Seasons Greetings

It's That time of year again,




E ku Odun, E ku iye'dun!
Ekelere m gi maka Keresimesi na ubochi izizi afo ozo!
barka dà Kirsìmatì!
Afishapa!
Nadolig Llawen!
Merry Christmas!

and all that....

I hope you all have a great holiday and a wonderful new year to look forward to.

Self-Censorship

I've completed my rewording and rephrasing exercise.

I would appreciate it if anybody can point out any references that reveal who the client of my project is and anybody that works for them.

I'm offering a reward of a 50p CD-WOW e-voucher for each reference you can find! If you're looking for an email address you can use the one on my profile page.

Does anyone know how you might force google and other search engines to refresh their indexing? At the moment searching for certain names seems to bring up this page rather high in the list when really I don't want it to be there any more

[edit: 29 Dec 2005 15:26 - I'm withdrawing the offer of CD-WOW vouchers. I'm confident that I've got all the references I wanted removed now, oh and also I just used up the last voucher!]

Mighty Blighty

I'm home for Christmas and New Year, and there's hope on the horizon of something in the bank before christmas holidays.

I have just received my score for the Open University T224: Computers and Processors course exam I took in October. 88%
That with my coursework score of 94%.

Both scores need to be over 85% to get a grade 1 or 'A' so I have nothing to complain about. What will be interesting perhaps is the statistics of other students. I think they will send some info with the result letter when it arrives but on the website I can see some statistics and it seems that I am perhaps among the top 7% who achieved 85% or higher in part one of the paper and roughly 30% who achieved 85% or higher in part two of the paper. There's no statistics available for the overall scores so it's hard to see exactly how well everybody did.

I don't know if I've mentioned it on here but I have subscribed to two new courses starting next year. MT262: Putting Computers to Work and M255: Object-Oriented Programming with Java Both are level 2 courses and like the T224 course I completed may count towards my final degree as the OU explains:

"The class of degree is determined by the best grades you achieve in 240 points from those courses above Level 1 listed above. At least 120 of those points must come from courses at Level 3 and will include the grade you achieve in the 30-point project course whether or not it is among your best grades at that level."

All my current level 2 courses are 30 points which means by the end of this year I'll have completed 30 points at level 1 and 90 points at level 2

So other than that news I am currently going through this web log from start to finish, carefully rephrasing certain things. This is because since this blog is far more widely read than I ever thought I am a little worried that I may upset some people that I may candidly write about when I naively thought they would never find out about it. [slaps head "IDIOT!"] I don't want to get involved in a political debate over it so I'm volunteering to clean up this page, also it may be paranoia but I get the feeling that I may have already upset some people. So from now on I will try to keep names of people and organisations out unless I know they won't mind, or if It's important to put it in.

Perhaps it's not as bad as it sounds, I've been thinking that if I make it more anonymous I can put a little bit more of my opinion on display than I would otherwise.

AAAAAAAA+++++++++++

We've had a bit more feedback on the issue of the volume of complaints from customers about their new bills, It does seem that bills have been delivered to people who are not even customers, only potential customers! Whatever the reasoning behind this is we have yet to find out, but to point the finger of blame at us for supplying 'bad data' seems very unreasonable. We would be happy to investigate legitimate complaints of being unable to deliver particular bills or incorrect tariffs but when such complaints would be swamped by literally tens of thousands of bills sent to customers that they don't even have, it will make this very difficult.

I'm glad I bought a PSP and brought it with me, that's occupied quite a bit of my time. Wish someone I knew had one so we could play multi player. Timmi told me he had one offered to him recently for N40,000 or something but he turned it down. I think N40,000 is about £166 these days but since I've been out of the loop for a while I'm not quite sure any more.

Last Night I went to N...'s flat to help her move. She's had to move out of her flat as she's on the top floor and the landlord wants to work on her roof. Luckily there was one vacant flat on the floor below hers and she was around at the right time to secure that. By the time I got there most of the heavy stuff had been moved by the Gate man, Abdulai(sp?) So I tipped him N1000. I was relived because I pulled a muscle in my chest when I was moving my luggage around on my way to Nigeria and it's still occasionaly giving me problems now. All I had to do there was fix up some light shades and wire up her tv, dvd and stereo. The power cut out just after I got it working so I left her to it and went home to find I'd been locked out! Dad was in bed, ready for an early start going up to Abeokuta, and Mike had closed up downstairs thinking I was in bed too. I managed to get dad to open up by phoning him.

Gah, Frustration! 1 week in Lagos

Sorry for not updating sooner,

I haven't really done much over the last week. Apart from the meeting at our clients office on Friday I have been at home working on my design document for phase 2 software that I intend to start writing as soon as I'm paid up to date. The extra time I have to write this document will I hope pay off at the end of the project when I will have to hand over all such documents to the people who will be operating the software afterwards. It also allows me to thoroughly think through and plan my work for the software so that I can complete it as quickly and effectively as possible.

I also had a short meeting with a gent who works for Lagos State governement on Sunday. He is looking for some software to manage documents submitted for planning applications, it sounds very interesting and I would like to give it a look to see if it's something I could do. Hopefully I should find out a bit more about it soon.

There's been a few events in Lagos recently but in particular, very close to my house, litteraly a five minute walk, Soldiers are evicting by force residents of 5 blocks of flats. The BBC has a report about it. Apparently, according to Cool FM this morning, the residents have a court order to stop the eviction but the Soldiers are still continuing to remove everybody.

The flats were sold off in the last year to a property consortium along with another set of blocks of flats on Victoria Island called "1004 Flats". These are also on the eviction list.

I don't think I mentioned before that we no longer have a cook. Dad and Mike have been supplying the food, I think I should probably get my act together and give it ago sometime soon. Joseph the cook was 'let go' recently along with one of the drivers Charles. I wasn't around at the time so I can't comment on the circumstances, all I can say is that they wern't doing their jobs properly.

Lagos Calling

I'm back in Lagos after a 5 month Hiatus.

I'm planning to stay for just a couple of weeks, I'll be trying to secure our data in our offices for the Christmas break and also recover receipts I need for the Tax man in the UK.

I arrived yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day resting. I only got a little sleep on the plane, despite taking some herbal tablets to aid sleep.

There was a man on my flight who was being deported, he was in the middle section of the back row accompanied by several security agents who were there because he refused to go quietly himself. He was making a great deal of noise about being sent to his death, and complaining about his hand cuffs. After take off he was much quieter, so I guess he either realised he couldn't change anyones mind now, or the security agents found a way to keep him quiet. We were gently reassured that despite his screams and shouts he wasn't being harmed in any way.

Eventually after arriving and waiting a long time for my luggage I eventually got outside where Nanayah was there to greet me. Bello, my driver, met me outside the gates to the arrivals area.

At the house I met Dad, who was already up, as by this time it was around 8:30am. I also met the New Parrot called Freddie, due to being captured the day England won the Ashes. All I heard was a tuneful whistling, which made me think Mike was there but it turned out to be Freddie. Apparently he knows various swear words already.

All I did for the rest of the day was take a shower, have a nap and unpack my luggage.

Today I attended a meeting at our clients office in response to the draft Final Report, which was issued just after I left in June. Today was the first chance since then for us to sit down and discuss the report with the client. Various typo's and clarifications were identified and noted so that the final report can be finally published.

We discovered in the meeting that bills have been issued using the data we have handed over and they have recieved a great deal of complaints. This surprised us and we have asked for more details but it seems from our own probing questions that bills have been issued to Everybody whether they are customers or not... Not surprising that there's complaints!

We've got a new internet connection that's a little bit faster than standard dial up, but so far it's been quite unreliable for me, but it has apparently been working better prior to my arrival in Lagos.

I put on the server when I was at the project office, to update the debian sarge installation, and it seems that the hard disk has crashed. I'm a little suspicious that somebody has tampered with it since the keyboard cable was trapped underneath the case, and it would have been free when I last used it. I will investigate that tonight.

I've used the Power Supply tester I bought, on some of the computer power supplies I was suspicious had been damaged in a power surge. The tests seem to show that the power supplies were in good working order shich suggests to me that the problems I am continuing to get with one of the systems here is caused by a motherboard fault.

My mobile phone has been causing me problems, All the buttons seem to be malfunctioning. I suspect it's the humidity but it's the first time I've had a problem like this with any phone. I'm hoping it will recover after a while. In fact the buttons seem to work a bit more reliably now than they did this morning, so I'm quite hopeful everything will be ok.

I'll be trying to get my skype phone working soon. Linux has stopped recognising my USB skype phone, probably because I disabled OSS sound in favour of ALSA and skype doesn't work with ALSA. Skype promise a new version of their software soon that will support it.

I'm eagerly awaiting a new version of Gaim that will support the voice protocol in Google Talk. I'll probably switch to this instead of skype when I can get it.