what with you doing other things, like traveling the world, traveling home, seeing old friends and enjoying the incredible British weather but I've been away for a week. Yes, I and twenty nine or so other people (including children, married couples and Kris) have been in Somerset (and Devon, briefly) staying in a small hotel/large house just outside of Porlock. We were there for two of the group's delayed 35th birthday celebrations. Oddly it turned out that, after journeying there by multiple trains and hired cars, I'd actually been to the area before only a year previously and so it was with a mild sense of deja vu that some of my wandering time was experienced. As fun as that had been, sharing a fifteen room house with pretty much almost all of my current friends and acquaintances, having Kris with me and doing all our own cooking and entertaining was a completely different experience unlike any other I'd had to date. I was pretty damned sure there'd be some kind of argument or busy up before the end but remarkably everyone survived intact. Even the children. Actvities included dressing up in formal wear and taking a vintage open-top double-decker bus to a steam train to have dinner on a train while a Murder Mystery was performed for us, hiking, running most mornings for Kris and I, kayaking and sailing on Wimbleball Lake, more walking, cycling to Porlock to spend massive amounts of cash in the local economy, power kiting, reading while the heavens were open and deluging the earth, pass-the-parcel, bouncy castle fun and hiring a cinema (in Lynton) for a private performance (including a tour of the projection room). Lots more happened, there was plenty to do, lots to see and as much fresh air as you could breath. Other than running to Bossington one day (but not up the Hill) it was all a wonderful set of new experiences which left me significantly tired on my return on Friday. Having broadband at the house meant I was able to keep up with email every now and then so I was able to confirm that I'd be rowing on the Saturday and Sunday mornings. Not only that but that I'd also be in the boat (at Bow, obviously) for the races at the end of the month. As a result it's likely there will be outings almost every day between now and then. I was up and on the water for 06:15 this morning and there's another one of those planned for Thursday morning too. Between now and then there's a timed Head race tomorrow evening and an evening outing on Wednesday. Yes, all go at the moment. I'm a bit disappointed that gym and climbing are taking a bit of a back seat to this new sport currently. Hopefully once July is over I'll have some time to devote to keeping the rest of me in shape again. Kris is still here (until Wednesday morning) so I've more than enough reason to leave work on time and get home. If nothing else there's last night's Top Gear to watch. Hmmm, what else? My brain continues to bubble and froth a little now and then. Now I think about it though, its been a few days since any kind of major upheaval, which is nice. I wonder if it's the exercise evening me out again. I should go, today has been an extremely busy day with lots of software to install/upgrade (including that more recent version of CVSNT) and documentation to write (which really could have done with being publically accessible before I went away given some of the things I'm told happened). Oh yes, and we all have Cisco 7941 IP phones on our desks now. If someone knows how to change the ringtone without resorting to Cisco Call Manager then let me know.