Rebuilding the Great Wall of IrnBru

The photo shows a small number of cans. Usually 30 or so empties build up on my desk before I can be bothered to crush them and put them into recycling. My reason is it's much more satisfying to stomp on a whole load of them that to do them one at a time.

I finished describing yesterday too soon. That afternoon I discovered that my project's website had gone down. Somehow there was a missing </p> in the latest version of the code. I don't know how that happened - it certainly wasn't missing when I built the code. That, and a clash between single and double quotes between PHP and Javascript, corrupted not only the current version of the site but also all the records of the previous versions. I spent until very late yesterday trying and failing to fix this.

So today I rebuilt the site from scratch - fortunately there are only 5 pages, avoiding where possible use of fancy 3rd-party design blocks (I think of them as 'blockages') in this Wordpress-based site. I also hived off the bit of code that was problematic to a sub-page, so that even if it corrupts again, it shouldn't corrupt the others which contain the essential information. Am I tempting fate there?

Before that I was at a departmental meeting where the senior manager announced some very positive results - our work's outputs over the last five years have been recognised as 'fantastic' in terms of their national and international impact. 

After that I met with a couple of colleagues about a small joint project - the person doing most of the work is doing very well. Most of our conversation was about data-protection - we understandably have to jump through some interesting hoops. After that, I went for an eye-test but it wasn't in the optician's diary, so that wasted 30 minutes. It did get me out of the house, so it's not all bad.

Then I spent from about 6pm to 9:30 reviewing outputs from my main project. They're not quite ready for public scrutiny, but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic that I was earlier this week. 

So what are today's good things: I finished work before 9:30, I've phoned my sister, was phoned by my wife (she's still away), had nuked baked beans and sweet corn for dinner (such a comfort food!) and watched a bit more of Aliens. We're just at the point where the colonial marines discover what's happened to the colonists, and then encountered the Aliens for the first time. As Hudson says, 'you tell me man, I only work here.'