O-ho. Back from a walk in the woods and a few more computerless days. I actually had my new pooter delivered Saturday, but the nitwits have sent me the wrong sort of modem. Ahem, well, granted, it is the one listed on my order, so maybe it’s at least partly my fault. But their guy told me what to order, and I distinctly told him I had “two normal phone lines”, I can’t remember whether I actually said the word “analog” (which has got to be inaccurate, hasn’t it? Anyhow, it conveys the right idea) or not, but I sure as h*** didn’t say ISDN. And I have an ISDN modem sitting prettily in its box at home (where, due to this, I am not, I am in the same internet cafe).

Well, at least my new tower case is nice and blue and shiny (no, really).

Walk in the woods was nice and relaxing. Actually, the woods were nice and relaxing, the walk wasn’t. My father had got himself roped into emptying some “fall traps” (a container buried up to its rim in the ground so that any beetles etc. walking over the edge falls into it and are trapped) in a research area near the cabin. So that’s what we (him, my mother and me) spent most of Wednesday doing. It involved a lot of bending and traipsing through greenery (including burnt greenery, more aptly named blackery) and such, and trying to avoid spilling the stuff in the containers (it kills the beetles “humanely”) all over the place. This would have been tiresome enough, but silly me also had to go put her foot down a bog-hole the first thing she does… My right leg was consequently soaking wet from the thigh down for the rest of the day, and if you’ve ever tried walking around in wellies that are wet on the inside you’ll know it was not pleasant. Well, all very bracing and improving of character, I’m sure. At least I got plenty of fresh air and was reminded of all the pleasant aspects of my day-job (chair to sit on, coffee and cold drinking water readily available, no strenous excercise, shade…).

So, new job starts tomorrow, so I am about to leave this place to get home and rest (read: watch stupid movie on tv). Hopefully I’ll be able to get the right sort of modem sorted out pretty sharpish, until then I’ll be online in my social capacity only sporadically…

Oh, dear, I hadn’t realised how addictive this diary-stuff would be. Not only have I spent two days thinking things like “I wonder how many hours the train from Aberdeen to Glasgow takes? I know, I can just check the Railtrack site! Oh, no, I can’t…”, and “I wonder whether there is a GAP in Oslo? I know, I can just check the yellow pages on the internet… Oh, that’s right, I can’t.” I have also kept thinking: “Oooh, I need to write that in the diary!” And realised I couldn’t do it there and then. And now, of course, I’ve forgotten most of the stuff I was meaning to write.

And I don’t have time, either, because, joy of joys, the New Company have realised that there’s really no point in me starting tomorrow because the person I need to work with most to start with has the week off. So I’m off to Solør to see my grandparents very quickly and then go to the cabin with my parents for a few days. Nice and relaxing. V.g. because I REALLY need a break. Not that I’m not quite keen to start the new job, but I’m not THAT keen…

However, the bus leaves in 12 minutes, and I need to get out of this internet cafe and down to the terminal. See ya!

Music in my head: Me and Bobby McGee

I will be computerless for a few days – the PC is on order, but will not arrive until some time towards the end of next week. In the meantime, I will be reading mail and writing in the diary, but perhaps not several times a day like normal…

Music in my head: Freedom (George Michael)

Well, the updates are sort of done… It might be a good idea to watch out for falling masonry, though. Like the picture of the day page… Don’t know what’s going on there…

LAST DAY AT WORK TODAY! WHOOPPEEEEEEE!

Music in my head: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (again, well, that seems to be inevitable as long as I’m reading it)

I find I can still be surprised when I meet people (Norwegians) who are into books who don’t read English effortlessly. Odd, really, since it happens all the time, and I ought to know by now. It all comes of learning English so early, I suppose – it’s second nature by now (I think in English as often as I do in Norwegian), and it’s hard to remember ever finding it difficult. Just like I can’t actually remember learning to read, I seem to have been able to read all my life (which I know for a fact is not true, I just can’t remember the fact). I must have found English difficult at some point, though – I can remember being horrified at my mother buying The Chronicles of Narnia for me in English, rather than Norwegian, when we moved to the Gambia and I was adamant I could’t survive for a year without them (I had been borrowing them from the library in Norwegian every few months). Now I’m very glad she did.

(Oh, and I know I still make the odd mistake – but I make the odd mistake in Norwegian, too, and I’m also more often lost for words in my native language; scary, really.)

Music in my head: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (started the book at breakfast)

I’m going to update my blogger template to take into account the lost frames. It may look a bit odd for a while afterwards (frameless files should be up by tomorrow night, I hope). Bear with me, please.

In other news, I might have a new PC at the end of next week, which will be good. I have been talking to the very nice people at Komplett, and have put one together that I want to order, but one of the components was out of stock, so I’m going to phone back tomorrow and see whether they will be getting it back in stock soon or whether I should change it for another one.

Music in my head: Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees)

I’ve been doing a bit of updating of files to lose the frames on the website. I kinda like frames, but they have their disadvantages, so I thought I’d try going without for a while. However, turned out I had more files than I had reckoned with, so I’ll have to postpone the update until later this week. Which is a bit of a problem, as I guess my employer will want this laptop back when I leave, and although I’m sort of in the process of buying a PC, “in the process” in this case means I’ve checked the websites of a couple of possible vendors, and I don’t think their technology is far enough advanced to handle telepathic ordering yet.

And tomorrow night I will have no time for html and php, as we’re going to The Dubliner to celebrate our impending freedom (and the rather large paycheck most of us got this month). Of course, I could do as Nicolette suggests and work on my own code rather than the company’s the last couple of days, unfortunately (for me), I have some work to do that I would really rather like to finish – partly from the satisfaction of a job well done and partly from sympathy with the poor guy who will have to pick up the pieces next week if I leave it as it is… I’m too nice, that’s my problem.

Now I think I’ll try to sleep some. I’ve heard sleep is good.

Music in the room: Den sorte seiler (Erik Bye)

Trying to ignore the symptoms of a splitting headache developing at my temples. The monitor connected to the aforementioned webserver is really shitty. Everything is blurred and there does not seem to be any way of getting it into focus (no, it’s not just me). And that’s the monitor I have been working on all day. Well, at least it now all seems to work (including the bits I’ve changed), after some of the standard inexplicable tweaking (such as cutting all the text out of a file and pasting it to a new one and then replacing the old file with the new). Standard level of weirdness.

My ferritine levels (iron reserves) were up a whooping 5 points, now at 11 rather than 6, and therefore in the “safe” zone (10-100). However, I’ve been given an appointment in two months rather than next week, in the hope that it will have risen a bit more by then. I’ll have to start eating more broccoli. All my other favourite sources of iron are things that I want milk with (pork liver pate sandwich, Norwegian brown cheese), and milk inhibits the body’s ability to absorb iron, apparently.

On the upside: less than 2 and a half days to go as an employee here. New job starts Monday. Looking forward to it in an apprehensive sort of way.

Music in my head: Just Like a Woman (Bob Dylan)

Having spent most of today (when not blogging) trying to get the test environment web-server to work in order to test some changes I’ve made, I am now heartily fed up. Before I put any of my changed files in I had to see if I could get the old files up, and I couldn’t. The server’s just been set up, so naturally I was messing around with the IIS and paths and permissions and whatever I could think of and kept getting “file cannot be displayed” errors. Turns out that the default text editor someone (NOT me) installed as an evaluation version (f***ing TextPad, sorry, I don’t normally swear – much) actually made the .asp files unreadable as .asp files by the browser. Open them in wordpad and hit save and refresh in explorer and they all work fine. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Robin seething quietly.

So now I’m going home while I’m on the upward trail, once I copy in my changed files things are likely to fall to pieces again. (Hey, what am I saying? As if my code is ever anything but perfect!?)

Music in my head: “If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife” and so on (I think it’s on the Mermaids soundtrack or something, and I have no idea why it popped into my head just now)

Oops, actually, what I was going to say was that one of the dvds (or four, rather) that I bought was the Audrey Hepburn collection, which I found at filmbutikken at Filmens Hus yesterday. I have been oogling it at amazon, but it’s of the borderline price category where you risk the customs people slap a bit of a charge on you, so I’ve been hesitating.

Anyway, it’s got Sabrina, which is brilliant, and three more films that I have been wanting to see; Funny Face, Paris when it Sizzles and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – I have to read the latter first, of couse, but I think I have the book somewhere already.

Now all I need is a bit of time.

Music in my head: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (now, I wonder where that came from…)