Wow, Greenbelt is tomorrow!!!! Eeek… Have made 3 lists: foodstuff, clothes, other essentials. Haven’t started packing yet. Outlaws arriving tonight (they’re coming too and we’re all going down in convoy tomorrow morning). Methinks that tonight is going to be busy and a late night packing affair.
Why do I always do things like this last minute??
The whole thing with our internet connection not working was very wierd. We have a wireless printer/scanner/fax, which was plugged into the phone line along with the DSL filter and the ADSL modem. Even having replaced our old modem (the old one was getting very hot), we were still having problems. The connection wasn’t there yesterday morning, or yesterday evening when Hubby turned up.
He tried all sorts of things, and eventually unplugged the printer’s fax cable from the jumble. Suddenly the connection was back up again. Very Strange. Why would the fax being connected interfere with the ADSL connection???
Well, let’s hope that this is the end of it. To be honest, I don’t think we’ve ever used the fax capability anyway, so it’s no great loss not to have it plugged in. Fingers well and truly crossed that this is the end of a very frustrating few months of patchy net access.
Today I have spent most of the day in a small lab playing with some circuitry and stuff. It’s great to be back doing a bit of hands on work (I need a bit of practice though!). 
)
It’s happening, and it’s happening really soon! I can’t help wondering where the Summer has gone, but the bonus to it nearly being the middle of August is that Greenbelt is coming up. Talking about the logistics and who’s doing what is starting to bring it home that it’s really in 2 weeks!! Yay!!
In other news, our net connection is still very dodgy to say the least. It seems to lose connection and then reconnect at will, with randomly varying time lags inbetween these events. I think I’d better finish this post quickly before it cuts off again. Mr Moog is (for the third time in as many weeks) on the phone waiting in a queue to speak to someone at our ISP. Hopefully this time they’ll be more helpful than the last two times…
Ok, so I am not as back online as I thought I was. I have 283 unread e-mails in my inbox, Gah! (I am managing to keep on top of new ones but not caught up with older ones yet). Got home yesterday to find that the connection wasn’t working again – looks as though our router may be on the way out (although it’s not really clear whether that’s the cause, by a process of elimination over the past few weeks that’s the next thing in line to be replaced. If that doesn’t work, then I don’t know what we’ll try next…). So I am updating from work.
The new job seems to be working out ok. I have been here now for a bit over 3 weeks. Things are a lot more laid back than previous jobs. I am still on a temporary computer at a temporary desk, but have what I need to get on with things in the mean time. My colleagues are nice and generally friendly and helpful. They are all on holiday this week though, so it’s nice and quiet for me to do some reading/learning. I can’t really claim to have enough background yet to really be doing any actual Research. But it’s not as scary as I thought it was going to be, so far things make sense! Hopefully in a few weeks I will have a computer which is actually allocated as mine, on my own desk in a shared office with another Researcher. I am looking forward to that and especially go having lab space (labs are currently in the process of re-locating) to be able to get my hands dirty and start doing some real experiments and playing with circuits. Not something I have done since my graduate training days.. How exciting!
Hooray!!! Finally our internet connection appears to be working again. What a relief!
Now to wade through the 272 e-mail in my inbox that I need to deal with (that’s the ones I have whittled it down to after spam, and quick reply ones). argh!