Filed under: Lifestyle
My glasses are sitting comfortably on my face. This wasn’t easy. It started off on Sunday with a cool stroll down to the “next door” B&Q (The Servi-star of the UK) and browsed around the glue section. I was dead set on taking home some sort of super glue and had narrowed down my choice to about three different types. Then I made the mistake of asking for advice from one of the happy helpers. Happy helper number 1, said that I would be better off with an Epoxy equivalent… strong hold, but not as definite and “static” as the super glues that I was interested in. We talked glue for a few minutes. We discussed melting plastics. The glue talk got intimate.
£4 later, I walked out with a strong hold Epoxy glue, and ran back home to get the gluing session going. I stacked books, and made some sort of clamping mechanism to hold the broken glasses in, preparing for the long 12 hour setting procedure that the glue required. The glue was mixed, added in the key areas whilst the glasses were clamped in for their journey of joining. I left the structure until the next morning… it would be then that I would discover whether it was a success or not.
Success… well, at least I thought it was. Two hours into work the glasses had ulterior motives. I pleaded with them… I asked them to stay on my face, to assist my blurry eyes, to make me the geek that I need to be. They retaliated. The joining was not what they wanted… they wanted time apart… the lenses parted ways, and I was left with nothing but restricted vision. The bastards.
Spent the last two days thinking about things… Wondering why it happened to me. Why did the frames decide to crack and break on that fateful day, and why I am now being punished for my acts of negligence. I pondered solutions, solutions to the joining of the frames, the conglomeration of the lenses… the eternal bond that would leave me happy. Whilst the eternal bond didn’t exist, Jen and I both attended a web usability talk last night. Well, she was supposed to be going for VisitScotland.com, and I ended up just going along for the geek talk. It was also being hosted at Microsoft’s premises here in Edinburgh, so who can forfeit an opportunity to get into the belly of the beast and stab it with a spoon. The talk was interesting, and was basically a case study of the NewZealand.com website and the problems they encountered in making a workable solution for a tourism site like that. There was some bullshit involved. We dodged it. Kept on moving.
It finished around 9pm. We got free beers during it, and because I didn’t have a spoon, on the way out I stole a peppermint off some ’suits’ desk. It tasted yucky so I spat it out. Take that Microsoft!
This morning I troddled on back down to B&Q and bought the superglue that I was eyeing out on Sunday. I got to work and glued the frames. The lenses are now happily married. I’m hoping there isn’t some newly wed fight during today. One day with glasses will be like a frost eagle in a blizzard. Cold and windy, but perfectly suited for the environment.
Filed under: Lifestyle
So, whats the worst thing that can happen to you after you spend £99 to get new lenses put into your old glasses frames? Well, you can break the frames a couple weeks later. Yes, on Saturday morning, I left my glasses lying on the bed and a couple minutes later, they were crushed and snapped the frames right on the nose bridge. *argh*. It’s just another entry into my array of bad luck this month, but it’s too much to get into right now. So now I have some brand spanking new lenses, broken frames, and the realisation that I may just have to buy whole new frames, as well as the same frakking lenses. Sure, you can move the lenses from my current frames to the new ones, but only if the frames are exactly the same size, or smaller. This is not a very common thing to find… in fact, after going into like 3 optometrists, I found that it’s near impossible. If only I had originally had some big-ass frames with massive lenses that are all bug-eyed, making the lenses ultimately big enough to fit any damn pair of frames. But no… I have small, what one lady in Boots called, “almost childrens glasses”.
I then found out today that my frames have been discontinued, so theres no hope of getting a pair sent from Souff Afreeka either.
Balls.
Filed under: Travel
This week has been a week like any other, except for one piece of bad news: we are getting kicked out of the Rigg. The Rigg is the place where we live, for those of you who Googled Rigg looking for stuff about oil (you also may have spelling issues)- and our landlord has decided that it is costing him too much money. Woe! Woe, woe woe!! We love the Rigg. It has a jaunty little garden and a river and a park, and a playground that comes in useful for realising important facts, like the fact that adults have legs that are to long for sitting on one of those wiggly round-about things, and also, a 2m slide is not what it used to be, excitement wise. The Rigg also has big sunny windows and some fresh basil growing in the kitchen, and basically, it is home. We don’t want to leave it, but we must. So now the process of web surfing, house visiting and decision making must begin. The bugger of it all is that you can’t simply sign up with an estate agent, because they want to charge you around £60 for the service of taking you to properties. However, if you find the properties on the internet, phone them up, ask to view them, and meet them at the door of the property, they don’t charge you anything. Wierd, but convenient, because let’s face it- we’re internet people. Web 3.0 and all that.
So we are looking for places, and we are hoping to find something worth about £1,5 million, owned by someone who needs a tax break on a very expensive property. Failing that, we might have to look in our own price range, but hey! All will be well.
I don’t , as a rule, hold with the idea of coming all the way over the sea (or over the land, technically, for those of us from Africa) and then proceeding to hang out day in and day out with the people you knew at home. However, this sensibility obviously has a flaw, in that Kyle is my built in South African buddy, so really, I am being a bit of a hypocrite. But anyway- my point being, we broke the rule a bit last night and went to a party thrown by Warrick Bus Guy. We met Warrick Bus Guy on the bus waiting to go to Canonmills. We asked him when the next bus arrived, he answered in an all too similar accent, and the next thing we knew we were singing Nkosi Sikelele Africa to a bus full of bemused passangers. Since then Warrick Bus Guy has been very good about inviting us to a couple of his parties, and we have, for a bizarre range of reasons, been unable to attend any. To his credit, he kept inviting us and last night we went to a masked party where the punch was lethal but the people were nice. We chatted to a range of Poles, Scots, Aussies and South Africans and generally had an amazing time. Then we came home and ate pistachios.
That’s what you call a good evening.
Filed under: Travel
Well, once again we are bad bloggers who have not fulfilled thier civic duty. I am getting over it. I am generally tired a lot of the time. During the week I can eat, sleep and travel on the bus. There isn’t really room for much else. Although I am aware that it is not necessarily a good policy, I seem to be living for the weekends at the moment. Luckily we have had three good ones.
3 weekends ago- Heather, Kyle and myself went up to the beautiful Isle of Skye. It is just desolate with these puffy cobbled hills and endless water, and the sky curves differently, as though it were actually about to reach an end. We drove through loads of rain and storms, but the mountains of Glencoe and Skye are well worth it, as is the thrill of coming around the corner in some deserted mountain area and seeing a busker in full tartan standing on the side of the road, piping to the glens, and to whoever else happens to be listening. Going to Skye has made me even more eager to go further and further north, to try and find mroe desolate places with larger tracts of diminishing sky.
2 weekends ago- Isje, Jack, Kyle and I went down in England to the lake district. We had a brilliant time, notwithstanding torrential rains, Kyle and myself sleeping on a sliding downhill slope, Isje and Jack sleeping on nothing at all, since they left their mattress at home, and eating more sausages than is healthy for an average human being. We also had the best meaty meal I have had since arriving in the UK (if you are ever in Paterson, go to the White Lion Inn. The food is all amazing, but we had the lamb shank, which was a steal at £10). On Saturday we went on a meandering drive through the mountains to Windemere, taking in all the waterfalls, hills and scree slopes that the lake district is blessed with. We also took in some amazing ice cream at Some Like It Hot (try it if you are ever in Windemere). I came to a conclusion: I am passionately, madly, deeply in love with…flower boxes. What? Those little boxes or baskets of flowers that the British hang everywhere in summer, brightening up even the dullest street. Paired with the black and white of the Tudor-esque houses, a flower box or two can make anyone’s day. Just a thought- use it, don’t use it.
On Sunday, Jack bullied us all up a mountain. A big mountain. And me not having done a spot of exercise in around 2 1/2 months. I was puffing, sweating, red faced and generally pretty grim. I cursed, but to no avail. I swear I only climbed to the top because I wanted to push Jack off the summit, with his cheerful grin and his un-puffed face. Fortunately, once at the top, I was given some chocolate to assuage my homicidal feelings, so the boy had a lucky escape this time.
This weekend- Kyle and I agreed that we needed to ‘bumph’. If you have never bumphed before, here is a howto:
1. Find your most comfy clothes- tracksuit pants, jerseys and warm socks will do. Make sure you have a puffy duvet handy.
2. Get some comforting food going. Spaghetti bolognaise or other warm starchy meals will do (stew!….), also, biscuits, esp. chocolate, and lots of sweets (Magnums and chocolate milkshakes were our food of choice).
3. Build a nest. Our nest was an inflatable mattress on the floor of the lounge. Make sure it is at the right angle so you don’t even have to move to see the tv.
4. Every tv programme or movie you have meant to watch but haven’t had the time to.
5. Lie back, and enjoy.
6. Repeat for best results.
Filed under: Travel
Then there are the days when you don’t *want* to be the systems administrator of a film company. Take yesterday, for example. At around 4pm, one of the 5 main servers, the one that carries over 4 terrabytes of information, decides that it’s not cool to work anymore, burns up all the fans in the process, and refuses to boot up again. Panic sets in. What went wrong, how do I fix it, how quick can I get it back on line. These are just some of the questions running through my mind.
Haul the server out of the server rack, and take a looksie. Repair the fans that are needed to cool it, hoping that this is all that went wrong. 6:30pm, fans fixed. Fire up the server again… Nothing. Panic some more.
Lets freeze there for a few seconds… Why panic in a situation like this, you ask? Well, a couple reasons. The server that has died has a RAID array of 8, 500Gb hard drives. These drives are all striped together into two big arrays, making them look like 1tb each, along with a mirror. This means that this server, when dead, is the only server that knows how these drives are lined up and, subsequently, the only machine that can actually look at the data on these drives. To any other machine, when plugging those same 8 drives into it, it would just look like garbage. It’s freaky. Things like this are very freaky. They are made even more freaky by the fact that the information (whilst I cannot explain exactly what is on them on a public web page) is incredibly important. And on top of it, although there are backups made of the drives, the last backup was a week ago, and since then, we’ve done more work on that server in the last week than we’ve done in the last 2 months. This means huge data loss. Project goes on hold for a week whilst we scramble for the data… who knows. Well, I know, and thats why I was stressing so much.
Back to the story… So, after 7 hours of overhaul, I managed to get the exact same RAID array working on another PC, by transferring the entire RAID controller from the broken machine, into one of my other servers, and then replicate the exact same arrangement to trick the controller into thinking nothing went wrong. It works! Hooray! But thats not where the story ends… You now have 4tb of hard drives hanging off the side of a server that is also used for critical information… that server is now offline whilst you work on restoring and temporarily moving the information off of it. Theres no room for any other hard drives in any of the other servers because they’re all pretty much running at capacity. It’s tight, but I manage to sort it out, moving all of the offline servers information on to another hard disk so that I didn’t have to move the 4tb of data anywhere.
So, at midnight, I walked out of here, everything pretty much sorted, but so incredibly not keen for today. Today is the day that everything has to be re-thunk. Thunking sucks.
