May the twenty third! 2000: Julia is here! a jpoc journal entry

There is not much to say about the last week at work except that it was another week at work. The weekend was a lot more fun. I had to go out early on Saturday morning to buy some cheese at the market but, on the way, I discovered that there was a festival of sports in the centre of the town. So I had a look at the boats etc for a while.

On the way back, I saw that the music shop was having a sale. I bought a couple of song books. Bowie and Mott the Hoople, interestingky, they both had one song in common for which I already had the music. Of course, that was "All the Young Dudes" which was written by Bowie but given to MTH when they were in difficulties and considering splitting. I also looked at the Tenor Saxophones that were on sale but somehow managed not to buy one.

The rest of the day was a frantic rush to buy the rest of the things that we needed for the arrival, on Sunday, of Maria's friend and her son for a short visit. I was so busy that I didn't have time to watch the qualifying for the GP but I did have the time to start learning to play Ziggy Stardust on the guitar.

Finally, all of the computers were put away and we went to bed only to have to get up before five am on Sunday! Oh, that was hard for the three of us!

I packed some reading material, fruit juice, mineral water and beer into the big rucksack and off we went on the train to Hannover. On the way, we passed through a town called Hameln and, as the train left, I saw a mural of a man in a funny hat playing a pipe and being followed by a small crowd of rats. The penny dropped that this was of course the town called Hamlyn in the old fairy tale.

It took two hours for the train to reach Hannover and then, after a thirty minute wait (we just missed the bus) we had a twenty minute ride to the airport and a few minutes later Julia and her son walked out of the customs area and it was smiles and Russian chatter all around.

We had a better look at Hamlyn on the way back as the train broke down and we had a little wait there for another one. It didn't look particularly special though and I was surprised to see that there were no public toilets in the railway station!

As a result of the delay, I missed the first half of the GP but I was able to watch Schumi display his mastery of the wet conditions. I really do think that he will take the championship this year. I do wonder though what will be the level of commitment from Ferrari next year if he does. They have made a real push over the last four and a half years since Schumi joined them and at the start they did say that it was a five year effort to win the drivers world championship.

After the race, it was my turn to Mr Chef and I baked a Salmon. We had some French Fizz before and I cooked the fish in some Muscadet. I was going to serve the rest of that with the meal but it was fit only for cooking so we had to have a red wine and we drank our last bottle of Chateau Grand Puch 1995. Oh well, we have plenty of the 1996 to try so we shall see what it's like. There will be reviews of all of the wines here in a week or so.

I've been working hard at putting up new things on the web site. I've been trying out a few things on the Tipod perl cgi facility but I'm not yet satisfied with it to the extent that I'll make anything live just yet.

I noted though that the Lycos Htmlgear team are planning to have most of the things that I want as easy to use add ons in the next few weeks so I may just use those.

My list of things to write about is growing apace but I have to be careful that I don't spend too much of my time as Mister Computer.

Speaking of which though, one of the computers that I bought in the auction now works. I discovered that it had 16M of memory and not the 32M advertised and a different video card but that's the auction game for you. I added another drive and installed the Linux package that came last week. I'll post a review of that package later this week. I still want to install windows on it and then add sound, tv, scanner and network cards plus a tape drive. Once those are in, I'll have a platform for games and my CD-ROM reference works. Then I'll get to work on the second of the two auction PCs. That one come without a CD so I'll put my new CD-RW drive in that and install Linux and either NT or W95 and it should make a decent backup platform.