Carnal Octet Emu

Screw the Microsoft dictation stuff.

A fairly decent day in work. It was my Unix day, so I spent the morning going over the backup system as I'm going to have to be solely responsible for it for the next two weeks. It's getting rather near capacity now and so the daily admin needs to be kept on top of, especially the bank holiday weekend where it usually throws a tantrum because nobody has taken the tapes out of the I/O door. The afternoon was spent struggling with the slightly bonkers way that Unix keeps time, which was causing issues with scripting.

Pleasantly surprised by Dell today. We had a Latitude D620 with screwed up graphics. It has an Nvidia Quadro NVS 110 that was one of the many that Nvidia had problems with a couple of years ago. The standard warranty on the laptop expired in April, but I read on the Internet that Dell had extended the warranty on affected machines. I logged a call with them, expecting a battle to get the laptop repaired but nope, they said cheerfully it had a 5 year warranty on the graphics chip and after I did a couple of tests over the phone, they said an engineer would be out tomorrow to replace the motherboard and screen. Result!

Came home and packed up for the weekend, off to my nephew's wedding on Saturday. I leave tomorrow evening directly after work, as all the family are staying in a B&B, which should be good. On Sunday, I'm taking Amogharatna to Leek so he can do a half marathon there, and then to the airport I think. I've got Monday off as I think I'll need it after all that.

It's been a hugely fat day. First I was persuaded to have chips for lunch, which was actually good as they really hit the spot, the weather was OK, and it was nice to get out of the office. On the way home I thought sod it and got a Chinese. I don't know how to get out of this cycle I'm in right now, it's pissing me off.