Two weeks ago I felt I was making good progress on updating the two interpreters that are at the core of my PhD, but I’ve not made much progress since. First I was away for a week, visiting Sarah’s family in Cornwall. That was a really nice week, but progress was slow as I was doing other things most of the time, including a bit of bird watching. (Three birds I’ve never seen before, a green woodpecker and a firecrest in Sarah’s sister’s garden, and three choughs, including the one pictured at the top of this post, near land’s end.)
The journey in both directions went well, with no major delays, but driving over 500 miles in each direction was quite tiring. Our new car’s adaptive cruise control and lane assist did make the journey a lot more relaxing than previous trips to the south, however the car did also indirectly lead to more disruption on our return. It’s a plug in hybrid, so we got a charging point fitted when we got it. That led to the SSEB wanting to upgrade our electricity supply, and when we got home we found a trench up the middle of our driveway. The electricians came and did the supply upgrade on Monday – a challenging job – electric lighting was a new innovation when our house was built, so there’s not a lot of space for the requirements of a modern supply. But, it’s all done now – a three phase cable that looks large enough to supply a small town, all ready for a 56kW charging point which I can’t imagine we’ll ever need.
Tuesday’s disruption related to a different energy supply – noises from behind our gas fire indicated that a bird had fallen down the chimney. We’ve been wanting to replace the hideous old gas fire with a nice looking coal effect one for ages, so we got a gas ‘engineer’ out to remove the old fire – the trapped magpie flew out the window, but there was also six inches of soot, and the skeleton’s of a couple more birds for me to clear away from the chimney before the gas fitter was able to properly cap the supply.
While we were away, issues with the new server hosting our blogs kept getting worse – a cacheing plug-in made delivering blog posts OK, but the admin interface was almost unusable. Even with the PHP time-out increased to 90 seconds, it frequently failed to load. In between dealing with gas and electricity issues, I spent a lot of time trying to work out what the problem is. As far as I can see it is a disk issue – connection times are slow, and data transfer glacial. This is outside my control, and so I’ve passed it over to the hosting service. For now our blogs and my other sites are back on the old end of life Windows 2012 VPS, which fortunately I’d forgotten to cancel..
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to get back to PhD related development and reading…