I went to York to visit Ania this weekend as a last minute sort of thing. It was a really good weekend.
Most of Saturday afternoon/evening involved being by myself while Ania worked. I decided to go for a York walk to buy a book and maybe get a haircut.
I put a star on the location of Ania’s work on Google Maps and then searched for a local Waterstones. I found the shop straight away with no messing (admittedly it was a straight journey aLong one road). I bought a copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and set off in a random direction.
I found a street that looked like it might have a barber shop on it, and walked along for a while. Towards the end of the street I found that it actually did have 2 hairdressers. They were closed, so I looked at the map on my phone and saw where I was, then sauntered along a different route back to the city centre.
I went for a fairly twisty-turny walk through the city centre and then found my way back to Ania’s workplace. At absolutely no point did I worry that I could get lost, knowing that I had my phone with GPS and Google Maps.
I love smartphones!
I was just reading a BBC News article about the death of presenter Kristian Digby, who I’ve never watched on TV before, or even heard of before he died. I found a sentence that I completely misread because of the grammar.
“The property expert, who was born into a family of property developers, worked on a number of other shows including Double Agents, Living In The Sun, House Swap and Buy It, Sell It, Bank It.”
The problem I had was in the list of shows. Due to the lack of a serial comma I read one of the show names as “House Swap and Buy It” which is obviously not a show once you read the rest of the sentence, but seemed like one at first.
Adding the serial comma would be a nice start, but would still potentially cause confusion in the final item of the list, which contains 2 commas of its own. Normally when one or more list items contain internal punctuation (their own commas, for example) you should separate the items with a semi-colon.
I was going to use point 2b on this page on the Northern Illinois University website as my source, until I read the rest of the page and noticed that they’d written poles instead of polls. That’s not to mention that the top of the page includes the phrase “weak period” which I don’t particularly want to get into.
Instead I point you to Essentials of English Grammar: a practical guide to the mastery of English by L. Sue Baugh. 
Now you know.
I was just reading a bit of documentation–the RFC in fact–for SRV records when I had to stop and read the same sentence a couple of extra times because it was so unclear the first time. Here it is:
Name
The domain this RR refers to. The SRV RR is unique in that the name one searches for is not this name; the example near the end shows this clearly.
I did a bit of a search around and I found a site called Debian Help that had this to say on the topic (emphasis mine):
name
Incomprehensible description in RFC 2782. Leaving the entry blank (without a dot) will substitute the current zone root (the $ORIGIN), or you can explicitly add it as in the above _http._tcp.example.com. (with a dot).
Oh well. It seems I don’t need it.
I finally got back to work today after the flu kept me off last week. It was quite nice to be back in the office, actually.
I managed to get quite a bit done on something that had me stumped before I became ill, as well as fixing a couple of new bugs with some Javascript changes. Felt good to make progress.
Hope the rest of the week goes so well. 
For the last couple of days I’ve been feeling really ill. It started out on Sunday evening when I was watching a film with Dave and Hayley. I started to shiver pretty constantly. I though I might actually just be feeling the cold, as it is February. An hour or two later it was a lot worse. My face was boiling to the touch but I was still shivering. I was also feeling sick.
I decided sleep was the answer, but ended up being sick first. 
Sunday night is one of the worst nights I’ve ever experienced. I woke up at least 10 times during the night. When my alarm went off at 6:30 I also had a sore throat, so I sent an email saying I wouldn’t make it to work.
Throughout the course of the day my knees and hips began to ache a lot. Ibuprofen helped keep that dulled down a bit, and my fever disappeared. I did have a really stiff neck though, at which point people told me to look for a rash thinking of meningitis. Pretty sure I don’t have that though.
Shortly before I fell asleep on the sofa I began the whole feverishness thing of shivering while being boiling to the touch. I managed to drop to sleep, but woke up less than half an hour later with a shout because my right hip was absolutely killing me.
I managed to talk myself into getting up from under the warm blanket so I could get ibuprofen and gargle with Oraldene then go to bed properly.
I woke up in the night completely covered in sweat, which was horrible enough, but also the ibuprofen had worn off and my hips and knees were hurting again.
I sent another email saying I was still unwell and slept until the pain woke me again. Now I’m in bed trying to work up the courage to get up.
Ugh. I hate the last day or so!
My mum called me on the phone at about 11pm tonight. I decided to ignore it and call her back when a show had finished.
Shortly before I called back I prepared for an argument. One happens just about every time we speak. Especially if she’s had a drink.
She answered the phone in a good mood. She called to tell me about a sketch on TV reminding her of when I failed to get a job at McDonalds once. Itold her that it was at KFC, and then she started about how she once applied there when she was desperate for work, but refused to give them a photocopy of her passport.
I said that there was a good reason for having ID of people being hired, and it was just a photocopy. I don’t actually see the reason for it, but I doubt KFC are in the habit of selling photocopies of passports to let illegal immigrants in, as my mum shouted at me.
She then went on to shout about how they’re all drug dealers there because they found a hypodermic needle in the baby changing room once. I tried to point out that that only meant some scummy drug user had been there, but she’d moved on to how all of the NG18 postal code was run by drug dealers, and it wasn’t safe for her to go outside any more.
This is where I gave up trying to talk to her and came to bed.
This whole thing is getting old, fast.
I was altering some code in Vim a little while ago. I had recently undone some warnings because I thought I didn’t need them any more. It turned out that I did. I started typing :redo :redo :redo and the changes were coming back gradually, but it was a pain to type the command each time.
In Vim the ‘.’ key repeats the last action, so I figured it would save me a lot of time to just press that instead. Bad idea! The ‘.’ character will not repeat the :redo command, it will repeat the action that the :redo caused. So if :redo inserted some text then pressing ‘.’ will cause that same section of text to be inserted again.
This is not only a bit annoying, but also causes a divergence from the history meaning you can no longer use :redo to get back to where you were going.
A useful shortcut for redo in Vim is Ctrl-r. I’m slowly becoming less of a Vim n00b.
Now I better get back to typing in all of my warns.
For the last week or so I’ve been chasing around after the bank and my solicitor to try to keep them on their toes so that the mortgage and house can finally be transferred into just my name.
It’s not been particularly stressful so far, just expensive. It’s going to come to somewhere in the region of £600 which doesn’t include the £150 fee that Natwest will add onto the mortgage amount. I’m hoping the whole thing can be sorted in the next week or two. Lizz has had an offer accepted on a new place, so it seems silly that she should still be on pieces of paper linking her to Crown Street. Luckily I believe the mortgage has already been changed, but I don’t know if that counts for anything before I’ve filled out some forms for the new mortgage.
I’d just like to take a moment to say how absolutely brilliant it has been to use Natwest’s free callback service. I put my phone number in, say I want a phone call in so many minutes and they call me. It saves me looking all over the Internet for an outdated 01 or 02 number that I can call from my mobile phone. Thanks Natwest.
So yeah, that’s what I’m doing with my life at the moment. Exciting stuff, huh?
Just as I thought would happen when I wrote this blog post people have begun to say swine flu was a hoax by the large medical companies to make a load of money from vaccinations.
Why doesn’t anybody think that perhaps all the vaccinations people had prevented the situation from being far worse than it has been? Has everyone forgotten the quickly rising numbers of confirmed cases in the early stages?
Of course, I’m open to the suggestion that it could have all been hype from evil medical corporations run by heartless, unseen billionaires who want people to die so they could make a few more dollars, but it seems a little far-fetched. Too much like a plot from a bad movie. I believe the simpler theory is that the vaccination worked. Enough people were immunised against the virus and so it was stopped, or at least slowed. Occam’s razor. 
Yay, it’s the future now! Twenty-ten has started.
I spent New Year’s eve in Mansfield town centre with Dave, Hayley, Katy, Ryan, etc. We started the night at Ryan’s house for the first couple, and then headed to The Mill. Everyone was in a good mood and looking forward to the rest of the night. So after a few more drinks we headed into town to Wetherspoons.
Drinks flowed for a while and then Len came to meet us. Other people left to go to The Mill as I had made everyone promise to do, but I stayed with Len in Wetherspoons instead. We saw the new year in there with some other people and then headed into Liquid for the remainder of the night.
It was a good night overall, and I was very pleased to get to bed, even though it was getting light by the time I got to sleep!