Week Notes 49 & 50

Another fortnightly “week notes”. This will probably be the last one of the year as I’ll be on holiday for the next two weeks. I’ll try to do a final round-up when I get back early in January.

Blogging

I wrote a blog post. It was about equal marriage. People seemed to like it. Some people didn’t understand it. Other than that, I wrote two classic album posts. All three of those posts were written on the same day.

Health

In the run-up to Christmas my weight is slowly creeping up again. Currently I’m about five pounds heavier than the lightest I got to this year. My current target is to stay under fourteen stone until the end of the year and then start with renewed vigor in the new year. I managed to lose over two stone this year. If I can do the same next year I’ll be at my target weight.

Speaking & Training

Perl School 3 took place last Saturday. It seemed to go well and the feedback I’m getting has been positive. Didn’t sell quite as many tickets as I wanted to. If I want to continue doing this then I’m going to have to get better at marketing.

And that’s all the training finished for the year. I already have three training sessions booked in for next year. Looks like that side of the business is doing well.

Technology

Had a bad technology week. One of the hard disks in my main web and email server crashed early on Monday morning. That’s ok though, it was only a secondary disk in a RAID cluster. Had I just asked the admins to replace it, then things would have been fine and my sites would have been back in four hours. But I didn’t, I tried to take backups of some important data before doing that, which meant it was three days before I got the server back. And at some point during the process an important database file went missing and four or five of my databases became unusable. Two of them were really quite important. Nothing that I can’t live without for the time being, but there’s going to be some work to fix them in the new year.

This is why I’m not a sysadmin.

Holiday

As I mentioned last time, we’re off on holiday this week. Don’t expect any updates from me until early next year. I expect I’ll still be active on Twitter.

Gigs

I’ve seen a few gigs in the last couple of weeks.

  • Elbow at the O2: The band were great but, once again, I had a terrible seat.
  • Beth Orton at the Union Chapel: One of the gigs I had been most looking forward too all year. Rather too focussed on her new album, but she was great.
  • The Men They Couldn’t Hang at the Borderline: This was ok. I don’t think I was really in the mood for it. Probably won’t leave it another twenty years before seeing them again.
  • Stealing Sheep at Bush Hall: Another gig I was really looking forward to. For various reasons I’ve missed every gig they’ve played in London this year so it was a year since I had last seen them. They were great a year ago, but they’ve become so much better in the last year. If they don’t become huge stars then there’s no justice in the music industry.
  • Ellie Goulding at Brixton Academy: Another one I wasn’t really in the mood for. I seriously considered just not going. But I went anyway and it was alright. Don’t think I’ll be rushing back to see her again.

Films

Seems ages since I saw a new film. But this afternoon I’m going to see The Hobbit. Reviews have been mixed.

 

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