Hmmm…bit if a post drought going on, however - I think I have found the perfect signature for my work emails now:-

“Aspice, officio fungeris sine spe honoris amplioris.”

I’ll give you a clue - it’s in latin…but pretty good none the less!

First of all I apologise for getting a geeky - being a technical support engineer, it comes with the territory and whilst I cannot be specific in the following narrative suffice to say, this was one of the few moment’s of job satisfaction I have had in a while

I was given the mother of all faults on Monday to deal with and have had a couple of late nighters as a result of the sensitive nature of my client.  Anyhoo - I put in a temporary fix and set out on my quest for the root cause of the fault. 

I did this by building a mini approximation of the client’s network in a lab - No no no!! no mad flashy lights, or volatile chemicals here please! In my case a lab is simply a bunch of routers and a switch plugged into each other.

Anyways, by doing this I was able to play to my hearts content at replicating the fault without affecting the operational network.  It certainly paid dividends in my opinion in that it increased my understanding of a very robust routing protocol and it’s interaction with other routing protocols, in this current case I was dealing with BGP with routes learned from OSPF if you don’t know what these are then tough, I am too tired to explain

Since I played on the lab for the last day and a bit, I was able to identify a flaw in the routing; and tonight I got the opportunity from my client to prove the theory on the live network - Yay!!  It worked! My kudos get’s increased, though I say it all the time, this was still a team effort and I didn’t acheive my wonderful results all on my own, I got one or two crucial nudges from colleagues within my team that helped get to the end result.

though humbleness aside I did 90% of the work to prove this!! So there

In other news I have decided to get a Flickr account since so many people have one, and here’s what I have so far:-  Geese I will figure out integration with the blog at a later date, though I already have the latest plug in for it - I would partially blame Nikki for this but really it’s to do with a competition on BBC 1 for taking snaps of wildlife and whilst my first entry of a goose, isn’t technically Homegrown widllife - I “am” working on it ok!!

You know, diets come and go; however it’s the wasteline that has the truth to show.  All this comfort eating I have been doing of late has had it’s toll.  I think I hit “critical mass” this weekend.  Somewhere still between 15 and 16 Stone. 

It is proving so much harder to lose weight than the first time around.  I will not pay some 3rd party upwards of £40 a month either as that is the average cost of a gym membership these days. 

I just can’t afford it.  Even if I could I doubt I would spend that much - it’s an extortionate price; you do the math - how many people can fit in the gym at any one time?  over 100?  Spending on average 1-2 hours not a bad income £400 per hour.  Now I bet you the average wage there isn’t any more than £8.50/hour?  Most or all of the equipment was paid for from initial capital investment, which means that it wouldn’t take “that” long to pay it off even with the maintenance costs.  Oh and I almost forgot this doesn’t include all the “joining” fee of anywhere from £10 to £50 depending on which gym you join, plus the fact that many gyms will “financially” tie you into that membership for a full 12 months (what are we mobile phones?).

pah! Oh well, guess I’ll just stick to being a lard-arse.

For goodness sake! Airport Closed in wake of terror plot! - the plain (sorry about pun) and simple fact is that the “precautionary” security measures enforced have added to delays, meaning the airport(s) fast run out of space for any more planes, leaving them little or no choice but to close to any further incoming flights….hardly “Hollywood blockbuster” material is it? 

Crikey how dramatic.