Eirglish

Where have I been?

Apologies for going awol.

Due to the time of year work is mental and as with anything, the more pressure you put on the IT systems the more frequently people find ways of breaking stuff. Or they just make you think that stuff is broken. The latest example of this is one of our sites MPLS lines failing. We go through all of the usually diagnostics with the staff on site who maintain nothing has changed and all is well. We reset all of the equipment a couple of times and when this fails we refer it to the MPLS provider.

About 24 hours later they come back and say the line has been tested twice and all is clear but they are getting no signal from the modem. A couple of phone calls back to site and then comes the inevitable “Oh, hang on!” *pause *hear clicking noise “Yeah, that modem was switched off!”

The desire to get myself down to that site to do some severe beating was huge. Had it have been a bit closer that four hours drive away I may have given in. So, User of the month goes to…….. well, them!

Apart form that all is normal. Snooze and I went to see Top Gear Live at the RDS again last night. An hour and a half of roaring engines and stupidity really but was very enjoyable. Clarkson was hung over again. It would appear that they just start drinking the second they get off the plane. I suppose this is normal for lads holidays to Ireland!

Finally, this afternoon I have an appointment to try out contact lenses (again). Things didn’t go so well the last time. I was OK getting the things in but I had such hassle removing one it got to the point where the optician had to use the scope thingy to check if it was still in or not. I had somehow managed to remove it in my fumbled attempts. I left that day with bloodshot eyes and a serious headache. It was seven years ago so I’m hoping this time will be better.

So, that’s me up to date! Here’s something to make you chuckle!

Many happy wotsits!

Tis my brothers birthday today! Happy birthday bruv! Hope you get everything you wish for! So the big party is next year eh?

Now, getting older isn’t a reason to blame your aging memory for not getting me details for the kids Christmas presents! I really will start a spamming campaign against you. As it’s your birthday I’ll let you off with this public announcement and I’ll even put up a Foo Fighters video for you!

Happy birthday again dude!

Hot Spot.

The New Simon’s cat!

Always make me chuckle!

Poxy!

Poxy back, poxy weather, poxy footy!

The back is getting better but no quick enough for my liking. I know, it serves me right for doing stuff around the house. Wont be making that mistake again. Well, not for a while anyway.

The weather over here is flippin’ terrible as well. We seem to be getting absolutely hammered by rain constantly. There seems to be widespread flooding across the country resulting in images like this.

Not good biking weather! The cats are none to impressed with it either.

Moving on to the last poxy. I don’t normally do football but I happened to watch the latter part of the Ireland versus France match last night and am somewhat astounded Henry actually managed to get away with a handball offence not once, but twice and in doing so enabled France to take the win. I honestly don’t understand why in soccer they haven’t introduced another official to watch video evidence? But hey ho, every dog has their day and all that.

Toodle pip for now.

What you get!

Snooze is away for a couple of days and I thought I would get the stuff shifted around as a small surprise for her. I managed to shift all of the required guff into the loft with few problems and got the other bits a pieces moved around as required.

All seemed to go remarkable well right up until I attempted to get out of bed this morning and realised I’d done some damage to my lower back. I think I might have tweaked a sciatic nerve. I’m OK when I’m sitting and I’m not to bad when I standing and walking. The real problem is negotiating between the two! This meant for an interesting “roll out of bed and hit the deck” maneuver to enable me to get to a standing position from the bed!

I never used to suffer from as many back complaints as I do these days. I blame it entirely on the stupid tart who was driving the car that slammed into us last December. It’s when things like this happen I am tempted to pop round to her house and punch her in the nose just so she can share some of the pain.

Unfortunately riding a bike in this condition isn’t too easy so I’ll stick with being collapsed on the sofa watching telly! I might even prepare tomorrow nights dinner if I’m feeling adventurous. Maybe a sausage casserole done in the slow cooker? I just have to hope that Misty doesn’t get up on the counter to try and investigate the smell.

Also, If Snooze gets home and moans about where I’ve put stuff I’ll batter her (when my back is better!)

Superstition

I’m not normally superstitious. Walking under ladders, black cats, brollys indoors and all that really don’t have that much of an effect on me. I’ve been reprimanded numerous times in the past for doing things that other people believe will bring bad luck. I kind of just shrug my shoulders and carry on regardless. That is of course unless it’s my mother in which case I apologise and do as I’m told.

During my employment in my current company we’ve suffered varying IT related problems ranging from “meh” through “oh crap” and right up to “where did you say my P45 is?” They always seem to happen at the most inopportune moments. Tis for these reasons that today I scheduled absolutely nothing. It wasn’t worth the risk as far as I was concerned. Still the phone calls of weird stuff going wrong started no sooner had I put the key in the office door.

The first was a printer going wrong. this is OK I thought. I can deal with simple things like this. Got another one sent to site and a couple of hours later it needed configuring. This is where the new one goes screwy and takes over an hour to get sorted. Thankfully I wasn’t the one doing it but G looked as though his head was about to explode. Switches started going slow for no reason, test server upgrades did weird things, scanners that arrived broken amazingly fixed themselves (typically Irish!). Nothing serious went wrong but the day was full little failures.

It’s probably a good job we had the loft ladder fitted earlier in the week. It was like a hammer house of horrors then so god only knows what it would have been like today! To keep the story short the job of fitting the loft ladder and flooring the loft ended up needing a trip to casualty, six stitches in one of the guys face, a few x-rays and then a bit of an electrical glitch that knocked out some of the upstairs lights and I think nearly fried our sparky coz the guy that wired the house was clearly drunk! But hey, we got the loft ladder which is the main thing.

I now have room to store the Xmas tree in the loft rather than the shed (for all of four weeks!). This makes room in the shed for the garden shredder which is in the garage and that makes room for the garage stuff that’s in the utility room. Once the utility room is clear we might actually get around to decorating it. Note, I did say “might”! The chances of this happening this side of the new year are pretty remote I grant you.

Right, that was my boring week! Have some music to match the title…

Never forget….

To communicate! Phone, mail, text or whatever…. Just do it as often as you can. It’s probably a good thing to tell those closest to you that you care every so often as well. They’ll probably think you’re mental and that you’ve lost the plot completely but the chances are they knew that about you deep down anyway.

So I decided to get myself a little pressie. I think it’ll look good next to the stetson on the wall behind me. I decided it was lonely up there on it’s own and needed a little company. I’m sure I’ll bring it out for an airing every once in a while if only to bug the hell out of Snooze! It’ll make a change from a baseball cap or crash helmet!

Last but not least a song. It’s been piddling with rain for days over here so this is appropriate on multiple levels!

G.O.

More spookyness!

To add to my spooky weekend I decided to take in a couple of movies and watched the following:

Doghouse (Lower budget British zombie flick)

I was (in cockney lundun axent) “well cagey” about this due to the casting of Danny Dyer. It was however very funny and well worth the viewing time consumed.

The second movie was:

Zombieland (Much higher budget hollywood zombie flick)

This was a cool film. The first few minutes nearly made me choke to death due to excessive laughter. Pretty good from start to finish and again well worth the time wasted watching it.

So, all in all a good spook filled night!

Prepared for spookyness!

We were this year. Did the sweety shopping trip earlier this week to ensure we had plenty of tooth rot to go around!

Normally we don’t get too many callers. I like to think that this is due to my reputation for being an unpleasant and mean child hater. I honestly doubt this is really the case though. Due to the lack of trick or treaters we usually have loads of sweets left over which go to the kids next door. I’m sure they like it and the dentist will no doubt appreciate the extra business.

So Snooze has left me alone to deal with the little darlings this year while she enjoys harassing some unsuspecting houses with her niece and nephews. The only problem with this being that this year there has been a nice steady stream of them. Every time I go to do something the doorbell goes and we’re getting decidedly low on chocolaty substances. Hopefully there wont be too many more otherwise I’ll start dishing out apples which I’m sure will make me popular.

Maybe the recession has caused more kids to take to the street in search of freebies? Could the parents have been forced to reduce pocket money and as such this is the only route left for them to use. I honestly hope not as this would mean that we’ll get a shed load of carol singers starting on December first and that might cause me to become violent!

Anyhoo, Happy Halloween to you all!

Bank holiday spin

Finally got out on the bike for a good spin this morning with the brother in law. I thought it was all going to go pear shaped as work called at just before eight but it turned out to be a nice simple case of user error (who’d a thunk it!)

So we met up at just after nine and headed off for a nice jolly of some fun roads with some good twisty bits. Leisurely covering somewhere between 150 and 200 Km’s in a couple of hours. Plenty of time for a couple of cups of tea to keep us going. I’ve done the google maps thing of the route but to be honest it may not be completely accurate!

We both had a bit of a twitchy moment on some loose gravel but that’s part of the fun of biking. I got a bit over zealous on a couple of corners but that’s what the back break is for.

I think this is what I needed to get reacquainted with my bike since she was violated and it did just that. Hopefully it wont be the last of the year! Same again the next time the weather’s good D?