We had an eclipse today

This is the image I captured of today's partial solar eclipse. I took the picture with no specialized equipment using only a 3x optical zoom, which is why it's of such poor quality.

All I can say is thank goodness for the hazy clouds that moved across the sky; otherwise I'd have never gotten the shot since the light from the sun would have been so intense that you couldn't have seen the moon moving across it.

And I did look at it. Briefly. To set up the shot. In case you're having trouble making it out, the sun is the circle in the middle of the picture, with the moon just taking a bite out of it on the lower left hand side.

Leccy's back on

From Friday evening, we were having serious electrical problems in our house. Our house has five main circuits, with all but two sockets upstairs and the sockets in the main downstairs area of our house on a single circuit, with the two remaining upstairs sockets on another, the kitchen and dining room on another one, the extension on another circuit, and the downstairs electric shower on the fifth circuit.

Whew, that was boring wasn't it? Anyway, the main circuit to the house kept tripping with a loud pop from Friday night onwards. Whenever it tripped, we'd go to the fuse box and flip it and try to find the source of the problem. We found a space heater that reeked of ozone, so we threw it away assuming that it was the source of the problem. It wasn't. We replaced two sockets in the area of the living room where the pops from the circuit tripping were the loudest, assuming that would solve the problem. It didn't. Time to call in an electrician.

I nearly shit myself when I found out what the problem was this morning. We have been having heavy rains here for a few weeks; the Foss broke its banks last week and hasn't receded yet, and the Ouse broke its banks last night. The village where we live has a high water table anyway so drainage has always been an issue, and our patio has flooded three times in the last two weeks. We didn't think anything of it since it does that all the time, it never bridges the damp course, and it always recedes on its own relatively quickly.

Anyway, the electrician came this morning and quickly determined that the two suspect sockets were wired incorrectly to begin with; we suspect that the previous owner of this house did it, since the neighbor says that he was a DIY enthusiast. We didn't install or wire them; we merely replaced the sockets, which weren't faulty to begin with. The wiring in the wall and floor was the problem. The electrician said it was a complete bodge job and we could have burned our house down. The recent rains meant that when the electrician peeled up a floorboard, there were two inches of standing water underneath the floor. This is common in this part of town and is not a problem; everyone in this estate has had that problem at one time or another and it always goes away on its own without flooding the houses or causing damp problems.

In our case, however, we had live wires sitting in water because of the poor wiring job. The wires kept shorting, tripping the circuit and scorching the joists underneath the floor. Any one of the times that the circuit tripped, we could have burned our house down. Very scary shit. Anyway, it's all fixed now. I'm dreading the bill.

I'm finally learning C++

Well, I'm finally doing it; I'm finally learning C++. I figured it was about damned time, and Transact-SQL simply isn't a challenge anymore. I wrote 20,000 lines of scripting code last week and I'm not even impressed with myself for doing it, probably because I used templates and it feels like cheating even though I wrote the templates. They're rather ingenious if I do say so myself; other people want to use them. They say they're 'real timesavers.' I'm preening here.

So, we're looking at a screen shot of Borland C++ Builder X, which I got free with my C++ book. I'm no longer new to programming, but I got a n00b C++ book anyway because Transact-SQL isn't object-oriented and VBA is basically a toy; I figured starting from scratch wouldn't be such a bad idea. If this were a few years ago, I'd already have thrown the book against the wall several times in frustration because they never explain exactly what every single little word is for. I no longer care; I just take it as a given until it is demonstrated otherwise. Real C++ programmers will look at what I've written and guffaw, and I probably would too if I kicked as much ass at C++ as I do at T-SQL; but hey, we've all got to start somewhere. At least I didn't take a screenshot of the 'Hello World' program.

I suppose the real issue is why I'm bothering with C++ if I'm an 8-year veteran of QA wanting to become a DBA. Well...the QA market in the US is different from that in the UK, where you are essentially never required to learn a programming language. In the US, they pretty much expect people at my level to know C, C++, or Java. I probably won't be able to get DBA gigs straight off the bat since I'm still studying for my OCA (first level of Oracle certification), so I need to beef up my QA resume since I may be stuck doing it for another year or two or three. Plus, it's a good skill to have on the resume, and you never know; I may enjoy it so much that I decide to become a programmer instead. Stranger things have certainly happened.

The state of UK politics

Y'all should know something. Tony Blair is not popular around here. That sign...it's not a typo. Private Eye is just full of ads for "Bliar" t-shirts with the Labour Party rose logo. The signs pop up like mushrooms at every protest, and believe me there are plenty of those. People here just don't like Tony Blair and most of them seem to want him to go.

"But but..." you sputter. "There was just an election there last year, right? You guys re-elected him, didn't you?" Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am not part of "you guys." I'm not British and I can't vote in this country. I became eligible to apply for citizenship in June 2004, but have refused to do so because I would be required to pledge loyalty to the Queen, and I won't do that on general principle. My husband, on the other hand, CAN vote in UK elections. He voted Labour in May 2005. There are many reasons why he voted Labour, and none of them involve liking Tony Blair. He doesn't like Tony Blair. Not one bit.

In May 2005, the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrat Party were led by Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, respectively. Michael Howard, at the time the third Tory leader since 2001, led his party to its third consecutive general election defeat. (The others were in 1997 and 2001.) He pledged to resign afterwards, after the party elected a new leader...which they finally did a couple of months ago. Charles Kennedy had led the Liberal Democrats for a long time, but was falling apart spectacularly in public. Rumors of his alcoholism had been rife for years, but we had not had any public confirmation. Still, everyone knew he was an alcoholic. We just didn't know, if you see what I mean. So...faced with the Transylvanian Michael Howard or the ruddy Charles Kennedy, the British did the sensible thing and stuck with what they knew: Tony Blair.

The British political system is in the midst of some fairly interesting shifts. Since Tony Blair took control of the Labour Party it has shifted sharply to the right, with a deep divide between socialist, pro-union 'Old Labour' and the Blairite, capitalist 'New Labour.' The Tories have been in meltdown since the early 1990s and are now moving to the left after a sharp swing hard to the right didn't win them any elections. We would normally call this 'flailing about.' The Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy swerved hard to the left, with Kennedy promoting such ideas as an income-based council tax (which would have raised our taxes considerably), heavy taxes for high earners, and scores of socialist programs designed to take back control of public services which were privatized under the Tories and whose privatization continued under Blair.

Now everything has changed. The Tories elected David Cameron as their new leader a couple of months ago and on the back of that, the Tories have seen gains in their polling numbers while Labour has seen sharp falls. Almost immediately after David Cameron took the helm for the Tories, the Liberal Democrats fell apart as only they could have. Charles Kennedy finally confessed to the nation what we already knew: he had a drinking problem and his drinking problem was negatively affecting his ability to lead his party. The Lib Dems had been in near-full revolt for weeks prior to that, and Kennedy had no choice but to step aside when he lost the support of his parliamentary party. Last week, the Lib Dems announced the election of Sir Menzies (pron. 'Ming-us') Campbell, a 64 year-old moderate and former Olympian. During the Lib Dem leadership campaign, not one but two prominent Lib Dems were involved in very public homosexual sex scandals. The Lib Dems really have their work cut out for them.

In the days and weeks since the new leaders were elected, we've seen a shift to the left for the Tories and a shift to the right for the Lib Dems. The political spectrum used to read, from right to left, Labour --> Liberal Democrat --> Conservative. It now reads Liberal Democrat --> Labour --> Conservative. Will Cameron push the Tories to the left of New Labour? Will Menzies be able to inspire the British public with his tepid promises of centrism that doomed the party to permanent minority status?

With choices like these, is there any wonder that the British public chose to put Labour in charge for a third Government? I didn't think so. Just don't assume that it means that Blair is popular here. He isn't.

It snowed

All the old-timers kept saying it was going to be the harshest winter in years. They were saying this all summer and all fall. It didn't happen. We got some snow right after Christmas and some pretty cold freezing fog, but nothing really huge. I've seen worse since I've been here. We got a nice little surprise the other day, though; the day started off dry and fine...very sunny...then about 3pm it started to snow and dumped it down for 2 straight hours before tapering off and finally dying away around 6pm. I'd say we got a good inch and a half to two inches of snow, and it was still there when I woke up this morning. I shot this out the window of the back bedroom of our house. That big flat area in the foreground is the flat roof of the extension of our house.

I enjoyed the snow yesterday; it was still snowing when I left the office to catch my bus yesterday afternoon and some colleagues of mine and I stood at the bus stop trying to catch snowflakes on our tongues. People looked at us as if we were crazy, but who cares? At least the snow on the ground covered up the vomit and used drug needles; where I work turns pretty rough after dark. We have a nice view of a park across the Ouse, and of the York Minster; it was snowing so hard that the Minster was completely obliterated from view. It was gorgeous, though. Just gorgeous. I just wish I had taken my digital camera to work yesterday so I could have captured it, but on BBC Breakfast yesterday they didn't give good odds for us getting any snow. This may be the last snow we see for a very long time.

Worky jobby things

I've been at this contract since late November. It's working out pretty well; this week I programmed an Access VBA application as the front end to a bunch of crap on the SQL Server. I had to reprogram a bunch of Access crosstab queries as stored procedures in SQL Server since SQL doesn't have native support for pivot tables. I had to reprogram a bunch of VBA functions into SQL UDFs which wasn't all that hard; it's just time-consuming to test them all.

The DBAs at the company are so greedy with their resources. No recursive functions. No cursors. No calling basically any system stored procedure. They don't want to see any table scans. Etc. They're so fussy about indexing; I can index these tables to make the app run faster, but then my inserts take forever. They only have to be run once a week and I made them pretty efficient using ISNULL(), but still. We're also not allowed to run any DTS packages, so we have to schedule them and get the mainframe extract files to the correct directory before 9:30 am every Monday morning. If we have a bank holiday, we have to call I.T. and actually raise a call to get the DTS package run manually. They're insane there, but hey; they're paying me, so I don't really care.

I don't know when the contract is going to end; they're going to review it at the end of the month. I've reprogrammed all of their Access DBs to run on SQL with an Access front end so I'm not sure what there is for me to do, but they keep saying they've never had a situation where they had to get rid of an MI person.

The contract started off as maternity cover and the person I'm covering for isn't coming back until the end of May so I should be safe until then. She also doesn't have my skills; all she can do is Excel spreadsheets. I can do those plus everything else they need, so I hope they'll keep me around at least a couple more months before we run off back to the USA. If they don't it's not the end of the world; I've saved plenty in the bank in anticipation of the contract ending early, but I'd rather it didn't. I'm actually enjoying it; I like going to work. I like the people I work with and I'm learning so much; I'm being challenged in ways that QA never challenged me and I'm having fun. I told my boss that. Hopefully it'll mean something. :-)

Visa update

Y'all haven't heard anything because we haven't heard anything. We sent off our 'biographical information' form at the end of October. It's now early March and we should hear from the US Embassy in London basically any second now. I've been getting butterflies every day coming home and checking the post, expecting something from them.

Previously, my husband would have had to arrange for a medical examination prior to his visa interview but the rules changed and they didn't notify us (of course). The deal is that his medical exam comes after his visa interview, which will be anytime between April and when we begin collecting Social Security. His police certificate from the Home Office (demonstrating that he's not a terrorist, felon, communist, or pedophile) hasn't come yet, but those take 40 business days to process, probably because they're using MS SQL Server down in London. (Newtch.)

The IRS is taking too long to update my 2003 return (didn't file a foreign income earned exemption that year because I forgot to) so my parents will be my husband's sponsors. Basically what this means is that if he goes on welfare, they'll get a bill from the government with interest. It's no biggie and they're not really bothered. It'll just be faster to have them do it. Once he gets his visa we'll put the crapshack on the market. If it doesn't sell in four months, we'll just sell it to a broker and take a 20% hit on the value of the whole thing, but even with that kind of hit we should have about $85-$95,000 of profit in cold, hard cash. Buying a house in the UK in the late 1990s-early noughties was an excellent investment. Of course, if someone actually pays asking price we'll be a lot better off. We bought the house for £110,000 in late 2001 and it should sell for between £190,000 and £205,000.

It's only 1000 square feet, but the cost of living here is ridiculous! Of course, since we're moving away that works to our advantage. Eeeeeeeeeee!

Haven't been around in a while

Lots of stuff has happened since I last posted. I can't lie; I've been busy doing absolutely nothing except working, watching TV, reading books, etc. I really should get back to posting regularly!

First off, the University of Texas at Austin won the Rose Bowl...and with it, the BCS Championship...defeating USC in a down-to-the-wire nailbiter. But you already know that.

Vince Young has gone pro, basically screwing UT's offense for the 2006-07 season, but hey...Vince has to do what Vince has to do, and I wish him well. The kid worked hard and has earned a shot at the pros, and if he thinks he's ready, who am I to say he isn't? Bon voyage, Vince, and I hope you don't end up on one of the shittiest teams in the NFL. That honor should be reserved for Heisman winners like Reggie Bush and crybabies like Matt Leinart.

Very little else is going on. I'm still at my latest contract, programming databases and stuff. It's not particularly interesting, but it's challenging and that's enough for me. I'm learning a lot, adding new skills to the arsenal. It's all good. Plus, I get paid; so I'm happy. The move to Texas is still on, and I can't wait. My husband is still somewhat reluctant, but we hope that when he gets there, he'll love it.

Fox News takes sides in war on Christmas

Well, looky what we have here. This is a photograph of Fox's morning broadcast (afternoon for us in the UK) on Christmas Eve. You guys are so BUSTED.

First, a word. You may be wondering why someone in the UK can see Fox News, an American network. Glad you asked. We have a Sky subscription. Sky is a satellite service here in the UK. Cable never really caught on. Sky is kind of like DirectTV in the US. We don't get any American networks other than this one. This is because Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch...the same guy who owns Fox News. We get the channel's national feed instead of a broadcast from a select area, since none of the American advertisers have paid to have their ads distributed in the UK. So, this is what we see when American viewers see commercials:


They show weather for the entire world, including Africa, except for the Indian subcontinent and Canada. I don't know why they eliminated these two areas; you'd have to ask Rupert.

They also play ridiculous elevator muzak or weird porn music during their little "Fox Cast." I don't know what's worse...this or commercials. A few years ago, Fox News didn't show the Fox Cast during the ads; they showed e-mails they got from around the world praising Fox and how 'fair and balanced' it was. This is better, believe me!

All through the month of December, Fox viewers have had to put up with Bill O'Reilly and his ilk blasting 'liberals' for declaring 'war on Christmas.' Bill O'Reilly even went so far as to say that non-Christians are not (really not ALLOWED to be) offended by 'Merry Christmas' but that Christians are offended by 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings.' Then...irony of ironies...Fox goes straight into a station ID that says (guess) 'Happy Holidays.' Watching Fox in the week up to Christmas, I counted several holiday IDs:

• Happy Holidays (most often seen over 1 week)
• Seasons Greetings (rarely seen)
• Happy Chanukah (seen once every other hour)
• Ultra-religious Merry Christmas with Bible-y overtones (seen once every other hour)
• Wordless ID with CGI snowflakes and a red Christmas ornament with the Fox logo on it (rarely seen)

So...Fox News has been propagandizing a fake culture war for weeks, lionizing fundamentalist Christians who insist on cramming their religion down peoples' throats and demonizing anyone who dares to issue a more secular or inclusive greeting such as 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings.' Then they turn around and show those same words on their news broadcasts. There are no American fundamentalist Christians around here, so I can't ask them what they think about this. However, it strikes me as mildly hypocritical, but what else can you expect from a right-wing propaganda machine like Fox News?

I saved the best one for last. On Christmas Eve, they showed Christmas greetings from American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's how they introduced each soldier's video Christmas card: