I got back from France last night, back to work today – only to find despite taking three weeks to sort out my contract renewal, my agency has managed to hire a new guy to replace the guy who quit, in a matter of days.

I’m off to Docklands to replace this server either this or next weekend, so gotta take a new database backup – the static content hasn’t changed since I cloned the server, so it shouldn’t take too long to get going, although I’ve left all my IEC cables in France, so can’t even power up the replacement server at the moment!

Due to being mucked around by my agency (they just announced its going to be 5 more working days, not mid-week as previously hinted at) I’m flying back to France tomorrow morning for another week, whilst I await a new contract. I’ve only been on holiday for a day and am already out of things to do in Ipswich!

I’ve cancelled my service and MOT as neither is really due for another three weeks. Dad was super-efficient and put my tax disk in the post, so that will go to the office whilst I’m in France!

I’m back from my trip to France – which got extended by a couple of days due to erm, snow. It was nice and relaxing, caught up with family and had some good food and drink. I took most of my stuff back with me, so I didn’t feel like I was living out of a suitcase whilst there, I was more settled.

I’m wishing I hadn’t bothered coming back now though, due to having to deal with agency and contract crap. It looks like I’m going to be sitting in Ipswich for a week unpaid whilst my contract is being haggled over. We’re losing at least one member of the team next week and the boss isn’t even in the office!

Only 3 days left until I go to France on Friday! I’m mostly packed, gonna do a late Tesco shop for supplies tomorrow and then put everything in the car.

I should be getting a replacement Mac Mini tomorrow, then another courier is going to pick up the broken one (turns out its a dodgey RAM chip) hopefully before Friday, then we’ll see what free gift I get as compensation – I’m after a keyboard, but will probably end up with an Apple T-Shirt or something rubbish.

I got my new Mac Mini today, all very nicely packaged and designed, not too keen on all teh GUI’s for doing anything. Anyway I’ve already managed to brick it by installing the recommended 10.5.2 update, hopefully I can fix it tomorrow at work with a USB keyboard, or I’ve got to reinstall from the DVD’s….. NOT impressed.

I got XBMC working on it, as well as a few other apps like VideoLAN, MPlayer etc. Also enabled X11 forwarding over SSH, and the VNC server.