Week of  14th February, 2000

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Monday, 14th February

Valentine's Day. The day when we are supposed to show affection to a loved one (even if one loves from afar!) Well, I tried, late as usual. I bought a card while out shopping today, signed it as from one of Jane's Teddy bears, and left it in a prominent position in the kitchen for when Jane got back from the school run.

Jane's response was her typical deprecating one, on the lines of "late as usual". Why do I bother, especially when she doesn't respond even if I do make an effort?


The Afghan hijacking saga gets more confusing by the minute. Now I read that 72 of the hostages have accepted HMG's offer of a free flight back to Kabul (via a neutral carrier, since most of the world shuns the Taleban regime), and further that they have been feted on their return. In public at least. What will happen behind closed doors is anyone's guess. Cynical, aren't I?

Meanwhile, the remainder of the passengers remain in custody, under questioning to establish who was a hijacker, who was/is related to them, and who is an innocent victim.

Printed comments suggest somewhat of a lack of gratitude among those who left. Sentiments such as "Britain is not a muslim country, the weather is terrible, and the food isn't good" have been attributed to various leavers. Well, excuse me? Britain is a pluralistic country - we have many religions represented, and we are fairly far north, so it's going to be cold and wet. The comment about the food reminds me of a certain class of British holidaymaker, which insists on fish and chips and English beer while on foreign holiday.


I found out why the freelance site I'm doing a lot of work for haven't yet paid over for shifts completed. Apparently, one shift is to be paid from a separate budget, and the accounts people get very confused if one money claim has to be split among more than one budget, all of which are like watertight boxes - you cannot move monies from one to another, It Just Is Not Done. So the bulk will be paid within the next three days, and the rest, when I submit a separate claim, will be paid by month-end. All's well that ends well.

Accountants - don't you just love 'em?

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Tuesday, 15th February

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Wednesday, 16th February

When I went in to work today, I found an enormous backlog of commercials and other interstitial material waiting to be ingested. Apparently, the entire ingest system had been practically unuseable since about Sunday. Eventually they traced it to the off-line browser system, which will allow people to content check and choose commercial break points in programmes resident on the servers, or the archive system. After shutting down the browser, and power-cycling everything on the ingest side, all came back to life.

I now wonder whether all the problems with clip transfer are, just possibly, related to this. If so, we will have major fun when the system goes tapeless on the transmission side. Rumours in the industry suggest this could be as soon as next month. Add to this the upcoming increase in the channel count and I foresee fun-and-games.

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Thursday, 17th February

Despite my comments about going tapeless for transmission (above), they are still installing tape players, with robotic loading/unloading, for the new channels - not actually new, but being moved to the UK from Scandinavia. My former bosses are evidently intent on utilising the ecomomies of scale provided by high-powered multi-channel transmission automation - it is rumoured that channels that have, to date, only been transmitted from a facility local to the destination viewers will be brought to London.

This is all very fine from the bean-counters' standpoint (which I can understand, but not necessarily agree with) but I still have philosophical differences with the designers about how this is implemented - there is  a single point-of-failure, the main control computers (albeit there is a mirrored pair of machines for this job), and it is practically impossible to get back on air under manual control if the automation goes toes-up. It can only get worse, with more channels, and installation engineers who shut down control systems without telling anyone, so that when the sole remaining controller throws a wobbly, we fall off air. Don't laugh, this happened only a couple of weeks ago.

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Friday, 18th February

I had a visit from my immediate boss last night - really very early this morning, about 2 am. This from a nominal "five day weekling". Was he "just passing", or was there ulterior motive? No matter, if your heart is pure, you need fear no man. And that's such a good quote, I'm sure it's not original.

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Saturday, 19th February

Jenny has a swimming gala this weekend, a total of 3 events spread over 2 days at a Leisure centre halfway around the North Circular Road from here. Jane did today's event, waiting to watch the swimming with Katy, since I was asleep after a freelance shift.


With the current hysteria over denial-of-service attacks over the Internet, I decided to test the vulnerabilities of Fujisan. The acknowledged best site for this is Steve Gibson's, and his Shields Up! utility, which does a portscan, at your request, and reports the result over a secure connection to your browser. The only problem I had with this procedure was the fact that one of the Microsoft-supplied security certificates expired on 1999 Dec 31, so of course I got an invalid certificate alert. Does anyone know how to update these? If so, please mail me. I'm not going to report the results here, for obvious reasons.

Fair warning, the site is slow - due to weight of accesses. Steve admits to this, and apologises on the home page.


As I was typing the above entry, Jane called me to look at the hamsters. Dudley is lying on her side, twitching feebly. We suspect that she will die very soon, if not overnight. I say 'her' since, despite the name, Dudley is female. She was originally named Bounce, by Sarah, whose hamster she is, until Jane said "She looks like Dudley the Dormouse" (from the children's books of the same name, by Judy Taylor, and illustrated by Peter Cross), so she changed names in mid-life.

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Sunday, 20th February

RSGB VHF Convention at Sandown Park racecourse, in Surrey, today. I'm planning to go, more for the socialising than to buy, since there is a good bar and restaurant in the pavilion where the exhbition and trade stands are. There will be no horse-racing that day.


Dudley died overnight, so Jane held a burial service in the back garden this afternoon, on her return from Jenny's swimming gala. Then we all went out for a burger.


The VHF Convention at Sandown was not as good as previous years - there were fewer dealers there. That said, I picked up a few things, mainly a Sony CD-ROM Discman (a portable CD player and SCSI CD-ROM drive, all in one) Trouble is, there was no power brick, so I can't test it yet, the lithium ion rechargeable battery pack is flat.

I also found an external aerial for the DX394 HF receiver, so that I can get a better signal for HF-FAX decoding.

When I bought Celery, I evidently omitted to ask for an install CD for WIN95, and the shop refused to give me one, claiming that I'd only bought a licence - no media. To cap that, they offered me a gold CD for UKP20. That should have been free. I object to being gouged, so I walked away. Today I found a pukka Micro$oft CD, correct version and everything, for UKP12.95. This will be useful in case I have to reinstall Celery again.

The CD-ROM Discman came with a SCSI PCMCIA card, badged Sony, which identifies itself as an Adaptec APA-1425/50/60 on installation. Close reading of the labelling suggests it's a 1460. So even if the drive is faulty, I'm ahead, since the PC Card is about UKP80 new.

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