h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Deb

Yes, the Leonid meteor shower occurs every November. Saturday night should be a good time to look up.

I'm aware that this post is so late that it is already Saturday 16th in some parts of Europe. On the other hand, Amy Pawloski can read this for another 7 hours before she moves into Saturday.

Today I spent a lot of time in work preparing for Sunday - I have to work more-or-less a full day's work on Sunday, from 8am to about 4. This is very rare and I'm not complaining. I have very good reasons not to complain, which I may get around to telling you about on Sunday while I'm waiting for things to happen.

My father was a devout Catholic, and a thoughtful one. He didn't agree with everything that the hierarchy in Rome decided, and could quote scriptures to show he was right and they were wrong. The Church, he would say, is the people, not the priesthood. His local church held a ceremony of remembrance this evening for all the parishioners who died in the last year, and since it is only 10 months since he passed away, I went along. I brought up a special candle with his name on it at the appropriate point in the ceremony and lit it from the Paschal candle. I'm not a believer, but I have no problem in joining with other people in remembering the good people who have died.

It was quite late by the time we got home, so we didn't feel like cooking, and had takeaway pizza.

Tomorrow, Mrs G and Iz are going to Ikea to get the inside bits for Iz's wardrobe. I built the shell a few weeks back, but it needs drawers, rails etc. I don't intend to go. I'm sure there will be plenty for me to do at home.

Quick note to say that Mrs G has sold her late father's house. All the work we did on it paid off.

We'll have to remove all the furniture we left in it to make it look like a nice place to live in. And there's a shed at the end of the garden which needs to be cleared out as well. But not bad for a few months' work.

Congradulations on selling the houe... I don't know what the housing markets like over there; It seems so varible all over the UK thesedays, even town to town, or stree to street variations, and being winter its useually* not a good/quick time for selling

Oh, and back a few days... that exploding cake with twice the sugar... tempting...

I remember Hoovooloo tried to put an exploding cake recipe into the Guide to show how bad Peer Review was, but someone copped it.

I'm just jealous when I read how practical you are!

As for the broccoli, I'd not use it myself, but cabbage and cauliflower work okay, particularly if you use turmeric/mustard seed/ginger combination as the spice base.

Congrats on the Goulash recipe.

Deb

How do you mix cabbage and cauliflower? They are such different shapes, doesn't it look rather odd?

My sister, former h2g2 researcher Azara, also suggested that cauliflower would work better than broccolu, particular if combined with mustard.

Spent a lot of time measuring our attic and then drawing it out on a plan. Our roof has a very shallow slope so the attic is very low, far too low to ever make a room (I can't even stand up straight at the highest point), but it's good for storage. We're trying to figure out a way of storing things more efficiently - ie, fitting more stuff up there.

Mrs G and Iz went to Ikea today and came back with lots of bits and pieces for me to fit into Iz's new Ikea wardrobe. There were sliding wire rack drawers, shelves, and a clothes rail. Most of it was straightforward (only one thing actually required me to drill anything) but it still took a couple of hours to get it all in place. Meanwhile, Mrs G cleaned out the aquarium and bathed the guinea pigs (they have quite long hair, so they need to be bathed every few weeks).

We decided to treat ourselves to a takeaway from a new Indian restaurant ("Indian Summer"). The food was very good; among the best Indian food I've tasted. It was recommended to us by an Indian co-worker of Mrs G.

Now I'm enjoying a glass of champagne (Moet & Chandon, my favourite) as I type this. But I'll have to get to bed early, as I'm due in work tomorrow at 8am. Mostly what I'll be doing is co-ordinating other people, so I hope to have plenty of spare time during the day to explain what's going on.

Now I think I will play "Words of Wonder" for a bit. This is a word puzzle game that comes with Facebook. I was stuck for the last week or so, because to get past a certain point I have to either solve three difficult puzzles or get support from my friends and for some reason the friends feature wasn't working. I'd post the request, but my friends never saw it, so they couldn't respond. And I was only given one attempt at a puzzle per day, so it took me a few days to get them all done. But I've passed that hurdle now, so I can play again for another 20 levels or so.

I'll talk to you all again in the morning.

I'm here in work on a Sunday morning. I've been here since 7:30, and it looks as if we won't be finished until around 4pm.

We have two data centres where we keep all our production data and applications. One is in the north of Dublin and the other in the West. We're supposed to be able to run our entire company from either, in the event that the other one fails. So every six months or so, we switch our entire system to the other data centre, which proves that it can work there. It's a big job, and much of the services our company offers are unavailable while this is happening, so we try to do it on a Sunday when the demand is low.

I wasn't due to do this job. It was supposed to be done by my co-worker A, but his daughter has been very ill for the last four weeks. She only came out of hospital on Friday evening. So the managers didn't think it was fair on A for him to spend Sunday in work. I volunteered to do the work instead.

There's not much happening in Dublin at the moment. My daughter will be conducting the Trinity Chapel Choir as I type this - they have their Anglican Communion Service at 10:45. Things will liven up a bit in the afternoon, with tourists, people doing their Christmas shopping and so on. I don't intend to venture out, for food, coffee or anything else. I'll see this task through, then go home.

I'll get two days off work to make up for the day I'm spending here today. Might do something nice with them.

I dream about being somewhere we can do a DR test like that. My business works 24x7 and there is failover resiliency built in at component level to route through to the other data centre in the case of problems. We simply can't fail over the whole shebang.

Well, I say it's resilient. In practice there are many single points of failure which we're getting around to redesigning, but it's costing a lot of money. Fortunately it fails so often we're finding and fixing them every other day.

Deb

reddit

(caught up with whole thread now. )

The work is all done now (14:40) and we're waiting while the users test it. It could take them up to about 15:30 to confirm that the system is working in its new location without any funny effects. In the meantime, we have to hang around in case they find anything wrong.

With luck, they won't find any problems and I'll be heading home at about half three.

They haven't found any problems, but they're still testing. It's 4:15 pm and getting dark. The cars have their headlights on, although I can still see clearly. I'd like to go home.

Finally got the go-ahead at 4:45pm, so I headed home at 5 and am now at home.



I think I might have a couple of glass of tonight.

Good for you, I hate to drink alone.

I was glad to get home from work today, after having worked all of yesterday - Mrs G had cooked a vegetarian lasagne yesterday for this evening, because we're always in a great rush between work and choir.

Choir itself was good - we had a different conductor, and he took us through one of the Byrd motets "Vigilate" in great detail. I was the only first bass today. Being the only one singing your particular notes means you have to concentrate very hard, but you get a great sense of achievement when you finally get it right.

This week is shaping up to be a busy one: Tuesday, dinner and some drinks with some people from work; Wednesday, window cleaner coming, lunch with sister, (another) mass of remembrance for my father; Thursday, big choir; Friday, guy coming to update our house alarm, both daughters performing in "Noyes Fludde" by Benjamin Britten; Saturday, putting up curtain rail for brother-in-law; Sunday nothing planned yet but I'm sure something will turn up.

Heading out in a few minutes for dinner with some people from work. If I get a chance, I'll let you know later this evening how it worked out.