Halfway

Halfway through a very busy week. One thing’s certain: I don’t have time to be bored in my current job. I’ve been looking at generic form handling today and am quite pleased with the direction it’s going, even if it’s taking longer than I’d hoped.

I also got back my door keys today from the client :)

Partioning Problem

I’m trying to shrink the Windows partition on my work computer so that I have enough space to install Linux. The problem is that even after defragging, the SuSE installer will only let me shrink the NTFS partition by 3.2GB. I can’t work out why as I’m sure that it should be able to better than that!

Finally…

I borrowed a hedge trimmer from Tim and sorted out the rather large bush by the drive entrance! Now when Georgina pulls out into the road, she’ll be able to see if any cars are coming !

In other news, I painted Jon’s new room yellow this weekend, so just the woodwork to do next weekend.

Oops

We discovered today that the Micra doesn’t have a valid tax disc and hasn’t had for a while! Seems that we didn’t get a reminder from the DVLA and we aren’t very observant either. I went down the post office today to get a back dated one, but apparently the back date is so large that they can’t issue me a disc and I have to go to the DVLA’s local Worcester office to sort it out on Monday.

Think we’ll keep the Micra off-road until Monday!

News Roundup

Some random thoughts whilst listening to the Today program today:

There’s a proposal to change the train timetable to reflect the reality of what’s happening on the rail network. What a good idea! As a passenger I think that what’s most important to me is knowing reliably what time the train will arrive because then I can plan. Of course, this isn’t the real reason for the change; the real reason is to improve the statistics. However, I still think it would be better for passengers to have a timetable that can be trusted.

One thing that’s been bugging me is the phrase “Let’s wait for the enquiry/report/plan”. What is it about Government ministers and the prime minister himself that means they are too cowardly to have their own opinion but have to hide behind a committee’s opinion? I think it’s so that they have someone to blame when the bureaucratic opinion turns out to be the whitewash it usually is. Yesterday it was the Prime Minister about Lord Hutton (I think – could have been the dead soldier), today it was Tessa Jowel about a railway line and the junior defense minister talking about the enquiry about the dead soldier. It’s driving me up the wall. I’d like to see the people at the top take some responsibility for a change!

Overtime

Spent the evening tracking down a couple of bugs for work. It’s taken quite a long while, but I’m pleased that I sorted out the issues. I fixed one and palmed the other onto one of our developers in India as the solution looked more complicated than I could handle with our current dialup…

All in all quite a good evening, though working through it wasn’t the plan this morning!

Home Information Packs

Does anyone else think that this is worthless? As the LibDem MP pointed out, would you trust a survey done by the vendor? Of course not! I do agree that improving the process of buying a house is a good idea, I’m just not sure that this is the way to do it. The only thing I can see it doing is providing worthless bits of paper that cost each vendor ?1000 a go. Not that I have much in the way of better ideas, but then I’m not in Government :)

Muffins!

Georgina’s just made muffins and they smell delicious! I’ve had a good day at work though wasted over two hours tracking down the use of the wrong id in an html page… Most frustrating! One of the nice things about this job is that I’m palming off the “boilerplate” coding to the others and just dealing with the more complicated/urgent issues. Also, I’m getting time to start to think about longer term issues and hopefully will have time to get them implemented in the shorter term :)

Update: They are delicious!