Dom Davis (The Blog)

It turns out that motorway driving at night is, in my opinion, easier than during the day. You’re separated from oncoming traffic enough that their headlights don’t cause the same issues as on a single carriageway and, when moving between lanes it’s easy to spot where everyone else is, especially if their in your blond spot because their lights just give them away.

I also discovered that in third at about 4,500 revs there is a tiny bit of grunt in Po’s 1104cc engine which meant I could risk overtaking some of the slower moving vehicles on the drive.

About 90 minutes into our journey we stopped at a pub for food. It was here that I discovered Po had a massive scratch along her passenger door. Some bastard had either keyed her, or run a shopping trolley into her or otherwise injured her while she was parked. Since were not sure when it happened we can’t be sure. There’s me thrashing the nuts off her and she’s injured, albeit just winged.

Despite her wound Po performed admirably over the weekend, if a little thirstily (for her size of engine) as squeezing out that last little drop of performance rather wrecks the fuel economy. Unfortunately the biggest challenge was about to come.

25 minutes from home, entering a little village called Letheringset (fantastic pub there if you ever fancy a meal by the way), we had slowed to just under 30 when a big four wheel drive pulls out of a side road to our right. He’s already made one abortive attempt at pulling out and we’re that close to him that I assumed he was going to pull half way out, wait for us and the car behind to pass and slot in behind. After all, Po is bright red, he’s surely seen us and isn’t going to pull out in front….

…yes, yes he is. Brakes were firmly applied and I wondered if I’d stopped in time or if Po was now sporting a new accessory off her offside front wing.

Now, to give you an idea of the final speed of the incident imagine, if you will, you’ve turned off a roundabout that has two lanes that instantly merge into one. Some tosser has gone round you and is bullying their way in front. You have to slow and they try squeeze in front of you. Eventually both cars stop at close to hitting and the car that can proceed without causing a crash wins. It was like that only in our case there weren’t two lanes going into one, just one small lane that our new appendage had tried to merge into and they weren’t slowing, or indeed doing anything to avoid us. Not going to work.

Anyway, he pulls off into the next little turning on the left and we followed. Not sure what to do, or how to react (he wasn’t the first person to drive at me that weekend, just the most successful) I opened the door to be met by a very apologetic man which rather diffused the situation. The Zozo, being infinitely more practical than I, proceeded to take charge of the situation and organise things like insurance details and the noting down of the number plate.

During the discussion the damage was assessed. Remember that I wasn’t even sure if we’d hit. I’d stalled the car and been a little surprised but during the whole thing hadn’t heard any bangs. The Zozo, on the other hand, tells a tale of hearing the tortured screams of metal upon metal. The reality was somewhere in between. We had hit, but barely. Po was sporting less red paint and more silver paint than before and the other car was slightly scuffed if you knew where to look. I believe the term is traded paint.

As accidents go it was almost pleasant. It’s not something I’d like to repeat, but if you absolutely, positively have to crash then that’s how you want it to happen. Meanwhile we’ll get a quote for buffing Pos front wing and see if we can’t get her scratch sorted at the same time.

I don’t know about you, but if I get woken in the night one of two things is going to happen. I’m either going to roll over and go to sleep straight away (sometimes not even remembering that I woke up at all according to The Zozo) or I’m awake for hours. There is no middle ground, it’s seconds or hours.

The tipping point seems to be how far my brain gets woken up. Occasionally my computer, which is in the bedroom, decides to wake up from sleep mode for no apparent reason. There is a click as the power supply goes from low power mode to fully on, the fans spin up to full speed for a few seconds before settling down and both monster screens turn on. You know how much light a 30″ TV throws out when you’re watching it? Double that. It ranks pretty low on my all time favourite ways to be woken up at random times but I can get up, put it to sleep and head back to bed and put myself back to sleep without really thinking.

Compare that with being woken by a machine that’s pulled your telephone number randomly out of a hat and forces your brain to actually do something. Still being woken, still having to get out of bed to do something but this time your brain has woken up too. You head back to bead and it suddenly decides were going to go over the points that need to be raised in my next meeting, the fix to my current coding problem…

…and no matter what you try it doesn’t let up until about 5am where it goes “phew, long night, let’s get some really deep sleep”. 90 minutes later and the alarm is letting you know that the extra 7 hours of that deep sleep you really need to face the day isn’t happening.

And it’s the time you need to wake up that dictates when your brain let’s up, not how long it’s been awake for. Don’t need to be up till 8? Fine, I’ll sit here and spin, keeping you awake until 6:30 instead.

As you can guess I didn’t get much sleep last night.

These days I’ve taken to sorting out my todo list, doing a load of admin and a bit of programming on the train to work. It’s the only way I can even hope to keep up with everything that needs to be done at work. It certainly helps that I now do 90% of my work on the laptop¹.

This morning I got on the train, grabbed a table seat² got out the laptop and hit big confusion. There were apps running that I hadn’t started, folders open that I hadn’t opened and files that I didn’t recognise. I’d picked up Zo’s laptop, a near identical one to mine. Crud.

My todo lists both sync to my phone, email and calendars are handled by exchange, code is all on a server and I could, in theory, move back to using my desktop for the day supplemented by my phone… or I could get off the train, go home, get my laptop and head into work a hour late.

I chose the latter; after all, I was in an hour early yesterday, I can work from home while waiting for the train and I’d probably get more done that way than ducking about with the other option. Teach me not to check which one I’d picked up

¹If anyone knows where I can get my hands on BEA weblogic 8.1 for AIX (don’t ask) I could make it 100%.
²Be interesting to see if I can still get a table when school starts again.

I’m very picky when it comes to watches to the point where they’re one of the few items I won’t buy off the internet. I need to see the exact size and how it looks in the flesh.

Having worn Fossil ‘Big Tick’ watches for about a decade I decided to go out on a limb and try something new. My first attempt met with abject failure. I broke my cardinal rule, bought something from the internet and never really got on with it. In the end I went back to wearing my old Fossil.

Eventually, however, the battery died. The display was broken (which is why I was wanting to replace it in the first place) and I had to go get a new watch. Deciding to just replace like with like I just headed to google for somewhere to buy a new Big Tick. The results page flashed up a number of results and some images for a new ceramic watch by Fossil. First impressions were that it was something I’d like, but I needed to be sure the face wasn’t too big.

That lunch I headed into Norwich and scoured every shop that sold watches for this thing. No joy. Eventually I ended up in House of Fraser where, after a long chat with the person in charge of watches, I discovered the watch I wanted would require special order and, worse still, was likely to be too big.

Since they didn’t have the watch in question we had been using other watches as examples and one had particularly taken my eye. Assuming it was going to cost a fortune (most ceramic watches I’d seen that day were hideously expensive) I made a throwaway comment about how I’d love that one but couldn’t afford it. With that the sales person pounced.

Knowing how much I was willing to pay for the Fossil I had come in about I was offered an ex-display model of the watch I liked heavily discounted (Hurrah for sales!). The only downside was the battery might need replacing sooner and there were no spare links. Given the watch was just a bit too large and I’d need a link removed I didn’t see that as a problem. I left the proud owner of a hideously expensive watch at a not so hideously expensive price. I was a very happy chap. So pleased was I with my watch I even bought a matching ring.

Now is probably a good time to mention one of the properties of ceramic watches (and rings for that matter): they’re very brittle and won’t survive a drop onto a hard surface. You can guess what’s coming next

Yup, this morning a bleary eyed me picked up a bunch of papers that also happened to be hiding my watch. In trying to work out what the heavy lump in amongst everything was I managed to drop the watch on the floor breaking two of the links. I was gutted.

Thankfully it was just the two links that broke and not the watch itself. Sadly I only have one spare link so I need a second. This will require sending it to the authorised UK service place and have them repair it. They won’t give estimates of repairs to ceramic watches until they’ve seen the damage which sounds expensive. All I can do is send it off and see what they say. Fingers crossed for good (and cheap) news.

People handle grief differently. I tend to be very private with my grief getting through the more public parts of the day by listening to very loud, very aggressive music and eating crap. Since I couldn’t be there I marked my grandmothers funeral today by stuffing my face with one of those individually wrapped portions of Cadburys Fruit and Nut (the 200 gram one so it’s more than 1 mouthful).

I’ve eaten a lot of crap this week so the diet should probably begin again in ernest tomorrow. That said, I am a lot happier with my shape these days and I did notice the other day that I had the body of an Athlete¹ so that’s OK.

¹ OK, so maybe not the body of an athlete, but I do have the feet of an athlete at least… OK, OK, I have athletes foot. Happy now?

Blam!

The alarm shocks you from blissful slumber to bleary eyed consciousness. Clinging at the desperate belief that, somehow, an extra 60 seconds in bed will make all the difference you delay the inevitable as long as you can. Eventually, resigned to your fate, you can put it off no longer. Trying to peel your eyes open you stumble into the bathroom trying to work out how, after 8 hours sleep, you’re more tired than when you went to bed.

Ablutions done and with the shower having had very little effect you head downstairs to prepare breakfast and lunch only to discover you’ve left the fridge open all night and nothing is cold anymore. Spreading half melted butter on your sandwich you contemplate toast for breakfast instead of cereal with warm milk, but no, you decide to be good.

Taking the cereal out of the cupboard in it’s plastic container you tip it upside down like you do every day to mix the large and small bits together but somehow today you’ve completely failed to hold onto the lid and there is now half a box of Alpen strewn over the work surface and floor. With a sigh you retrieve the dustpan and bush and tidy up before retiring to eat breakfast.

Having to clean up the mess has made you late. You have to rush your tea and head out the door to go to work. The Zozo is off today and you don’t want to go. You want to stay home with her. As you head to the station wondering what else is going to go wrong today the rain pipes up: “Remember me?” it says, “and you don’t have your big brolly with you either, what a shame!”

Cue a short, sharp cloudburst.

A month or two ago we had rain of biblical proportions which managed to soak me entirely despite having a brolly. I don’t seem to have blogged about it though which is remiss of me. I certainly bitched about it on Facebook a lot. Anyway, the upshot is that these days I take my bigger umbrella if it looks like more than showers. So consider this morning:

Me: Good morning rain!
Rain: Good morning Dom.
Me: You’re going to piss it down aren’t you?
Rain: *looks innocent*
Me: Well I don’t trust you so I’m taking my big umbrella!
Rain: As you wish.
Me: Yup, see, lovely and dry!
Rain: You sure about that?

[Cue more biblical rain that hits the ground so hard it then bounces up and soaks you from the thighs down.]

Me: Bastard!
Rain: You’re welcome.

Thankfully the point was proved on the quick 250m dash to the station so I was able to go from soaked to damp by the time I arrived in Norwich and was not made any damper on my walk to work. Poor old Zozo was out in it all day though

While perusing the App Store last night I discovered Dragons Naturally Speaking dictation app which was available for free download. Given typing on the iPhone keyboard isn’t the fasted of input methods (although it’s pretty good given the size of the keyboard) and considering entering any kind of HTML is a complete sod (yes, all those links, the foot notes, all that stuff I have to painstakingly enter by hand, just for you) I thought I would give it a go.

Apparently it works like this: You install the app, you dictate your text, it fires that off to a server somewhere, that converts it to text and the app presents you with said text.

What really happens is you fire up the app, it fails to connect to the server even before you’ve managed to do anything, you give up, write the blog the old skool way with keyboard and thumb. Hey ho.

My walk to and from work is a not unpleasant affair of a riverside walk with a short hop over a road to get to the station. I get to see green, wild fowl and endless people walking their dogs. The downside is midges. The little buggers hover at mouth height just waiting for you to ingest, or worse, inhale them. Keeping ones mouth shut mitigates the ingestion problem, but not the inhalation one.

I only mention this because today the bug threat was stepped up a level from passive annoyance to direct assault. I was just starting my walk, trying to remember what the hell I was going to blog about (I did have a topic this morning, buggered if I can remember what it is now though) when: *smack*. Some large flying insect (possibly a bumble bee, if not Mothra himself) hits me in the side of the face and proceeds to get tangled in my headphones. Bearing in mind I’m not good with wasps and this could quite easily be a wasp (or hornet, or killer bee) I instantly adopt the “Argh! Get it off!” position, flailing wildly with my free hand (iPhone in the other, remember?) in order to extricate whatever just dive bombed me without being stung to death. Not a good look, especially since I managed to pull my headphones out and end up with them dangling from the phone.

Thankfully the people from the office who seemed to be having a lovely picnic on the river bank (alright for some) were just a bit too far away to witness me at my finest. It was just the dog walkers who got a good chuckle.

So there is tiny flaw in the whole blogging while walking to and from work, namely the small problem of rain. That said, there have been very few days where it’s been raining on both walks but this is the UK and having crappy, drizzly days where it doesn’t let up isn’t unheard of. If it is raining you’ll just have to go find something else to do