Archive for January, 2006

As good as a holiday?

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

Today was a fun change – no work because I’m on a course . And it’s for the rest of the week too.
As courses go it seems interesting enough. The topic is UML (or Unified Modelling Language) which is very much the sort of thing that if you don’t recognise, [...]

One more step towards our next dive qualification

Monday, January 30th, 2006

It’s been a slow process but tonight we finally got through the last 2 of the theory sections for our Sports Diver qualification. Dave, our dive coach, has generously given up two of his Monday evenings (we had one last week as well) to come and give them right here – so convenient! [...]

Fun with graphics

Monday, January 30th, 2006

I know I mentioned I’d put up photos of the new windows but time ran away with me again. I had in mind that I’d get round to them right after I finished the custom header graphic I was playing with, and – you guessed it – that didn’t actually happen.
On the plus side, [...]

Russian Banquet

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

We had a very entertaining night-out yesterday, hosted by one of the guys in Tom’s team at work. It was a Russian evening, replete with genuine Russian dishes and lots of vodka (and schnapps and grappa for good measure).
Our host Artem is one of the younger repo team members. A graduate placement, who [...]

Addendum to the latest building work

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

One thing that occurred to us while we were shivering without a conservatory during a cold snap back in early December, was that the windows in the study are *also* prime candidates for heat loss…
Considered as a whole the study windows, as they were, had few redeeming features. Aside from being single-glazed, they had [...]

Cold snap

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

At 08h00, it was -4°C out this morning – frost all over our new conservatory roof. As an interesting comparison, it was 2°C inside the conservatory (which is essentially unheated given that we keep the kitchen door closed) – and 10°C on the inside of the kitchen windows. So does this mean that [...]

Lazy Sunday afternoon

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

On a whim, we decided to take our car to be cleaned at our favourite car wash this afternoon. (It kind of needs to be a whim in this case because getting to this car-wash is a bit of an excursion – so just needing to have the car washed is not normally [...]

Party with the Goldman’s lads

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

Thursday evening was Tom’s “VP drinks” party at a local bar-restaurant called the City Golf. (For reference, the pub has seemingly nothing to do with golf, and for the South African readers, it has nothing to do with VW cars either!)
Hosting big drinking functions is a bit of a tradition at GS. Especially [...]

Amusing logistics

Friday, January 20th, 2006

My Amazon order from a few days ago got delivered this morning (we took the free shipping option which adds on a day or two). The guy from despatch came wandering over to my desk, carrying this humungous box. No jokes, it was about 50cm long, 30cm wide and 30cm high and as [...]

Tinkering

Tuesday, January 17th, 2006

Computers are just wonderful procrastinators. They deftly sneak away with your free time without you even being aware of it. In their quiet, unobtrusive way they provide so many, many things to fiddle with – and 1001 new distractions branch off for each one of those.
I’ve finally done something with the arbitrary author [...]