Of iPods and Shoulders
On Monday my iPod came. For those of you who care, it’s a 20GB model, brand new, and very nice indeed. About 2.5GB used at the moment — not enough good music around for me to put on it. Plus I don’t have room to keep all the CDs I’d need to get that much music. Perhaps if I start encoding it using Apple Lossless instead of AAC… probably it would fill up too quickly then.
I guess the iPod doesn’t have to be full.
On Tuesday morning I got out of the shower and pulled a muscle or two in my shoulder. I have no idea how, but it just happened and it hurt quite a lot. Most things involving arms became painful — including typing and cycling, so work was right out. I was able to get online again by the afternoon but only through some strange positioning and the use of my laptop, so I didn’t get much done. My iPod was very useful that day.
Back to work on Wednesday thanks to Mum giving me a lift and Nigel giving me a lift home (Nigel my boss, that is). Nana had an operation on Wednesday as well, so it was a bit of a nervous day (although I was tanked up on ibuprofen, wonderful stuff).
Today we had champagne at work, but no sign of the usual Internet outage which accompanies such celebrations. Have we finally seen the last of the frequent outages? Time shall tell. I hope so, or the VoIP phone system we’ve just installed won’t go down very well. Some parts of it aren’t going down well anyway, as the client software to run on Windows or Mac OS X is absolutely dreadful. I don’t think I could write a piece of software that was less usable if I tried for a year. It’s so bad it feels offensive to run it on a Mac, and even on Windows it looks dreadful — a platform not really noted for any sense of UI consistency on the side of the software vendors.
Needless to say we’re trying to get the source code or the network protocol so we can write our own version. We’ve got enough knowledge and raw talent (what with being a company providing products based around large and complex bits of bespoke software) that we can probably come up with something better. Goodness knows it would be difficult to come up with anything worse.
Appraisal tomorrow. Nottingham and Matt’s at the weekend. My birthday is on Saturday.
Nana, thankfully, is doing well after her operation, given her age and what they had to do to her insides. Fingers crossed that she continues to do so.