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Yes, it me again !

It appears as if I have caused near mass hysteria by being off the email-waves (ok then how to you say “air-waves” for email - off the e-waves?) for the last three weeks. It was not for lack of news, there is a ton and a half of that (ok, so how do you measure it then ?). It was partially due to being off the net last week with a problem (I suspect at my ISP), and for being overworked (but not underpaid) the week before last and for being on holiday in Wales last week.

So anyway, we are all fine,

Just time for an elephant joke and then I must send this and get on with something more interesting…

Q: Why did the elephant wear green eye shadow?

A: To match her green dress.

OK then, bye…

Oh all right, here comes a bit of news then.

First a synopsis. The car is back at Wiggens with another blown head gasket, we had a great drive through Wales, I trashed Roger’s PC and spend most of yesterday and today resurrecting it, we rewrote IBM’s abortion of a system which took them five years - in two weeks, SWALEC cancelled the 70 million UKP project that I have been working on for the last two years, I blew out all the lights and had a mini Guy Fawkes party in the kitchen of the house in Cardiff, Nicky scored a goal in her school hockey match, Tarryn has progressed to a full sized Violin, We have finally got our drawer-bridge from our lounge to our top garden, PC World shares are up again after I spent a fortune in their Cardiff branch (Encarta 97, Flight Simulator, Interactive Escher, World Atlas 97, Creative Writer, Close Combat, Battleground Waterloo, 12 Zip disks). So busy, busy, busy.

Lets start at the beginning.

The car. Well the lump of metallic trouble then. Yesterday morning after a week’s worth of perfect driving pleasure through the Welsh countryside, it began by complaining that the Coolant level was low. So we topped it up with the finest Southern Water H2O, and headed off to the shops. In the afternoon, I wanted to go back to Computronic, so Maggie and I left the kids at home and hopped into the car again. Another “Coolant level” warning. Bugger. Then ten miles along the M3 with the mobile phone left at home and the lovely English weather chucking it down in buckets, the temperature roars sky high and the warning panel starts behaving as if Christmas is coming or something. Loads of lights and “bongs”. By the similarity in symptoms to the problem we had in Dover six or so months ago, I guess the head gasket has blown again. Lovely. Well at least it has not been a year (I hope) since it last blew, so this time BMW can fix it at their cost. We got wet walking back to the SOS phone and then had a boring wait for the highway rescue/AA vehicle to come and take us home and the purple monster to BMW where it is now sitting and sulking.

The trouble with Roger’s PC was caused when I tried to run a compress on his hard drive (Drivespace). It started off well enough and then while we were all off at the pub having lunch and a few pints (or in Maggie’s case doubly few half-pints), it decided to have a bit of fun. We returned to a PC which had very little left on it and no sign of a compressed drive. Windows was on holiday somewhere beyond cylinder 1024 and none of the 16 heads could remember where they had stashed the bits that they had been merrily compressing all through lunch. So after a bit of panic, we packed the Gateway 2000 box into the boot of the BMW (ok keep up now, we are going back in time) and headed off back to Winchester. Yesterday and today I spent reinstalling Win95 and compressing the drive before putting back all the software and data which I was able to recover. Alls well that ends well I suppose, I think the root cause was trying to compress the disk (560Mb) with only 30Mb of free space.

We went through to Newant to see Roger and Oliver and “help them” with their PC, from Cardiff where we had all been spending the week in the Welsh rain and hurricanes. It was the kids “half term”, so we all drove through to Cardiff last Sunday and spent the week in the house in Birkdale close. Maggie and the kids shopped until they dropped on Thursday and then after SWALEC canned the project (getting to that bit) and I took the rest of the week off, we headed off through the Welsh hillsides and low cloud and drizzly rain for an unplanned drive. The mountains are pretty groovy and the whole countryside is pretty reminiscent of Northern Natal but more Welsh if that makes any sense at all. Maggie gave up navigating after spitting all over the inside of the BMW, those names can be tricky. We stopped at Swansea for lunch (Pizza Hut) before heading into the hills (Brekon and loads of spitting names) and finally returning to Cardiff in the late evening.

An innocent query of “who would like soup and toast”, ended in fireworks. I had not used the griller in the stove before - there is no toaster in the “furnished” house - and didn’t know what I was missing. Turning it on revealed some hidden pyrotechnic ability, with a load bank, and a shower of sparks whose brilliance was enhanced with the simultaneous dimming (well turning off actually) of all the lights. The hunt for the fuse box using the rechargeable torch from the BMW (no it was not sitting at Wiggens, at least not yet), ended under the stairs, with an old style fuse box with fuse wire. Well it looked more like heavy duty steel cable to me. All the “fuses” were intact (I think they could quite comfortably be used as the fuses for Nuclear Power) and the mains switch was still ON. So after some sleuth work and phoning around to various disinterested parties, we had “supper” at Burger King and had a TV free night. Being a rented house has advantages, as the pyrotechnic problem was left in the hands of the agent and will hopefully be “sorted” by the time I arrive back in Cardiff on Monday.

The timing of the directors of “Lusis” - the IT services company which provides IT for SWALEC (Welsh Electricity) and Welsh Water was impeccable. On October 31 1996, after a five year multi-million pound project involving about 700 people and including my efforts of the last two years, IBM finally packaged their software (CROESO/CSS) for delivery to SWEB and SWALEC. On October 30, the Data Migration team (the team I now work for) cracked open loads of bottles of French Champaign and toasted our success of migrating all their data from their Legacy systems (Ideal/Datacom, VSAM Cobol, PL1, Assembler etc) to the CROESO/CSS DB2 database. On October 29, the DMIG Tools Building team (my team) took pride in the completion of a fantastic VB application which provided for customer enquiries into the CROESO/DB2 database on the mainframe. And we were gearing up for a major demo of the system on Friday November 1 to the “suits” at Lusis/SWALEC. On Thursday October 31, the Lusis Directors decided that in order to meet their “synergy targets”, they were cancelling the CROESO project. Major downer.

So, I then took the rest of the week off. Tomorrow I will try and figure out which bits are salvageable and try and pull the thing together into some semblance of order. As you can imagine, everyone was fairly shocked on Thursday. Now SWALEC is going to start another multi-million pound project to re-convert all their legacy systems to a Welsh Water system, CAS, which does not support electricity billing. Go figure. One positive thing though is that OS/2 and all things IBM are now very much a thing of the past and we will be able to go to 32 bit VB code. The database will change to IDMS on an ICL !!! but we will still be able to get at it using a Shadow Direct sister product for IDMS, and to VB it will still look like an ODBC database which we can still access via SQL. AmiPro and other pathetic products like ccMail and Lotus 1-2-3 are also going to go out the window in favour of MS-Office and Exchange. Our Intranet stuff will survive and again, we will be able to move to 32 bit.

On the kids school front, Nicky is in the school hockey team and actually scored a goal the other day in a match against another school that they won 4-0. The crowd was very appreciative of this frenzy of goals, Maggie and the other two mothers who were involved in transporting the darlings even looked up from their cross-stitching. Tarryn is playing netball for her school and starts swimming lessons next week. There is a fine balance with the swimming lessons, because as soon as they see that you can swim, your lessons end and you get ordinary school work to do during the swimming time. So the trick is to look as incapable as possible for as long as possible. Tarryn with all her drama class experience is a master of acting and I suspect will be the last to finish the swimming lessons.

Maggie’s course are going well, and we have a Halloween pumpkin in pastels which may just be suitable for framing. The pottery is also going well apparently despite heavy criticism from Tarryn who joined Maggie the week before last and commented how much better the efforts of the other students were. Undeterred, Maggie is still churning out Christmas present ornaments.

The PC gaming is going well. Maggie is talking to the other PC at the moment, never a good sign. She is experimenting with Creative Writer. The kids are outside in the darkness (its only 18:00 !!) playing with some of their friends who have spent pretty much the whole day playing on the PC’s. We have had to console ourselves upstairs watching enthralling BBC TV, “The Dam Busters” in black and white and making the Sunday Roast. Well the Vegetarian Sunday roast anyway, with some huge Yorkshire puds that Maggie has now perfected. Talking (well all right typing) about Vegie food, we now have bacon and eggs on Saturday mornings, meatless bacon which looks, smells and tastes (well from what I can remember) like bacon. Just the uniform size (perfect rectangle strips) gives the game away. Anyway, it’s a firm favourite with the family.

I haven’t heard much of the other ex-Southerners, excepting from Alison Brooks who is in the same predicament over CROESO as I am, and Malcolm Featonby who braved the possible darkness of my Cardiff house this weekend in a return holiday trip to Cardiff.

The House now boasts a drawer-bridge (OK, it actually can’t be pulled up) from the lounge to the top garden, which will be wonderful when it stops raining and we are able to enjoy the outside garden. In a couple of weeks we will be able to envoy our ski slope again, and will now be able to boogy board right into the lounge. The whole thing cost us 2000 UKP, which is a snip compared to the 19,000 we have been quoted on our next plan, a conservatory on our lower garden.

The rollerblades came for a holiday to Wales with us, but stayed in-doors for fear of getting wet, or making me look stupid.

Tarryn is playing a full sized (and full priced) violin now, and has almost caught up with Nicky on the piano, they are both sharing the same book now. Maggie has had her instrument of torture rehaired and is giving us renditions of Bach, Give me a B, give me an A, give me a C, give me an H, yea Bach….

Well, that’s about all the news.

Just time for a few more Elephants…

Q: Why do elephants wear sunglasses?

A: If you had as many dumb jokes told about you, you'd want to wear sunglasses too.

Q: Why did the elephant wear red braces?

A: The blue ones were in the wash.

Sorry if I caused panic by missing a few weeks in my regular communications. I will go on a diet of prunes to try and improve the regularity, just don’t complain about the consistency and quality then.

Bye for now…

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