Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I managed a poor night's sleep last night. Don't know why, precisely, though I am tending to point the finger at the entire pot of coffee I drank between 20.00 and 23.30. It's not that I got no sleep; it was more a case that I kept waking up for a minute or two before dozing off again.

The temperature didn't help, either. Having gone to bed, I rapidly got very warm and ceded all claim to the duvet, which was fine until sometime around 3.30 this morning when I rather fancied having it (or at least half of it) back. This proved to be harder than one might imagine as sleeping Furtles attain a zen-like oneness with duvets. How she does this is beyond mortal ken.

Of course in addition to industrial amounts of coffee in the evening, sleep was hardly ushered in by prolonged gales of laughter. I can't now remember how or why the subject came up, but it seemed the thing to do, to relate the story of the chicken that fell down a well in a Pakistani village. The story, a half-remembered paraphrase from an ancient copy of the Fortean Times, was delivered sotto voce out of respect for people trying to sleep elsewhere.

It was, by all accounts, a very deep well and one man, presumably the owner of the chicken, took it into his head to rescue the bird. Sadly he was overcome by fumes. A friend tried to rescue him, followed by another villager and then another.

Suffice it to say that eventually a fair number of men had gone down the well, and in the end the only survivor of the entire escapade was the chicken, which climbed out of the well entirely unhurt, over the pile of unfortunate would-be rescuers.

At one a.m. when you are trying to be quiet on account of lightly sleeping house guests, the story is riotously funny – you can trust me on this – and all attempts to quell laughter by stuffing the duvet and/or pillows into your mouth only makes it funnier.

So now I sit in the office desperately trying to stay awake by consuming, irony of ironies, industrial amounts of instant coffee.

Wired and tired. It's the only way to go.

I have just attended a lunchtime seminar on GI Mapping. That is Geographical Information Mapping, for the uninitiated, the idea is that statistics can be overlaid on a map down to council ward level, and then geographic/demographic etc trends spotted.

It's even more fun when the maps are animated to show the passage of time.

What could have been a very interesting seminar was snafued by the fact that the air conditioning wasn't on, so I came close to dozing off on a couple of occasions. Next time I shall take my carpet slippers, a pillow and a blanky.

Despite wandeing out for a blast of fresh air directly afterwards, I am difficulty staying awake.

Still, it's Thursday and although there's no games night tonight, I am going home early.

So there.

I am confused.

I went to bed very late, but seem to have managed to sleep through uninterrupted until my alarm went off at 7.30...

Qué passa?

All things considered I managed a reasonable night’s sleep in the end. Once the Kronenbourg 1664 had gone down, I wandered off to bed absolutely knackered, but still unaccountably bursting with adrenaline. I have no idea why I should get an adrenaline rush just before bed. My life isn’t exciting enough to warrant it. Nonetheless, there it was. It took a while to doze off, but I did in the end, and slept the sleep of the dead.

Just as well, as today, being my last day in the office for a week has been hectic. I have been as busy as a …er… busy thing, and I’m not entirely sure that I’ve managed to get rid of everything I should have. Not that I care, particularly. I can do it when I come back.

Well, yesterday we completed the ISP migration from entanet to Plus Net , a switch that would have been a little more complicated had not Ser Taylor been at hand, as I had no idea where the url was for the router, so couldn’t change the settings to point it at the new server. Ironically, on the day the migration took place, we received a new bill from entanet, still in Adam’s name despite the fact he moved out 3½ months ago, and with no hint of the fact that they had already migrated us. I wouldn’t want to be in their accounts department if they try to take the money from Adam’s bank account through direct debit. He should, of course, have cancelled, but I’m not sure he has…

Anyway, we’re still at 512k for the next week potentially, but once BT get their act together and do what ever magic they do at the exchange, we will be up to 2mb, which increases the urgency for a 200gig hard drive on my PC so I can download all that nice telly and stuff on the bit torrents. Luckily the brutes are relatively cheap these days. I’m just going to have to remember where the various applications are, and how they are spread across the drives I already have. That might be fun.

Two hundred gigabytes.

Ten years ago I was fretting over a 100meg hard drive. Cripes.