Electrical issues weekend

This last weekend was problems in regards to electricity and electrical devices:

On Saturday night when I returned from a friend's place, the electricity was off. I suspected that the pre-paid electricity has not been paid and went to bed.
On Sunday, when I got up sometimes between 10AM and 11AM, I heard there was somebody in the yard who did some electrical work, so I knew it wasn't the lack of pre-paid electricity, but it could have been the geyser going faulty again.

When I checked how many pre-paid units there were, I discovered a new pre-paid meter in place of the usual one. That explained some electrical problems from the past.

In the afternoon, I got networking issues. In the evening, my Switch (Switching Hub) seems to have died. Today I am testing it at work to see if it is faulty, or if it is a faulty network card or cable.

Guild Wars: Travelling and mapping

Last night, I was planning on mapping some areas in Tyria with a Factions character. As I started, there was a necromancer who was looking for other travellers to come along. We actually started in Wilds and around midnight went all the way through to Sanctum Cay and on to the Oasis.

There were some other people that occasionally came along and some fading on us because they wanted to just run through and kill themselves. Doing all of that work to map was lots of fun, and I collected 4K gold which means four more primary skills at 1K gold each.

The end result of the story wa having lots of fun, meeting new people doing missions together, mapping (to get that 60% title) and earning rewards from the effort. The cheapskates don't get that.

Huge traffic jam in Cape Town due to fire

Early on Monday, 2 October 2006 there was a nasty fire underneath the N7 bridge next to the railway line in an informal settlement due to some gas tank causing tremendous heat. As a result, the N7 was blocked off due to the danger of the bridge collapsing. Traffic was rerouted through various roads and there was and still is a daily huge traffic jam all around the area during peak hours. The railway line seems very much unaffected by this.

All kinds of things

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy.

Recently, I got an ADSL connection finally. As long as I mostly use it for internet and keep an eye on the traffic, my monthly phone bill should settle down a bit, since it is based on usage and not time. As a result, I could now meet with several people while playing Guild Wars.

This evening is the farewell party of a colleague.

The birthdays of my father and sister are coming up soon. The week after that is the birthday of another friend of mine.

On the 21st October 2006, I will be in my Spider-man suit at a charity event for roughly half an hour. Hopefully the temperature won't be too hot.

Due to some training excercise on Monday with weights at the gym, my arm and shoulder muscles are sore and partially numb. Yesterday was quite bad in regards to the pain.

New costume booking system gone live

After going live with my newly developed costume booking system, I ran into some glitches which needed fixing. The live server was a bit different than my local server. Somebody already used the booking form for a costume and booked one costume for an entire month. Last night, I did an update to enable the end date on the booking form and the displaying of the bookings now includes the end date. There are still other issues that need to be fixed, but as it is now, the system is running and in use.

The booking system is the biggest headache, since time needs to be calculated for at least three days per costume, and overlapping dates would cause a problem. The minimum three days comes from a costume being picked up one day, then being used the next day, and usually brought back the day after that. Some people cannot return costumes on Sunday, so they come on Monday, which makes that four days. Once a costume has been returned, it needs to be washed which can be up to two days, or if there is a long washing machine waiting queue, it might take a few days longer to be ready.

Repairs are of course an annoyance, expense and time delay. There is usually no fixed time how long that could take.