My tweets

• 07:02 morning tweeters. The sky is grey and my phone's still out. Balans was lovely last night, great Manhattan! Not so good burger--avoid it. #
• 09:23 Working at home is lonely... #
• 13:45 sitting at home doing a flowchart of how releases need to be done for the customer. ick ick ick ick ick #
• 18:43 made baked beans for dinner in the crockpot; HWMBO thought I wrote "naked beans" #

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I haven't posted much in a while, so here's a blog!

Well, sorry I haven't been keeping up with life except with twitter compendia, which have turned off at least two of you. Sorry about that. I shall make up for that.

First, it looks like my assignment in Hinckley (via Nuneaton) is over. The trains are not running correctly for the next two weeks, so I shall complete my deliverables this week. It's been a real roller-coaster. My life felt like Groundhog Day (the movie).

Up at 6 am (as usual), out of the house at 7:15, to Euston Station, get on train for 8:17 departure, work on train with my data card until I get to Nuneaton, Warwickshire, at 9:21. Sandeep's Taxi to Hinckley, where I worked until 4 pm. Reverse everything: taxi to Nuneaton, train at 4:35 pm to arrive at Euston around 5:47pm. Then crash most days, unless I went to the gym with M or we went out to dinner.

It does take a lot out of you.

The work, on the other hand, was interesting. I can't talk about it, but I learned a lot about the UK gas network.

Sandeep was pretty talkative, which was a bit off-putting, but I managed to get some solitude in the back of the cab. Hinkley itself is a real deadspot. There is little or no traffic through the centre, the only decent restaurant is a Subway (although there is a KFC and various other delightful places to dine), and the local constabulary advertises itself as the Last Chance Inn where miscreants are housed for the night.

We had a lovely day on Saturday. It proved to be the only really decent day on the Bank Holiday weekend. So, it was a day for a picnic. We gathered up our friends Mark, M, spwebdesign, and his friend Anna and went to Hampstead Heath on the 168 bus. The food was rather eclectic (I think that spwebdesign and Anna brought a much snazzier class of food than we did) but nice, and I noticed for the first time that Dr. Pepper Zero is available here. It was quite nice.

We had trouble with children running around screaming, being breastfed, and the like, but tried to ignore the noise. Here are a few pictures from the event:





And Mark drew our attention to a cloud that was sailing past (one among many). He thought it was "penis-shaped". I think it has more to do with his mind...



A good time was had by all, I think. We arrived home and slept the sleep of the just.

Sunday after church we took a walk across Southwark Bridge and along the Embankment to Villiers Street, where we had a Starbucks moment.

Monday we did bugger-all. Just relaxed at home. This is a very good thing when you've been commuting 110 miles morning and evening for a month.

The rest of this week I've been working at home, finishing up bits and bobs for work.

Tuesday night we went out to dinner with sinnerz, who has been doing some exchange work here in the UK. He is in customer service for public exhibitions, and did a month in Cornwall at the Eden Project and seems to have loved it. We went to Balans Soho, which is probably the trendiest eatery on Old Compton Street. They did make a good Manhattan, but my burger, which I had ordered "medium", was well past medium by the time I got it: grey and dry and unappetising.

I am really through with restaurants that, for our own protection, cook beef to the point where it is unappetising. The danger from BSE has pretty much ended and the need (if there ever was one) to cook burgers until they are dead, dead, DEAD! is over.

After that we walked off our food in a circle, walking to Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street, and Dean Street, ending up back on Old Compton Street and having coffee in Caffé Nero. We walked to Piccadilly Circus and posed in front of the police trailer:



We will be seeing sinnerz again in Singapore in October, we hope. It's always lovely to meet nice people.

Tonight we are going to dinner at Jom Makan with iejw, whom we always seem to be missing out on when we are in the same place. We have a 25% off voucher for the place, and I like Malaysian food, so I'm going to be off to Cambridge Circus for cocktails at 5:15 pm.

Will post the pictures of HWMBO's triumph in the 10K Pride Run shortly. And if you see iejw in the background of a picture, that's where we missed him.

Here we are, posing in front of the

My drive problem seems to have been fixed miraculously

(reposted from gaygeeks)

You may remember that I posted a few days ago about a problem that I thought was related to Vista having to do with my hard disks failing in RAID 0.

Well, this morning I got a message from the Intel Matrix Storage Manager that a new download was available that might fix my problem. It was one of those "Windows thinks it can solve your problem" messages.

Well, I downloaded the new version of the Storage Manager, installed it, rebooted (and endured an almost endless CHKDSK full of funny errors), and logged back in. The Storage Manager icon was still there, demanding attention. However, when I opened it and right clicked on the "failing" disk, it said that I could "Mark it as normal", which I did. On rebooting (again), no problems came up.

So the difficulty that I thought was Vista corrupting my disk seems to have been related to the Intel software that runs my RAID controller.

While I'm not out of the woods yet (lots of other things are turning up), I'm grateful for all the suggestions (and, yes, I got my Stephen Gibson SpinRite money back today) and also grateful that the disk problem was repairable and now is also explainable.

RIP Del Martin

I am really sad; the pioneers of the lesbian and gay justice movement in the United States from the 1940's and 1950's are passing away quickly. Del Martin was one of the greatest of them--with her wife Phyllis Lyon she founded the Daughters of Bilitis organisation in the 1950's and thus spearheaded the more radical organisations of the 1960's and 1970's. This is her New York Times obituary, and while I'm sad that she has left us, and send my condolences to Ms. Lyon, I am happy that she lived to be legally married to Phyllis and in that she was yet again a pioneer.

May she rest in peace and rise in glory.