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Home News Monday 1996-09-23

Well, the nice long weekend is over, nice to be back home in Winchester that is, not nice from a weather point of view, that was pretty crap. This weekend was maily spent at home with Maggie and the kids doing sewing and arts and craft stuff and me working a bit on the house, trying to improve the insulation a bit for what is going to be a cold winter. I was also supposed to fix Nickys bed but somehow never got around to that, so she is still making do with the spare bed.

We went out yesterday despite the weather which was pretty miserable and cold. First stop was "The White Swan" for some lunch and a Forsters (I have gone back to Lagers at the moment). Then we went walking/roller blading along the river down to Southampton. Dad, you will remember the walk, it is the same one we dragged you along in the rain with Alan and Rhona last time you were her. The kids enjoyed the long roller blade opportunity, but Nicky is now complaining of blisters - her fault for not wearing thick socks with her new blades.

PC wise, I didn't do much exciting stuff over the weekend apart from six or so paid hours worth of VB development for SWALEC. The latest app sifts through the DB database and the source code of the applications and highlights problem areas, specifically where IBM has delivered code which uses a version of the CSS database which they are not delivering to SWALEC. It is quite useful having loads of inside information from having worked at IBM, as I am better able to cut through the bull shit dished up as documentation and muck about behind the scenes. Having a few bits and pieces on my Zip drive that I guess I really shouldn't have also helps me and SWALEC highlight problems with this 70 million Pound abomination.

This week my VB coding and team leadership "skills" are going to be put to the test reworking a lot of their existing VB code into reuseable objects and creating loads of class modules which will hopefully not only up our productivity and quality but also serve to enforce the embryonic standards and get everyone thinging OOPs and not along their current mega-modules mindset. Some of the team will be a simple task to convert, being new to VB, but others may be require more coaching. I think I will start with the new coders and try and get them to rewrite their latest creations and get them to see the benefits of being able to reuse their objects. Then start a register (may need a quick and dirty bit of VB code to make that nice and useable, I am not really impresed with the supplied object browsers or the one which came with the "Object programming with Visual Basic 4" book) to fully documnet all the objects - there is nothing quite as unusable as undocumented objects.

Well,no time travel trickery here, but the week is over (well my modified short weeks), I have racked up by 37.5 hours of normal time (although I have a shit load of overtime work lined up for this weekend), and I am at Bristol station on the Cardiff-Portsmouth 15:30 train, although I will be hopping off in Romsey.

So, what has happened in the week. Well, working from 07:00 till 19:00 each day doesn't leave much room in the week for much else apart from work and the boring necessities of life like washing (no ironing yet, must remember to buy an iron and board for the Cardiff house, or bring the shirts back home one weekend), reading, watching TV (well if it can be called TV in Cardiff - half the channels are in gibberish) and throwing out loads of stale bread and sour milk (shopping for one is tricky - especially for three days in the week).

The need for a car in Cardiff has totally evaporated as I have discovered the delights and freedom that a mobile phone and a couple of taxi company phone numbers can bring. It really is the best way to travel (apart from being able to walk to work that is) - no worries about parking, driving or paying off a second car. It also give you the freedom to be able to go out to the pubs and enjoy yourself, so long as you stay just sober enough to be able to opperate the mobile and figure where you are and where you want to go. Costs are quite high using a taxi, but compared to monthly payments on a car and the time saved traveling by taxi compared to the bus (one sixth the cost), when you are earning your taxi fare to the station every ten minutes, make it all make sense.

The drive to convert all our stuff (ok, SWALEC's stuff) to OOPs, went quite well, we now have an OLE server to handle the connection to DB2 and two new classes for application stuff. As expected winning the hearts and minds of ex-mainframe, just converted VB programmers was a bit more of a battle, and appart from a bit of a scene on Wednesday, it is going remarkably well. I think it will start to fall into place a bit better as tey start to experience the benefits, which should come soon as we are building an error/ problem tracking system (yes ANOTHER version of STAR) using a fairly comprehensive and well documented class that I finished this morning. The hearts and minds have been consoled by lending them some of my MS-Press books, most of which are fairly fanatical about objects.

Next week I am being pulled into doing a fairly detailed revied of their MIS applications, which from what I have seen so far are very flash on the outside, "sexyware", but quite sick and in need of some care on the inside. When you get a response to a question asking to see a logical chunk of code which results in one being hacked together from numerous forms from a monolyth 3Mb pc application, you get the idea that the words "modular" and "components" are not in the general vocabulary. Well, we are doing the framework for the review on Tuesday, so I guess I will have to be fairly diplomatic so as not to come across as too much of a perfectionish hypercrytical zealot.

The BMW is playing up again by all accounts from Maggie. It seems that the battery is constantly flat, so I guess it is eith the big monster of a battery under the back seat which needs repplacing, or gulp, the alternator or the piece of expensive custome BMW technology which cannot be repaired and needs to be replaced with a smile and a huge bill. For the moment the jumper leads and AA telephone number are kept close to hand.

Last night I was able to solve a scary mystery in Winchester over the phone. The house was haunted by a mysterious bleep every minute of so which the girls (and Maggie) couldn't track down. They tried turning off all three PC's on the Datak LAN, the other bits of technology littering the office, but to no avail. Then I pointed them to the smoke detectors which were cunning labeled "this device will sound intermittently when the battery needs replacing". Up until that point Maggie and Nicky had fears that the house was being bugged (as in electronic surveylance) for some strange reason.

Maggie's courses seem to be going very well, the two favorite being picture framing (lock up your working documents, every thing not locked up is being framed) and pottery. The pastel sketching course is not going so well. Apparantly the teacher walks around and comments how wonderfully every one is doing, but walks past Maggie in silent admiration (I presume). It seems she has a hurdle of self confidence to overcome, or maybe the brutal realisation that artistic ability is not evenly endowed. Yoga is comming on well, and she hasn't neeeded untying once.

The kiddies are getting on well at school, and are as busy as ever with their numerous after school activities. Thusday is Nicky's late night of jazz and modern dancing which she does with a friend and her mom, and from which she returns at 20:30, just half an hour before Maggie gets home from Pottery. Busy, busy, busy. The violin hairs broke, but it turned out that the UKP 20 violin (I guess it's not a very good one for that price) had a bow which couldn't be rehaired, so Maggie had to splash out on a new haired bow which cost 5 pounds more than the whole violin originally cost. Seems odd to me, but compared to 300 UKP for Nicky's flute, we are still onto a winner. Tarryn is now in the netball team and had two inter school matches during the week, both of which they won. Nicky has started playing hockey at Kings school and is the left wing, although she didn't get to see much off the ball in her first game. Now we have a shopping trip over the weekend for shin pads and a hockey raquet to look forward to. Or is that a Hockey club, or bat - who cares - the thing they wack the hard painful ball with - apart from the shins.

I may be able to get a limited eMail account at SWALEC soon. It is limited in the fact that I can't initiate internet eMail, only reply to it. This is rather a doff corporate restriction, which we will be easily able to overcome by you guys (those that wish to anyway) just sending me a blank mail message that I will store away and reply to over and over and over again. I will let you all know the address if and when I get it sorted. In the meantime I am being taunted by internal mail and a crap Lotus ccMail package with monster toolbars and bubble help but no simple function which you would expect from an eMail package, like an easy way to reply etc. Only got it today, so may be slagging it off a bit unkindly. Still, first impressions are not favourable.

The work P5-133 running Win95 and nothing else is still going well, and now sports an auto flipping sequence of Wallace and Grommit desktop wallpapers, care of a neat Vb app (Wallpaper Flipper) which I knocked together when I got bored with the same wallpaper hour after hour. BTW, if you (SLA) are doing serious VB development and aren't using Microsoft Visual Source Safe, do yourself a BIG favour and get it. For mainframe Endevor victims, look at the simplicity and eas of use of VSS, and curse the endevours of Endevor.

We are now approaching Salisbury and the weather is getting grimmer and grimmer. It was quite reasonable when we left Cardiff - so much for the claims that the Meridian region has the best weather. It looks like it will soon be time to put my draft proofing and the central heating to the test.

Maggie has just called to let me know that I should retriieve the number foe WinTax (the Winchester taxi company), as the BMW has a flat battery again. Sigh. Oh well. And as it's pissing with rain in Winchester, she will have to get one to go to and from Pottery (a nice walk otherwise). Mobile to the rescue. Anyhow, we are well past Salisbury and charging towards Romsey, so it's time I hit Alt-F S on this handy HP palmtop and got my gear (an assortment of technology and books/magazines) together and got ready to hop of the train.

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Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This week has not started off too promisingly. The 06:08 from Romsey to Cardiff, the train I usually catch on a Monday morning eventually arrived at 06:50, hooked to the back of the South West trains train to Yeoville (nowhere near Cardiff). It was apparently rescued, stranded and broken down on the track near Dennis (no idea where that is). So now I will have to change at Salisbury and wait for the next Regional Railways or Alpha Line train to Cardiff. All rather confusing, frustrating and annoying. And with an extra two dead carriages strapped to the back of this three carriage train, it is making heavy weather of the starting and stopping at all the intermediate stations. Actually come to remember it, that's probably why it almost missed Romsey station and stopped with only the last two carriages on the platform, and barely at that. Sigh.

Anyway, how are you all on this clear and mild morning, which makes quite a change from the weekends stormy weather. We all felt great sympathy for the yachtsmen and women at the start of the BT global challenge which left Southampton on Sunday in 45 knot gale force winds. For those unaware of the BT challenge, it is an amateur event sailing round the world the "wrong way", ie against the prevailing winds. Each yacht (64 foot) has a professional captain (Helmsman) and a crew of 16 amateurs who each pay 19000 pounds for the privilege of being sea sick and cold wet and miserable for 8 months. The yachts call at Sydney and Cape Town for those interested in welcoming them. Both Maggie and I have a glimmer of interest in one day taking part. In the meanwhile we are still looking through yachting and motor boating magazines at various forms of water-craft and mulling over the idea of catching the sailing or boating bug. Graham, I know that you guys will insist that a yacht is the only way to go. With about two million makes, shapes and sizes to choose from, what should we be looking for as something to muck about in the Solent and perhaps from time to time in good weather do a bit of channel and Irish sea sailing ?

This train is going to take forever to get to Newport. I have decided to try Newport station as an alternative to Cardiff, with St Mellons halfway between Newport and Cardiff, it doesn't make much odds, and the taxi drivers say that Newport is earlier to get into and out of. Also the train fair to Newport is 19.20 compare to 19.65 to Cardiff (yey a 45p saving!) Now they are shunting an extra coach onto this hybrid all station make it up as you go along train. Never mind, at least it is pointed in the right direction and does go from time to time.

...

Well it's Sunday already, and late at that, so a short news update will have to do until next weekend. On Friday Maggie and I went through to London to the Windows NT '96 show, which was a big disappointment. We had a fun day in London though. Saturday was a normal weekend day of shopping and PC hacking, and Maggie using the circular saw in the garage and knocking out a couple of hundred more picture frames.

Today we went through to London again, this time with the kids and met up with Malcolm and Jason and later with Patrick to go Ten-Pin bowling and ice skating. I finally bought a pair of Rollerblades, so I guess you will be getting another hospital homenews soon. The look quite smart, but it's difficult admiring them while you are waving your arms around and crashing into pedestrians. I also bought knee pads (on the way home - Patrick) and wrist braces to reduce the inevitable injuries. I will keep you informed as to the progress, but if you have shares in the Scottish Provident, now would be a good time to sell.

OK, sorry about the brevity and the loads of unanswered personal mail, but thats all the news for tonight.

Just enough time for elephants...

Q: Why do elephants wear red earmuffs?

A: White gets dirty too quickly.

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OK, here I am again on the train, I guess I should call these "Train News" instead of HomeNews as I seem to do very little writing from home. Sorry about the rushed end to last weeks home news, we returned late from London after some more train trouble. The silly thing stopped outside some minor station for about half an hour and then backed back to the previous station and switched lines. Just as well it did though as there was one of those beefy looking train line construction and repair locos on the tracks we were on. You just get a bit concerned when the train driver walks through the carriages after stopping for twenty minutes. We all thought it was his dinner break and he was making his way through to the buffet car for a relaxed supper.

In London we met up with Malcolm and Jason and first headed for Lillywoods, to check out (hip terms of what) the "blades" - Rollerblades for those who just can't keep up with the new cool speak. I settled on a pair of shiny blue Rollerblades (make) with (and here the technical terms start to get a bit fuzzy) AY5 bearings (second best in a list about 10 long of funny codes), and 76mm wheels (not the best but upgradeable when I wear the current set out). They were on special as well (well ok, that's what made me look at them instead of the Bauer's in the first place) so I ended up paying 89 for the same skates that I almost bought at Kinetic in Winchester for 169 on Saturday. Lucky they didn't have my size. I also bought the essential wrist guards, well three pairs of them as the girls also cashed in on the deal, and Maggie got a pair of hiking boots. Another nice thing about getting the blades at Lillywoods rather than in Winchester is that they are "by appointment to the Queen". It is comforting to know that she also owns a pair of shinny blue Rollerblades and that if I meet her blading through Regents park that we will be able to discuss the merits of a 76mm vs a 79mm wheel and which bearings are the best. It seems that Charlie must get his blades elsewhere as they are not appointed to the Prince of Wales.

After the shopping we went through to Queens Ice Rink - they are a sporting family aren't they. There we attracted the crowds by displaying our ten-pin bowling prowess. Nicky after rolling three zeros and a one redeemed herself with a roll of two strikes and a spare and ended up beating Malcolm, her sister (who was just beginning to glow in the glory of beating her sister) and Maggie (who excelled with a total of 23, although she claims an extra 18 as the machine did not register a strike that none of us observed). I just missed out on a century, ending with 99, in second place behind Jason who roared away with a score of 158. After the crowd thinned and the autograph hunters faded away, we headed off to the Deep Pan Pizza parlour for some grub - the Deep Pan is a great place to take hungry kids, 3.95 for an eat as much as you want buffet of pizza, pasta and of course chips (the brits eat chips with everything, on Thursday I witnessed my first "Curry and Chips".

After the will to eat had been dulled, we waddled out and relaxed in the park (Kensington Park) across the road - well relaxed that it until everyone wanted to see me perform stunningly cool manoeuvres on by new shiny blue blades. The less said about the following non-cool 10 minutes the better. After my display of unbalance, uncoordination and non-cool, Malcolm, Nicky and Tarryn each had a go in them and tried to emulate me. As it was now nearing 16:00 the appointed time for meeting Patrick back at the Ice Rink/Bowling Alley, we packed away the blades and walked across the road, vowing to practice in private before scaring passers by again.

The ice skating went much better than the roller blading, mainly because I decided to keep Maggie company watching the kids (Malcolm, Jason and Patrick included) skate around. They are all fine - those who know them, with Malcolm having grasped the opportunity of leaving his boring Batch Cobol DB2 job in favour of another boring Batch Cobol DB2 job at the same company. Patrick looks as cool as ever and scared me into buying knee pads on the way home with stories of wiping out at 60km/hr on his blades while playing "tag" with Malcolm and Jason in Hyde Park (children will be children I suppose).

The train trip home was "interesting" as I have already explained.

On Friday Maggie and I went through to a Windows NT show in the Olympia stadium in London, but is was very much of a disappointment. Thankfully we didn't have to pay for the tickets as Maggie has written off for free tickets as part of a magazine promotion. Loads of boring NT (well windows really) apps, such as the "Super Help Desk" call logging and tracking system - barff.

So with time to spare in London, we took a number 9 bus and saw a bit more of the surface of London (the underground is not a great way to see the city), before transferring to foot (or in my case HiTech's as the Rollerblades were still in the future - come on, you must keep up here) for a walk through to Covent Garden to visit Gateway and see their new Solo P5-133 13"TFT 1.3Gb 6xCD-Rom 16Mb Li/Fe notebook which is a steal at 2890. But we decided not to steal one (they were very securely attached) and continued our walk through London via Trafalgar Square with Nelson still displaying his enormous column, to Waterloo station, where we hopped on a returning train to Winchester.

The kids were already home from school - Nicky has a key and feels very big stuff about that - and of course busy doing their home work and practising their not so musical instruments, NOT.

On Saturday the kids went to play with friends and go for a swim at the Leisure Centre which turned out to be a non-swim as the pool was closed to kids. After picking them up we went though to Hedge End and did some much needed (83 pounds of need) food shopping and again searched in vain for a skirt that Nicky is on a personal quest for. PC World was given a miss as I am again involved in a low key boycott of them for their high prices.

Thursday's train trip from Cardiff was uneventful, mainly because I slept through most of it after trying to start a Bill Brynson travelogue book "The Small Island" about Britain.

We are almost at Bath now and it is still dark outside. I guess in Winter it will still be dark when I reach Cardiff Central. I have given up on the Newport experiment, the taxi fare is 8.80 compared to 6.50 from Cardiff, and the journey is no faster. Also Cardiff is a nicer station.

Last weekend when Malcolm and friends went though to Cardiff and borrowed by house there, he also took through Wimpette. Wimpette is the 386 which I constructed from spare parts and sold to a friend of Maggies, unfortunately also offering a no quibble money back guarantee. Unfortunately he quibbled and so now we have another PC which we are calling Wimpette and have dumped in Cardiff. It is very wimpish in its capabilities, with a grand total of 2Mb of RAM, and two throw away disk drives, a 30Mb and an old 84Mb extracted from Wimp when I upgraded him to two 2Gb Maxtor drives. I figured I could at least use Wimpette as a text editor, but am beginning to have my doubts, especially after playing with the Gateway Solo laptop over the weekend. Also with 2Mb of RAM and a 512K flash ram card this HP100Lx is a better, more portable text editor, even if the keys are designed for people who sharpen their fingers to the two square millimetres that they present.

Well, I am back on the train. But hey, this is Sunday, so how can this be. Well, with me on the train are two girls playing chess, and Maggie reading her Cross Stitch magazine. We are on our way to Exeter from Salisbury where we are going for the day to a craft show. It is 09:10 (well it was when the train left anyway), which is also a bit more respectable than my Monday morning 06:08 train which I will catch tomorrow.

It seems that the train gets chopped in half at Salisbury, just as well the conductor checked the coaches due to be shunted off to a siding, because we had just got ourselves relaxed and were remarking as to how nice it was to have the coach to ourselves. Would have been a smidgen embarrassing and inconvenient. We decided on going by train rather than by car, since with our rail discount card it only cost 25 UKP, only about half a tank of petrol so it is definitely cheaper, and it also give us two hours of relaxed travel rather than two hours of stressful driving on the UK roads.

On Friday I called a truce to the PC World boycott and did some browse shopping, leaving with a copy of "Close Combat" an excellent Squad Leader (or even Squid Leader) pc game from Microsoft. It is pretty darn good and fairly realistic, and the sounds of rifle and machine gun fire interspersed with the screams and noises of war have been heard coming from "Tuynhuys" for the last two days. Although the scenarios are fairly limiting (just three basic ones, and about six variations on each), each time you play a scenario you get different units on both sides, so there is actually a fair bit of variety. Unlike most games, it is sort of stand offish, while each unit (a squad or section, 3 to 6 men) follows your orders initially, they put self preservation above your order to charge a pillbox filled with machine guns.

The tank and armoured car units are also very realistic and apart from when I ran out of ammo when replaying a particular bridge crossing scenario, I was able to (playing the Germans), hold up loads of Yanks with Tanks using an 88 in a pillbox, a machine gun with line of sight down the road across the bridge and a mortar plopping rounds onto the bridge approaches to deter the brave. The rest of my troop contingent were kept safely in the rear as reserves. I still haven't won that scenario playing the Americans, the 88 dominates the terrain and knocks out the US Shermans without any fuss.

Well, we all had a great day out in Exeter, and are all back in sunnier (well compared to Exeter anyway) Winchester. The comments about there only being three basic scenarios to Close Combat was due to an oversight on my part. I oversighted the scroll bar (ok a bit of an excuse I have Mystery theme on Tomcat at the moment so everything is a uniform dull grey colour).

Time for the elephants again...

Q: Why did the elephant wear horn-rimmed glasses?

A: He didn't like contact lenses.

And another for luck...

Q: Why don't elephants wear stockings?

A: Tights are more comfortable.

Have a good week all. Oh by the way, I have an email address in Cardiff (at SWALEC) now, GBSWA1RC@IBMMAIL.COM

I will drop you all a note from there during the week.