Just so you all know, Katy and I are fine. No need to worry.
We now return to your regularly scheduled insanity.
Month: July 2005
Ohhhhhh, baby
I'm listening to Pink Floyd's set at Live 8 and I have shivers…
Yoinked from <lj user="ultimategirl">
1) I can't leave home without having checked that I have my keys, wallet, antihistamines, cell phone, epipen and that my oven is properly off (even if I haven't actually used it that day). Even if it's to go to the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread. I can check this multiple times before actually leaving the house. I think I have mild OCD but can't really be bothered to do anything about it. My friends call this my macarena dance.
2) Even though I can remember trivial facts from years ago, I have crap short-term memory and am therefore always writing things down on bits of paper. Every few weeks, I go through all my pockets and wallet to purge all a not insignificant biomass.
3) When I'm busy doing something, the world can crumble around me and I won't really notice it.
4) When I'm concentrating on something, I tend to tuck my chin in my shirt up to my nose. I can't really tell you why.
5) I'm addicted to my email and can check it, without exageration, about 150 times a day.
I've been told I haven't been writing enough
The last few days have been rather uneventful, really. Work has been mostly aggravating, to be honest. We're at the point where we're testing the code in real-life scenarios with actual data and it's making gremlins pop out of the woodwork. I spent the whole day today wrestling with Oracle JDBC. We're trying to load data that has very long text blobs to load. We found this out the hard way when JDBC was complaining about strings above 4K. We then changed the back-end tables to handle CLOBS, but then we found that the oracle:thin driver didn't handle CLOBS above 4K, so that was rather useless too. We tried to switch to the oracle:oci driver, but that needs oracle client library binaries. I spent the afternoon trying to get a windows oracle installation to play nice with java ant under cygwin. Basically, I was asking for trouble. In the end, we gave up on my laptop and we got it to run on Phil's laptop (a native linux install) and lo and behold, everything worked. I'm happy that I got it to work, but I could have done without the aggravation.
On a completely different issue, I installed a wiki on my website (http://www.flubu.com) so I have a rapid sandbox for notes and such. It's basically the electronic equivalent of my little yellow post-it notes I always carry with me.
On a final issue, I have too active an imagination and this is going to bite me in the ass shortly. Katy's become obsessed with a TV series called Millenium (I got her the series on DVD). In the last few days, she's gotten through something like 10 hours od it. Some of the themes in the show give me the serious heebyjeebies. Not good.
I can just hear it now :)
I bought Katy a new cell phone today because her old one was crap and I promised her a surprise if something nice happened. It did, so I got her a phone.
I can just hear her mom telling me off because I'm spending too much money on her (and I can subsequently hear her dad telling me to spend it on him :D )
hee hee hee :D
Coldplay concert pictures
I got the pictures from the coldplay concert :) The guy sent them today :D
Busy Busy Busy
I've been moving all day today. Spent the morning doing housecrap : waiting for the groceries to be delivered, doing laundry, changing the bed linens. I was supposed to meet some of the guys from work at the Grafton center at 2:30, but the laundry took longer than expected and I cut it a bit close, but I got there on time.
Ran some errands. I bought myself a roasting pan I'd been lusting after for a while (it was half-off, which finally decided me on the issue), got some Whittards goodness. I was able to pop into the fabric shop (that's been having a going-out-of-business sale for the past 2 months) to get some more fabric for the last screen I want to make.
I went to La Senza to get something nice for Katy. Apparently, English men cannot shop for lingerie on their own. It's just Not Done. I walked in alone – Katy was working today again – and as soon as I walked in, two different sales clerks came to my “rescue” and asked repeatedly if I needed any help. Jeez. I mean, I've shopped for undies before and I have a good batting average, according to Katy. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or not, but the other blokes who were in the store with their girlfriends were all blushing and looking like they'd rather be having a root canal than being seen in a undies shop. Now I know I have little to no shame, but come on. It's La Senza, not Sexe Cité…
No, this is not Phil's Taxi Service
My phone number is one-off from a taxi serice. The taxi is 918, I'm 819. This means that once in a while, we get the occasional random phone call (usually either really late or really early) asking for a cab.
This morning, I spent 2 minutes arguing with a little old lady that no, this wasn't Phil's Taxi Service:
LOL: I'd like a taxi please
me: I'm sorry, you have a wrong number
LOL: No I don't, this is Phil's Taxi Service
me: I'm sorry ma'am, but it's not.
LOL: Yes it is, I have the number on the card right in front of me XXXXXXXX918
me: You've reached XXXXXXXX819.
LOL: That's what I said. Now I'd like a cab.
me: *silence*
me: I'm really sorry ma'am, but this is a private flat, not a taxi service
LOL: Oh bother (she actually said that) *hangs up*
I was told off because I wouldn't send a cab out to her. If I'd have been just a bit more evil, I'd have taken her address down and hung up way before the end of that stupid conversation…
Have you hugged your geek today?
I've just setup a CVS server on my website to hold all of my programming projects. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now.