All these things that I have done

Well, that's it! After 2 and a half years at Winton, I'm out. It's not been too bad, all things considered, but not the job for me. Went out to lunch with my colleagues and was given a rather lovely card (with cat on) and a Next gift card, so I shall have to go have a browse around and decide what to treat myself to.

Of course the effect is rather spoiled by the fact that I forgot to return a book I borrowed from a colleague so I will have to pop back in next week :)

Sometimes, I think that I'm way over paid for the difficulty level of my job but sometimes, just very occasionally, I do something that makes me feel like I am worth it. Smug, but true.

Arrrrgggg! So I have a query which was running in reasonable time. I make some changes and it runs in unreasonable time. So I change it back. AND IT RUNS IN UNREASONABLE TIME!!!!!1111!!!! It's just the same as it was before when it ran fast!! WHY, GOD, WHY!!!!!

Ahem. Sorry about that.

I have been absolutely convinced for the whole of this week that next week was my brothers wedding and the last week of March. It was only last night while we were out at the luminox that I was forced to look at my calendar and discovered that there's another whole week to go! Of course, allied to that, that means I have to go into work for a full week next week instead of getting 3 days off, which is part of my frustration. On the other hand, it gives me more dithering time before deciding what to buy from the wedding list for them.

All in all, this has been a pretty good week at work, as I got lots of thanks for bringing in 2 rush projects I was asked to take on in with aplomb. I have to say I was feeling rather pleased with myself this afternoon.

Having signed up to basically every web 2.0 task manager out there (and boy do I wish they would get open ID - separate registration for everything is sooo 2006) I have finally decided that there just isn't one out there that does what I want and so I'm going to write one myself. It's surprising how often this is the case really - I think I'm just too picky :)

Was tempted to count my post in privchange as today's post, but I think that would definitely be cheating :)

Some progress has been made on the list of things I am committed to doing but it will still be roughly the same length as I have remembered some other things I must do that weren't on there (e.g. get car serviced). Ah well, such is the way of these things.

In a bad omen for the week to come, I have managed to lose all this mornings work in a computer crash (fortunately, I think I can remember most of it) and I have laddered my tights. On the plus side though, I have warmed up considerably since remembering that I have my fingerless gloves in my desk drawer.

Updates eh. Stuff happens to me, but somehow I don't write about them. Recent happenings include:

* Visit from parents last weekend. Spur of the moment plan to get together to watch the Wimbledon finals at my place. Dad bought champagne and we had that with strawberries and cream. It was a really nice weekend actually.

* Chat with my boss at work resulting in promise of bonus for me at end of quarter! w00t!

* General announce by my boss that we're moving to another room where I will be able to sit with my screen facing the wall. Also yay.

* Failing to find any trace of my old address book that I thought I had backed up before my harddrive died last year and consequent failure to pass it to Caption folks :(

* Rediscovered a short play I wrote when in my first year. Not terrible, actually, but not actually what one would call good.

* Feelin' good about that whole SB admin thing. The last month or so, I've really felt like I had it under control. Now I need to kick some of my training projects up a gear.

* Visit to Beanwood with Brownies where the girls were all really well behaved and then visit to cricket match/party with Sadie. As last year, watched penultimate Dr Who ep and was unimpressed. Also enrolled 4 new Brownies. As of September Brownies will be all girls we've enrolled, which seems kind of cool.

* Girls night. Fantastic. Booze and talk and much good cheer and good companionship.

* Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest. Not as good as the first one. Too much plot, too much drama, not enough fun.

* Macbeth on Headington Hill: Not too bad. Didn't like the witches at all. Good MacBeth. Lady M started over the top but got much better.

Well, because know you're all gagging to know (!), I thought I'd better post to say that the window installation actually went sucessfully. The only issues were with openning handles in the wrong places which they spotted before me and offered to fix free of charge - so far so good. Of course now I have no curtains in the living room but I'll get to that tomorrow along with starting the windowsill painting.

I have such a huge backlog of photos waiting to go online, I really ought to get on with posting them. Of course, they're at work so I can say that without actually posting any now. Charlie looks very cute climbing the Christmas tree though :)

I suspect that I'm going to have a bad week next week - from the Friday afternoon phonecalls Damian was getting I think there's going to be a bit of crisis development going on next week. Sigh. Would people be up for pubmeet at a slightly later time - say 5:45/6ish? I should be able to escape by then. Also, note to self, if you start off on port you're bound to get very drunk, foolish girl! Also, take red wine next time.

I nearly mucked up my whole system this morning! I thought for a horrible minute that I'd set all the change requests on the system to complete! Fortunately, what I'd actually done is set the field which indicates current status to complete in one place but not (crucially) in the place which is definitive for status - the history details. So all I needed to do was run a query to reset the flag to it's proper status. Still, though, a scare. That's what happens when you get distracted while writing queries.

Damn. I have no money. Bugger. Ah well, new credit card month soon. And we find out what our bonuses will be tomorrow. Which will be interesting. I have no idea of what to expect really as no-one talks about that kind of stuff here but I got a reasonably good performance review so I've allowed my self to be a little bit hopeful.

Wow. I have actually been working practically all afternoon! As you can imagine, this is something of a shock to the system after the last couple of days spent fruitlessly trying to use the web to troubleshoot stuff and surfing generally. The man from Microsoft came in (he was here anyway for a meeting apparently) and fixed my SQL server problem - well sort of. It turns out to be an undocumented feature of SQLserver 7 that you can only have one alter table per transaction so you have to take them all out of the transaction block in order for what I want to do to work. So it wasn't really my fault :) Given this, I have decided to sleep on the cookies problem as they're working well enough for me to get on with the software development for the stuff that the SQL changes were for (I'm not quite sure if that sentence makes sense, but so what eh). And now I look up and it's 16:23! Going to see mentalsuz tonight for a gas and a cup of tea (or several) in Borders tonight. Borders, I would just like to say, is fantastic cos it's huge or at least the Charing Cross and Oxford ones are. Somehow, there's nothing quite so cool as a huge building stuffed with books :) And I was paid today :)