The Alaknanda River

So what has happened this week? Not a whole hell of a lot actually. I had a pleasant lunch with John M on Tuesday in between trying to get various bits of the new MIS system configured. Wednesday was a more fragmented day, as there were lots of Helpdesk issues I needed to deal with, resulting in me doing virtually no proactive work at all.

At home, our internet connection inexplicably dropped midway through the evening and I discovered that our ISP has now discontinued their 24-7 support line. It’s disturbing how much we rely on having a live Internet connection these days. I ended up ringing friends to ask them to check the ISP’s website for a number that might still be open at 9pm on a Wednesday night!

Today I had a pleasant cycle into work (having been too late out of bed the previous two days!) and the morning went reasonably smoothly. One of our departments were having a kind of open day and were laying on food to encourage people to come and chat and find out about what they do. IT are well known gannets; if there is food on offer, we’ll be there; coffee and pastries in the morning, sandwiches and cake at lunchtime and cheese and wine in the evening. I didn’t spend a penny on food all day and, having cycled rather than paid for the train, I felt very thrifty. I also got to meet some of the new staff in that department which was good too.

The downside was trouble with a server in one of our South-American offices; between the staff there not understanding their role properly and us not monitoring them properly, their file and email server has not been backed up for some time. Whoops. BIG Whoops! Especially as one of their disks is suffering from data corruption. Luckily it happened in a group of system files which are not critical. Nevertheless we’ll be focussing on the work of our less technically-literate branch office staff over the next few days…

Hopefully tomorrow will be smoother. If nothing else, I’ve got a poker night to look forward to and this week it looks like we have a full table of eight. Mark G and Chris M are joining us for the first time along with Rosie & Andy, Bruce and John M. Gaetan and Scott L had been due to join us but each wussed-out for one reason or another – albeit that’s probably no bad thing as we only have eight seats at the table!

Party-on, Dude!

Just in case you're wondering, the Alaknanda River is a tributary of the Ganges and has absolutely nothing to do with the body of this post. I just use random Wikipedia articles as subjects for my posts when no obvious title comes to mind. Random surfing on Wikipedia can be very educational. Did you know that roughly 8% of the world's population currently live in the catchment basin of the Ganges? No? Neither did I. What an amazing statistic; one in every twelve human beings. Wow.