Lockdown Diary - Friday 29th January 2021

Up a bit earlier so I'm showered before the first carer call, which is always bang on 7 a.m. on a Friday, after that the day will follow its usual predictable course.

Work is the theme again today, with some variation.

At around 10:30 I start on a marathon three hour session installing software on my client virtual machine, under the direction of a couple of guys in India.  Too much screen time, so I try and break it up by getting up and wandering about whilst the VM takes for ever to install various bits of software that I require.

When the carers arrive we take a break from the call and leave the installs running.  

On returning it's back for more until 1:45 pm, when we agree to take a break, which I use for a call with a mate I've not spoken to for several months. It's good to catch up and swap notes on life, music and films, not to mention work - he's also in IT, so we have work in common (many years ago he worked for me as a trainee mainframe database administrator, and I was his mentor!)  He has a another work call and I must return to my Teams call with India to install the software: we've hit a glitch and though the application is installed, it won't work. We try to uninstall and re-install but it's now playing silly sods, saying a jar file is locked, which it shouldn't be. All sorts of fun and games culminating in me being a twat and shutting down the VM rather than restarting it. Exit stage left one VM.  After raising an IT request to have my VM restarted (I don't have the power to do it myself) I decide it's time to call it a day on the software front - it must be 8:30 / 9 p.m for the guys in India  - so after thanking them profusely, I return to the final course in my anti-corruption and anti-bribery training. That'll be exciting.  

One of the IT guys is clearly still working as they contact me to say they've restarted my VM and ask if I'll check it, which I do.  This gives me the chance to do one final thing, delete the library that's blocking the re-install, and then log it off until Tuesday.

This evening I'll be having a Zoom call with friends across the globe, well some in France and some in the UK, but sounds more exciting.  Just before the call I get a WhatsApp message from a friend I've not spoken to in a while.  We chat for a bit on and off throughout the evening, which is fun, and she tells me she enjoyed my recent letter. 

After some technical shenanigans we have a video call with friends from school. It's good to catch up, chat, have a laugh and talk, inevitably, about Covid around the world.  

Dinner tonight is a pork stir fry and, when we finish chatting, I still have time left to help assist with the dinner before the inevitable episode of 'Mr. Robot'.  The episode further clarifies the past and progresses one of the story lines, whilst not touching at all upon last week's jaw-dropping revelation.

Soon it will be time to sleep after doing a bit of tidying in the kitchen.

Revisiting last year's album from Drab City, 'Good Songs for Bad People', with 'Devil Doll' 


[[~]]

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