The Bucket O' Nothing

The story so far. Not as bad as the Ikea or Virgin shenanigans I've heard from Aquarion or Dave, but bizarre in its own way.

1. Ordered a few things from ASOS last week. Delivery company was DPD, who give you a time window for when they'll deliver and can reschedule it for you.

2. Scheduled delivery for Saturday at work address, because I've had things delivered on Saturday before so I assume there's usually someone on front desk or post duty to sign for it. Saturday came, I got an email saying nobody collected it so I should sort out redelivery.

3. Went to the DPD site to reschedule, with the card number they'd given me in email. Discovered that the package had apparently been signed for - in February.

4. Phoned DPD, where the guy I talked to said that the card number had been recycled and (through bad luck, I guess) had previously been used for a delivery to the same postcode (i.e. my office). He booked the redelivery for Monday, and mentioned there were some other parcels heading to the same address.

5. Monday came with a text message telling me the parcels would be delivered around noon, and Monday went with nothing from DPD about them having delivered the parcels, and nothing from our facilities department about me having a parcel.

6. Tuesday came with a text message telling me the parcels would be delivered around noon, with a slightly different hour-long window but the same parcel number as yesterday.

7. Then someone at work emailed me because he'd got a reminder email from DPD about a delivery to the office in my name.

We've exchanged a few emails, and he's waiting for a delivery that wasn't collected on Saturday as well (although from a different online shop - to be extra confusing, he has also this morning ordered from the one I ordered from last week).

I think what DPD might be doing here is indexing orders by delivery address minus name, which strikes me as the stupidest damn thing if you stop and think about the existence of offices. Maybe adding a date, which still doesn't solve anything.

If the parcels don't turn up this lunchtime, I'll phone DPD and see if I can find out what on earth happened.

Hello, Jon Henley!

You wrote an article in the G2 today about the leader of a nation currently dealing with the (as far as I can tell) worldwide debt crisis, with some interesting stuff about that leader's political history. But there was something that nearly stopped me reading it at the start.

Why the hell did you see it necessary to describe the leader in question as "pale" and "irredeemably frumpy"? Did that have anything to do with discussion of their policies or political history, at all?

Do you comment on, for example, the US president's appearance when you write something about him? Other than if it's relevant to the article, no, of course you don't.

Or did you just do it to Merkel because she's a woman, and women's appearances are public property?

I have only just discovered that along with the many other science and mathematical Olympiads, there is an International Linguistics Olympiad. The sample questions are amazing.

Unlike another Olympiad I never heard of at school (the International Olympiad in Informatics - we knew about the Chemistry, Physics and Maths ones, and I assumed there was a Biology one as well), the Linguistics Olympiad started two years after I left school, and the UK one has only been going since 2009.

But having looked at the sample questions, I am so enthused about it that I am likely to have a look at some of them in more detail this evening. :D

Note: this is your last chance to claim any of the books in http://bouteillebleu.livejournal.com/187771.html - I am going to take the unclaimed ones to charity shops this weekend.

But I do have some more books. As before, these are yours if you're interested - come June they will be going to charity shops.

Books are £1 each unless there's another price, all paperback unless otherwise mentioned. Can do delivery within Cambridge or to Maelstrom event 4; Odyssey event 3 might be possible via someone else but would have to arrange. Anything else, let me know and I'll see what we can work out.

( Read more... )

Spinemeet on Sunday was good - I'd forgotten how much fun it is to get together with the other people in the group and just chat, either about things in general or about Maelstrom. (Hazard of going to player events on my own.) Looking forward to event 1.

Got more sleep over the weekend, so am feeling better about work and have clearer ideas about what I'm doing.

Sonata Arctica gig on Friday was good as well. Musician's earplugs continue to hold up well (they're these ones - cheap, reusable, and even work with my ears that can't cope with in-ear headphones, so I'd recommend them to anyone looking for something better than disposible ones).

I, er, spent most of the opening acts reading a book I'd started on the train into London, as the O2 Academy Islington has sofas on its mezzanine level and they were quite comfortable. Found a spot half-behind one of the ceiling pipes that gave me a view of the stage when Sonata started playing, which had the bonus feature that I couldn't see the strobe light directly. Then listened and sang along to my heart's content - the music is singable and the band make their concerts fun.

Set list was as follows:

( Sonata Arctica set list, 25/3/11, O2 Islington )

Will be happy at Maelstrom if I get the alcohol I bought to sell to people all handed out and paid for,

Managed this at the end of the event - there were two bottles left over because Aquarion and Helen hadn't collected theirs, Helen gave me £10 and I took the two of them to various members of PD crew as a thank-you.

and get to LARP with cool people,

Yes, but not as much as I'd hoped. I usually walk a thin line at events between eating and drinking enough to keep me moving but not have to take too many toilet breaks or drop OOC to eat too often, and drinking or eating so little that I get dehydrated or run entirely out of energy.

This event was hot enough and still enough that I tripped over the line and landed metaphorically on my face, spending about 50% of the entire event's time-in time OOC in shade of some sort (or First Aid) trying to rehydrate or remember to eat. Potch needs brainpower for me to play it and with heat exhaustion, it just didn't work.

meet friends I don't see very often,

I did do this - got a chance to hang around OOC with people while I was waiting for the sun to go away, including some people I see very rarely IC for one reason or another.

and enjoy myself.

Well, when I managed to time in I had some quite interesting moments. Can't pick out any as especially awesome or enjoyable - and the niggling fear at the back of my mind of "am I actually playing the character right?" that comes up when I'm not properly immersed was more frequent, presumably because my stints in character were shorter. I also didn't have enough sleep reserves to not be tired when it was very late at night (I got most of my roleplaying done after sunset because by then the heat was tolerable).

However, I've got some ideas ready for next event, have some other things I need to write about and write to people about, and have calmed down from the Sunday somewhat.

My main impression is that I'd kind of like to redo the weekend for myself, being more sensible about drinking enough (I brought six bottles of water and six bottles of Lucozade with me; I only drank two of the water bottles). As it is, I managed to be present at half an event and coherent for about a quarter - I wouldn't say it was a bad event, but it's my least good one so far.

Unit tests save my bacon today, as I was trying to figure out why my code is suddenly failing, narrowed it down to a pair of functions, think "urgh, ought to write unit tests for those", then discover that I have already done so. Whee!

(And once I had the problem visible it was about two minutes' work to spot the problem, fix it, rerun the tests, discover that everything was all right, and cheer. Going to get celebratory coffee may take a little longer than two minutes.)

Our house has quite a few laptops. One of them, James's first laptop, is a Toshiba Satellite Pro that's getting on for five years old, and was recently getting so slow that booting XP took about ten minutes and getting it to a usable state took at least twenty.

So, this weekend, after copying useful files off it, we reformatted it and installed Ubuntu 9.04.

It's still a bit slow in places, but getting it to a point where I can open Firefox and browse the internet is a lot quicker. I've even managed to get the Cisco VPN client working with my work profiles, with the help of two guides on what needs patching (the first of those is newer, and its instructions worked fine; the second gives notes on where to put profile files).

However, I've not managed to get rdesktop to connect to my work machine while I'm logged into the VPN, so it's not quite at can-work-from-home-on-the-laptop stage yet; that's for the desktop.

EDIT: Turns out that using tsclient - which comes installed in the default Ubuntu 9.04 distro - gets it working and brings up my work desktop. Hurrah!

Helped parents install Windows 7 on their laptop yesterday, by which I mean my brother and I installed it and occasionally told parents useful things about it when they came past.

Things I like about it:
- Plug and Play is what it says. Printer worked, mouse worked, scanner had to be searched for but didn't take very long. Only thing we had some problems with was the ADSL USB modem, of which more later.
- Internet access via ad-hoc network worked straight away with no need to change settings - just plugged the ethernet cable into its network port and it picked up the network and was happy. (More on this later, though.)
- UAC much improved since Vista and Win2K8 Server - it's more akin to the popups that one of the spyware blockers I use has, which tell you when something is trying to install or run that you might not have expected.

In general it looks like the operating system's grown up and really quite nice.

The not-so-fun has been today's attempt to get our Thomson Speedtouch 330 USB ADSL modem playing nice with 64-bit Windows 7. There are no drivers for Windows 7 in general or the 64-bit version in particular; we made two initial attempts, first with the drivers that came with the product (no go) and second with the 32-bit Vista drivers (also no go). A workaround on Technet looked promising but led to blue-screening every time we plugged the modem in.

Finally, another workaround on Technet gave us a working setup and a connection that would actually work! Hurrah!

Except now the Win7 laptop can't see the internet connection through the network like it could before, and I have no idea how to sort this.

FAKE EDIT: Brother has copied over the settings we had on parents' old laptop (for when it was using Internet Connection Sharing) and applied them to the LAN connection on the new one and it works fine. Huzzah!

I still think things might have been easier with an ethernet-based ADSL modem/router, but at least the duct tape on this setup is now in all the right places. :)

Gym again today. Managed 15 minutes on crosstrainer, did a fair amount of pressups (15/10/10/10/15 - didn't take notes on suggested numbers from http://hundredpushups.com/ alas) against the guardrail by the stairs, tried the arm resistance machine and gave up after about two minutes because left hand was aching, did a few minutes on a treadmill.

Treadmill unfortunately not great for practising paladin jog. Suppose I will have to find interesting places in Cambridge to run instead, OH THE HORROR.

Rowing machines possibly a good plan for near end rather than near start of workout, because at the start I'm not really warmed up and thus my leg muscles can't compensate for weak knees (also, lower back gripes a bit). Rowing machines occasionally dubious because I am a technique snob and don't want to have to look at rubbish rowers. :)

While going to the gym is getting me to actually do more exercise and sweat more (always good), I'm not sure I'm using the time as well as I could. Going to look at http://www.stumptuous.com/ and go on Wednesday with more of a plan.