Functions of a single brain cell

Cargo Unit:Chicago O'Hare International
Airport Airport code: ORD 10000
West O'Hare Chicago,IL 60666: USA,      
Tele:0113773235  
Cell:224 585 3272
Email:msmonicajohnson383@gmail.com

Attention:  

Final Notice of Your Package In view of your inability to receive your package with registration #: CT8100AF from National UK Lottery London United Kingdom originally scheduled to be delivered to you by an agency, city express delivery (c.e.d).

This package in a golden metal box valued ($8,316,000 USD) (Eight million    three hundred and sixteen thousand dollars) mistakenly arrived at Chicago O’Hare International Airport terminal 5 via British airways flight no.BA297 from Heathrow airport London sometime ago. The package with registration no,#: CT8100AF has been cleared by the USA customs and is 100% legitimate.

The agency, attached to the airport, city express delivery (c.e.d) who delivered your package to your address have just return the package to our storage facility at the Chicago Airport, due to incomplete address. Please reconfirm these information’s;

1. Your Full Name
2. Your current address;    
3. Your phone number;
4. Nearest airport to your location………
5. Your passport id…………  

Therefore, I am writing to inform you that the days of grace has elapsed and we shall begin to charge the daily storage fee of $89.00usd only, and the fee will be direct to united nation head office Lagos Nigeria.

Please call:MS MONICA JOHNSON UN AGENT, on (224 585 3272)she will email you the name to wire the money to united nations head office Lagos Nigeria. Extension 21 terminal 5 or contact to release this package directly to you.

Note that this notice serves as our last recovery notice to you as our department will be compelled to shortlist your package as an unclaimed consignment, and maybe forfeited. Note: Delivery of your package from the airport to your residential address is free.

Best regards,

Ms.Monica Johnson  
United Nations Agent World Wild.
STORAGE OFFICER Terminal 5 Extension 11

I’ve been getting increasing frustrated with the up and down nature of my Internet connection recently. Virgin have already refunded me this months fee to placate me…
Four or five years ago the lack of connection would be slightly irritating but now it’s crippling.

At the moment due to health issues the wife is having to work from home. She can’t get anything that cannot be spoken to her and adobe’s much vaunted creative cloud is …evaporated.

I’ve had to work from home today and I’m stuck in offline mode to…try checking code out with no connection to the repository :/

Turns out this has all been caused by virgin trying to be clever. I ran into an engineer with his head in the local cable node an hour ago and he gave me a sketchy outline of what they did.
Apparently they put a signal amp in upstream so our node could get 120mb connections which then overloaded the kit downstream. Once they’d fixed that the power started to go banzai on the new kit causing more cascade failures.

The moral of the story…just give us fibre to the house instead of trying to ramp more power down the line to account for signal attenuation.

On Thursday at about 1530 I was asked if I could be on call this weekend to do support for a new contract that was being tested this weekend.  This should only have been for me to work if they found bugs and I’d get paid for it.  So I said ok as I didn’t have anything major planned that could get in the way.

At 1445 on Friday I was told the plans have now changed.  Now I’m finishing off the development on the contract changes to the application, which needs to be tested and go live by midday on Monday.

I’ve brought my machine home from work to do the code at home….but like an idiot I’ve left the pad with all the notes on what needs to be done on my desk in the office >_<

Theres probably 4 days work to do…if I knew what exactly was remaining to be done on the project…but I don’t really.

I’ve already done 4 hours tonight on this stupid thing just getting the extra info in a state it can be put in the database and pulled out reliably.  Its now gone 1am and I’m refueling on rice crispies to see if I can pull some magic out of my bum so they can test stuff in the morning.

The number 50 and million have been batted about as the value of this project….so….no pressure then

Today has been decidedly odd.

I’ve screwed up my wrist spinning the kids in the playground last week.  On Saturday my left knee totally gave out when I was food shopping, thankfully I had the trolly (cart for anyone in the US) to hang onto.  So I’m wondering about now with both knees strapped up, a bandage to support my wrist and my boots holding my ankles together….turns out they want in on the fml action too……

The kids were up and dressed really early this morning without me having to resort to a cattle prod…huh what happened there then?

The eldest lost a tooth yesterday and the tooth fairy left her 2 coins (40p) of which her little sister demanded half…and got so she wouldn’t cause a fuss.  So that was reversed as soon as I had got dressed.

I spent 90% of the morning at work fixing other peoples problems because I have domain knowledge and its quicker for me to tell them what to do than for them to work it out themselves >_<

I had to come back home at lunch because the missus isn’t too well and someone needs to recover the kids from the halls of learning….The eldest has had an argument with gravity today and opened up her knee, not badly, but bloody enough to exclude her from her swimming lesson an hour after school ended.

That turned into doing a few hours work, getting the kids, doing another half an hour work then running about like something not right.

First to the doc with the wife, then to pick the kids and my mother in law up from the swimming lessons.

Got the kids home and the nipper demanded I do her homework with her.  They have some really weird things for 5 year olds to learn counting properly.  I swear they’re preparing them for a life of poker playing.  Every homework pack involves something to do with playing cards.  The reading was a bust though, she was more interested in what was happening on the computer than anything past page 1 of her book.

After fighting for another hour with a VPN thats up and down more often than a tarts knickers I finally got back onto the database and did a whole half hour before I had to cook.

I kind of miscalculated the amount of food….so we’ve had masses of sausage, bacon, eggs, baked beans and bread (that what I was asked for), still I don’t think anyone is hungry.

Whilst I was cooking the nipper informed us that one of the boys in her class has been shoving his hand up her dress…which I have to remember to bring up in the morning when I drop her off.

Got an email from a recruiter for the BBC…which I’d love to go for, but my situation and job are really quite suited at the moment.  The BBC isn’t any further away from me than the current place, its just a pain to get to and from if I need to :( …perhaps someday…

So now its almost 9:30, I have about an hours work to catch up on, the dishes to wash and the recycling to put out

what happened to the day?

I’m currently on a team at work trying to harden the database so we don’t have as much evil going into it.
The system is that old and clunky that its less of a database and more of a load of data just being stored.
It’s become blindingly obvious that there’s a good majority of the development department that do not have the slightest idea how a database works…which is in itself disturbing as their jobs revolve around manipulating data in a database.

We’ve been working on the system for a few months and have done a load of changes to stop some of the nastiness going on. This week I put a change in, that would in any other system be reasonable….not in ours though, and things didn’t work overnight.
So Friday morning it was sorted out in about 10 mins before I got to work.
Over the day it slowly unraveled as to what had been said by various people, it’s now obvious that the other teams in the department are queuing up to throw my team under the first available bus.
I’m getting very tired of office politics and the power struggles of the management. It’s recently become very dog eat dog.
I was enjoying work, my team get on very well with each other and the work is a challenge. It just seems all a bit pointless at the moment when you have to fight so much resistance for everything you do.

Last night my wife told me a story about her brother that happened the other day….
He got out of the bath the other day and put his dressing gown on. He promptly plonked himself in front of the tv and began to laze. He sat as all boys do…at this point in trots his puppy and thinks ooh sausage I like them….

You can work the rest out for yourself. Poor kid, he’s only 6….must not save this up for ammo when he’s 18….

Way back in about 1997 my girlfriend bought me a lava lamp for christmas

After 3 house moves and 15 years, it was not exactly in mint condition any more

You could still see what it was doing as long as it did it next to the glass.

Having done a quick google on repairing lamps I found this post.  So I figured what the heck, I can either end up with something better or nothing.  The replacement cost for the bottle are about £24 at the moment, so even if I botched it, its not going to cost a fortune to get a new one.

I’d left my lamp to cool for about 12 hours before doing anything with it just so all the wax could get as solid as it can.

After mechanically unscrewing the lid with my adjustable jaw pliers I got into it 

The lid was pretty much welded on with wax that had leaked some time in the past.

So I very gently tipped the what I assume is water down the sink and began rinsing out the bottle.  This part of the procedure has to be done with care or you can break up the wax and lose it all.

Once I’d finished I was left with a nice clean bottle.

Now its just a case of carfully topping it up with clean water to give a nice looking bottle

To get to this point had probably taken all of 10 minutes, and thats the hardest part of it all.

Then its back onto the base to remelt the wax to see how it flows

The remelt takes positively ages.  Not only is the bottle stone cold now, but the water was underground 5 minutes ago and not even room temperature yet.  I didn’t screw the lid on yet as I will need to make adjustments to the water density once its melted the wax.

The guide said you should have a saturated solution of magnesium sulphate to add to the bottle to modify the way the wax gloops when its melted, so I got on with that.  Magnesium sulphate can be purchased from the chemist over the counter, its commonly known as epsom salts and used to relieve constipation.  I got a tub (fist size) at the supermarket for £1 so this looks like a realy cheap repair so far.

3 hours later, the piddly 40 watt bulb had melted the wax, but all I had was a puddle on top and a dome pulsating on the bottom of the bottle.  The guide says using a few drops of washing up liquid in the water…so in went about 5 drops of Fairy Liquid.  Magically that altered the density of the water just enough for the wax to start to bubble up.

I wasn’t as pleased with the results as I would have liked, but still suprised that such a small amount could make such a difference.

So I put about half a drinking straws length of the mag sulph solution in and bish bash bosh its flowing exactly like it used to.

I suppose the results on this are entirely dependant on the chemical composition of the water in your area when you do this.  The water here has almost zero limestone disolved in it, but it does have lots of other nice things from the rocks around the north west of england :)

You may notice from the first picture that the bottle is blue and mine is clear.  Thats an easy fix, one drop of blue food colouring and its just about like new (well what I remember from back then, I’ve drunk a lot of vodka and had at least 3 head injuries since I was given the lamp).

Total cost for the repair…£1 + what ever 5 drops of washing up liquid costs :D

Now I just have to hope the light bulb holds up, you can’t buy incandescent ones any more ^_^

All the photos are on my flickr page