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Yes, as you may have guessed, coherence not entirely a strong point right now. Readers of the LJ will already now that last night I crossed through the 50,000 word barrier and became a NaNoWriMo winner. I was in part intending to continue today to get my November word count as high as possible, but it wasn't until this morning that I realise how much it had taken out of me.

It was immense fun, from an overall point of view. I think I liked the story idea better this year. Nothing against my previous effort, but I found writing in a contemporary setting more enjoyable. The style was different too, much closer to the style I developed writing all my Buffy Fanfic.

At the moment I don't know if I want to do it next year. Last year I did it because I had something to prove. I'm not entirely sure why I did it this year, perhaps to prove that last year wasn't just a one-off. This year it was like I had more to lose, or something. I don't know if Anne feels the same way about her participation but this year I put more pressure on myself to succeed simply because failing at something that you've succeeded at before is like double the failure. Or something. I'm usually not nearly so success-oriented.

Now, since I didn't write an update last weekend, I just have to say...

Australia 17 - England 20

England aren't in the habit of winning anything, ever, so it really is cause to get excited. Last Saturday morning Anne and Jess were over - well, they were over Friday night, to be precise, more on that later - and Anne and I got a little caught up in it. For so much of the latter part of the game it looked like England were going to do their usual thing and give it away at the last minute, but that didn't happen. And we proved we can score tries - would've got two if that guy hadn't had an attack of the butterfingers, I wonder how many people within a mile of our house heard me shout 'You fucking twat!' at that point...

So yes, Anne and Jess came over Friday night. It was Jess' birthday the previous weekend, and this was to be a belated meet-up-and-say-happy-birthday type thing. Food at Frankie and Benny's, followed by a trip to Leamington's one and only cinema to see Love Actually, which brings us to an impromptu film review...

Love Actually is a delightfully trashy schmaltzy feel-good romantic comedy. It lays it on thick in places but never actually seems to go too far. One thing I would warn people of in advance is how Christmassy it is. If you're not getting into the Seasonal Spirit just yet, then hold off seeing it until you are, or until you're ready to be forcibly jollied into it. Back to the film itself... there are so many different kinds of love covered in it. Of all the stories the film tells, the Sam (the kid)'s is possible both the most endearing and the most enjoyable. Liam Neeson's was I think my favourite character of the film, possibly because it was more of a low-key supporting role rather than one of the many lead roles. One finally plus point about the film was that not all of the best lines were in the trailer. Some were, but not all. Oh, and the American President's visit storyline was exceptionally well timed and well judged. </filmreview>

The four of us stayed up chatting after we got back, obviously, partly deconstructing the film and partly just throwing around the usual abuse, gossip and bitchiness.

The next morning was a relatively early start, as Alison's Dad was coming down to help us lay our Sun Circle patio. I put the rugby on, as you will have guessed from earlier. When Alison's Dad arrived he and Alison went straight out and got on with it, but I was far too caught up in the game to not see it through to the end. Once it was over I convinced Anne and Jess that we were quite happy with them hanging around while we got down to work, and left them watching Ice Age and went outside and joined in the hard work.

I was only out there for an hour or so in the morning. I had blood sugar issues that meant I ended up having to run inside and eat various foodstuffs and wait for them to get into my system before exerting myself further. This meant I ended up watching the last half hour or so of Ice Age with Anne and Jess and saw Anne reduced to a blubbering mess by the cave paintings bit. This left me apologising a lot and Anne accusing me of psychological abuse.

After lunch Anne and Jess left, and I went back to work outside. Alison went off to collect her Mum from work, and Alison's Dad and I starting laying the actual paving stones. We got five done with the first batch of cement and then called it a day.

With both of Alison's parents in tow we headed to Ask in Warwick for dinner, eating out for the second night in a row (incredibly fucking extravagant, that's us!).

There isn't that much to say about Sunday. Alison took her mum shopping, and her Dad and I spent the day in the garden doing the rest of the paving stones, with for the most part him mixing cement as I laid the stones. We finished at around 3pm, with still an hour or so of light to go. This is what it looked like:

Afterwards we watched The Matrix: Reloaded, as her Dad hadn't yet seen it. It was interesting for me seeing it, now that I knew how it all ended.

That was then more or less it for the weekend.

The week at work was one of the most enjoyable I've had in months, for I was doing something I'd been trying to get the client to let me do for around 3 years.

4 years ago, I built a web-based reporting system. It wasn't particularly clever, but it worked. And the users loved it. The architecture was thus:

• A Windows 95 box had Apache on it as a Web Server.
• An Access Database also resided on the server.
• Once a week an event scheduler launched a batch file to run an Access macro to import and pre-process the data
• With the exception of a few high-level reports, all reports were produced in a run-on-demand fashion. Technical Architects may not wish to read further.
• A request for a report fired off a perl script which ran a dos batch file then started a timer.
• The dos batch file then launched Access, passing it the requested parameters to produce the desired report. Access ran the necessary query and exported it as html.
• After 60 seconds the timer expired and forwarded the browser to the hopefully now generated html page containing the report.

The fact that in some distant room in the US a division of the client not connected to our users decided that all servers on the client's intranet must be Win2K or higher finally brought the matter to a head. Basically come year end if the Win95 box was still on the network it would be told to clear its desk and then be forcibly removed from the building.

Nevertheless, the users still hesitated over funding doing something about it. They tried to insist that we just port the existing architecture onto Win2K. I told them it wouldn't work. They still insisted that was all they could afford right now, and that was all they could do. I told them it wouldn't work again and reiterated that the old box would have to be turned off. They went away to think about it.

Later on it was commented that I had been undiplomatic by saying it would be switched off. Never mind that it was someone on their side of the fence that had dictated this.

So, anyway, eventually they agreed, and myself and another bloke have spent the past week building an ASP front-end on top of a SQL Server back-end that is, to put it mildly, the dog's bollocks.

Whether it will actually make it into production, since we should apparently be using Oracle instead of SQL Server, is another matter. We've pointed out that Oracle is ridiculously heavy duty for this kind of task and volume of data, and that we'd end up doubling the cost by the time they'd bought a new server and we'd configured it. Still, they want to use a sledgehammer to knock in a nail because their policy (which is probably motivated by the sort of corporate politics that reside at the root of all instances of corporate fuckwittage) says that a sledgehammer has to be used because other types of hammer have not been approved.

Anyway, that has been the week at work. Fun for everyone. Ish.

Then, this weekend.

I'd really been flagging with NaNo all week - although I was staying ahead of schedule I'd mostly only been doing my bare minimum each day. With 2K6 left to go on Saturday morning I knew it was possible to finish in a day but that it would probably be hard work. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it anyway.

There was a completely fruitless Christmas shopping trip to Coventry in the middle of the day but other than that I pretty much spent the whole day writing, and it turned out to be easy going. Then when I did pass the finish line I had the first early night all month.

Today I have been rather tired. This is probably not surprising. I went to Leamington and had a much more productive Christmas shopping trip which included a lucky blag on my part. I'm pretty sure that Brute Force for the XBox was not supposed to be in the "2 for �30" offer, but there was a copy labelled as such. So, with some Christmas shopping as the other half of the 2, I got Brute Force as a pat on the back for myself for completing NaNo. For just 15 quid. Heh.

The only other things of note I have done today are brushing the patio down with kiln-dried sand to fill in all the cracks, and writing this mammoth of an entry which could well have a higher word count than yesterday's efforts.

But heh. I did it. *BIG FUCKING GRIN*