…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

We had a problem on the service yesterday. It was first reported on Thursday night and by 1pm on Friday there were a whole lot of people looking at it. Including me. I still don’t know how I got dragged into it but I did. It didn’t sound too strange when I first heard about it. There were 4 or 5 possible plausable reasons for it. But as the day went on, every one of those reasons was knocked out of contention. There was the strangest fucking reports on it. Everytime I came up with a reason for it, something would come in to prove that was not the case. Roll around the end of the day, and we have gotten no-where with it and I mean no-where. So a few of us carry on and spend the next 3 fucking hours and on a Friday night bashing our heads off the wall, brainstorming, looking at code (we are talking sheets of paper and highlighters here), all to no avail. Sure we found a couple of minor things which we’ll address on Monday but not a single reason for what was going on. Around 9pm, we gave up on orders from management to go home. The problem seemed to be dropping off and indeed I’ve just checked my mail and it’s quiet today but I still don’t have a fucking clue what caused it. I don’t even have anything improbable to go on. One thing it did really flag is that we need some serious work on our escalation policies. The three of us who were there working on it, well we weren’t the ones that should have been doing that and yet somehow we got dragged into it. That’s another one for Monday morning.

It bugs me and it’s going to bug me until I find out what it was, I really hate when I get involved in trying to solve a problem like that and not either being able to solve it, or find out what it actaully was. So yeah, it’s going to bug me.

On a similar line of work related thought. Brand is a huge word. I’ve only really picked up on that in the past year or so. It’s interesting to have to think about the brand from the behind the scenes point of view. I am generally not too pushed about brands. Apple probably being the biggest exception. I can’t think of a higher quality tech brand, nevermind more inovative. Lots of people mention Nokia in the same breath and it may well just be my lack of interest in mobiles, but I don’t see it. They make decent phones but that’s really it. There isn’t a huge amount of inovation product or brand wise. I thought I had alot more on this but I don’t seem to.

Music, segue. I fucking love it. I love it when a piece of music just moves into the next one *perfectly*. Mars Volta was a good example of this last week. They just got on stage and played straight without a break between tracks or a single word for about 40 minutes. The songs (noise in some cases) just shifted together. They started, they played and the music changed from one into another and I fucking love it. Planxty from the Live 2004 cd are the ones which have really had me thinking about this. Track 12 starts off as The Raggle Taggle Gypsy and that plays on, then the finale on it shifts from being a finale to a build up and it’s Tabhair Dom do Lámh. I love it, it’s one of those perfect moments in music. There isn’t anything else but that transition, that segue. The skill it must take to be able to play and then to be able to play at such a level to go from one to another, it’s astounding. It’s just pure magic.

Luke, a friend from work was playing a DJ set a club off Oxford street last night and a few of us had promised to go along and support him. I had planned on going home and having some dinner and getting changed and then heading there but the work stuff changed all that. So I got there around 9 and we kept going until 3. He’s a House DJ and House is so not my style of music. It was, to be honest, not as bad as I was expecting and there were a couple of decent tunes. Luckily enough I was not alone in dissing the music so a couple of us just sat back with some drinks and chatted. I was really impressed by how good a DJ he was tho. It may have helped that the two warm ups were not brillant but Luke really got the crowd going. It was very easy to see that he was into it and pass that along. So it was all in all a good night. Which made two for two.

Thursday night was messy to say the least. Latymers in Hammersmith was the venue for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Lots and lots of Guinness and home around 1am. The nice Irishman behind the bar was passing out free shots and some of them went down really well. He just arrived at the table with a tray of them and left it there. All a good idea at the time. The music was Irish all night, there was much (really bad) singing along to anything from The Dubliners to U2. A good night with good company. A whole lot of people in pain on Friday morning. Such a good night tho. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and there was an great turnout.

Tonight is a birthday party for one of the lads. It’s just down the road in Camden but I’m thinking I really need to just arrive later. It started at 3 but I don’t think I’d survive a third night on the trot. So I’ll head down there later on.

Still no fucking KOTOR 2 patch despite lots of reports that it’s done. I’d really like to get playing it again.

I have written a comic script. Well, more precisily, I have adapted something for a comic strip. It’s small, just 5 pages and I have an artist ready to start drawing. It should go up here in a few weeks, I hope. I think it could come out quite well, Rich has expressed an interest in trying to draw a strip for a while and I’ve been meaning to get a script together for a while. I just need to get some panel layout down on paper and pass the whole thing onto him. Something to do tomorrow afternoon I suspect.

I have come to a decision, I know it’s a little early but I’m going to have a mid-life crisis. It may sound stupid, well forget may, it does sound stupid but of late I have increasingly been thinking about age, specifically mine and indeed everyone else around me. I really need to make a serious effort to focus less on living for today and more on living for tomorrow. I do the former really well, I don’t really do the latter at all and I should. It’s really stupid and I think I know what brought all of this on bit it’s still been in my thoughts alot. In fact it was a pretty big discussion on Thursday night although after lots of pints it kinda meandered along a bit too much. So anyway, time is fleeting.

Fucking Blogger is really sucking these days. It takes sometimes 20 minutes to get it to post and then it does it 3 times. I’ve been using Moveable Type i work for some stuff and I really wish fucking Readyhosting would support it’s requirements so I could change over to that. I have to take the del.ico.us stuff off the side, I’m not using it enough.

So here’s a cool link relating right back to the first couple of paragraphs:13 things that do not make sense.
It goes without saying that number one should be women. I assume this is just an oversight and will be corrected shortly.

Party time.