Nikki had a hairdressing appointment and I got up just in case Postie came - which he did. he brought the web cam I'd ordered the other evening. Yesterday I'd also had the copy of iLife I'd won on eBay arrived.

So I spent the morning installing the software (and downloading any updates) which was an easy task. The Creative webcam just worked when I plugged it in - no drivers or software necessary - fantastic!

Having iLife means I should be able to organise all our photographs a bit better rather than just having them stored in ransom folders! It also includes some music software to make your own tunes - could be fun!

Later on we went to Crown Point as Nikki wanted to have a look in TK Maxx, but there wasn't a great deal, so we came home again! My mate Jonny was menat to be coming over, but we heard nothing from him and so had tea and spent the evening watching television.

I was able to have another lie-in as I didn't have to go in until after lunch as I was on support for the Globe team out in the US. I had a few things to do in the morning.

When I got to work I, along with my colleague Pete had to give a presentation to our team leader, Paul, on how far we'd got on the Plone stuff and the questions he'd asked. We'd managed to answer most of what he'd asked about. I told him I was still having issues trying to get the LDAP functionality installed but I won't let it beat me! Paul was happy that we had answered the majority of the questions. He had demoed it to another member of the senior management team who was impressed but had some questions of his own, some of which I was able to answer other require a little bit more investigation. Overall it's pretty positive.

Back in the Java world Nick was working on trying to get Cruise running one a Windows machine as opposed to Ubuntu. They were having some issues passing parameters int he Ant script which they didn't manage to resolve by the time Steve went home. We carried on for a bit but didn't get that far and so decided to go back to the Log4J stuff we were doing yesterday. I'd downloaded the files including the DTD so we were able to try out the XML method of setting properties, which worked rather well.

There wasn't a huge amount of support to do - they did have an issue where Internet Explorer came up with a message stating that a script was causing the problems which will need some investigation next week (however Nick will have to look at that as I'm having the week off!).

As on Wednesday we had a takeaway pizza - which has to be said was awful. I now know why I stopped eating them!

We finished just after 10 and I got home about 10:40pm and that's it for me now for a week!

I did think about going into work a bit later today due to the late night yesterday, but that would mean Nikki having to get the bus to work, so being the caring husband I am I went in at normal time. I had a few things to get on with, namely sorting through my emails to get rid of some old ones as my inbox was exceeding its threshold.

Nick did come in a bit later and then we started working on how we can incorporate logging using Log4J - something Thoughtworks started but never finished. We started very simple by writing a little program to see how the logging worked. It seemed fairly straightforward but in order to use it to its full potential rather than use a properties file we needed to use an XML file, which is all very well but we didn't have the DTD and weren't able to download it at work so I made a note to download it at home.

Nikki and I We did the usual keep fit and gym in the evening before settling down to watch yet more ski racing.

Well I was able to have a lie-in this morning as I didn't have to go into work until 2pm! Which meant Nikki had to get up a bit earlier and go on the bus, The reason I didn't have to go in until 2 was because the GLOBE application was being used for the first time out in America and they needed some support for it. Due to the time difference that meant we'd have to work later.

I spent the morning trying various different ways of installing Plone onto Windows. There is a new version but I couldn't get it up and running properly so again more investigation is required and I didn't really have the time.

When I got to work there was a discussion anyway aout us maybe running Plone an a Linux server - which for me would probably be th e more sensible option. As for the support well we didn't have any issues to speak of which is good - we even had pizza and Vienetta thrown into the bargain.

Nikki came home and went to the gym like a good girl!

My sister Denise rang me to let me know that my nephew Ben was being transferred to Leeds General Infirmary because he has had some really bad turns over the last day or so and they have decided to operate on him. Hopefully that should do the trick for him and he can get back to living some sort of normal life.

After yesterday's busy morning, this morning was relatively quiet. Nick and I had to fathom out how to free up some space on the Cruise server. The disk was getting rather full at 93% and the computer on runs Ubuntu and Cruise. We eventually found the culprit was aSBackup which is a little program we use to back the server up. We have a USB disk attached to the server and if it gets switched off then SBackup will create a folder on the local disk to do the backup to. It took some digging but we eventually found the files - we needed to sign on a root so we could see them. Once we'd done that it was a case of simply deleting the files and the disk was back down to 9% full!

In the afternoon Martyn came up from the Service Centre to help me get LDAP installed on Plone, though we didn't get very far because we needed to download some files but the proxy was blocking the sites. So Martyn is going to have to get that sorted before we can continue.

I thought I'd have a go myself installing LDAP on my laptop (which runs Ubuntu) and although the install procedure appeared to work I can't seem to see the add-on. Some more investigation required I feel, but it should just work. It took up most of the evening, but we did manage to get some more ski racing watched - we must be getting back up-to-date now because that's all we seem to have watched for weeks!

I was back on GLOBE4 today, however there was still the problem from Friday to sort out. It didn't take long (mind you there were three of us working on it!) to pin-point the problem. Annoyingly Jennie didn't give us the full story on Friday, she said the program was falling over no matter what she keyed in, when actually it was falling over when she entered a large number of cartons (over 102).

Basically the Java program was passing a 3000 character parameter (made up of a string "1,2,3,4...101,102,103.." etc.) across to a stored procedure on the iSeries what was getting truncated down to 300 characters by the stored procedure. Once that was fixed the problem went away. Thankfully we got it fixed before Jennie jets out to New York to demo it to the users.

That meant the morning went rather quickly, the afternoon was pretty much the same - I moved a server and installed the new version of IntelliJ on the four PCs we'll be using it on. I know we had the whole IntelliJ/RAD thing last year but it has been decided that because the original GLOBE application was written in IntelliJ and GLOBE4 is just enhancements to it then we too shoudl use IntelliJ.

The usual Monday keep fit and gym plus watching a bit of television is how we spent the evening.

Unlike most Sundays we actually managed to get up early to go to the gym, which made a nice change.

That gave us a bit more time than we usually have, Nikki did a bit of tidying up and I spent the time copying (or more accurately trying to copy) the iTunes music from the laptop hard disk onto the Mac). It took an absolute age - I managed to copy the files off the laptop onto the USB disk no problem but when I started copying the files over to the Mac, for some reason it kept dropping the connection to the disk. Eventually I downloaded a little program call arSync which synchronised the two disks and so it was clever enough to know what files had been updated.

Once I'd got the files across I was able to then format the USB disk so we could use it with the new satellite receiver. I formatted it to FAT32 and gave it a whirl - yipee it worked!

We watched a bit more ski racing later and had the remainder of the curry that we had last night for tea.

We didn't have all that much planned today. We popped into Bradford to get some bits from Aldi and Home Bargains. I spent the afternoon trying to get the iTunes music copied onto the Mac, but whatever method I tried was rather slow so I didn't get all that far.

My mate Jonny was meant ot be coming across in the evening but he'd been called out and had been at work all day and was pretty tired so we decided to leave it until next week.

I also managed to get one of the hard disk drives working with the new satellite receiver. Indeed it does need to be FAT32 format but if the drive is switched on at the same time as the receiver then it is not recognised, the trick is to switch the receiver on and then the disk - hey presto it works! Nikki will at least now be able to record the Sasha concert that's on this week.

I did a little work on restyling the Plone site and I've pretty much got it looking how I'd like, just the navigation to sort out now. Martyn was again supposed to help me get LDAP installed but had to cry off as he had a migraine. I'm supposed to be back on GLOBE4 next week and some I'm not sure when we'll be able to schedule that in, but it would have been nice to have had it out of the way this week.

Towards the end of the day the Business Analyst in London, Jennie, was having some trouble with the Remote Intake application that we'd worked on with Thoughtworks last year. She said she was only doing exactly the same process as she had been doing in the morning but this afternoon it wasn't working - she was just getting error messages. I had a look at the code, but couldn't see a reason as to why it shouldn't work and besides it hadn't changed since the morning! We decided to leave it until Monday when the rest of the team are back and we can have a better look at it.

As it was Niki's birthday yesterday we went out in the evening - had a couple of drinks in Bar 57 and then went to the China Dragon Chinese for something to eat. It wasn't a particularly late night.

Today was Nikki's 39th birthday - only one more year to go until the big 4 0!

My nephew Ben has been in hospital since the weekend. He's got a diseased bowel and although he's been on medication it doesn't seem to be getting any better, in fact it appears to be getting worse. Nikki and I paid him a visit at lunchtime, but he wasn't up to receiving visitors really, he looked to be in an awful lot of discomfort the poor little fellow. We had a chat with my sister Jacqueline (Ben's mum) and my mum and nephew Mark who were also there.

At work today was supposed to be the day when Martyn from Technical Services was to help me get LDAP installed on Plone, however he had to postpone it until tomorrow as he's got some further investigation to do.

We had a briefing from our main boss Andrew Clarke, basically how the brands are doing and the like plus current and future projects. Nothing earth shattering but it does look like we're going to be quite busy over the coming months.

In the evening I went to the gym and Nikki to keep fit. I also continued installing stuff on the Mac.

We didn't go out for Nikki's birthday - that's tomorrow evening!

For some reason I had a brainwave in the shower this morning about why the third disk didn't work in the Mac. I remembered seeing a wire that wasn't connected to the motherboard when I installed the disk, but didn't think anything of it at the time.

We called in at the Post Office on the way to work as Nikki had a parcel to pick up - plus the wireless 'mighty mouse' I'd bought was also there to pick up.

I continued working through the Plone stuff, I've answered pretty much all the questions that Paul had. The only thing outstanding is the get it working with LDAP, which looking at the documentation is quite tricky to do on a Windows server.

Nikki was feeling a bit tired in the evening and so we didn't go to the gym, that gave me more time to continue getting stuff installed on the Mac. I found out the reason why the disk didn't work and it was exactly as I had thought this morning, so that was a relief! I had written down a list of applications that I needed to install so I worked my way through them.

I had several deliveries today! All the stuff I'd ordered from eBuyer arrived, plus the satellite receiver I'd bought from eBay had also arrived when we got home!

I didn't know what to unpack first! I had a pretty hectic evening. I installed the new satellite receiver and made sure it worked okay - which it did and it picked up a load more channels than our previous one! I attached the hard disk to it so we could use the PVR function, but the disk is in the wrong format - NTFS and it needs to be FAT-32. That's something Ill do later.

I then set about installing the new hard disk and USB card into the Mac, they went in no problems, but for some reason I couldn't see the disk I'd put in the other day. I got the new version of OS X installed and it went on like a dream. In fact the Mac runs much faster now and it's a nicer interface than the previous version.

By the time I'd finished it was getting close to midnight, so I called it a day. There are still a few other bits that I need to install and I also need to work out why the other disk doesn't work.

When Postie rang the door bell this morning I thought it was still the middle of the night - it didn't feel as though I'd been asleep all that long! Anyway he was delivering the copy of Mac OS X I'd won on eBay on Friday.

It's half term this week and the traffic was a bit lighter than normal. Nick, Steve and Stuart are off this week and so the work on GLOBE4 has come to a bit of a halt. This week I've got to concentrate on ironing out a few Plone niggles and getting it installed and working on a production server and help Pete out with some CSS issues he's got with his Lotus Notes application.

Pete's CSS stuff didn't take much effort and it didn't take much to resolve a couple of the Plone niggles.

It was gym and keep fit in the evening followed by watching a bit more ski racing.

We had planned to get up a bit earlier today, but best laid plans and all that we didn't manage it. We still went to the gym and then after lunch we set about washing the cars as the weather was quite pleasant and not as cold as it had been of late. I can't say the cars were given a thorough wash but at least they aren't caked in dirt and salt residue! When the weather gets more spring-like I'll give mine a proper decent wash and a good polish.

I did a bit of ironing while Nikki did a few other minor chores. We then spent the evening catching up on some more ski racing. I ordered a new wireless mouse, hard disk, bluetooth dongle and USB card for the Mac.

We had a bit of a lie-in but not too late. We both needed to go and get a tyre for our cars. Nikki needed one on her front passenger side as it was slightly worn on the inside edge. My passenger side front one that had gone flat on Wednesday needed sorting. Before we set off I pumped some air into it (and it stayed up!) I also checked the other tyre pressures. The rear passenger-side tyre didn't appear to have much air in it so that would need looking at too.

Amazingly my front tyre didn't go down on the journey to the tyre place. I asked them to look at both tyres. The front one was leaking slightly around the wheel rim which they could remedy and it wouldn't need a new tyre. The rear one though was very worn on the inside and definitely needed to be replaced, so not quite the outcome I'd expected, but they did fix the front tyre problem for free. I'm just really glad I asked them to look at the rear tyre though. Nikki's was just a straightforward new tyre on the front.

From there we popped into Bradford as we needed a few bits from Aldi, we also got some wheel cleaner from Halfords.

After lunch we started sorting out my studio in order to accomodate the Mac. It wasn't a quick job but we got there the Mac now has a new home, complete with 2 monitors. Also we cleared a lot of stuff out and so there seems to be a bit more space, which is good because it was starting to get rather cluttered.

That meant we didn't have tea until late. We then watched a bit of television before bed time.

I could have gone into work a bit later after being called out last night, but didn't feel too tired when the alarm went off, so I went in at usual time. I'd had a few emails about last night's problems and what had transpired. It seems a password on one of the operator accounts had been changed which caused the second lot of callouts. Hopefully ths issues were resolved during the day and that should be the end of it...

Nick and I had planned to enhance the message sending code I'd written so that it could be parameterised, but we didn't get chance. We had a couple of issues to deal with plus there was some reorganisation of the office that we've been working in so we had to move some of the equipment around.

At lunchtime we popped out - I had to get a Valentine's card and birthday card - two cards cost £8.20! and they weren't even ehat I'd call fancy ones!

We finished a little bit early, Nikki went off to do the shopping. I went across to our neighbours to pick up the Plone books I'd ordered the other day. They'd taken them in when the delivery man attempted to deliver them.

After tea we continued with the television watching marathon! I also bid on and won a copy of Max OS X 'Tiger' on eBay.

A got another call out for exactly the same problem as last night. I'd been goven instructions this time as to what to do so it didn't take me long to get it sorted.

I didn't achieve a great deal at work today mainly because it was filled with meetings! The first one was about Plone and how were going to lay out the Java team content. We then had a Java team meeting, which was more or less a continuation of the Plone meeting, just in a different room! In the afternoon we had another discussion about why we shouldn't write the GLOBE4 stuff in Java. I think people just want to make sure, but there's no point writing it in Java just because we can, especially if we don't feel it's the right language.

We did the usual gym & keep fit thing. I also spoke to my mate Jonny, whom I haven't heard from so far this year. It looks like he's going to have his cats put to sleep because they are both very old and have been ill of late. It's a difficult decision to have to make as we know all too well when we had to do it with Seefa.

I'd just nicely got off to sleep when I was called out. I had to call on some help as it was a problem I hadn't seen before. Then I'd just got back to bed when the phone rang again - and then again. It was about 3am when I finally got to bed!

Nick and I carried on with the work we were doing yesterday amending the tests to use a different database. By lunchtime we'd had enough, it's going to take around a fortnight's effort to change all the tests, we'd be better off putting that effort into an alternative way of running tests - something akin to that Nick suggested at yesterday's meeting would be good!

I did a quick program to determine how easy it would be to send a message to a message queue on the iSeries from within a Java program. It didn't take long to realise that it's a relatively easy thing to do.

On the way home my car was pulling to the left quite badly and making a rather strange noise - yes you've guessed it a flat tyre! Thankfully the MINI has runflat tyres and so it wasn't too much of a problem. I just had to drive a bit more slowly than usual.

We went to the gym early evening and I carried on installing stuff on the Mac.

The memory that I'd ordered for the Mac on Sunday arrived first thing today.

At work Nick and I started looking at how much work will be required to change the database we using for testing - it looks as though it's going to be a time consuming job. We also had a meeting about Test Driven Development (TDD) which got rather heated. Interestingly it that heat wasn't coming from me - it was mostly Nick trying to get his rather valid point about the databases we se for testing and where it should exist. Nick would like to see a local database that is created at the start of the tests and then used. That way the developer is in charge of their own data (rather than having a dedicated environment on the iSeries) and the tests run faster into the bargain. It was something that didn't go down too well woth the architecture team, but to be honest I don't think they gave Nick chance to get his point across properly and I'm not sure they actually understood it either!

In the evening I spoke to my mate Matt and then I rang Christine and Andrew that we'd met on holiday. I installed the memory and the old hard disk from the Sky+ box into the Mac and started rebuilding it.

The snow wasn't too bad today, although more heavy stuff was forecast. We went to work in Nikki's car as I needed some petrol for mine.

There was an announcment this morning, the last time anything like that happened it was to announce redundancies but not this time, thankfully. It was to let us know that the planned pay review scheduled for March would be delayed until September - no surpise there!

I'd ordered some Pone books on Friday - printed versions and PDFs, so I go the PDFs printed at work. Today was the start of the new project I'm going to be working on for the next few weeks 'GLOBE4'. We had an 'iteration zero' meeting in the afternoon, basically outlining what we're going to need and how we're going to achieve it. During the meeting it became evident that the majority of work earmarked to be done in Java would be better done using the iSeries languages as that is where it will run and there's no point reinventing the wheel.

we went to the gym and I spoke to my mum and my mate Andy on the phone in the evening.

It wasn't a particularly early morning but when we got up we went to the gym.

The afternoon was taken up with more cleaning up, this time downstairs.

I had a look at the Apple Mac computer Nikki had brought home from work before we went off on holiday. It's only got 256MB of memory so I ordered so more for it. Other than that it all looks in good shape, the hard disk is a bit on the small side at 80GB but I've got a 160GB one that I took out of the Sky+ box that can probably go into it.

Rather than take the car as there are some major roadworks in the centre of Pudsey we walked. The pavements were lethal - sheet ice. Not sure how older people are coping... Nikki had to get her car tax, I sent the ski poles off we'd brought back from Austria to the lady who'd left them behind, we got the lottery and that was about it.

We spent the afternoon cleaning up upstairs, bathrooms, changing the beds, etc. The evening was spent catching up on more television.

It was the final day of the SSIS training course, which overall was okay but I'm not really sure when I'll be able to put into practice what I've learned.

Nikki did the shopping while I packaged up the ski poles we'd brought back from Austria that need to be sent to their owner in London. I managed to find a couple of cardboard tubes that I joined together to send them off in.

Again we spent the evening catching up of television.

The second day of the SSIS training course and to be honest it wasn't as bad as yesterday - there was quite a bit more practical work. Consequently I didn't feel the need for a nap in the afternoon!!

The usual Thursday routine of gym and keep fit was followed by us catching up on some more ski racing - we've got a lot to get through!

There wasn't much chance of being able to work form home today as I was on a training course - something I didn't know anything about until I got into work on Monday. Thankfully it wasn't too bad a journey in, no more snow, just quite a bit of ice on the roads.

We have had a new package installed called Maple Lake which apparently uses Microsoft SQL Server. It runs as part of the overnight process that I am on the support rota for. The training course lasts for three days and is all about SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services).

The day seemed to drag considerably and I felt myself yawning quite a lot - in fact after lunch I could quite easily have gone to sleep! Let's hope tomorrow is a bit better!

We did go to the gym tonight at least and considering we hadn't been for a while it wasn't too difficult to get back into the swing of it!

The snow had abated pretty much by the time it came to getting up. As Nikki didn't have the option to be able to work form home, she got up to get the bus. I asked her if she'd had the offer of being able to work from home whether she would and the answer was 'Yes', so that's what I did. I had about an hour's lie before getting up.

I did have some work to do, basically it was adding Plone content. I finished off the topic on jQuery and then started on an HTML prinmer. It was sunny for a good part of the day and I'm glad I went out and cleared the drive of snow at lunchtime because it dried up nicely. A bit later on when it dropped cold again the street did get rather icy, so I can only imagine what the drive would have been like had I not cleared it.

It was sausage casserole for tea and I started it around 5pm - but what a disaster - while I was browning off the sausages on the frying pan they stuck and started to fall apart. Some quick thinking and I mushed them up into a sort of mincemeat consistency and made put it into the casserole mix, but made a sort of Lancashire hotpot thingy with layered potatoes on top.

Nikki got home just after 6 and tea was just about ready. To be honest it was actually very nice!

We continued watching more of the ski racing for the best art of the evening.

When we got up this morning it was snowing quite heavily (we must have brought it back from Austria!) - typical as we had to drive to work! The roads were quite snowed covered however at least there were no buses getting stuck like the last time! That said we weren't delayed too much getting in.

Once I got into the office I found that we'd moved desks and I had a new PC! I spent the day sorting my emails and making sure everything had been ported across form my old PC, which most things had only a couple of things had been missed.

It snowed quite heavily on and off all day and was laid quite thickly when we came to leave, however most people must have gone home early because the roads were really quiet.

If it continues then we've been given the offer of being able to work form home.

Due to the amount of snow coming down we decided not to go to the gym and keep fit, so we cleared the drive and I put the car away in the garage while I could get it up the drive!

I then spent the evening sorting out the channels on our EuroSat receiver - deleting ones we don't watch and the like.

We had a bit of a lie-in but not too much of one as we had to go and pick Indie up from the cattery.

My mum was due to come round after lunch but she arrived just before we were setting off to get Indie. She didn't stay all that long, she just really popped in to pick up a couple of books I'd ordered off the internet for her.

It was just after 11am when we went to get Indie. She seemed to have had a good time and wasn't too bothered for coming out! She made a bit of noise all the way back home and was a bit jumpy for a short time when we got home, but she soon settled back down.

Nikki went off and did the shopping in the afternoon before we sat down and started to work through watching the huge amount of stuff we'd recorded while we were away - starting with the ski racing!