A rough few days

Not been well the last few days. Really didn't feel well on Thursday but went into work anyway. The morning was spent doing some stuff with the backup system and then seeing the Unix guy who is still off sick in the afternoon. Still not sure when he's coming back. Also got my honorarium backpay in my last paycheck, which will be a big help to sorting out my finances.

Thursday night was the work Christmas do. I really shouldn't have gone as I felt quite ill but I missed it last year because of the snow and I wasn't going to chuck another bunch of cash away by not going. I didn't stay past the meal really but the food was excellent, so that was good.

On Friday I didn't go into work, and that day and yesterday and today have basically been laying around not doing much really and looking at the snow and hail we've had. Yesterday I did go out to get some bits for Christmas as I felt OK but I quickly realised it was a bad mistake and came home again. It's very unpleasant out there at the moment. I kept myself snug and warm and occupied with the Xbox and the DS.

There was a brief power cut last night but I think there was a surge when it came back on and it's killed the 8-port gigabit switch that links the Alienware machines and the Xbox to the router downstairs and to the Atom VMware server. Given that everything was up and running and I was on the Xbox at the time, it could have been worse. I was playing Saints Row 3 and had literally saved the game only 30 seconds before the power cut - if the save had been corrupted I'd have probably cried. Well, more likely I'd have sworn a lot.

Today marked the end of DS9, which I've been watching continually since August. It came as somewhat of a shock that I had just one disk left with the final two-parter episode, which played through as one long one. TNG is of course a classic, but I think overall DS9 is better with the long reached story arcs and the Dominion war and less of a reliance on the reset button between episodes.

The DS9 finale was pretty good but not quite as good as the end of TNG I think. It was certainly a lot darker though, much like the last few seasons of DS9. I don't really think much of Voyager, it was far too twee and soap opera like most of the time, and I never saw Enterprise beyond the first or second seasons.

I think I've reached the coughy stage of my cold now and it's making my throat hurt. Probably OK for work tomorrow.

Interesting demonstation of how much processor technology has advanced. I've got two machines which have Celerons at pretty much the same clock speed, 1.6ghz. One is an old P4 based one from probably 2003 or so, the other is a much more recent Core based one. The old one takes 15 hours to process a Seti@home work unit, while the newer one does it in 2.5 hours, even though it actually has less RAM than the older machine. Both are running Ubuntu and will probably end up on Ebay before too long.

The broadband is playing silly buggers at the moment. It's really annoying.