Happy Birthday Al!!! (by sarah)

Today is Alarics birthday 🙂

To celebrate we are working all day and then running Cubs and Scouts! - then carpet cleaning the house due to a little cat insident.

Were Did All Our Money Go? (by sarah)

A transfer was supposed to go into our personal account straight from a client rather than waiting for it to clear and then writting ourselves cheques for wages ect... Obviosly this was not all the money so some of it was still going straight to the company.

We did not panic when it did not come through as there has been a huge problem with all the banks so we expected it to go in yesturday.

I check our account today - erm.... erm... PANIC!!!!!

Ok ok I think I can pay my credit cards from my own account that should have just enough for both. What the..? Great just great, my family allownce thing (what ever it is called) went in a day after everything came out meaning I went 14 whole pounds over my overdraft limit, meaning that I have a 30 pound charge 🙁 Great.

Then I think hang on let me just check previous statements - what! I've been charged like every month and the family allowance stuff seems to randomly change what day its paid in on - grrrrrrrr!

Still I am so glade that I've finailly got my internet banking stuff sorted so I can check and notice these things more easily - watch out Mr Banks you are not getting any more charges out of me!!!!

(war paint applied - tommahawk at the ready)

p.s. we phoned the bank and they knew nothing of the transfer from the client who is on holiday now so we were actually quiet panicking - but it turns out its all been paid to the company so Alaric is currently out making an emergancy trip to the bank to pay in a cheque that will probably take like a week to clear 🙁 This means we are going to have about 100 pounds in charges -again :'(

e-zine On hold :'( (by sarah)

Today was supposed to see the luanch of The Spaces Inbetween e-zine but unfortunatly we just have not had enough submissions and with the best will in the world there is no way the editor could justify going live with an edition that would have been only mine and Ella's work! That includes all the artwork.

We could have infact had an edition with just 2 contributors but it was felt that it just somehow seemed wrong.

This is a shame as I was hoping to give our friends first bash at this e-zine - oh well time for plan b) to wit - advitising for contributors properlly.

I am still happy to look at peoples work - think cross genre, think marginalised genres, think the Snell-Pym book collection and DVD stack, that should give a clue as to what we are looking for!

I am very sad that this project has had to go on hold like this but the editorial staff would rather do this than produce something substandard!

MPLS (by alaric)

One technology I'd really quite like to play with is Multiprotocol Label Switching.

It's a network protocol, but one that doesn't entirely fit right in with the standard ISO model stack; it's a low-level packet switching protocol like IP, but it doesn't have a transport layer (TCP, etc) on top of it. It's just used to tunnel other protocols like IP and Ethernet over. Read more »

Pros and Cons (by alaric)

The downside of this morning:

Jean woke up about at 2:30am, when I was just drifting off after unwinding with a good book after a late night working, and wailed. I went and picked her up, and she quietened instantly, then fell asleep on my chest as I sat with her. I slipped her back into her cot, substituted her teddy bear for myself in her arms, and went to bed.

About half an hour later, I was starting to drift off again, when she started to wail again.

Repeat this a few times.

Then after a while, she stopped falling asleep on my chest, and instead was playful. But then screamed if I left her alone. Brought her into my room to see if she'd fall asleep being hugged, but just ended up being poked in the face by a curious baby. So we set a DVD playing to keep her entertained in her room, and tried to get to sleep again.

But the DVD finished, so she started crying. I went back and made it play again. This time, she started crying before it was finished.

Tried getting her to sleep in the bed with us again, no cigar.

Eventually, she drops off at about 6am or so. I'd never quite made it to sleep, but I managed to at about 6:30am. Slept clean through the 7:30am and 8:00am alarms to wake up in time to take Jean into nursery and woke up at about 11:30am, feeling a bit grotty. At the time of writing (3pm), Jean is still sleeping happily in her cot (thankfully...).

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the electricity bill came today!

Now, last winter, when we'd just moved in, Sarah was cold, and Jean was cold, and all we had to heat things with were electrical heating and the single coal fire at one end of the (long, thin) building, so we used a LOAD of electricity. Out here in the sticks there's no gas pipeline, and we don't have gas or oil tanks; electricity heats our water, cooks our food, and (apart from the coal fire) heats the house.

The bill for that quarter was based on an estimate. An under estimate. When they got a reading last summer, we ended up with a wopping huge bill, that they said we could pay off in installments, along with our predicted next bill, based on the new estimate of our usage.

So for six months, we've been paying £300 a month in electricity bills; half paying off the winter before, half paying for this winter.

So it's a good thing that the bill has come, because it means this period is over. The bill was for fifty pounds; their estimate of our usage, minus what we paid in direct debits. And since we now have draught-reducing and convection-limiting thick curtains over all the windows, have figured out how to convert the coal fire into a blast furnace, and have portable gas heaters, when we send them our meter readings, we're hoping they'll have found they overestimated our usage and pay us back money...

Which will be welcome, as things are still rather tight!