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So, I have placed several mail orders recently, including a 2ft tall rack case and a rackable gigabit switch to go in it. The switch ... is a problem. I invite you to read the following to find out why.
Complaint to Citylink:
As is, by now, more or less expected, your delivery driver has left me a "Sorry we missed you" card instead of the package I was expecting. Given that we have a loud doorbell, I was sitting in a room a few metres from the door and expressly listening for it at the time they claim to have attempted delivery, I can only assume that your drivers have been mistrained in special operations or ninja sneaking, rather than in delivering packages.
Given that another firm both found and used the doorbell this morning to deliver an eight-cubic-foot package into which the item sitting in your warehouse needs to be inserted, I know that both the doorbell and indeed the door work perfectly well. I am, frankly, curious as to how you you can fail this badly.
Complaint to Misco, who used Citylink:
Good afternoon,
Regarding order reference ****************
It may interest you to know that Citylink have failed to deliver a parcel to my home address, while I was sat in a room next to the front door. We have a loud doorbell. The only way I could have further increased my chance of detecting their ninja-like delivery operatives when they arrive is by staring out of the window from 0730 (the beginning of their delivery window) until 1730, and assuming they're going to block the sunlight briefly at some point. Or, alternatively, some kind of laser tripwire sensor in the hedge.
It is somewhat inconvenient to have to take a second day working from home to compensate for their inadequacy. I don't actually expect you to do anything about this, other than possibly to ask Citylink what they think they're doing (because it's possibly not quite what you think they're doing, to whit, delivering your packages).
Thanks for your time
I ... wish I was surprised. I don't know how they're still in business, really. So that's a day working-from-home mostly wasted.
Several of my friends have started keeping todo lists online, for the day, for the weekend, or for whatever period is necessary. They seem to use them as a reminder that they are Succeeding At Life: that things are getting done and that they are a worthwhile person, even if they feel a bit overwhelmed by All The Things.
This seems like an excellent idea, so I'm going to try it for a bit: apologies for the blogspam this will generate.
Equally, they note that sometimes even the little things can be hard, some days. I'm aware that I'm at an extremely low ebb right now, in terms of mental capacity, so my todo list will probably seem weirdly specific or excessively detailed. This is an attempt at using mental resources when I have them (in the evening) to give structure and sense to the day when I don't.
Good Morning!
Workaday (0930-1800)
Evening all
I've just finished teaching my last ever class at Sussex University. Granted, I was the TA, not the full teacher, but still, they were my class, and I taught them. They were a good lot, maybe not the fastest workers, maybe not the sharpest minds (though some of them were damn hot).
I've taught Real-Time Embedded Systems, Advanced Microprocessor Systems, Computer Networks, Advanced Network Technologies and High-Level Integrated Circuit Design in my time, and had generally good results from my classes. These are all courses I've studied, and as the wheel turned I was asked to teach or TA them. I did so happily. Knowledge-Transfer is something I'm apparently quite good at, so long as my students are willing to learn.
But now that's it. We've moved to Brighton Uni, where we currently have no teaching responsibilities, and I'll probably leave the department before that changes (it'll change in the new school year, most likely, and my contract runs out on the 30th of September). No more teaching for me. I don't think I'd want to teach full-time, but I'm going to miss it nonetheless.
As for the title, well, that's kind of how we left Sussex Uni altogether, I think. Snuck out the back door while everyone else was looking elsewhere: there are people in the Engineering School Office who are surprised to hear we're leaving, never mind that we've left and the rooms we used to occupy have been stripped.
I spent ten years of my life in that university, most of them in that building. I helped get the cafe installed (I even repaired their fridge and coffee machine when they broke down). I helped rebuild the uni radio station pretty much from the ground up. I helped save the Chemistry department from closure. I kept the fencing club ticking over by repairing kit and doing admin until we managed to get a committee put together, the year when it all went a bit wrong. I've looked after their minibuses. I've served on their IT Helpdesk. So many memories.
I passed my viva there.
And the last one, likely the most enduring, is slinking away after TAing that lesson, unable to look the students in the eye. Pressing my nose briefly to the glass in the cafe, watching them pack up for the day after all their customers have left, and being unable to open the door and bid the cafe staff farewell.
I'm going to miss the old place. And ... I wonder if my inability to say goodbye is my subconscious being unable to let it go. Time will tell.
When swinging between branches (brachiating!), it is sometimes necessary to let go of one branch before having a hold of the next, in order to bridge a gap slightly larger than you are. I wonder if that's what this lurching feeling in the centre of my chest is.
So.
I'm still here, as you've probably surmised from the fact that I'm talking, and it's been a busy few months. Doesn't look like it's going to get any better any time soon either, so while this is an update, it's not a return to the old frequency of posting, at least not yet. Sorry about that, if it bothers you.
Hell, some of you may be enjoying the break.
Anyway, yes. I'm currently writing my thesis, and it's draining pretty much any reserves I have of cope, happy and other useful things, so I'm ... well, not so much fun to be around at the moment. For that I'm sorry. I hope people will put up with me leeching sanity from them for a little while.
In my Copious Free Time, I am still gaming. Maelstrom event 1 was a few weeks back, and was a fair bit of fun - the wind and rain and mud weren't great, but the rest of the event made up for it, and next event promises to be better for a variety of reasons. Here's hoping.
Also, a group of friends (Firecat Masquerade) have started running a fest-larp system based loosely on Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows. Because I am mad, but also because they needed the help and it's a great way to burn off stress, I've volunteered to crew it. Event 1 was an astounding success by all accounts, and hopefully event 2 will be at least as good. Since E2 is set a little over a month after my thesis handin deadline, I may be slightly crazed at that point. But it'll be fiiiiiine.
Fencing ... is not going so well. Despite being on the committee, due to noone else standing for armourer and the club needing one, I've not made it to the great majority of training sessions this year. Feel quite crap about this, as they do rely on me to some extent, but there are people there who can repair most things, and two full evenings a week is simply more than I can spare at the moment. I managed to get along tonight, and they were only slightly pissed off, which is comforting. So it goes. Will persevere there, and might even fence again at some point.
To sum up, life is hard, real damn hard right now, but I'm still cracking on with it. I'm doing some slightly crazy stuff in an effort to stay sane, and trying not to neglect my obligations, tricky though that is in turn. I aim to write some more here soon, so stay tuned. Distinct risk of pseudophilosophical bullshit, but I guess we'll see what happens.
It's got to be better than total radio silence, right?
Today ... has not gone to plan.
Oddly, I think it started to go wrong on the way home, rather than while I was still at work (although I got no words written today on account of having to fight a series of administrative fires). I was happily cycling home in the dark, lights and high-vis on, everything more or less OK, when my rear wheel started to vibrate interestingly. I've been here before. I pulled over. Rear tyre, completely flat. Arse.
So I pushed my ironically-named pushbike home, and locked it to the mooring loop, as usual, and took the rear wheel off and brought it in with me, to fix the puncture. Since I'd just cycled/walked home, I took five minutes to spod on the 'net, and my music collection disappeared. The player stopped in the middle of a song, and when I went to check it there were no songs. No songs, no directory, nothing.
Troubling. I could swear they were here only a minute ago.
So, it seems the highly reliable RAID I built a couple of years back to store my stuff ... isn't so highly reliable any more. It's a 3 disk array, which means it can lose any one disk without losing any data. It's dropped one particular disk a couple of times recently, both times pretty soon after street-wide power cuts, so I figured it was a little tired, and planned to make backups etc. Real Soon. Unfortunately, now it's dropped that disk, and its brother... Array Failure.
RAID arrays spread the contents of a file across multiple disks to increase redundancy, so I don't even have a few of my many files intact on the remaining disk: I just have bits of the vast majority of my files. Those bits don't add up to a whole, in most cases. None of my skills with Linux seemed to be working, and I couldn't get it to rebuild.
Then, dwm turned up on IRC, and guided me through a six-hour rebuild that hasn't quite finished yet, but looks like it's going to work. Once it's done, I need to pull important things off that drive, then see what happens, I guess. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the machine, but signs point to one of the SATA controllers going bad, which would be very annoying.
So, bit of a wakeup call there. A lot of my data is pretty insignificant, but I'd miss it if it were gone. So I must implement a Proper Backup Strategy in the soon-after...
I eventually solved the bicycle problem too. Patched the tube, went round the tyre to find the cause, found a 10mm shard of road-grit that had gone right through the tyre wall and slashed the tube. Yet another reason to hate snowy weather...
Oh well. The world turns, things happen, or don't, according to their own inscrutable timetable, and we all get slowly older. This is the way of things.