That was fun to manage. Pretty much settled down now, thankfully.

1 hour 48 minutes last night, and my shoulder hurts this morning. Pushed my skill level up to 584, so pleased with that. Took my fitness age down to 74 (soon it'll be younger than I am), and ow I think I understand how that works I can get it down quicker, I think.

In other news, one of our sites has been - literally - Slashdotted, so there'll be an anxious day ahead while we watch that server carefully. Hits Tuesday, 33608, hits Wednesday 679595, first two hours of Thursday, 201772. Fun fun fun.

Which is a) not very couth, and b) something we haven't done in ages.

But it's worth it - photocena.com is now baby's first WordPress blog, and frankly I'm DEAD CHUFFED with it. So there.

Feel free to subscribe - it will be full of utterly uninteresting nonsense about the Jordans' culinary habits and adventures.

In the general drudgery of Monday to Friday, just now and again you get a day that goes really nicely. And yesterday was one such. In no particular order:

1. perlmonger is not keen on making telephone calls, and he had a couple that he _had_ to make; I couldn't do them for him. He made them, and the outcome from both looks good.


2. I sent an e-mail to a client explaining that their project had suffered from severe scope creep, and we would have to increase their bill by £1.5k. "That's fine", he quoth - "no problem with that". Why can't they all be so reasonable?


3. stompy red boots!


4. the new Show of Hands double CD, and DVD, arrived. We listened to the former last night. Might go and watch the latter in a minute


5. pumpkin and apple risotto for supper; delicious - trust me


6. a potential client with a mega e-commerce application has booked a meeting for 10 January. The downside of that is that the train fares cost me *£83* [scream] - the joys of catching the 8.11 from Nailsea to Paddington (they are in Edgware Road).

So that was all rather nice. Today we battled out in the rain to the greasy spoon, the greengrocer, the farm shop, and the station, to collect the aforementioned usurious tikkits.

Tomorrow, LibDem xmas lunch. The rest of the weekend is going to be spodding, I think.

I discovered that the errant server made it to Bristol by checking the ANC web site yesterday morning - no, nobody bothered to let me know.

I phoned up to ask if they could get someone to deliver it, and was told "they have no drivers on Saturday" which is utter bollocks. Thankfully, the depot was round the corner from Costco, which I wanted to go anyway, so I whizzed down there, and was extremely irritated (and a tad concerned) to be kept waiting 15 minutes, and watch two other people being attended to who arrived after I did.

The young lad offered to carry it to the car, and I rather childishly said to him that although I knew it wasn't his fault, I'd rather that ANC didn't touch anything of mine ever again.

We had to pull one of our web servers out of the rack at the back end of last week. In theory, it should have arrived back here on Tuesday, and been back in the rack on Thursday.

In reality, it is still stuck somewhere in the maws of ANC / FedEx ...

First off, FedEx phoned on Tuesday to say they had been to collect it from Docklands, but they had taken the name of the company down wrong, and so couldn't find it. We told them the right company.

The returned to Marsh Wall and collected it that afternoon. We waited patiently for it to arrive on Wednesday. Did it? Did it buggery. The twats tried to deliver it to our ISP in St Neots (who ordered the collection). They rejected it, and told them, literally and figuratively I imagine, where to take it.

Today, we waited. And waited. And got quite vexed and chased it up, to discovered that this useless bunch of wankers had somehow mis-routed it, and the bloody server is now in *Belfast*. They promise a pre midday tomorrow, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm working on a photo-diet project - basically you upload a photograph of what you eat, whenever you eat it, so you can review how sensibly (or not!) you're eating.

I will shortly be in a position to require more beta testers, so if anyone's interested please comment here.

Sitting up in the study in the evening, writing code - not for paying customers, but for the new photodiet project thing I'm doing (coming soon, hopefully).

However, I think it's time to give up and go to bed, as I've just had an error message that says:

ColdFusion cannot determine the line of the template that caused this error.

Which means it's comprehensively borked; neither perlmonger or I have ever seen *that* one before ...

[Dear ColdFusion.
It's line 117.

No Love
Me].

perlmonger and I set out at the crack of 8.15 this morning to go to Gloucester, for a meeting with a potential new client.

I can't abide being late, but even I think that arriving 24 hours (and 15 minutes) early is probably not a good idea. God knows how I managed to get the date wrong, but they had another meeting scheduled (for someone else who is pitching for this work), so we had to turn round and come home, and shall return tomorrow.

arrived back home to find a snitty e-mail from our accountant, saying that our internet banking transfer hadn't arrived. There was also a bank statement, saying that it had gone out as it should have done, so I fired up a browser to see what had happened. And I'd sent the money to the wrong bloody account!

tortuous navigation of Yorkshire Bank's appalling telephone banking system (getting cut off three times) brought me little joy, but while looking at the account online I saw that the money had been returned, so presumably the details I entered didn't exist, thankfully. As YB didn't sound terribly helpful about getting it back ...

screenshots now sent to accountant, showing that I did try, honest, but was just inept, and I've done it right now.

what else can go wrong today? (this is a rhetorical question)

we spent most of the weekend working, as previously detailed. I don't think we've had a full day off for about four weeks, and it's starting to show ... making silly mistakes with server config files and flailing formed a large part of yesterday afternoon :(

which meant that the Complicated Cooking I'd planned fell into abeyance - it will have to be Duck with Lentils and Ceps tonight. Anyway, we scoffed a full english for brunch, and all we could manage at the end of a long afternoon was a bag of Kettle chips and some chocolate raisins. Very healthy. I was thwarted in my probably foolish desire for a last half glass of wine by finding that the bottle I'd put in the fridge was in fact *red*, due to perlmonger's inability to put the white wine in the left side of the wine rack. Probably just as well.

caught up with Dr Who (huge fun) and the second episode of Jekyll, which I am enjoying enormously. Best line, most definitely: "I've got my pride" - I'm still chortling.

in other news, Liessa is not mending as well as we'd hoped, and is now on 5mg of steroids a day. And not enjoying it, and neither are we. The first pill went down reasonably easily, as we had surprise on our side; yesterday, not so good. We got it down her, but we are scratched quite badly, and she is extremely suspicious. Not quite sure how to deal with this ... kevlar, possibly.