M and I were mooching around our local Netto store for some bargain or other when we came across the rows of 2L Coke Zero bottles. It’s that there new diet/sugar-free version of the cola and we figured we’d give it a go to see what all the fuss is about.
Turns out it’s actually very nice indeed. It’s very smooth, much like Diet Coke, and doesn’t taste too radically different from the original. Served with ice, it’s pretty good. Between us, we polished off the 2L bottle in under 24 hours and that’s pretty good going for us.
I also noticed that it’s very dark. Maybe it’s my memory going, or the fact that I always used to drink Tesco Value Sugar-Free Cola, but the actual colour of Coke Zero is a very thick black, with not a great deal of light getting through at all. It’s not quite up there with Guinness black, but it’s pretty close. Wasn’t Coke always a reddish-brown colour?
Especially when the work’s web server disappears off the face of the Internet sometime on Sunday and then reappears full of out-of-date websites. Oh I really don’t f*cking like THOSE kind of Mondays.
And the ones where you ring the server company and give them an earful, only to get an imbecile who doesn’t understand that you’re renting the entire server, not just one domain thereon, and then says that your usual contact is no longer your contact, and who arranges for an email reference to be, well, emailed to you.
Only to have the email server fall over. And the SSH server. And the Admin server.
And then the customers – oh God, the customers – who all discover that they can’t get at their email at roughly the same time on a Monday morning, and decide to ring you at the same time. Understandable, because it’s their business suffering here, but it’s not fun while it’s going on.
Did I mention that I really really don’t like Mondays?
I haven’t actually been anywhere mind you, it’s just been crazy hot weather and too many things to do. Such as!
Server Crash!
Not this one, thankfully, but while copying some MySQL tables via phpMyAdmin the server spat it’s dummy and deleted all the databases, plus a few email accounts and even the odd website for good measure. This happened on a Friday afternoon as well – what a great weekend I had!
Hemswell Car Boot
Decided to get rid of a shedload of stuff at Hemswell and managed to sell a few books, some CDs, my spare UPS and a pretty decent chessboard amongst other things. Made the best part of £90 before coming back with sunburn.
Heatwave!
Britain is basically melting this week and nobody wants to do anything. I heard earlier on t’news that temperatures may hit 39°C here. I’ve had 33°C in my office and that was bad enough in just my pants – I can’t imaging what 39 is going to feel like. Maybe I should set up a webcam and point it at the thermometer so you can all see how bad it is. Heh.
Work work work.
Lots of work going on last week with two large projects finishing. For that reason I’ve been swapping between the two and trying to keep both sets of clients happy. Sometimes I get a thirty minutes to myself before the phone starts ringing again. Sigh…
Dreamcast!
Actually, not much to tell here. I bought one at Hemswell for a fiver and got another on eBay and I was going to bid on a load of games but forgot to, so I don’t have anything to play on it yet. I’m looking to get into the whole DC malarky again because, let’s face it, the Dreamcast was the Best Console Ever.
Went out to visit my sister last night and it turned out that she doesn’t currently have a video recorder or a DVD player. Well we can certainly help with the former since we have at least two (that we know of) sat here doing nothing. I have an older JVC in my office for the odd occasion that I need a VCR and my Sharpe has been sat in the cupboard ever since we bought the Panasonic TU-CTH100 PVR.
So I make some vague promise to get the Sharpie out and forget about it until today. I found the video recorder without problems but couldn’t for the life of me remember what we’d done with the remote control. Two hours later and I’m still none the wiser, but I’ve discovered an extensive collection of cables I didn’t know I had, liberally spread out around the office.
It appears I have a cable for every occasion. Huzzah!
Off the top of my head (no, I’m not going to catalogue them properly!) there’s 2 USB cables, a Centronics printer cable, several power leads (including a US ‘clover-leaf’ one), a null modem cable, a serial sable, something which looks like a null modem but with opposite-genter connectors, a Playstion RF cable, an NEC e616-to-USB cable, my entire Kodak DX3700 camera and cable collection, several IDE and floppy cables, sound card cables, CD-Rom audio cables, Phono cables, Scart blocks, Scart to Video/Phono cables, RF leads and god knows what else.
I’ve coiled them all up and bagged them where possible and put them all into a huge carrier bag which.. well actually it’s currently sitting there waiting for a new home. I can’t bring myself to throw any of the cables out, though I did draw the line at one-ended RF cables from the 60’s. Ugh.
In the process I’ve even turned up some potentially sellable hardware bits like harddrives and CD-Roms. I also found a CD-Writer I didn’t know I had, plus the aforementioned Kodak camera, a 17min UPS, 4 USB Snake Lights and a Microsoft Natural Keyboard that had gone slightly yellow. Looks like I’m going to Hemswell Market and Car Boot Sale next week!
Just checked the admin email account for the other company I work for and we’ve suddenly got 20,000 emails clogging everything up. What the blinking flip?!? Almost every one is a message from Cron along the lines of:
We only actually found out about this because I checked the email account to see if there was an error message from sendmail. A client’s new server has decided to stop sending out email shortly before their site goes live (and right before I demonstrated how ace the site was – argh!) and it turns out that somewhere in the bowels of the machine the IP address for domain.com is still pointing to the old server. www.domain.com is fine, and domain.com is still resolving correctly from anywhere on the internet, but internally the IP address for domain.com is wrong.
Or at least is was. Ping from within the server now resolves correctly but email still isn’t getting out. I’ve given up for the weekend, too – heheheh.
The heatwave that has tortured the residents of the UK for the past week or so has finally broken, leaving today cool and overcast as opposed to scorching hot and blindingly bright. The heat has made sitting in the office almost unbearable and even doing light work around the house has become a rather sweaty experience. Temperatures in the office upstairs have passed 33°C on a few occasions, even with the window open.
Last night I went out shopping and could hear the thunder rumbling overhead as I made my way around the store. I was delayed at the checkour but could see through a fire escape that it wasn’t actually raining. Of course, once I actually stepped outside, the heavens opened and the whole area was absolutely drenched with those huge, splattery raindrops that have an individual, physical impact when they hit you.
The drive home was only short, but it was slow. At times I couldn’t see the road clearly at all but on the whole it wasn’t too bad. Grimsby’s drainage system was temporarily overwhelmed by the deluge and many drains were a couple of inches deep in water. It eased off a little by the time I got home and settled down to a steady fall.
