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Another week, and another training session underway - this time the training is approaching Salisbury and the weather outside is a glorious bright winter sunshine with only the most persistent frost spoiling the green hillsides. This week has been another boring one. Since the decision to scrap CROESO, it seems that the management at Welsh Water and at Swalec are all too busy playing political football and reorganising themselves in their little empires to realise that four weeks have slipped bye already - four weeks which they are going to be desperate for towards the end of the project. Luckily I still have some outside work for another area of the company which is keeping me busy, and of course I have kept myself busy one way or another. This week it was the turn of ccMail to go into the dustbin to be replaced by a much speedier and more respectable Microsoft Exchange. Unfortunately we also had a run in with some other bored (or rather boring) people who, we found out this week, have been working for the last year (A WHOLE YEAR !!) at installing an intranet. So it must have come as quite a shock to them when in a week we had our intranet up, populated and used by the whole department for all their documents. We first started suspecting that there was another TCP/IP network somewhere in the company when we started running out of IP addresses on out DHCP server. Very strange as we had allocated more addresses than there were people on our LAN. When we queried the people who had current IP address leases from our NT server, it included all sorts of people that we had not heard of before, including a strangely named web server ("web server", reminiscent of my choice of names for the OS/2 LAN server at Southern Life, aptly named SERVER. I wonder if it still has that name, and whether after seven years, it still has a password of MAGGIE?)

So their little year old web, with zero users ("we are planning on getting departmental requirements and rolling it our to the users next year") went AWOL after our DHCP server captured it and allocated it an address, one which where weren’t expecting - serve them right for having a dynamic address for their web server - dumb and dumber or what. All of that caused much huffing and puffing by this group of dim-witts, who see the future of their net in Lotus Notes and AmiPro documents and think that HTML and ActiveX are not necessary. Sad (a great multi purpose expression which the kids have hooked us on).

This weekend we have the delights of a ballet performance put on by the Hampshire Dance Group including Nicky. This is on Sunday, so we have the whole(in my case extended) weekend to look forward to it. I think it is more modern dance than ballet, and they have been practising with a "professional choreographer" for the last couple of months so it can't be too bad - can it ?

Hopefully Tomcat is still alive, the plan this weekend it to get NT server installed on him and then to set up RAS so that I can connect the SWALEC and the DATAK LAN, to what ends I am not sure at the moment, it just sounds like a good idea. Also on the agenda is a revamp of the now very tired and stale Ricky homepage and the hitherto permanently under construction Datak home page. That's the plan for this weekend anyway, the reality is always quite different. I also want to try landing a Cessna on top of the New York and Chicago twin towers. Apparently it is possible (well in FS anyway, I am not sure about reality). And I must still try and loop the 737-400.

The Close Combat campaign which I was loosing (well I am playing German on Very Hard) went back to Seagate on the bust 2Gb IDE which was manifesting train tendencies (click clacking away), so now I must start all over again. I had a few games at work during the week, but without sound it is just not the same. Oh yes, and Tomcat now has very good powered speakers to complement the SB32, so sounds great even without the clickity clack of the Seagate.

Salisbury at last, and the Sun seems to have given up for the day, something which is now does shortly after lunch - lazy or what ! Maybe it is adhering to the European Union rules of a maximum of a 48 hour working week.

They had a very sobering program on the Beeb during the week, on the BSE fiasco. Everyone seems to be pointing to the fact that there have only been eight human fatalities to CJD (although I don't think those eight would agree) as an indication that an epidemic is not going to happen. Sobering thought is that in the first year of the BSE epidemic which went on to kill more than a million cattle (if you don't believe the Government figures of 160,000 which only include those which actually died of BSE, not those which were slaughtered while infected with BSE and fed to their populous) only ten cattle died of BSE. So, all around a good thing that we are vegetarian really.

Sunday again, and Steve Davis is trying to beat Ken Doherty upstairs on the telly, while Tarryn is having just about as much success in navigating her 737-400 across the English Channel using the AA British Road Maps (keeps hopping upstairs to check where she could be - seems strange to me, all I can see on Tomcat is sea and sky and a 737 instrument panel which must provide some sort of a clue, but buggered if we know how. Last night I managed to land the Cessna in Times Square, but then blew it by crashing into one of the buildings while taxiing around the streets of New York, much to the annoyance of the NYPD and the Yellow Cabs. The attempts at landing on the twin towers all ended fairly predictably with a Cessna stuck through the windows of the 100th floor.

The weather in Winchester was great yesterday, but is making up for it today with a typical Brit winters day of rain, more rain and yet more rain. We have a fairly cunning rain gauge in the lounge with which we are helping out the Met Office, the outer pain of one of the double glazed windows is cracked and the lower half of the window is now filled with water. Must get that fixed some day I suppose. Yesterday we started the ball rolling to put a fire place into the lounge, and this week we will be getting two outrageous quotes. The curtain material still hasn’t arrived yet, so Maggie is keeping her eye in on the Husqvana making some skirts for the kids.

Tarryn and I did the Christmas Cards this afternoon, if you don’t get one and feel offended, please send us your address, as even with our snazzy 32 bit Visual Basic Address Book and Christmas Card Label printer, we are still lacking quite a few addresses. Otherwise, draw a nice Santa Clause on the reverse of this eMail and hang it up instead - Merry Christmas all. We almost bought a new printer on Friday, an HP 870 Cxi (Colour Inkjet), but it was vetoed by the Chief Purchasing Controller who pointed out that two printers was perhaps enough. So if the colour printing on the slips inside your cards is slightly below par, you can blame Maggie.

Ok, enough waffle for one week, I hear the pitter patter of tiny elephant feet. (Talking of which we have Nicky’s dance extravaganza in a few hours, she is in Basingstoke at the moment doing last minute dress rehearsals.

Q: What do you call an elephant wearing pink earmuffs and a dress?

A: Anything you want, it can't hear you.

Bye all,

Ok, then, one last Elephant joke, then I really must go…

Q: What do you know when you see three elephants walking down the street wearing pink sweatshirts?

A: They're all on the same team.

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