Have you missed me?

Crikey. Missing a day means I have to (remember) cram in TWO days worth of exciting antics into one bumper blog.

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Tuesday

Bike ride. Cold but not wet. Hands ok in my warm "lobster" gloves, but feet like blocks of ice when I got back. However, I was able to slip into a lovely warm bath with my muscle relaxing crystals that I got as a lovely Xmas present.

For those of you anal enough to check out my times on FB you'll see a distinct improvement recently. That, unfortunately, is due to the fact that I'm using a new App - Strava - which has autopause enabled so it stops recording when I have my drink stops, rather than me actually improving.

In 1981 I joined TSB England and Wales Computer Services as a trainee operator. Two years later I moved into TSB Group Computer Services to work with Mike B who saw the promise in me, and helped appoint me as a Junior Programmer. I was actually employed to do technical support on the PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E and the VAX 11/780 systems running VMS with a bit of programming. I was utterly pants at programming, and slightly less pants at support, so quickly stuck to support full time.

PDP 11/70: This isn't the actual one, but looks pretty much like it.

Mike and I did almost everything on the systems and it was great fun. By doing everything you learnt an awful lot about how computers worked (switch them off and on again, basically).

The PDP was already a bit on the old side when I started supporting it, but if I remember correctly it ran our entire mortgage ledger, some product called Maxiyields (needed £10k+ to invest so there weren't many of them), and some accounting products (which we called Nominal Ledger and Purchase Ledger), all with less than 1Mb of memory, and two 30Mb disks. Try telling that to the kids of today....

Why am I telling you this? Well on Tuesday afternoon I caught up with Mike and spent a good hour or so drinking coffee and catching up. For a city fan, he isn't that bad.  :0)

In the evening I met up with two mates for a curry at the Great Khatmandhu, where I had a feast of paneer with Jeff and Matt.

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Wednesday was taken up with a trip down to Coventry to see Bridie (my mother-in-law) who was 90 last month and was in great form. We sat with her and her buddies in one of the lounges listening to a CD of 1940's songs - "Roll Out The Barrel", "White Cliffs of Dover", "Painting the Clouds with Sunshine", "Sing as You Go", "Der Fuhrer's Face" all of which were greeted with glee and variously sung or whistled along to. It was a nice happy place.

Just before we left, all those who wanted were then taken down to the "other" lounge where a priest conducted an Ash Wednesday service for the residents and staff.

On the way home, Gel and I did the crossword and got a little stuck on "Cain and Abel's father", which we really should have known. When we filled in the other answers we had A_A_ which Gel rightly identified as ADAM, but only after I confidently said AHAB and then (less seriously) ALAN. Not sure how many Alans there are in the bible. Not many I'd guess.

We had Shrove Wednesday pancakes when we got back, and then I went off to Camera Club for our competition night. I had an image held back, but not placed, in the general colour section, and then had another placed 3rd in the "Body Parts" theme comp.

And so to bed.