Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

It’s August 27th! In 5 days it will be September. Where did summer go?

I still have loads of unsolved items on my to do list. My room is still a tip (not that it will be a major issue once I move out as it will all move out with me and I can sort it then). My server still isn’t working. The network in the house still isn’t setup properly.

I don’t know what the situation is really. Will I have more time during term time? I work 50-60 hour weeks at the moment. When term time starts again I’ll go back up to anywhere from 60-80 hour weeks so will I really have more time to solve things?

Do you know how much money I got in my last pay cheque? £370! 12 out of the 14 days of that pay period I worked and all I came away with was £370. I think I must have been raped by tax because I was on over £400 pre-tax before my last shift.

All in all I’m realising how much of a bad shape my overdraft is in. Once my credit cards are paid off it’s going to take 4 or 5 weeks to clear it on full time pay and I have about 3 weeks left. While I still have my student loan to come in, I have rent going out and I got hit by a massive phone bill from when I was sorting out our BT line and internet for the house.

Still hopefully I should be able to generate some kind of decent pay cheque next time. At the moment I need to pick up some more shifts to fill my days off but I made a good start today – I clocked into work at 05:45 in the morning and I’ve just got home now. Open closes for the win.

Currently my VPS is going down every 10-15 minutes! Neither me nor my host can work out what is going on.

The end result is, after continued problems with my VPS I’ve ordered a new one with ServInt. I am going to be migrating a lot of my important sites over to that and then those remain will ever stay on my current VPS or will me migrated over to a new VPS with PowerVPS and the old one cancelled depending on whether I can stabilise it or not.

It’s 10:30 and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago. I wasn’t though as I needed to rush over to my new house and carry out some more testing in order to try and get this hideous networking up and running properly. I need to speak to Linksys before I can really do anything else and I don’t think I’m going to like the answer to be honest.

Once I had home I had to fire off a couple of emails as well as test some stuff I got off eBay. My inbox is rapidly filling up with items that need attention though not to mention the fact I can’t see my floor and it’s not just from having too much stuff anymore, it’s actually important things need sorting. I need to phone several different people, email dozens of different people, come up with some CompSoc literature in the next week, sort the A-Soc summer work, organise some meetings, do a million other things on my to do list, re-do my budget, the list goes on. And when is my next day off? Next Thursday. Might need to cut down on this whole sleep thing. The 5 hours at best I’m going to get tonight it just too much apparently.

I clocked into work at 5:45am yesterday morning. And clocked out at 2:10am this morning.

Long day. You simply can’t beat a good open close. I did the whole thing on only 3-4 bottles of Kick as wel (I brought 12, just in case :D). Having done my open shift which finished at 3, I went home to grab an hour sleep before going back to do a 7-close. It’s the second open close I’ve done though this one was significantly longer than the last one though I worked straight through last time. I can honestly say I’m glad it’s over though.

I’m quite glad to be back in union politics (for lack of a better term). We had the first CompSoc committee meeting today at The Library, nicely arranged to coincide with lunch which I was quite impressed with. It’s standard pub food but then I love standard pub food so it’s all good.

Most of today was just coming up with ideas and working out the plan of who is going to do what, who is going to contact what, etc but it’s good to get the ball rolling. We have an idea of what needs doing before September and what events we want to throw together next year. Hopefully tommorrow’s A-Soc meeting will prove to be productive too.

I have a hole to repair in my wall. You see, somebody hurled a chair across my room because my new server isn’t working. To be honest, the chair had it coming. That’s not true, I love my chair but the server would have got very broken, no matter how much I wanted to hurl it.

Meanwhile, away from my summer house, back in the mean streets of Woodhouse I am still battling with network problems. We’ve been upgraded from the Advanced Troubleshooting Team (which we had previously been upgraded from) to the Ops Team apparently.

I got an email from UK Online last night saying our internet account had gone live. So I headed over to try and get it all configured. I spent a good 2-3 hours battling at in and we got some of the problems resolved but it’s still not working in any way and I’ve added another few hours of calls onto my upcoming phone bill which is probably going to bankrupt me by now.

This morning the missing components from my server arrived back so I stripped down my computer ready to put it all back together. I got so far before discovering that the back plate for my CPU cooler has vanished and so I can’t actually put it back together at all. I’ve no idea where it is, I don’t think I sent it back with the rest of the stuff but it doesn’t appear to be here either. So almost two months after ordering my server it still isn’t up and running.

Tomorrow is the last day of the school term. Probably not a good situation for work. Especially tomorrow evening when parents are treating their kids. That isn’t what this post is about though. There is something far more exciting going on. My parents and my sister leave for France on Saturday!

So the house party starts Saturday night and pretty much just goes on solidly for two weeks or so ;). Unfortunately they are only going for a little over two weeks (rather than their normal month) but I am going to enjoy it all the same. The house to myself, the car to myself, it’s going to be so good. I love my house, my car and the suburbs in general but there are all these other hippies that insist living here too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. But I also love my independence. I love been able to get out at 2am after a night out and watch ABC1 for the rest of the night. I love being able to go shopping to Tesco at 3am without worrying I am going to wake people up going in and out. It’s going to be grand!

Today I’ve been on the phone with UK Online, BT fault tracking, BT customer services, CCL customer services and Parcelforce.

Some good may finally be arriving though, I finally have my bag back (though I’ve not checked it yet) and, drum roll please, our BT line was finally turned on this morning! To the point where we can now use it at least, I just need to wait for the order to be marked as complete and it will show up in the database as a BT line when broadband providers run their checks. If it ever is.