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

[Amy P]

Wed 26th of November

Beautiful cold clear morning. Sun due to rise in 45 minutes. I can see Jupiter high in the southwest. All the other bright stars look unfamiliar because they're not in their usual places.

Today in work we're going to do what we intended to do three weeks ago. We're upgrading one of our major systems. I've been preparing for this for about a year. So I'll work today and take Friday off indtead.

There's a definite frost. That's the first I've seen this year.

Sorry, I mean this winter.

[Amy P]

Deb

Well, our upgrade worked very nicely. Everything happened exactly as expected - we may uncover a few oddities tomorrow, but in general the system us now running on new servers, new operating system, new database and a slightly upgraded version of the system itself. This is about five years overdue, so I'm delighted it worked without a hitch. I did most of it myself, and since I had done it twice before in trial runs, I knew exactly what was going to happen even down to the error messages that had to be ignored at various points.

The only part I couldn't test in advance was the part that delayed us - we were trying to test the new system by sending a small file and someone had written into the system that if the file was small it wasn't to bother sending it because it couldn't be genuine. Took a while to figure that one out.

Tomorrow I'll sit back and wait for the complaints to come in, but tonight I'm celebrating.

[Amy P]

Thur 27 Nov

Another fine, frosty morning. Jupiter was very prominent again. I have routes to the tram in the morning. I took the longer one today as it better view of the sky. it was from a point along this route that I saw Mercury on two occasions in the past.

Today the day is 8 hours and 6 minutes long from sunrise to sunset. I believe it gets down to 7 hours 30 minutes on the shortest day.

[Amy P]

Here the weather is grey and drizzly. No chance of seeing planets or

Deb

An eventful day in work - after yesterday's upgrade, there were various things that no longer worked, because nobody had realised they were tied to the location of our system, for no apparent reason.

I spent most of the day learning how to delete stuff out of the database to speed up various programs which were inundated with old data. Most of it is sorted now, so I'm taking tomorrow off (to make up for working on my Wednesday off).

This evening, we had what was officially the last rehearsal before the day of the concert, but everybody agreed we could do another run through of everything, so we've another rehearsal on Sunday afternoon. Then the concert is on Monday night. But because it is the 1st of December, the National Concert Hall are going to have a special "turning on the Christmas lights" ceremony and since we'll be there anyway, we've been asked to sing at it. So it'll be a busy day on Monday. I may take a half day from work.

[Amy P]

Fri 28 Nov 2014

Day off. I plan to drive Iz over to her college and then go to Costa for coffee. Our coffee maker is still out of order, waiting for a spare part.

Then I have to do some digging. Mrs G's apple trees have arrived so I need to clear the raspberries out of the side flowerbed and dig holes for the three trees to go into.

The toy show is on tonight and El is inviting her friends around for a toy show party so Mrs G and I will go out for dinner, probably to the tapas place in Dundrum. The toy show is a 2 hour programme on National TV presenting all the best and latest toys that people might like to ask Santy for. The toys are presented by small children who are extremely clear about what they like or don't like. It can be hilarious. There are also lots of children dancing, singing and being cute.

[Amy P]

I dug out all the marigolds, raspberries and anl climbing shrub which had died when the gardeners raised the level of the garden to improve drainage. That's enough digging for today. Now I'm on my way into town to collect a pair of shoes from the cobbler.