Ageing (dis)gracefully!
Archive for May, 2007
A Sturdy Purchase!
May 31st
Today we went to Bristol again with the intention of buying a few bits of furniture for the new house. Primarily a decent computer desk, a TV cabinet/stand and a coffee table. We actually only managed the former though.
Our first port of call was ‘Furniture Village’ on Cribbs Causeway. I firmly believe they should change their name to ‘Sofa & Bed Village (with a few crappy overpriced tables)’ as it would be more descriptive and less of a waste of my god damn time! We also had a brief look in B&Q where we were accosted by an elderly couple asking us how to put up venetian blinds in their house???!!!! f*ck off? how do I know? 
At a loss we decided that as we were so close to Ikea that we would give it a try again, so off we head(ed). Thankfully parking was much easier this time, most likely due to the fact it wasn’t a bank holiday monday!
I Won A Competition!
May 29th
I drunkenly entered a competition a few weeks ago to win a pair of tickets to see Marillion at any date on their upcoming UK tour. I found out today that I have won, not only tickets to a gig, but my preferred destination of Portsmouth!
I am already seeing the band the day before @ the Colston Hall in Bristol, so it will be Marillion 2 nights in a row for me!! Eeeeeeeeeheeeeee!!!!
Is quite crazy that I had gone 15 years of being a fan without seeing them live, and now I will be seeing them at least 3 times in 2007 alone!
I am contemplating driving down to Portsmouth on the Saturday afternoon and staying in a B&B overnight so I can have a few beers during (and after) the gig. I had offered Lucy to come with me, but she isn’t up for it, so it’s likely to be me and Leigh again.
I am apparently on the guest list ..wonder if that means I won’t have to queue? 
Alonso Makes Hamilton His Bitch!
May 27th
Just watched Fernando Alonso win the Monaco Grand Prix, beating his rookie team mate Lewis Hamilton into 2nd place.
Hamilton has taken the sport by storm this season, purely because of his gritty determined and consistent drives. He has yet to finish a race lower than 3rd, which is mighty impressive! ….but I just don’t like the idea of him coming in and ruling the roost so early in his career. I also don’t like the fact that the media are largely writing Alonso off and claiming Hamilton is better! How can you reach such a conclusion after so few races?
Alonso is the best driver in the sport in my opinion. He has struggled in recent races as he has joined a new team, is racing on completely new rubber for the first in his F1 career having raced purely on Michelins before …the simple fact is he is still discovering his limits in the car and on the Bridgestone tyre. Lewis on the other hand has nothing to compare to, …its been mentioned that this year lack of experience is a benefit as the old school drivers are having to change their style to adapt to the new tyre.
Manic Sorting
May 26th
Been doing a lot of sorting out today in the spare room with the intention of getting rid of as much crap as possible before we move. We are hoping to do a car boot sale on Bank Holiday Monday providing the weather holds. Whatever crap we don’t get rid of at a boot sale will goto either a charity shop or in the bin …….no sense in taking it all with us.
While sorting out I have been listening to the new Manic Street Preachers album Send Away The Tigers (on repeat! ..it’s that good!). I’ve always liked the Manics but always preferred their earlier material over latter day stuff. I have pretty much dismissed everything they have done in recent years for no good reason really …. more fool me!
Perhaps the reason I like this new album so much is that it definately harks back to their earlier days, lots of guitar aswell which always goes down well with me! 
A Comfy Pluto!
May 25th
We finally ordered a sofa last week – its from DFS and is called ‘Pluto’
We ordered in the colour of ivory a 3 seater and 2 armchairs, which came to about ?1300.
Unfortunately there is a 12 week turnaround on leather sofas so we wont have it until end of July/early August. Should be worth the wait though!
HR – Bunch Of Muppets!
May 25th
It’s been a nightmare couple of weeks on the house front, mainly due to my HR dept not playing ball with my reference.
When we applied for the mortgage we were asked if we had any additional income besides our salaries. I said that I had a non guaranteed bonus every year (based on company performance) and was told this was fine, so we put it down.
Fast forward 2 weeks and my mortgage broker starts to chase me to give my HR dept a kick as they were not giving the correct reference to our lender. The lender was apparently faxing over a form with specific questions and my HR dept kept returning their own brand of form, missing out certain key questions such as ‘additional earnings’. This was going on for 2 weeks before I got wind of it and when I chased HR they informed me that as my bonus wasn’t a guaranteed thing that they wouldnt state it under ‘additional earnings’. Fair enough – but the lender was not bothered by that, they just wanted to know what additonal earnings I had last year!!!!
In the end, I had to send the lender my last 12 months of payslips so they could see for themselves that I had infact earnt additional money last year. A pretty piss poor effort from HR means that this has all been held up for 2 and a half weeks!
It all turned out fine in the end though …we received the official mortgage offer on Tuesday, which we signed and returned on Wednesday. So once again, we are now waiting for the solicitors to do their thing. I haven’t spoken to them in about 2 weeks, but last I heard they were waiting on the mortgage to be approved before they could finalise things.
We are still on track to move for the last week of June though, all being well.
Back Online
May 25th
And the blog is back! I upgraded the O/S on the server to Windows Server 2003 so I could try out Exchange Server. It was a fraught process getting everything configured and getting to grips with Active Directory …so I decided to keep the setup due to the amount of work that went into getting it running.
Running IIS (a must for Exchange) meant I had to manually install and configure PHP and MYSQL as opposed to running the Xampp installer on my old setup (I couldn’t use Xampp as its an Apache bundle). The biggest problem this posed was getting PHP and MYSQL talking to each other …a relatively straightforward process once you know what you are doing – but took me several attempts spread over almost 1 week of evenings to get working. A good learning experience though!
All setup and imaged now …sorted
