Things to do when your network is dead

[chrisvenus]

Monday Afternoon at 15:22

Well, here is an update written while I wait for the internet connection to come back so I can work...

Its work. Mostly.

Well, first day of working at blackwell publishing. The work I have been given is absolute monkey work. Look at CMS (for the blackwell publishing journal stuff) and check that the right articles are in the right place and that the abstract hasn't got any stupid titles (like "ABSTRACT" in *huge* letters). IF they are in the correct order and stuff then I uncheck the new box and check the "to web" box. Then repeat until the journal is done. At this point click the button to make the journal go live and hey presto, a web update.

Not hard work. Requires *some* skill I suppose but not the sort of skill that requires thought, just the sort of skill that means a monkey couldn't really do it and they'd much rather employ somebody technically competent.

I'd thought I'd be in on HTML and so on but as far as I can tell this system got fubared by the people who supply the data by them stopping for a while and then everybody playing catchup. Thus there are 3000 odd articles that need to be processed in this way now. That is about 150 journals. Todays total done runs to about 15 journals and about 260 articles. A reasonable amount of that is today's new arrivals but I have started to get to last friday's arrivals and that is all the backlog really except for the big snarl up at the beginning of the month (whcih thankfully Andy is working on at the moment so hopefully will have done a lot by the time I get to it).

I am currently probably the most smartly dressed person in the office, even after having taken off my tie and undone the top button. Must check later that it is alright for me to dress down a bit tomorrow. :) Also I need to find out exactly what time I will be expected in. I'll do that when I leave though, probably the easiest thing.

Makes me realise that I am actually working on timesheets at the moment so this downtime of the network just means more money for me really. Go flaky networking! :)


Mornings and evenings

Managed to get up at a reasonable time this morning having got to bed nice and early last night. I'm still pretty tired at the moment. I'm not sure how much of that is tiredness and how much is being sent to sleep by the work. I'd try to get an early night tonight but am up to birminghamland instead with krys who needs to do some RP stuff up there. We'll be getting dinner courtesy of Kath which will be nice and the RP should be interesting. I'll be taking my laptop with me so I can update character sheet stuff and get my Victoriana eternity turnsheet done as well as maybe a character diary if I have time.

Hopefully it will not be too late an evening and I'll get home at a sensible time to get some senisble amounts of sleep.

Tomorrow will be work again and then in the evening catching up with huggyrei who will have finished her exams. I was intending to meet Joe out of his at lunchtime but that will no longer be an option and I don't think I'll even see him due to him running home tomorrow evening (or was it wedensday and packing tomorrow evening?). Anyway bye Joe (since I know he stalks my Journal). And apologies to Rei that I won't be able to see her out of exams. I'll try to find you all later though (you any idea of what you're doing or where you're going?).


So, what about the weekend then? Well, I have no idea when I last updated since I can't check my LJ and I have the memory of a goldfish. Apologies for repetition if there is any. :)


Friday was down to london for Garou. Stopped off in town first where I had to go see CHampion to finalise some stuff for this job. Bumped into luciefoulston, taigne and huggyrei in the street and headed back to balliol with them to kill time for a bit. I had intended to go find balliol people anyway to fill in an hour but I just found them earlier intended.

Sat around on teh quad with them for a while chatting and stuff before finally heaing to pick krys up from work. Managed to crack my head nastily on their back gate as I left. I refuse to believe that door is a sensible size for *anybody*. Damn thing.

Picked krys up a bit late and headed to london. Got to london a bit early and had to pay a fiver for the congestion charge. So easy to pay though, one SMS and I was all done. :) The game was good fun. I didn't go near the caern because I am still "affected" by the chaos monitor to the best of my knowledge. Sat in the pub first though until we got a call to get to the savoy. Business meeting there where a spirit gave the quaterly audit figures out (aka Renown). It was quite amusing. I felt very at home there and quite liked the spirit apart from her incredible rudeness and lack of professional conduct. However, that was partly as a response (So she claims) to the rudeness of the garou who really didn't have the hang of board meetings. :)

Its interesting to see how naturally I fitted into that environment though. IT never even seemed out of place to me but many of the others were absolutely seething. I don't know if it is because I wasn't on the bad end of any of the spirits nastiness or just because I was a glasswalker but I was quite happy there and taking the occasional note for questions to ask at the end. That and of course to politley rebuke the spirit when she was dissing us ("why didn't you sort this out sooner?" "we sorted it out as soon as we found out. Why didn't you tell us earlier if you wanted it sorted earlier?").

We then went off and had a big fight. It did seem a bit 10 o'clock monstery to me but that might just be because I wasn't in the right place to hear the actual plot bits. All I really know is that loads of us went to Dagenham in the umbra and beat up some big wyrm spidery things and then left. I was quite smug to have taken no wounds, even from the garou frenzying at me. I am occasionally impressed with my ability to fight. :) Was pulling a nice number of traits when shooting guns (having discovered you can shoot in crinos if your gun is dedicated appropriately).

Anyway, session ended and headed back to the car to head home. As I was driving I saw something stuck under the windscreen wiper that I asked krys to retrieve as we were stopped somewhere. A parking ticket. WTF? I thought. "Failure to display an excise licence"? What the hell does that mean? Having checked when I arrived that I was alright to park there (I thought) I turned around to check again. Perhaps people can help me here. I was parked on a single yellow line. The nearest auxiliary sign was about 15 yards down the road at the beginning of the street and was one of those little yellow rectangular signs with the "no parking" bit and "8AM-6:30PM". There were absolutely no other signs that I could see nearby. Was I in the right or the wrong? I always thought that single yellow lines could be parked on apart from those times indicated on the signs. I intend to phone up to query that at some point unless you all tell me I was clearly in the wrong. For the record I parked there at about 7PM and got ticketed at about 8:30 (if memory serves).

Anyway, not much more of interest after that.

Saturay I got up and started tidying the house. It had been left a tip after Tuesday's compsoc BBQ (down to food having been left out on the dining room table and I didn't even bother to look closely at the crap left in the garden on the table). I tidied the kitchen thoroughly, discovering ants in the process. I then tidied the lounge non-thoroughly before deciding I needed to do shopping. I went out and made sure I had ingredients for cookie making and then after I got home kissifa and quisalan turned up about five minutes later.

WE chatted for a while and I put DoA3 on for them at whcih point luciefoulston called and said they were lost and how did they get to mine. HAving assertained where they were (not too far away) I gave them some simple, impossible to fail to follow directions and sauntered out to find them. Found them and bought them home at whcih point more DoA3 was played.

After a while cookies were cooked and at some point we came up with the plan of DVD watching and for some reason the scorpion king came up. I think it was with regards to a conversation on The Mummy and somebody commented they hadn't seen the scorpion king. At some point before this liriselei turned up with Ben who promised to come back later to pick up huggyrei.

Anyway, I went to the video shop and took lucie in my car. She went "whee!!" a lot and also became an honourary member of the Chris Venus School of Driving. This was due to her wonderful abuse of another road user for being a muppet at a set of traffic lights. She looks set to become a full member after I have seen her drive. :)

Anyway, we started to watch the scroption king and I realised the one thing that would make teh film so much better. Being drunk. So I proceeded to spend 15 minutes making up cokctails for people. They even had straws and umbrellas in them later. :)

Much heckling of the scoprion king (who, I might add, we think gets a little over friendly with his camel) before watching Tank Girl, courtesy of the wonderful taigne.

Much drinking happened. More programs happened and other stuff happened.

However, my internet connection is working again so time to post this and get back to work. Nice 45 minute break anyway. :)