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Looks like Rachael had a great time at camp. She's brought back a video of the highlights, the main one being The Blob, involving a large inflatable. One person jumps onto it, and another sits on the end, and gets catapulted into the water. Plus the water slides, flying fox and dozens of other activities. Fortunately she doesn't have school tomorrow!
Bronwyn's thinking of starting a playgroup at the church. An official, funded playgroup, rather than a church one. There used to be one a few years ago, and all the equipment is apparently still there, locked in a cupboard. There's already the church playgroup of course, so negotiations could be delicate...
HelpX seems to have woken up. I recall it was really quiet in February and March last year. Now that the air fares are lower, everyone wants to come to New Zealand. And stay on the farm of course.
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( 3 / 1967 )Haven't been too well for the last couple of weeks. Not sure which is worse, the illness or the antibiotics. I've stopped the antibiotics a few days ago. Now let's see what the illness was like...
We had a hacking incident last week. One of the Australian schools had their pages defaced. The message was "Welcome to NOPE". The last one read something like "We are legion. Unlike Denise's password, which is Legacy". At least they had a sense of humour. The school tracked him down using the IP addresses to an ex-student. And I believe they've also had a good lesson in choosing passwords.
Rachael's off to e-Camp next week (the junior version of the Baptist Easter Camp). I've got to drop her at church at 7am. Should be fun...
Bronwyn's had her handover, and offered to help with the mopping up of all the people who haven't done their census form yet. Meanwhile, I've been working on a job for the Australian schools. And there will likely be An Announcement Soon. But fortunately I won't have to move to Australia. Interesting Times are ahead...
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( 2.9 / 1963 )It's St Patrick's day. And it's raining. At last. The whole North Island and large chunks of the South Island has been declared a drought zone. Bronwyn says she's come across paddocks with large areas completely bare, and dams run right dry. Fortunately, our dam is huge, and is only a few inches below the overflow pipe. And we're only down to 60% on the water tank. We haven't had a lot of rain, but it should be enough to get the grass growing.
Bronwyn has finished. Yes, there's still a few houses who weren't in, or haven't got round to doing the forms, or refused to do the forms, but she can hand them over to the district coordinator to sort out. This is a little tricky, because her district coordinator resigned last week after working far too many hours. So Bronwyn has been talking to the area coordinator instead. There's the handover next week, and she's got a lot of paperwork to sort out. You wouldn't think that it would be quite such a complex operation, but there's all sorts of things that might go wrong. Including the one house where Bronwyn got no answer, and saw some, um, paraphernalia on the table, and had a quiet qord with the police...
I've been really busy at work. And we've now got a big Australian contract which I've been doing in my spare time. Didn't feel well last week. I had to take some time off sick, and they just had to do without me!
Allan's sweetcorn is mostly harvested. We're onto the last third. He put an advert on Facebook and sold seversl hundred cobs. He stuffed a suitcase full of them and shipped them out around the lower South Island. I've got some stashed in the fridge and freezer. Meanwhile, I'm working on the carrot patch. Still plenty to go there, and at least it lasts longer than the sweetcorn does!
Rachael has found a new friend. Well, she knew her before, but now they ring each other up every night. Rachael got a story published a month or two ago about autism, and how she'd worked to overcome it. Charlie spotted it. Charlie has aspbergers, and had a really rough time at school last year. Meanwhile, Charlie's mum has left and gone to Tauranga, leaving her with her grandparents. So we've all been helping out. I upgraded their PC from a 2002 version of XP to something that generally works, and got her grandmother set up with an email address, which wasn't easy since they're only on a wet piece of string for internet, and rain has been hard to come by lately...
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( 3 / 2045 )Bronwyn's been struggling with asthma this weekend. Fortunately, she's finished all her deliveries, so it's all set for The Big Day on Tuesday. So long as the forms actually got delivered. Apparently some postman has been collecting the blank forms back out of the mailboxes, and posting them back to HQ...
Had some rain this morning. Didn't last long. Don't think we'll get any more this week. At least it pays to be complete tramps at this time of year. We've still got 75% left in the tank. I've been sticking the hosepipe at the base of the trees and leaving it on for an hour or two per tree to get them some water.
Last year, we had problems with the old filestore at work. It was a bit on the slow side. So someone offered to set up some storage space on his shiny new machine, and link it through to us. I had to get up just after midnight to switch it over. This year, I found out that this guy was charging us more each month than the old filestore was worth. Someone else offered to install a spare server he had, which had high speed disks and plenty of space. However, he decided that we ought to be able to fit all our servers into a half size rack. So in anticipation, he installed the thing in the small rack, with a cable to the main rack. Of course, our servers aren't going to fit in the half rack, and we haven't got the cash to buy shiny (and smaller) new ones.
He'd also installed a version of Linux that I'd never had experience of, and failed to get the network configuration working, thus leaving it unreachable. I ended up taking it back to the office. He'd also prevented anyone from reinstalling a different operating system on it; there was a password on the BIOS config. But I got it working, and put it back, in the main rack of course.
I got up at midnight again and tried to switch it over, but it had crashed that evening, and I ended up fixing the chaos on the rest of the system instead.
I went in again, retrieved it and gave it the old screwdriver-across-the-battery-contacts trick to clear all the settings. 'E wake up. 'E know nothing. I set it up properly, and then returned it.
Got up at three yesterday morning and switched it over. Fingers crossed, it's still running...
Four redundancies, and now the boss has resigned. And there's some talk about Due Diligence. We shall see...
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( 3 / 2006 )Had a very busy couple of weeks at work. All the schools are back, and as usual, they've left things until about a week after the last moment, and we're now getting frantic calls because the parents want to log in, nobody's checked the school database and they assumed it would be done in a single click. Ah well. I guess it's nearly as bad as expecting teachers to spell correctly.
And it might get busier. We've just had four redundancies. I've been told not to worry, and that I'll probably be the last man standing. Not sure I want to be in that position; it's much easier sitting down. But I'm now taking on extrs work to make up for the guy who left our team. It's going to be chaos.
My manager finally got round to juicing some fruit and veg up for me as part of our plan to Get Healthy. However, today's juice was mostly orange and carrot, and it was rather strong. I'm hoping we can diversify a bit before my teeth fall out.
Bronwyn's been out most days handing out forms for the census. Every form has a code number on it, which she has to carefully note down in her book. She has nine different sets of forms, and nine different sets of pages in her book, corresponding to the different areas she has to cover, and she's not allowed to mix them up. She has to keep an eye out for houses that didn't exist for the last census, and many are down long winding driveways up in the hills. There are also an assortment of difficult customers, angry dogs and drug dens to deal with. But she's been making good progress so far, and met her target last week. Nobody knows the district as well as her right now...
Allan's sweetcorn is ready. Apparently he's not planning to sell it, despite having spent a grand on seed,irrigation equipment and a pump. He just doesn't have the time. So we're going to have sweetcorn coming out of our ears. Carrots are pretty much ready too, and I picked our first watermelon yesterday.
And I had a quick chat with the Prime Minister on Saturday. He was opening the new surf and community centre at the beach near us, and the brass band was playing there too. Didn't get much of a conversation. Had more fun discussing the scene with a couple of police officers. They were there on duty until the PM left. It occurred to me that if it was Britain, there would be secret sevice agents everwhere. "Ah", said the policeman. "how do you know they're not here?". He then turned to his colleague and said "Where is he, anyway?" and they went off hunting for him in the crowd...
Still no rain. At least we have a large lake to draw from. The ground is bare and dusty. One of the sheep keeps climbing through the fence and mowing our lawn for us. At least it sticks to the grass...
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