Well, not really.. but close enough!

So far 3 of the 5 man Department I work in, have came down with a heavy illness (I know in some places it might be referred to as “Man Flu”) leaving just myself and Jaymes (my boss) in here.
Well, Jaymes would be here if he wasnt with his pregnant wife at the natal clinic having another check-up done. Which leaves me as the only fit and able bodied person in the department today.
Thank god one of the 3 aircon units was still switched on this morning when I walked in, or there would of been problems!

For a quick recap, our server room is a small-ish room set somewhat in the “middle” of the building, with no natural forms of ventilation (i.e. windows or vents) and it contains up to 40 servers and associated networking equipment, in an enclosed space with a roof mounted Aircon unit, and two wall mounted ones.

So, when you walk into a supposed “cold” room only to discover that its warmer than your office.. you do somewhat panic! luckily none of our servers suffered due to the heat and its all functioning properly.
I suspect a quick e-mail to the rest of the department saying “please check all aircon units are switched on before you leave, and DO NOT SWITCH THEM OFF” would be beneficial just in case.

On other things… I hate TdC even more (Mr. Alphanor there on the sidebar) as I have now gotten Battlefield 2142 to play (I wonder if he will read this!) And after the disaster which was Battlefield 2 and its patching woes, it seems DICE still havnt sorted it out (current hate: Servers which auto-switch you without warning in the middle of games when you die for no apparant reason)

Oh, and Zootfly got “slapped” by Sony Pictures over the Ghostbusters videos they posted on Youtube, so the stuff down below wont be working any more 🙁 at least the TimeO stuff is still there!

Happy new year 😀

Well for some people, when you wake up on NYD and listen to the news that a 5yr old girl gets killed by a pitbull which could be a dangerous breed, guess some years start off better than others.  Your heart can only go out to the family for the suffering they will go through, because her uncle decided to keep a deadly weapon 🙁
An interesting aside, Ballymena has started a “Pitbull Amnesty” to allow owners of dangerous breeds to hand them in without fear of prosecution.

Given this blog a new “facelift” with the Ocadia theme, its another fixed-width theme so I would put money that GalleryEmbedded doesnt work right, partually due to me putting up huge-ass pictures. The sad part is that I have to manually edit the theme to put in the correct date (none of this shit-ass American date crap for us here!)

Oh, and working on a square monitor after over a week of 24″ widescreen goodness (see post below) makes a HUGE difference, wonder if we can perswade management to buy us DVI capable graphics cards and widescreen monitors for work.  They really do make a hell of a difference when working on loads of stuff!

Well christmas has been and gone, Back to work today (and its really quiet!) and stuffing ourselves with turkey and ham sandwiches, really getting sick of turkey already :( 

The shop was hectic on the run-up to Christmas (it was closed Sunday to give everyone a rest from working) with two vans on the run, the second van was a Nissan Kubistar generously loaned to us by Charles Hurst (Nissan) in Mallusk for over 4 days to help with deliveries.  Even with two vans we still had to resort to family members doing errands around the place (I found myself thursday morning on my first day “off” from work, driving to Belfast to pick up stuff for the shop!)

Now on another note, I would like to point the finger of blame to a select few of the Generalites on Freddyshouse for a recent purchase.  I recently invested £560 in a lovely great big Dell 2407WFP 24″ Widescreen TFT monitor, They had massive discount on it recently so I quickly snuck in and picked one up direct from Dell themselves.
It now sits pride of place on my desk, wired up to my Main computer.. and the Xbox 360 (and it does HD which makes it even more spoogeworthy)

I now Curse you all! especially TdC and Ch3tan! Welcome to the dark side!

Overtime sucks, but not as bad as when you arnt paid for the overtime.

Its always interesting when your overtime is paid in Flexi Time, which you cant really take because its that time of year that everyones taking off (me included)
Your stuck with 20 odd hours of flexi which needs to be taken, it could be as simple as leaving an hour early every day, but its always feels nicer taking a day off with all the flexi hours accrued 🙂

Right, now to get back to what I was doing… hopefully get to finish early as well!