Author: davebushe

Yesterday was both an excellent day and a piss poor day at the same time. The weather was lovely and the office was quiet so Friday lunch was excellent. We went early to get a seat outside at the Old Parr’s Head and had a lovely Thai, a nice pint and good conversation. It was really nice. A long lunch but not too long…long enough for me to get sunburnt on both my arms. Not badly, it’s already fading to a tan but it was sore for a brief while.

The rest of the day was kinda meh. The afternoon dragged by and there was quite a bit of socialising going in the office. Whole loads of people were out and no-one was stressy busy for a change so we wandered the floor talking. It’s something that we don’t do enough of and nice when a decent Friday afternoon comes together like that. I’m much happier within the whole greater team now and so anything that helps along those lines is a good thing.

Hit the Comedy last night to meet up with the V. Strange night but not so bad in the end. Not a late one at all, home at a reasonable hour and a quiet one today.

Some faffing around on the internet and a walk into town to pick up some comics. No rain after all that. Nothing too major comics wise with the exception of the second volume of Age of Bronze which I’m looking forward to getting into tomorrow. Dinner out and then home still fairly early.

Music wise there is a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. System Of A Down’s latest Mesmerize is excellent and I’m playing that lots. I wasn’t a fan of the last album so only now looking forward to seeing them at Download next weekend off the back of this one. Also Audioslave’s second: Out of Exile is awesome, love the acoustic live version of Like A Stone. The Duke Spirit finally got their first album out and I like that a whole lot. Very much on a Queen kick at the moment too so some of them mixed in between all that.

I’m reading My Life by Bill Clinton, finally out in paperback. It’s allright, I dislike intensely how from the start he writes about something and then says that’s why I did something when I was president etc. The way he says it all comes out very wrong and every second person he talks about get some fancy job down the line. Saying that I’m enjoying it and as I’m only coming up to the mid-eighties now, quite a lot to go!

I like fixing things. I’m not always very good at it, but when it does all work out it’s a lovely feeling of satisfaction. My email client in work died on me Thursday afternoon, very badly. It would load right up and then the entire exe would just die, not recoverable and no useful info in any logs I could find. Saved my profile elsewhere and reinstalled with no joy. Put the profile back in and then started taking bits and pieces out. Eventually when I edited my inbox in a text editor I found the cause. The top email was an image of somesort and as soon as it tried to render boom. So deleted it in the text file, saved it and bingo, all was good. Ok, so that was fairly minor and some of you are scoffing and perhaps rightly so, my only point is that I figured it out and made it work again and that felt good.

As I mentioned above, next weekend is Download. A half day Thursday and then I’m all off on the train to Donnington. Hurrah for a weekend of camping and rocking. It should be good fun. A couple of the lads from work are headed there and a couple of other friend of friends. We shall all hook up and have a good time. A good bit of music to get excited about. Garbage again should be awesome, never let me down live. Sunday night should be the perfect end, Slayer, Slipknot and SOAD. Monday will hurt, a lot. Can’t wait.

I was sitting here thinking, yay Post Secret will update soon and it just has! It’s a small joy but one that I look forward to each and every Saturday night. Mileage can and does vary but such is the way with everything. Perhaps someday I’ll send something in. I’m sure I can cover the secret part but I’m not sure I can cover the artistic part. Probably not for either actually.

I love it when a plan comes together! I hate it when a plan comes apart! Everything was all setup and ready to go and then all of a sudden boom. Given the amount of effort that went into that plan, I’m not sure there will be another one anytime soon 🙁

I started going to Primary school in 1984. As it happens there were three kids my age living in the house next door to us going to the same school. So I use to get a lift in from their dad most mornings. It was all pretty handy for a few years. There was always a tape playing in the car in the mornings and there was a song that I loved that it took me several years to find out who played it. As it turns out having just done some googling, the tape was Queen’s The Works. One of my older cousins while babysitting for us told me at the time that it was Queen and the song was I Want to Break Free. I would look forward to the journey every morning, hoping that in the short time I was in the car, it would come around again. I since have the album and a whole lot of Queen’s other stuff. Fantastic band, I’d love to have caught them live. There is an awesome version of the tune on Live Magic, it just opens with the crowd singing and I love love love the first 5 seconds. It captured what the expierence of seeing them live must have been like.

Bored and feeling somewhat down.

I go walking in the park with a part of me hoping to get rained on.

Gigs for the year. Someone was asking the other night.

June 10 – 13 Download Festival. Garbage, Velvet Revolver, Slipknot, Slayer, System of a Down and much more.
June 16th Billy Corgan
June 21st U2 (Scotland)
June 24th U2 (Dublin!)
June 30th Ryan Adams
July 9th R.E.M.
July 10th Sigur Ros
July 11th Bright Eyes
July 12th Funeral For A Friend
August 19th 22-20s
August 25th Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

With lots more to follow 🙂

No trains this morning so I’m late. I find my boss is off ill, my call which I put the boot down to get here for has been canned and I’m getting hassle from someone who isn’t even in the office to meet with me.

Not a good start to my day.

–> Stressed.

Not as badly as I thought I would be. I wasn’t looking forward to today so much, I’m taking on a lot of extra stuff for the next couple of months covering a colleague who is away. I’m already covering quite a bit of other new stuff and every now and again it feels like it’s going to overwhelm me, it never does and it’s not just all for me, there is another person doing it with me and more support than I could possibly ask for from the rest of the team which rocks.

So it didn’t start too well this morning, there was an email already mentioning that a report was a day overdue. It was of course a bank holiday here and that was fine but it didn’t help that I did not even know what was meant to be in the bloody report. It took a while on the phone to figure out where I was. I should have made sure I was copied on everything from a week ago so I knew what I had to build on. Ah well, I got it all forwarded onto me and then I was able to sort it out.

I’m a lot less stressed now than I was, I’ve spent the day working on both of these other projects and so far so good. Everything I need to do is done and done pretty well I think. I probably had no real reason to stress and indeed I probably don’t have any reason to still do so, but it never really works like that. I’m going to stress anyway, that’s just me!

At the same time, it’s nice knowing that I’ve made it through day one and it’s all gone well. OK so it’s not much but it’s meetings and calls and people and deadlines and information sharing and other such fun, it’s business as usual but most importantly, nothing went wrong and so thusly I shall continue.

The weekend was good. Friday was a couple of very quiet drinks with various people in various places. It was really nice outside and so we all sat out and chatted which was good. Saturday I wandered around for a while and picked up some comics for the first time in a while. Nothing much of any interest and I’m really going to cut back on what I’m reading. As soon as Bendis on Daredevil is over, it’s the end of singles for me.

Saturday night…well that was messy. A few of us hit The Ship for Guinness, good music and good company and all three were plentiful. Then Neil and I carried on in Crowbar just up the road. I had no cash left on me at that stage so I was using plastic…and of course there was a minimum. So a couple of rounds in there meant bourbon shots and my god did I feel it. Around 2am Neil was heading off, I had a half a bottle left and decided I would stay on to finish it. I stood up from the wall I was leaning against and the entire room spun really really badly. So I got out of there and struggled home. Sunday morning, painful…well…make that Sunday afternoon.

A couple of quiet drinks with Alex that evening which was nice as we haven’t been out for a catch-up in a while and then an earlyish night.

Monday, just general faffing around before meeting Alastair and another friend for a preview of Sin City which was excellent. I enjoyed it a whole lot, nothing quite looks like it and the visuals were every bit as good as expected. Cast were all excellent and some seemed to be having whole lots of fun with it. Over around 9, a single pint for a post-mortem and then an early night to bed…

Except that I was bored and I logged into CoH…*ding* 38. I have no idea what power I want. I think this is going to have to go to test and then perhaps a respec. I don’t want more toggles but I may be very limited in my choices.

Tonight, out to dinner after work and then it’s Wednesday already!

Ok so the current PPPoA network in the UK is being toned down at the moment and PPPoE is having it’s day. It’s a simple update to the modem drivers and that one has gone fine on two computers.

But it’s completely fucked what I laughingly refer to as the network here. My computer has the modem in a USB port and it does all the connection. Then a network cable runs into a hub and then Alex gets a cable from the hub and all is good.

Your typical gateway setup, I’m 192.168.0.1 on 255.255.255.0 and she’s 192.168.0.2 and uses mine as a gateway. ICS is all up and running the PPPoE connection is shared and once that’s active it creates the LAN and bingo things are away.

Except Alex’s computer can’t see a single thing. I can’t ping anything, I can’t get any sort of connectivity yet it insists it has a network connection and all is fine. If the internet connection is not active on my machine, her laptop will call it…despite as far as I can tell it not acknowledging any connection.

Is there something I’m missing with ICS through PPPoE?

Yes I know I should just get a router but why bother spending the money when it’s perfectly workable this way (in theory…)