It’s been a strange day today. First of all, Jan’s back is still bad, and so I didn’t go in the office this morn­ing and took Jamie into school. I phoned work and told them I would work from home. I man­aged to get some work done, but they were hav­ing prob­lems with their fire­wall, and in try­ing to fix it kept cut­ting off my VPN access.

Old Friend
At lunch time I received an IM from an old col­league, Mark D, to whom I haven’t spoken for far too long (I’m too lazy to keep in touch) which was a pleas­ant sur­prise. I was just telling him that a mutual ex col­league, Steve P, was now work­ing again with me, when who should IM me, but Steve P. spooky
Any­way, Mark happened to be sat in his office using ICQ remotely on his Linux machine at home, using, I think, VNC over SSH to talk to his fire­wall, and then run­ning ICQ as a remote X-app from a machine on his internal net­work. I was impressed! LOL

Prob­lem!
After I had fetched Jamie back from school this after­noon, I got a phone call from the office to say they were hav­ing a major prob­lem on one of the sites and could I invest­ig­ate. As the VPN was down I couldn’t. But they got IT to stop what they were doing and restore the old con­fig­ur­a­tion so I could re-connect. Hmmm, that ser­i­ous then! So I looked into it and Duncan R and I have come up with an hypo­thesis which may explain what happened. It’s one of those true mul­ti­task­ing issues which you don’t often come across is my line of work. Caused by the fact that the site runs on a box with three or four pro­cessors, and things really do hap­pen at the same time.
I’ve still got to invest­ig­ate whether our hypo­thesis holds water, but my gut feel­ing is that it will. There’s cer­tainly noth­ing else to explain it.

Toi­lets
Back to this even­ing, and I fixed the down­stairs loo. That’s the second loo I’ve had to fix in a week! Both broken by me. I don’t know what’s going on. Last week I man­aged to break the SEAT of the upstairs loo. I mean the actual seat, the ring shaped bit you sit on, not the hinge (which is what usu­ally breaks on these things) but a split in the seat. And I wasn’t even stand­ing on it ( which is how I’ve broken hinges in the past). I was sat on it. I know I need to lose a bit of weight, but I’m not that heavy!
I replaced that last week­end. Then yes­ter­day I broke the handle on the down­stairs loo. Just snapped it right off. So now it’s got a new one which doesn’t match, but hey it’ll do for now.