I gave up blogging about my work a while ago, but sometimes you just want to share your acheivements with a wider audience.

Today I finished writing the first version of a perl script that actively monitors a list of servers, and generates a RSS file showing when devices (or any defined services running on them, such as HTTP, POP3, etc.) go up or down.

There’s still loads of things wrong with it, cheifly a problem with the system clock running slow that makes all the times and dates wrong. But it’s a proof-of-concept exercise more than anything, to show how RSS feeds can be used for things other than syndicating blogs. I think it does that, if nothing else :-).

South Stack just before sunset, taken the other day.

I haven’t touched a web browser for five whole days. This is quite a feat, and one I’m sure I can’t have acheived for a good few years. How scary.

As a result, it’s been so long since I read Planet Afterlife that the new entries go off the screen. I wonder if I can set up archiving on it… Would that be good or quite a scary thing to have, I wonder?

I went for another run this evening after work. Despite being slightly dark by 6pm, I managed half an hour or so down to Newbold Comyn and back up the edge of the golf course towards Lillington. There’s a climb of about 40m from the Leisure Centre up to the radio transmitters at the top of the route and then back down a bit, so it’s a good up-and-down run. Probably not quite as pretty as running to Offchurch (especially not in the dark), but I can save that for another day :-).

Soon it’ll even be light enough in the evenings to be able to see where I’m running to. Roll on Spring!

It seems exercise is what all the cool kids are doing this morning (it’s still morning, right? ;-).

My personal contribution to getting Britain fitter today has been a 50 minute run over towards Offchurch. I haven’t really done much cross-country running since I stopped living on campus, and it’s something I actually quite miss. I find running through Leamington too stressful – you have to concentrate to much on avoiding people, cars and random items of street furniture that you don’t get to enjoy your surroundings or concentrate on the running. And you don’t get to be on your own.

I love people. I love the buzz of cosmopolitan spaces in lively towns and cities. But I’m a country boy at heart, and sometimes you just want to get away from it all.

Someone’s stolen the ‘e’ from the word Rootes on the side of the Rootes Social building, overlooking the piazza. Was it a student prank? Perhaps a cheap elections publicity stunt? Or maybe it just fell on someone’s head?

Either way, the Boar should be covering this – it’s clearly far more important than a load of bitching about the VC 🙂

Or more to the point, I need to start spending more time at home (in Leam, as opposed to Wales). For reasons I won’t go into here, I left work a little early today so I could make it to the stupid shops that all close at 5.30 (why is that still, in the 21st century?). And for once I had time to get a few things done in town, go for a 20 minute run, cook a nice bolognese for myself (and drink the remainder of the red wine that I didn’t pour into it) and chat to a couple of people on the phone. I’ll probably still not get to bed until after midnight, but at least this time it won’t be because I’ve sat in the office until six ‘o’ clock.

So this has been one of the most boring blog entries ever (aside, perhaps from Laurie’s famous blogs about his lunch ;-). But it’s been that kind of evening and anyway, I’m going out to DV8 tomorrow. Woot!

I really should. I’ve made it back from Top B, removed my contact lenses, washed my face and brushed my teeth. In fact I’d be ready to go to bed, if it wasn’t for the fact that I stripped it earlier in a fit of cleanliness and haven’t yet made it again.

So I’m sat here at my computer with no T-shirt on, writing this blog entry, chatting on MSN and trying to work out why Planet Afterlife isn’t updating. I’m deliberately not looking at the mess beind me that I need to fashion into something in which I can sleep tonight.

If I don’t go to bed real soon then I’ll be tired at work tomorrow unless I drink lots of coffee.

Mmmm, coffee.

I’m procrastinating about making my bed. How bad is that?

I did the test a while ago at Dave’s, but I didn’t get round to blogging it and I couldn’t remember what I got. So seeing Laurie’s results prompted me to do it again.

And yes, I’m aware that I’m at about the same position as the Dalai Lama on the interpretation thingy. But it’s fine being in that kinda bracket when you work in the higher education sector (albeit at one of the country’s most corporate-minded instiutions). Isn’t it? And anyway, I’m not as far off the scale as Matt was the last time 🙂

What are you all waiting for? Go do it yourselves!

Another weekend up in Wales, another three-and-a-half hour drive back down to Leam again for work tomorrow. Things still seem to be improving with my mum, though it’s all slow progress, still.

They did some more tests today while I was visiting. It seems her short-term memory still isn’t what it could be, but now they’ve established this they can start doing some activities that should stimulate that area of the brain. The consultant wants her to to do more physiotherapy on a daily basis as well, but as there’s only one physiotherapist based at the hospital, that might prove difficult apparently. I guess all I can do is see how things progress this week, so not much change there 🙂

Other than my frequent visits to the hospital, I’ve done very little over the weekend, although this morning I did manage to clean all the mud off the car that (a) flew onto it off a tractor, and (b) got spattered over the side of it when I had to veer out of the way of oncoming traffic that was going too fast on some stupidly narrow country lanes. Don’tcha just love the countryside? And sentences that go on for almost an entire paragraph? And sentences that start with the word ‘and’? OK, I’ll stop now.

So last night we discovered that Birmingham (Nightingales specifically) apparently isn’t the place to go on a Friday night. You’d have thought I might have noticed this last year, when I was going over there a lot more for various reasons, but apparently not.

We’d almost gone to London, but had abandoned that idea when it became clear that nothing seemed to be going on there, at least among the two people we managed to get hold of. Birmingham was choice number two, having ruled out everywhere else in the West Midlands.

We got there quite late. Bar-that-I-can’t-remember-the-name-of at the top of Hurst Street was a bit quiet, but nice. Gales was also pretty quiet and had some *very* random people in there (including a short, fat black man dressed up as Beyonce, who was giving out glowsticks to anyone that wanted one). But nonetheless, it was good to do something different.

I guess the moral is that random nights out, planned on the spur of the moment, are good. In fact that’s one thing I really miss about living in London. There’s much less scope here for randomness, but perhaps that makes it better when it does happen. Even if we did go on the wrong night 🙂