Hope you feel better soon, Matt.

And Claudia... You can so play the flute!!

Thank you

Mrs was in the loo, and suddenly the 'globe' of the light fitting fell to the floor with a crash and smashed into many pieces! She was really .Good job its wasnt directly over her head. Of course I got a right 'earholing' as I changed a bulb about a week ago ! She said it might have killed her !

I hope Mrs fsharpminor is ok. That must have been scary.

argh

That was a very quiet scream, Soph15. Hope you're feeling better this morning.

Thanks muchly I am definitely recovering, should be back to normal real soon, yay!

Since this is the scream thread...Grrrrrrrrrr I HATE paperwork!

Guess who now has a cold...

I'm so looking forward to going home on Monday. Someone else to do the laundry, cook, clean... and I can just sit about... and revise.

I just hope my parents know how much I appreciate being looked after when I'm home: And don't start suggesting I wash up.



Sarah, did you manage to sort your coursework? Did you remember to check through temporary, hidden and autosave folders?

ARGH! Is it possible to overprepare for an essay?! Every time I make a point now, I think of about six others that relate to it, and I don't know what to put where, how to start and what is the most logical lead on! I think I'll go and hide under my covers now.

Lucky, a strategy I had told to me years ago for essay writing might help here:

Sit down and write your essay (on a computer is good, as it helps with the next bit). Dno't worry about a logical order, or even paragraphs. Just get all you ideas and points down on paper. Then go away for a bit and forget about it.

Later, come back with lots of different coloured highlighters/pens. Select one colour per concept/theme/category and go through highlighting or underlining every sentence that relates to each category with the appropriate colour.

Each colour will then become a paragraph or section of your essay. Have a think about which order the sections/paragraphs should go in. Then go back to your computer, and group those sentences into nice logical paragraphs. Ta da! Nice well structured essay. In theory, anyway.

Good luck with it.

They will if you tell them

Argh.

'Argh' doesn't sound good...

It's not really.

Why do people insist on coming to work when they're coughing their lungs up? Especially when they're doing lab work that requires a germ-free environment?

Don't worry too much about it - by the time the cold has got to the "feeling OK, but coughing up gunk stage" the virus has pretty much gone and what's being coughed up is the debris left over from the immune response.

If you need to be in a germ-free environment then use a hood - it should be perfectly possibly to keep your experiment untainted.

I miss my fluuuuuuuute I had to fly home v spontaneously to go to the doctor and only took hand luggage. I thought I'd go back to get my stuff but now I'm not so I'm not going to have my flute back till January! What am I to do?? I've even been playing the recorder in desperation but it's not the same. My recorder is rubbish and I'm not very good at it. Argh!!

Just think how motivated to practise you'll be when you get your hands back on it!


I'm feeling quite ARGH! I've been getting all nicely settled in back at home, recovering from my cold, enjoying doing lots of reading, lounging around the house, watching TV (I don't own one), getting in touch with my friends again, and generally having a few lazy days before doing a bit of revision.

So today, I dug out a few big textbooks, and was about to get stuck into some reading on non-Newtonian fluids when in panic I sudden remembered: I had to get an extension for the last piece of coursework of the semester, because I just ran out of time. Having secured the extention, I'd stopped worrying, and forgot all about it! ARGH indeed.

So I frantically get onto my computer to check the date. Mercifully, I've got til Friday to do it, but I can't believe how close I was to not submitting anything at all!

I'm now trying to calm down from my total panic, before getting on with it. Truely, University is coming close to driving me completely mad.

What a good job you remembered, Tamsin! At least you have a couple of days to work on it, and after the bit of a rest you've had, it should go well. It could have been much worse!

And think how noble you'll feel once it's been sent off to the authorities at your uni.

Arghh! Everyone's falling out over places to live next year, it's so tense here. I'm trying to be calm, and tell myself it's ages away, but the worry is contagious - and for the moment I have no one to live with! Plus three flatmates in conversation have said "oh, you're living with your coursemates aren't you?" and I'm like "no!".

My coursemates are living with their flatmates, and my flatmates think I don't need to be included in plans, so looks like there may be nowhere for me to go!

Why do we have to decide so early?!

Eek, Lucky! I really hope you find somewhere. I'd like to tell you not to worry about it but of course that's going to be much easier said than done. Good luck.

(PS Did it take York long to get back to you last year? )

I hope I find somewhere too. If I don't though - it's a new adventure! I can find a room with strangers and maybe they'll become friends. Haha, or I could stop being melodramatic and worry about it when I need to.

Well... York took about a week and a half to get back to me, but I sent my application off in time for Oxbridge deadlines, so I was early - and it took them much longer to get back to others, so don't worry if it does take a while! Good Luck, it's so lovely here (I know you know York itself, but the uni specifically is lovely).

I'm sure it will work out for you, Lucky. I don't know how things work at York, but in Durham people can live in college again in their last year, so you get houses with some people who want to live out for a second year but others who are going back into college.

My daughter was in a similar position to you (5 years ago now -eek!) and found it was a good position, as there were several such houses with folk looking for a new person to join them; I know she went to 3 or 4 and was able to choose the one where she felt most comfortable with the set-up. She'd had a bad experience in her first term as one of her immediate neighbours used to come in sozzled at about 3am several nights a week, and then put on loud music, so she was keen to find people to share with who didn't have this habit!!

And yes, strangers can and do become friends under these circumstances. You don't always have time in your first term to make friends with second years, as they're living out, but it can be quite useful to have older students as your housemates. My daughter was lucky that one of the boys in the house had a car, which was great for supermarket trips and getting taken to the station at the end of term!

Just seen this.

I know it wouldn't be the same, but could you hire or borrow one for a while during the time you are home?

So big-important-project is due to Go Live tomorrow.
For which I was supposed to have a big file to work on from Monday morning. Said file was not available until Wednesday morning.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but because of the bigness of this particular file, loading it in has been a nightmare. My initial estimate was that getting all the data in would be around 24 hours - long, but not so long that I couldn't do a complete test run locally, before submitting the whole lot for the production/Go Live thingy wotsit.

And then the files decided to take a bit longer. It's going to be 36 hours, no 48 hours. So I told those concerned this morning - if we'd got the final file on time, we probably would have made it, but we didn't, and we aren't going to make it.

And now, I am sitting here, watching stuff load in. One of the files usually takes a long time, as in 3-4 hours on a normal sized project. This one is 25 times the size of the file - so I sensibly split it up in to smaller files, so I could watch and ensure they progressed. The current file is progressing, SQL tells me, but it's been sat loading it for at least 6.5 hours now.

At the current rate, thiw whole local test run is going to take approaching 4 days, i.e. 96 hours. Given that I started it at 8pm on Wednesday, there's no way it can be ready in time to submit and have it built Live on Friday.

Just *ARGH* because at every step just as something goes right, something goes wrong. At least this time we have an issue that was out of our hands for the 2-day delay on the last file I was waiting for.

Still, suspect I will just plead for a deviation from the test plan, and submit for live-production-implementation before the test-local-implementation has finished. With fingers crossed that no errors happen, or nothings going through this side of the holidays...

Have just done a lot of typing, only to find I had hit the "Caps lock" button! Grrr! Why is IT NEAR A COMMONLY USED LETTER SUCH AS A???

*See what I MEAN?*

AAAAAAAAAAAAArgh at this stupid chest infection
I've missed a week of school
Missed gymnastics yesterday
Am just starting to feel better today... i feel fine before being suddenly overcome by tiredness and sleeping for an hour or so then feeling fine before being overcome by tiredness again etc... i can feel the next bout of tiredness coming now...

If i'm not well enough for my violin lesson later...













...*falls asleep*

Deviation approved, live submission in, hurrah. So now I'm free, free I tell you! At last, no more mucking about, I can get back to a normal daily work routine, and far more importantly, not having to lug a laptop back and forth, I can start cycling to work again.

Only if I do that tomorrow, I'm going to get Very Wet Indeed.

Pah, thinking about it I need to take the laptop home over the weekend Just In Case so I can't cycle tomorrow anyway. And neither on Monday, because I'll be lugging the laptop back in to the office.

So Tuesday's going to be my last chance of the year. I will probably do that whatever the weather then, because I only need one more day of commuting to get to 500 miles which kind of has to be done. (Wednesday we do a half day, but then I'll need to take the laptop home with me and also empty my locker of junk. Roll on Xmas, if Santa doesn't bring me the laptop-pannier-bag I've asked for, I'll be getting myself one in the sales!)

ARGH! I'm fed up with everything today, still only an hour left in the office...

I know EXACTLY what you mean! But I have the same problem with the hash key "#". Why put it so close to the "enter" button?! In fact there's a rhyme about the "#" key - I've got it written down somewhere at home, I'll post it once I'm back from work.

ONE MONTH since a car crashed into our front wall and steps.

Repairs have not started, our own car has only just been given the OK for panelbeating, and the insurance company is refusing to pay enough to replace the bike Viohazard desperately needs to get to all his Saturday music lessons. . With no car and no bike, today we walked about an hour each way lugging a big old guitar and hard case in the cold and the dark.

If the insurers want to gripe about how much the damage cost, why don't they go and moan at their client, not me?

Arggghhh...............

I thought, by my age and with a degree in English, I had quite a good command of our language.

But yesterday our tv blew up so we went to a shop to buy a new one this morning...

... only to be met with a foreign language....

"Blue Ray"
"High Definition"
"LCD screen versus Plasma screen"
"DVD recordable hard drive"
"Digital compatible"

blah.... blah.....blah.....

..what's wrong with an 'on' switch and four channels like we used to have????


AND, OMG look at the SIZE of the things!!!!!!!!

We now own a flat thing the size of a small planet that sits on glass shelves filled with a pile of boxes and about fourteen remote controls, flashing lights, whizzing, banging and fireworks...

*ducks behind the sofa until OH explains where the 'on' switch and four channels can be found..... *


(p.s., OH seems oddly excited about the whole production???....)

That is quite possibly the funniest post I have ever read on here, Lottie. And that is not to cast any shadow over the serious nature of the situation in hand... We bought something similar when we moved into our new house and after 3 months I still don't know how to turn it off.

Aaaargh!

Sometimes I just don't get my dad!!

We have an old cat (I think she's about 14) who has basically stopped eating for the last week and has obviously lost weight and isn't herself. A similar thing happened to her a few years ago where she literally refused to eat for about a month and we only just managed to save her by force-feeding her. That time, someone took her to the vet, and they didn't come up with anything very helpful apart from a couple of tins of special cat food.

My dad won't accept the possibilty that it could be anything other than the same as last time this time, so won't take her to the vet as 'it's still in the early days so we can't tell yet and it will cause more harm than good anyway because she's very nervous of strangers!'

When I pointed out that it would be better to take her to the vets now rather than to have to pay the emergency call-out fee over christmas, he said that in his experience of 20 years of cat-ownership, they don't go downhill quickly and die slowly over the course of a year or so, so there's no urgent hurry I was particularly surprised he took this approach because given that someone we knew was completely fine in the summer, went to the doctors because they thought they were feeling a bit dodgy and had died within about two weeks. I mentioned this to him, but all it did was get an explanation of how cats are different to people.

I can tell that my mum thinks she should go to the vets too, but she's mainly my dad's cat, so noone wants to go against him.

Just aaaaaargh!!!

Sarah, why don't you and you mum gang up on him and nag him til he takes the poor creature to the vet?

Good luck!

We did our best, but he is really stubborn and will never consider any view other than his. I think hopefully my mum might take her in tomorrow if she hasn't improved eaten anything overnight. It would cause a bit of an uproar though.

Poor kitty

She might simply have some sort of infection that could be easily cleared up by anti-biotics, but if you don't get her to the vet you won't know

I hate accident scenes

Are you ok, Matt?

Hope nothing too traumatic has been happening...

Oh dear..doesn't sound good..

I'm ok thanks...or at least I will be It's been a particularily death-filled week for me, which especially sucks just before Christmas I'll get by eh

Are you a funeral director perchance?

Sure feels like it sometimes! But noooooo.

Surely a death-filled week wouldn't be anything for a funeral director to scream about? That'd be in the "what's made you happy?" thread.

ARGH for me today because, 35 hours in to my installation, the server rebooted. Despite me disabling the automatic reboot. I suspect someone has changed the time of the 're-enable rebot' command and not told us. So now I get to start what looks to be a 96-ish hour job all over again...

Oooh Maizie you have my sympathy.

I was just ready to do something fun like clean out the cupboard under the kitchen sink, when a client rang and said the boss had rewritten the original of what I've just translated, so could I redo it all incorporating all his edifying comments...for free, please, and this evening, please...

My friend's mum has cancelled our carol singing night, because my friend is singing at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Apparently it's unthinkable that she should sing two nights in a row.

Mums are evidently sent to try us!!

Not even my mum! If it was I could persuade her!

I feel ick and I can't sleep due to jet lag, and it doesn't feel like Christmas yet, and all the little things are really building up and up and I'm drowning a little bit meh