I haven’t bothered blogging about football recently because it’s depressing. United are currently in a rut and, if I’m honest, I can’t see things getting any better. 😥

Fergie and Queiroz have lost the plot. Why they persist in playing the likes of John O’Shea and Darren Fletcher at all is completely beyond me. They are clearly not good enough for United and never will be. On current form Paul Scholes is also not worth a shirt yet he seems to be guaranteed a place for the whole 90 minutes, regardless of his performances. 👿

Having spent over £200 million in the last five years, why do we still have one of the worst midfields in the league? It’s time for a serious clear out, starting at the top. 😕

Congratulations to Chelsea for winning the Premiership by the end of October, I’m sure they’ll dominate the English game for the next decade. I predict a difficult few years for United. All I ask is that we go back to playing entertaining, attacking football. 🙄

It’s half term at work this week, nice and quiet. Everything is ticking over nicely so I’ve booked a few days off:

• Today I have finally finished sanding and re-varnishing the downstairs window frames and front door. I’ve also undercoated and glossed the window sills and the back drainpipe. There won’t be many more nice days this year so I had to take advantage of the weather and try to do everything today. I’m absolutely knackered now. I’m now going to treat myself to a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine. 🙂
• Tomorrow lunchtime I’m meeting Dunk in Manchester for a few beers. Apparently we’re going to explore the “Northern Quarter” this time, so I haven’t a clue what’s in store. Looking forward to it though, shame Paul and Adrian couldn’t make it. 🙄
• On Saturday evening we’re off to the Clayton Green in Oldham to meet up with a bunch of other people who are in the process of moving to Australia. With a bit of luck we’ll find someone who might want to share a container when shipping over their furniture and stuff. If it’s crap we’ll probably just find somewhere that’s showing the United game. 😐
• Sunday shall be a day of rest. I have no plans except a Full English breakfast and watching several episodes of “24” on DVD. We didn’t watch this when it was on telly, but we’ve watched the first two series over the past couple of weeks. Very good it is too. 😎
• On Monday we’ll be going to the funeral of Sara’s auntie Mary who sadly died last week.

Yesterday was Jon’s last day so we all went out for a few drinks in Oldham. We started with lunch in the Budda Bar and didn’t move from there until they turned the music up so loud that we couldn’t talk. I can’t remember where we went after that but I know we ended up in the Litten Tree eventually.

Feeling a bit worse for wear after drinking for about seven or eight hours, we grabbed a takeaway kebab and jumped in a taxi – one of those with the annoying Driva-Gard cages which makes you feel like a criminal – and headed home at about 11pm, just as Oldham was “livening up”.

I’ve got a bad head this morning but I reckon my San Miguel hangover is nothing compared to NickB’s: he managed mejitos, a whole bottle of white wine and several apple martinis before we left Budda’s. 😯

Not much to report this week. 🙁

Sara and I finally made a start on varnishing the windows but have been hampered by the lousy weather, only managing to do the downstairs at the back. Hopefully we’ll get another dry day soon to finish off the downstairs, then I’ll see about borrowing a ladder and getting the upstairs done. 🙄

No news on the migration front. Our agent, George, advised that applications lodged two months before ours are now starting to be processed so hopefully we’ll hear something soon. We thought we’d request our Police Clearance Checks now, rather than waiting until we’re asked for them, so we filled in our Subject Access Request forms and took them to Barn Street police station on Monday. Hopefully there’ll be no surprises when the results come back! 😯

Work has been quite interesting. I started to dabble with VBA code to analyse incoming e-mails, log them on our Helpdesk system automatically and send an appropriate response back to the user. This meant learning about Outlook events and a bit of SQL to hook into the Helpdesk database. It’s been a while since I’ve done any real programming, so I’ve quite enjoyed this week. 😀

Nothing much planned for this weekend, I suppose we might go and watch the England vs Austria game on the big screen at the Bull’s Head this afternoon. 😐

This week at work:

• One of the I.T. Support Team handed in his notice to take up position at the University Centre Oldham. Can’t really blame him, it’s a similar job – in fact, it’s much easier – but pays up to £6K more than we can offer. It’s a real shame to lose Jon, he’ll be difficult to replace. 🙁
• We finally got Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) running. After a bit more testing this will replace our current SUS server and will automatically deploy security updates, hotfixes and software patches to our 1400 networked PCs. 🙂
• I finished off a Software Metering system which monitors how many licences of each application are being are being used. It has already shown that we need to buy a handful of Photoshop licences. 😐
• The wireless bridge which services our construction centre on Manchester Road failed. Upon inspection – which could only be carried out once students had erected scaffolding for us – we found that the waterproof box was leaking and the power supply had died. Although a replacement was found and everything is working again, I need to investigate alternative equipment because the 11Mbps is far too slow for full network access. 😕
• We looked at a few commercial Helpdesk products to replace the one we are using at the moment. I can’t believe some of the rubbish on the market or the prices that they try to charge. One company wanted £3000 plus £400 per technician – nearly £10K for us – for something I could throw together myself in a couple of weeks. Hmm, could be a business opportunity here. 😯
• We had a meeting with the supplier of our Virtual Learning Environment to express our dissatisfaction at their efforts to fix numerous problems that have surfaced since they upgraded the system in July. They went away with a long list of things they need to sort out but I don’t have much confidence that things will improve. 👿