Wooo
By popular demand, I made it snow.
News Archive for December, 2003
Hmmmmm
By less popular demand, I put a snowman there from all the snow.
Hurrah (again)
After having had my last ever supervision of 2003, I'm mildly happy. No more lectures for at least a month, and I leave the country before that happens :)
On the down side, I really need some sleep.
What a strange day
Yesterday, I was bored, so I decided to play in a concert. Well, the more accurate version is that I was asked at about 4ish whether I had a recording of a particular work (Shostakovich 2nd Piano Concerto) by a muchly distressed flautist and the next thing I knew I was playing the piccolo in the concert that evening. All in all, rather strange.And it's taken him 2 and a half years, but my director of studies has finally realised that I'm overworked.
Bliss. Arguably.
Well, today I got up at 6am. Yes that's really early and it was still dark. I had to get the 7am train to be in London by 9. Watching the sun rise whilst on the train was pretty cool though :) And it's really very very very very very cold outside. Lunch might be interesting. But then again, I do have over a kilo of chocolate sat next to me. Technically, I'm working for the next 3 weeks, and then I depart for snowy places across the pond. I should buy some gloves before then.
It's been a while
It's been a week in fact. I've been slightly busy trying to do this job which requires me to build a database. Honestly, it's a lot more exciting than it sounds. Really.
To be fair, the joy of getting up really early and being greeted with some of the best views (Tower Bridge at dawn) is fab, despite the fact that it's about -20 outside.
There's a piece of paper stuck to my desk that has a list of "Things to Do". I'm working with 2 other people on this particular project, and most of the things to do have my name next to them. Hmmmmm...........Still, I've done most of them, although no-one else knows that :)
It's Thursday Today. Apparently.
I've reached that point where I've done everything I need to or can do, and now I'm just waiting on other people to do other things for me. I missed the train this morning, mainly because I woke up at 7:38 and the train leaves at 7:36. Of course I didn't tell anyone that. I merely strolled in about 20 minutes late with the excuse that I stayed 20 minutes late yesterday. Time-management, you just can't beat it.
There are now 9 things to be done. I've done 3, I can't do 2 yet, 1 of them isn't going to get done because it's stupid, and the rest are someone else's problem. And I've got 15 minutes before I decide that I want to go to lunch, so I will pass the time by looking busy. Given the large ratio between the time that it takes for me to do things and the time everyone else thinks it takes me to do things, I'm getting rather good at looking busy. :-) Currently, 1$ is worth 56.56p. I know it's a record low, but dammit it needs to go even lower. I just hope there isn't a surge in the market before I leave on holiday...
For all the geeks among you
<geek>First I built this database thing (that I keep talking about). It was basically an access thing sat on a slowish webserver and it was talked to by a bunch of asp scripts. This was fine when there was 3 records in the database and one person was using it. However, it's now got around 280,000 records and about 5 people using it. So we talked to some very nice people who moved the entire thing onto a SQL server. A rather quick and expensive SQL server (think quad xeon with 2.5Gb memory)</geek>
For all you normal people out there, today might be my last day. Hurray! And I'm going on holiday in a week. Hurray! And it's Christmas day on Thursday. Hurray! And I need to by people things. Crap....
Required: Gloves.
I still need to buy some gloves. It's getting rather cold now, and most of the time I can't feel what my hands are doing which, I can assure you, is a bad thing. So I'll probably go to London in a minute and get some. London might be overkill, but necessary in the sense that I like it and it's far away from here. Ah. Joys.
Oh I do like to be beside the seaside. Again.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Leave on holiday in an hour and a half.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
I think it's important to point this out often.
:)
I'm desparately trying to source a camera after my usual contacts failed me. I might have to buy a cheap one when I'm there or something seeing as no-one else is prepared to buy me one :(
Happy New Year to everyone. (Unless I find an intarweb place in the US, in which case I'll say that then).
:)
(Too many damn smileys)
The land of the free
It's 5:30 in the morning local time, and I'm sat here in a hostel because there's no point sleeping. Usefully, the 8:30 flight out ended up leaving at about midnight, and therefore I arrived at 3:30 local to find that there wasn't a bus for 2 hours. Therefore, I got a taxi to the wrong hostel (even longer story) and ended up asking the person at this wrong hostel if I could sit in a chair for 3 hours. Thankfully, he said yes.
I've now been up over 24 hours, and I won't sleep for another 15 hours at least. Great!
All gone tits up. Again. Again.
Well, had an interesting yesterday. After the no sleep for about 40 hours bit, I managed to make my credit card vanish, which I initially thought was a fairly impressive feat given that I havn't used it yet. It also means that I now can't buy anything. At all. (By anything, I mean big exciting things like presents for people).
Now I'm off to play some pianos.
Well Flah! from me
Wow, these Easy Cafe things are cheap. $1 gets one 24 wholesome American minutes on the intarweb.
It smells like a funfair. Honestly.
Distinct lack of snow.
This is bad. This is really bad. You go on holiday to somewhere that's famed for snowing in winter, and it isn't snowing. Honestly.
But Hurrah! as it's New Years Eve today. So hopefully at about 6pm (this time) I'll be crammed into Times Square and not let out again until about 1am. My main provisions will be lots of cake, so all in all, it should be quite good fun.Woo, too many commas.