Its been a strange and long weekend. Roughly every second Easter seems to be like this, so I suppose it could be worse. The vague threat of illness which hung in the air at the end of the week became a stupid, snivelly cold which won't leave. I'm trying hard not to let coverage of the Royal Family and their (mis)fortunes get to me, because I suppose I'd appear somewhat churlish. Mostly, I'm nervous and uncertain about my new job, and about events in my world. Practically rewrote gdaylog this weekend, also added absurd and pointless features to the script which I use to get stats from the bandwidth logs of my Demon account, and (much to the derision of the locals) I spent quite serious amounts of time on learning Quenya. After all, I've been reading Tolkien for 19 years (eek!) and pretty much skipping the poems, so now it must surely be time? If only I wasn't so obsessive about these things...
Last day of working for Social Services. Except I've not been there since Tuesday. Wretched sore throat and a union meeting put me out of action, and I've slipped away not with a bang, but a whimper. Again, beautiful weather. Made uninvited and perhaps quite annoying visit. Later bumped into some Burnham people, which was a pleasant enough surprise. Anyway, end of an era etc. but I never felt a thing.
Today had promise from its very start. Fine weather and early productivity pave the way for a generally positive working atmosphere. Later, passed up the chance to witness a talk by Terry Waite (which was apparently quite compelling). Instead, went visiting and saw some frankly dodgy acts performing so called 'acoustic' music. However, much fun was had. Its been a long time since I've been able to see far beyond my nose, but somehow today I dared to look. I'm far, far luckier than I ever dreamed.
In a bleary-eyed, early morning effort to clean up the GConf schema conflicts after upgrading the gnome-panel, I managed to trash enough of my system here to make a reinstall practically the only option. Restored bits from backups, but needed to rebuild GNOME2, which was a good chance to clean up and shed some cruft along the way. Managed to fall prey to my usual error of not letting SMTP through tcpwrappers, losing a good 90 or so messages (and angering several mailing list admins) in the process.
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
