My other journal is a blog.

I fly to Thailand for two weeks tomorrow, so will be unavailable to reply to all of your witty and incisive comments. Enjoy work ;)

I might update the blog from Bangkok, but I will probably have better things to do. Hope so, anyway...

I hadn't written in here for ages, but I thought I'd mirror this article from my blog...

My estate agents have decided to charge me a £75.50 "administrative fee" for renewing my lease. Apparently this is standard practise.

Yes, they're charging me the equivalent of over $130 (apparently), for amending the expiry date on my contract with a pen (or possibly a pencil).

Actually, to be fair, perhaps they will have to print out a new contract, by pressing Ctrl-P, and then write the new date on that with a pen (or pencil). This still seems a little steep for the price though.

My contract is approximately fifteen pages long. That's £5, or $8.72, per page. They don't even use a nice font...

Of course, I could always just refuse to be extorted like this - I could move out! Sadly my lease appears to expire the day before I fly to Thailand for my holiday in the sun. Attempting to move house that week would not be a good idea. It looks like I'm going to have to just grit my teeth and pay the bill.

I had originally decided to pay the bill in 2 pence coins. Three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five of them. But apparently this is not legal tender (scroll down to "Legal Tender", near the bottom of the page), although that didn't appear to stop this woman from making a point.

I also considered the approach taken by Michael Howard (no, not that one), aka Mr Bastards (right-hand sidebar, top story). Sadly I suspect this would cause problems at work.

All suggestions gratefully received - I'm going to have to pay the sods, but I want to make them suffer, at least a little bit. Any ideas?

I got a website again. It is more likely to be kept updated than this journal...

clicky

I eagerly await the 'witty' comments on the domain name from people who don't get it... ;)

Wooo yay :)

Liverpool won the Worthington Cup, and I hit the two month mark without a single cigarette. I guess I really am a non-smoker now.

I have a salary review approaching at work, and I just discovered KCompare, which should put an end to the config file update hell that Gentoo Linux occasionaly tosses me into.

Oh, and if short skirts on secretaries count for anything, it must be spring!

Well, vegetarianism lasted about a week - I found myself 3/4 of the way through a tuna salad sandwich before I thought to myself "hang on, this isn't vegetables...".

Single, carnivorous, but still not smoking.

Don't mention the football...

What else can a non-smoking single vegetarian give up? Don't say beer... I think I'm obsessing now. A month without cigarettes, and a week without meat.

at least liverpool won :)

Well, I've gone more than two weeks without a cigarette, and look like getting some admin work at last. I'm set to become the admin for the main development box at work (crusty sun/solaris box), in addition to my development work.

Also finished the foundation of the scary OO PHP project I've been working on recently - it's hella ugly, but it works and can be reskinned easily enough.

Not a bad week. Not a bad week at all :-)

I finally replaced the dead DVD-ROM drive in my PC, and within hours the hard drive seems to have died completely.

Knoppix truly is a lifesaver this time - I'm back in X, streaming OGGs from our SMB fileserver and checking my email, with no hard drive attached to this system at all.

The only remaining question is how big my replacement hard drive should be - 80Gb drives are less than £100 now...

Still not smoking :)

It's my 3rd day of not smoking, and they're testing the fire alarm at full volume, very enthusiastically. give me strength...