Some days are just good.

An excellent days work, even if I do say so myself. Five logs down and all for today, not closing from last week. I also had a good result yesterday with the display panel I am playing with on the Arduino. On a bit of a roll maybe, wait for the fall!

No pain, no gain.

And what I should like to know is, "When does the gain begin"? I am still getting pain from my sinuses and, so far, have yet to see any gain from it. Life is not fair! The second box of bits arrived this morning and very good it is too. I now have enough to pursue some fairly complicated designs from the basic learning package for Arduino. I have joined forces with a colleague to administer the Arduino blog as we both have lots of links and things to write about.

Back to normal

Well, I'm getting back into the swing of things again now. I managed several jobs yesterday and have done even more today so life is settling back to a comfortable routine of work and leisure. At home, I'm having a lot of fun playing with my new toys, the Arduino kit, and interacting with all the animals again. Titch is very happy now I'm back and tries to spend a large part of the evening snoring on my lap or chest. Cocky just wants a lot of love and Rodney has been so bold as to lick me on one occasion. Life is good.

Another year over

and deeper in debt.

Well, maybe not quite that bad but things got a bit tight towards the end of last year. We ended up paying other peoples bills on an almost weekly basis. As we had been in these various predicaments ourselves in the past, it was really the only thing we could do. Life for most of our family has now settled quite well and the rest will follow shortly so we are now looking at upping our mortgage payments yet again in order to clear as much as possible while the low rates last.

My own particular cross, over the Christmas, was to have some serious sinus problems which caused me intense pain. Suffice it to say that I was on pain killers until New Years Eve. Not a particularly merry Christmas.
On a lighter note, I have begun a new blog around the Arduino open source hardware and software control system. The link has been added to my personal blogs, below left, and is this

I don't believe it!

Well I do, of course, because it's just happened to me. A state of the art HP box suitable for server duty with some serious RAID possibilities has just been misbehaving because of the floppy drive. Why they wanted a floppy in it in the first place is unknown but that's the way it was purchased. Suddenly it keeps flagging disc errors with almost every click on the mouse. I re-installed all the drivers and did the usual checks and, then when I was out of ideas, I remembered having seen something similar once before. I put a disc in the drive and, lo, there was an awakening. Simply switching the dam' thing off in Windows was enough to stop the problem but, after consultation with the long suffering technical officer, I also switched it off in the BIOS. Everybody happy and a feather etc.

Red nose day?

It feels like it today. I have had a running nose for two days now and my shnoz is beginning to feel the strain. The strange thing is that I don't feel particularly unwell. I think, and hope, that this is simply the end of the two bad bouts of cold that followed my flu jab. I wasn't able to clear either lungs or sinuses from them and now I am losing from both. Work progresses well, with the usual 'Two steps forward and one back' routine. Today I found a reason why a particular error message was constantly popping up on a PC. After I ran the fix, install dot net framework 2, the problem was still there. Upon checking with Microsoft, it appears that to fully effect the fix, I need to install another two or three updates as well.Lovely!

The post with no name.

An interesting week once again. Samuel was with us Friday and Saturday apart from a few hours with his dad Saturday afternoon. He was offered the chance of a special Christmas (other) family meal on Sunday and, like any six year old with a big appetite, went for it. By Sunday evening I was, once again, thick with a cold. This is getting beyond a joke now, I went for years with very few colds and this year, as soon as I had my flu jab, I seem to have had a permanent cold. Strangely, although I still felt bad, this morning I have had no thick head or throbbing headache so I have been able to come to work. Hazel has been having some nasty problems as a result of her medication so, this morning, it was decided to change her over to the injectable version of  the drug that causes the problem. This probably means the I will have to give it to her as she is a little squeamish about these things. So am I but I don't let it stop me when it comes to her health.