Cool! My page counter passed the 200,000 mark some time in the night. That’s up 100,000 since the 1st of January.
I still haven’t got proper stats yet, which has been going on since January. Although curiously, when I asked about them in the support forum, they suddenly started working on the 11th. But most of the data since the 18th January is missing. This is after being promised that no data would be lost. I’m following it up but I am not a happy bunny!
Monthly Archives: March 2003
Cats Photos
The Cats photos are up in the gallery. Unfortunately, the pictures of Jamie getting her program signed, and outside with the Cats Groupies did not come out 🙁
I’ll add captions tomorrow. It’s too late now.
Cats!
Yay! We saw Cats today. It was fantastic! We all thoroughly enjoyed it. The Palace was packed, I don’t think there was a single empty seat. I’m so pleased that Jan was able to make it. I think she was in a lot of pain, but she doped herself up with pain killers and managed to survive.
The show was great. There were some really strong voices in the cast, I’d say stronger than when we saw it at The New London Theatre, particularly Chrissie Hammond as Grizabella. The cast made execellant use of the relatively small set, and despite the comparatively awkward layout of the Palace, managed to make a few appearances amongst the audience.
In my opinion, there were only two niggles; Nicholas Pound as Old Deuteronomy — his voice was fine, but his acting was lacklustre; and the legroom in the circle seats was a joke — I couldn’t even sit straight in the seat. I had to either sit with my legs to one side and my back twisted, or sit with my legs spread wide. I’m not that tall really at a shade under six foot, there are plenty taller. Within an hour my back was very painful. It must have been agony for Jan.
But the show was worth it. We picked up some more merchandise, including the Cats – Ultimate Edition DVD, which we then watched as soon as we got home!
If you get chance to see this show, you must! Highly Recommended.
More On The zed1.net Outage
It turns out that the tech people were upgrading Apache on my server and hadn’t informed the support people. I got a nice apology from the support guy I’de been dealing with.
Phew! It had crossed my mind that I may have to change hosting company.
Another Day At Home
I didn’t go in the office again today. Jan is still bad with her back. She’s managed to keep off the cigarettes too. She is doing really well.
School
I took Jamie in to school this morning and had to stay for a special assembly. Year 5/6 had put together a special play to support the schools efforts to raise money for CAFOD. They also has some other stuff going on like a cake stall, toy stall, raffle, etc. I suspect that it was either a statement by the church or maybe just an unfortunate coincidence that this has been organised on the same day as Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day.
Work
After investigation, I suspect that my hypothesis from yesterday is less likely to be correct. 🙁 However, I have yet to prove it either way. That coupled with not being able to connect to the office network reliably and several jobs on my to do list being delayed because of this made for a stressful, unproductive day today.
Still we go to see Cats tomorrow! I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that Jan will be well enough to make it.
Zed1.net Down!
Aaargh! My new domain zed1.net is down! My three new hostees are without their blogs! The server itself is up and running, I can ping it and ftp to it. But the web server is refusing connections. Grrr.
I couldn’t even use the support forum because that is down too. (I wonder if it’s on the same machine). I fired off an email to them a couple of hours ago, but have not had a reply yet.
Update: It was back by morning. I’m told it was back some time after midnight. Support replied but denied anything was wrong. I’ll follow that up.
Strange Day.
It’s been a strange day today. First of all, Jan’s back is still bad, and so I didn’t go in the office this morning and took Jamie into school. I phoned work and told them I would work from home. I managed to get some work done, but they were having problems with their firewall, and in trying to fix it kept cutting off my VPN access.
Old Friend
At lunch time I received an IM from an old colleague, Mark D, to whom I haven’t spoken for far too long (I’m too lazy to keep in touch) which was a pleasant surprise. I was just telling him that a mutual ex colleague, Steve P, was now working again with me, when who should IM me, but Steve P. spooky 🙂
Anyway, Mark happened to be sat in his office using ICQ remotely on his Linux machine at home, using, I think, VNC over SSH to talk to his firewall, and then running ICQ as a remote X-app from a machine on his internal network. I was impressed! LOL
Problem!
After I had fetched Jamie back from school this afternoon, I got a phone call from the office to say they were having a major problem on one of the sites and could I investigate. As the VPN was down I couldn’t. But they got IT to stop what they were doing and restore the old configuration so I could re-connect. Hmmm, that serious then! So I looked into it and Duncan R and I have come up with an hypothesis which may explain what happened. It’s one of those true multitasking issues which you don’t often come across is my line of work. Caused by the fact that the site runs on a box with three or four processors, and things really do happen at the same time.
I’ve still got to investigate whether our hypothesis holds water, but my gut feeling is that it will. There’s certainly nothing else to explain it.
Toilets
Back to this evening, and I fixed the downstairs loo. That’s the second loo I’ve had to fix in a week! Both broken by me. I don’t know what’s going on. Last week I managed to break the SEAT of the upstairs loo. I mean the actual seat, the ring shaped bit you sit on, not the hinge (which is what usually breaks on these things) but a split in the seat. And I wasn’t even standing on it ( which is how I’ve broken hinges in the past). I was sat on it. I know I need to lose a bit of weight, but I’m not that heavy!
I replaced that last weekend. Then yesterday I broke the handle on the downstairs loo. Just snapped it right off. So now it’s got a new one which doesn’t match, but hey it’ll do for now.
No Smoking Day
Today was No Smoking Day. It was on my mind because Jan is on her third day without the dreaded weed. She is doing well, although it is hard. I think the nicotine patches are helping. Also Jackie has now stopped for over a month now and still going strong. Well done Jackie!
I did think that Jan and I would stop together, but she insists that I wait a month. She says she couldn’t cope with both of us giving up together!
On top of giving up smoking, Jan has hurt her back today and has been in a lot of pain 🙁
Other resources:
Stop Smoking in 2003, Quit Smoking UK
