Mark Dalton

After being Duty Manager last weekend I had Friday off as a day in Lieu and thought I would book Monday off and enjoy a long weekend. I dropped the car off for its annual service first thing Friday morning and then headed into town for a coffee and some window shopping. I sat in Costa Coffee for about two hours, chilling out with the laptop and looking at potential holiday destinations, but didn’t arrive at any conclusions. I then wandered around the town, only buying another 500 GB USB Hard Drive, before walking home.

It wasn’t particularly warm but I did enjoy the walk. One of the problems with commuting every day is that I don”t really have the energy or time to get any real exercise, and this time of year only really see daylight out of the office window. I had a couple of PodCasts to catch up on so wrapped up warm and plugged into my iPhone

After a spot of lunch Mum dropped by as I had agreed to go TV shopping with her. She had seen my new Samsung and set her heart on one. So we headed up to Curry”s only to find that they didn’t have any in stock but said they could order one for delivery, but there would be a delivery charge. I asked if they could order it in and we would collect it but they said they couldn’t, if it was ordered it had to be delivered. Mum had really set her heart on walking away with the TV, so we headed over to Comet. They also didn’t have any in stock, but said they could order one and have it delivered Sunday with no delivery charge. It wasn’t walking away with one, but at least she would get one before the weekend was out. Mum then dropped my back at the garage to pick up my car. I drove home not noticing the software update they had performed to the Engine Management System, as they said I probably wouldn’t.

Saturday I got on with the normal chores and started to make a list of the job”s that need doing around the house. This weekend was supposed to be the weekend I started getting people round to quote for some of the bigger jobs, but after a crappy couple of weeks, I just wasn’t in the mood, so settled on writing lists. Saturday evening I was sad and ironed while watching TV.

Sunday I headed round to Mum and Dad”s to setup the TV on the promise of a roast dinner. The TV was delivered around midday and I was set straight to work setting it up. Now I believed that it had a Free View receiver built in, but quickly found that it didn’t. I then spent several hours trying to get it to work with there existing Thomson Free View box. In the end I was pretty sure it was the ariel but Mum came up with the idea of trying the portable ariel that she uses in the dinning room. This quickly proved it was the ariel and once we had swapped out the ariel cable, the setup was a breeze. We tided up and I connected the TV to their home network and showed them the Internet interaction, and then connected up the DVD player and tested that out by watching the BBC”s Earth Series.

Today I enjoyed a nice long lay in and then popped round to Mum & Dad”s as Mum looks after Eleanor on Mondays, and I hadn”t seen her or Katrina for a couple of weeks. Returning home I did the last few chores before plonking myself on the sofa where I spent the rest of the day.

The second week of the year back at work started out a little better than the first. To start with I had a train ticket so didn”t need to go through the Monday morning hell of queuing up, and the trains were also running fairly smoothly with delays of only a few minutes here and there. All went well until it snowed again on Tuesday night and I couldn”t get the car out on Wednesday morning. This was a major pain in the butt as I had ordered something online, which I”ll come on to, that was due to be delivered on the Wednesday that I needed urgently but also because I hadn”t been shopping. Luckily I have access to all the work systems from home so could get on and after a several attempts on Wednesday afternoon I managed to get the car freed up. Thursday I was able to slip and slide my way to the train station and make it into the office. Thursday and Friday were busy but uneventful thankfully and I managed to successfully retrieve my package. Friday night it rained and for the first time since Christmas I was able to see my drive way. Saturday I was able to escape and get some shopping done before meeting up with some friends for a couple of beers (read hungover this morning).

So today is a house day! The chores done I can get on with catching up with the paperwork, first task my 2009 Tax Filing, oh the joy. That done and with the next major task being the ironing, which is Sunday evening in front of the TV job, I decided to get on with sorting out a couple of issues that had popped up during the week.

Now when working at home I often fire up iTunes as I find working in complete silence a little weird. Now since buying a Drobo and DroboShare I have been playing around with using it for both file storage and as a backup device. Now to cut a long story short I had copied my iTunes library over to it and all seemed to be going well. Well, Tuesday evening while catching up with email on opening iTunes I was told met with a default iTunes library screen. After a little messing around I found that iTunes kept telling me the Library file was damaged and it had created a new one. It wasn”t until I looked at the Drobo I found one of the drives was showing as failed. Now I didn’t have any spare ones so as quick as a flash I ordered two spares. Now what puzzled me was that the Drobo is supposed to handle a failed drive without any data issues. Mmmm interesting.

As I couldn’t get into the office on Wednesday and had selected the office as the delivery location for the drives I had to wait until Thursday to pick them up and until Thursday night to replace the failed drive. Imagine what I said when I plugged in a new drive and it went through the motions only to also show up as failed. So I dropped a line to Drobo Support. They came back to me on Friday suggesting I follow the following article, which I did as well as some other basic trouble shooting tips.

These tips basically involved testing to see if the fault followed the disk or if the slot was the issue, so they had me remove the failed drive and swap the other drives around to see if the fault followed the drive. Now this was interesting in as much as SLOT 1 was showing the failed drive but if I move the drive from SLOT 2 to SLOT 1 all three drives showed as good. However if I either inserted the failed drive from SLOT 1 or a new drive into SLOT two, the drive in SLOT 1 (which was the one I had moved from SLOT 2) showed as failed.

I tried moving drives around and inserting new drives in the vacant SLOT but what every I tried the drive in SLOT 1 showed as failed when all four bays were populated. So I emailed Drobo Support with the results Friday evening. Now it would appear that Drobo don’t do weekend support as I haven’t had anything more from them, but I needed to play a little more. So today I (having a full backup of all the data) reset the Drobo with the original four drives and recreated the volumes and formatted all the drives. Thus far all four are showing online and good so I am none the wiser as to what the issue is / was, but am loathed to trust it at this point. I will be testing it out a little more but look forward to Drobo”s next response, especially as I was on the verge of ordering another one to use with my Mac Mini Media centre.

Wow it was hard getting up on Monday morning. I mean I knew it was going to be, but when the alarm clock went off I just wasn”t expecting it. It was almost as if the alarm clock was mocking me. I got to the train station and had forgotten to renew my ticket over the weekend, so had to stand in the queue which isn”t great at the best of times let alone the first working week of the new year. There was such a demand for tickets the system kept crashing meaning that they could only issue weekly tickets. So I brought the ticket and stood with all the other happy souls on the station platform waiting for the train. Monday flew by after catching up with everybody and before I knew it I was homeward bound with several hundred emails to still wade through. The only problem with taking time off is that the work just waits for you to return.

Tuesday night it snowed and snowed hard so by Wednesday morning we had 6-8″ of snow on the ground and the roads were impassable, this continued all week so I worked from home. Luckily with technology today this is not a problem and I can access all the systems I need to, but I do miss the social interaction and by the weekend I was starting to suffer from cabin fever, and a distinct lack of food.

Saturday I tried to venture into town but the roads were still very slippery and the car parks were closed, so I decided to pop down to see Katrina and the kids as it was Katrina”s birthday on the Friday and I hadn”t given her the iPod that I had brought her.

Katrina was equally frustrated as the schools had been closed and the kids were also starting to show signs of being cooped up to long. We had a cup of coffee and complained about the weather like good British citizens, while the kids climbed all over me, but it was really good to seem them again.

Sunday it was still to risky to go to far but I dug the car out and cleared the drive somewhat and made it to the train station and renewed my ticket. I just couldn”t stand the thought of doing it at 06:30 Monday morning. After doing that and getting some shopping I walked up to Mum & Dad”s for Sunday dinner. We chatted about the snow as they hadn”t made it out too far either and then moved on to holiday”s to try and brighten up the mood.

I walked home slipping and sliding all over the place and then settled in for the evening with a rented movie.

Okay so we had a great dinner at Mum and Dad’s for Katrina’s birthday, but despite taking my camera I completely forgot to take any photo’s.

Last week was a busy week in the office as everything is now really getting back up to speed after the Christmas holidays. Friday we had an all day off site meeting to review the projects that are taking place in 2009 and firm out the delivery details.

Saturday Mum, Dad, and I ventured off to the Vue cinema in Basingstoke to see Slumdog Millionaire. The film is a story an Indian Tea Boy that win’s the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and more specifically the story of how he got to be on the show and go on to win.

It’s an extremely good film, and I would highly recommend it to anybody. For me the filming reminded me a lot of my time in India, and my trip to Mumbia.

Sunday was a day to catch up with paper work, an area that I have been neglecting recently. It was a productive day however and now I am up to date. I also got to work on my workflow a little bit, and for those that don’t understand what I am talking about when I talk about workflow I am talking about how I handle and process paperwork.

I used to like most other people action inbound paperwork and then simply file it in a traditional filing cabinet. Well, I moved on to scanning the paperwork and digitally storing it before shredding it. This meant that I could lose the unsightly filing cabinet. Well this weekend I took that a step further integrating it with how I handle my personal finances and how I capture the resulting actions, especially the repetitive ones. I also managed as an output to translate that into a system to track and identify tasks relating to my personal goals. I still have a bit of work to do on this, but once I have it all clear in my mind I’ll write it all up for those that are interested.

So the first week back at work after the Christmas break and boy was it hard work, even if I did only do four days. Last Sunday I was a good boy and went to bed at a quite respectable 23:00 but didn’t sleep particularly well at all waking up at 02:00, 04:00, 05:00, and eventually at 06:00 when the alarm went off. Of course when the alarm went off the last thing I wanted to do was get up. I forced myself out of bed however and got ready for work. It wasn’t until I had showered and dressed that I opened the curtains to see about an inch of snow covering everything. As I opened the front door the coldness hit be like a freight train. As quickly as I could I got in the car and fired up the heating. The car was frozen solid and it was a good 5 minutes before I could reverse out of the drive way and make my way to the station. Standing on the platform as the wind howled, I suddenly found myself thinking back to my time in India.

Monday was probably the hardest day in the office as no matter how much I tried I just couldn’t get back into the swing of things and found that my mind kept wandering. The rest of the week was pretty much the same, not wanting to get up, cold platforms, and general apathy but thankfully Thursday was the end of the week for me as I had booked Friday off.

Now normally a day’s leave is a good thing, but Friday was a sad day as I said goodbye to the Jaguar. It’s a decision that I have been mulling over for the last 6 months but an inevitable one nonetheless. I simply am not doing the mileage to warrant the running costs of the Jag and the with the type of journeys that I do am not getting the mileage, which hurts when you’re paying over £1 a ltr.

However the pain was eased today when I picked up my new VW Golf. I have always wanted one and don’t really know why I brought the Jag when I did, but thats life I guess. I brought a 2.0 TDI GT Sport and I must say having taken it for a good spin today that its quick. It’s not a Jag, but is very comfortable and as it’s considerably lighter than the Jag feels a lot more responsive.

Tomorrow I am off to Mum & Dad’s for a Birthday dinner for Katrina. More tomorrow, with photo’s!