Birthday

Birthday on the 8th, we went paddling in North Wales (Llangohlen and the Treweryn) that weekend with the club. Stayed at a nice pub called The Goat  where the kids had a good time. Poor Pete had a bit of an epic on the Trewy, but enjoyed it up until then. I drove us home in his Saab, which was a lovely drive. Piccies to follow if I can get hold of them.

Really fed up with being broke and also the work thing. Just not that interested, but keeping a professional attitude.

Birthday Meal

Excellent meal in Valpariso in Liverpool. Food cooked by a chef rather than assembled by a catering college graduate (no disrespect but you see what I mean?). Have the sea bass, or the rabbit, and the strawberry flambe!

Bristol

Odd place. Originally designed for pedestrians I think, cars just don’t work there. Went there for a couple of days’ meetings with customers. Really interesting how everyone’s needs were slightly different and we need to support them.

We went for a drink in the Coronation Tap (a dive, to be honest – didn’t like it a whole lot) and then on to an Indian restraunt called the Bombay Spice, food good but popadums were soft. Corrie Tap served stuff in plastic half pint glasses becuase apparently you can lose the ability to hold a pint if you drink too much of what the guys were drinking (Exhibition? something like that). I was drinking soft drinks and had a glass of wine with the meal. Don’t give a toss about this macho stuff, would rather not be ill.

Business

Still plugging away, making progress. This is not the forum to discuss it though.

Rownum in XSL

This is a special function in Oracle that allows you to get the number of the row you have retrieved, it can be used to manufacture a key or to restrict the number of rows you get in a query. XSL also has a rownum operator that tried to work because we had a string in a stylesheet that had the < character followed by rownum. Had to escape it and it startred working. Took several hours of head scratching to get to the bottom of it.

Portal

Doing some work with Portal 9.0.4. Yawn. Same as old portal but needs an enormous web server to get it going now. Not sure if this counts as progress.