Matt White

The humidity has been building for the last couple of days so it finally spurred me to go and buy a ceiling fan for my bedroom. It all looked pretty simple but me and DIY don’t mix so I prepared for a long battle.

Surprisingly there were no real problems fitting it, the current light fitting was already on a joist so I didn’t need to do anything extra to support it. While I was working the storm broke and there was almighty thunder and lightning show. It only occurred to me afterwards that playing around with mains electrics in the middle of an electrical storm was maybe not so sensible.

Anyway I lived to tell the tale and now I might be able to get some proper sleep.

My broadband is back up after 6 days. The episode has shown me how dependant I have become on it, I really must try to cut down a bit I think.

Talking of habit building, staying up in London last night has shown, again, how much time I waste on the train every day. I wonder, when I start the proper commute again, whether I’ll find myself thinking about moving to London on a more permanent basis?

I am staying up in London for a couple of nights in my second home for the next few weeks. The hotel does offer broadband but at a frankly extortionate price of 50 pence per minute so even I am not up for that. Luckily my room this week is in range of an open wireless hotspot so I am connected for free. My sincere thanks to whomever I am leeching off.

After an hour on the phone this morning there was still no progress on the broadband. Apparently my account was terminated by mistake and it will take a few days to get it set up again. Originally they said 14 but after I explained my issues with that (massive understatement) we have negotiated it down to 2 days (although I still assume it will take a week or so).

Apart from that I’ve had a productive day writing some code which doesn’t happen very often any more. Now I just have to build myself up for my first attempt at the trains tomorrow morning.

Broadband is still down and I am reduced to a snail-like phone line. It has been 4 days now and I can confidently say that my life is quite considerably different without a fast network connection… and I don’t like it.

I am assured that my line will be fixed tomorrow but then they said that on Friday as well.

My broadband connection has blown up over the last couple of days so apart from me getting all jittery not being able to access the internet it means that 50WordReview is unavailable as it runs on my home server.

I am chasing BT at the moment but they are famously difficult to deal with.

In fact, thinking back, and given the weather here at the moment I would rather be somewhere warm and sunny at the moment. Oh yes, I forgot, I’m off to Washington DC in a couple of weeks 🙂

You may remember that the family went to Florida last Christmas. Well the final chapter of that finished today. I have been battling since then to get the deposit for the house back from the owner. It hasn’t been easy and for various reasons I can’t put too much here but as of this morning the whole thing is finished. It shouldn’t have been this hard though.

After moaning about doing application support yesterday I was made to feel rather churlish this morning. One of the first line support people popped round to my desk this morning to give the team a box of chocolates for all the help yesterday.

How guilty do I feel now?

It’s going to be a fairly tough week. One of the team is on holiday so I have picked up all of the third line support for his app. Coincidentally one of my other apps seems to be especially active at the moment. Together these mean that I won’t get any, what I consider, “real” work done this week.

It’s a necessary part of the job but not especially interesting or rewarding. However, because of the stop-start nature of the work I have been reading up on my Websphere training. I am trying to decide if I should book a course (the expensive option) or continue to try and teach myself.

Any advice from people who have been in this position would be appreciated.