| Last Week |
Monday, 24th January |
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Freelance today, at the Central London site. I'm getting a bit fed-up with queueing for tickets on these shifts. It's not economic to get a season ticket - I don't do enough shifts - but London Transport do a smartcard-based system, called Oyster, that works as by pre-payment. Fares are discounted, too. So today I got one. Fill in a form, pay UKP3 deposit for the card (which is added to the card and is spendable on fares) add some credit, and away. To use it, you swipe the card over the reader when you board a bus, or at entry and exit from the system for a Tube journey. Readers are ubiquitous.
The card contains a Philips RFID chip, I believe. Whether the card actually holds the credits I don't know. Maybe it's just an "I'm here" flag, and credit data is held centrally. I suspect that centralisation is likely, because of the potential for credit hacking if the card were stand-alone. Regardless of how it does it, the system works.
I also wanted to post my tax return, having filled it in over the weekend. But the queue at the Post office was horrific. So I passed on that wait, and returned home with the envelope still in my bag.
Tuesday, 25th January |
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Given that the builder/decorator will be here next week to start refurbishing the loft shower room, I had to get the relevant bits - shower tray, enclosure, wash-basin, and assorted plumbing parts. That was a total of just under UKP550, plus a potential dislocated back moving it from trolley to car, and then into the house.
I've also posted my tax return - using what we call Recorded Delivery, which means the recipient has to sign for it, and I have a chit that says I posted something to that address on a given day. The reason for this is that Hector the Tax Inspector sometimes loses paperwork, and if that happens he'll want a UKP100 fine from me for late submission. But if I have a posting receipt that says "posted today" and the Post Office have a record that says "signed for on (say) 27th January", if Hector then says "We can't find it", I can say "That's your problem - but out of the goodness of my heart, herewith a photocopy". Not that I'd get any thanks for it - tax inspectors are notorious for have ice-water in their veins.
Wednesday, 26th January |
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Thursday, 27th January |
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Well, I've kept busy at work these two days, but the ingest guy (the job I'll be doing next week) has had it easy - not much work. I hope I get the same next week.
The builder was supposed to attend today to start gutting the shower room in the loft. But we don't have the tiles (foul-up at the tile shop - next week, apparently) and he hasn't finished his current job, so he will be here next week.
Friday, 28th January |
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Saturday, 29th January |
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Sunday, 30th January |
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I've been at freelance these three days, the City of London site, which means 7 days on the trot (allowing for next week), which is a bit much. But the channel they are preparing to take over transmission for starts from there on Tuesday at 10 a.m. so they need some people with clue to get material loaded to server properly. Which would be easier if the automation software wasn't a beta release, and not properly configured either. And they keep reconfiguring it, which means caching has to stop - the reconfigure basically requires a controller restart, and the client computer (the one I use) loses it's connection - and the job it's doing. Not good.
And then, last night, the whole system stopped inserting metadata into the clip database. As far as I could tell, the clips were present on the video server, but the automation was unaware of their presence.
The staff on site are only just ahead of me in knowledge of the system, so no-one really knows what's going on. But at least the transmission side can shadow (off-line) the present transmission site. And that's working. The big cut-over is Tuesday - I hope it works.
| Last Week |