A slight case of overblogging

So on Sunday night afternoon last week it started to snow quite heavily, and Mike and I went out for a fab walk in the snow - which cunningly lasted just long enough that our roast lamb had 2 minutes left to cook when we got in :) Having gone out after dark we didn't take the camera, but were amazed at how much light there was. Walking around nine wells nature reserve we even turned the head torches off, and it was like wandering round in a black and white photo. Beautiful. Monday morning the roads were well covered in snow - a good couple or three inches probably - and it was obvious that even the main roads wouldn't be very clear yet, so rather than push the bike to the end of the road and then cycle I decided to walk and get public transport. At least some trains were cancelled and others late, and the buses were reporting severe delays, so rather than the nearly a mile into the village for a one-every-20-minutes bus which is unreliable at the best of times I decided to take the longer walk to Addenbrookes, where there are *loads* of buses into town to choose from. It's about 2.5 miles, and even with 5 minutes stopping to take photos it took about an hour, which isn't bad! Took Mike's hiking walking stick, which has a nice spike on the bottom, but still had a rather scary moment crossing the road on Macaulay Avenue, where the cars had started to polish the snow into ice already. The photos have all been added to my snow album on Facebook, but here's a quick preview:

Tuesday I decided it would be too icy to be safe, and worked from home. By Wednesday morning it was starting to look a bit clearer outside, and the bin men turned up having failed to come on Monday, so I thought I'd make an attempt to get the bike as far as Hinton Way on foot - and ended up giving up in under 100 yards - it was just *too* slippery to be safe. The road on Macaulay Avenue was like glass, and the pavements were only slightly better in being lumpier! So another day working from home was called for - once I'd got over my fright :) It thawed a bit during the day though, and with the help of my trusty stick I did manage to make it out on Thursday and Friday - with quite a bit of walking on the road where the pavements were icy - and only 20 yards of really difficult stretch on Thursday and 10 on Friday. And despite the forecast there was no more snow overnight, and now the sky is blue, the sun is shining, it's well above zero and hopefully by the time the weekend is over it will all be gone and we can get back to normal :). It has been very beautiful at times - but just a bit too treacherous.

Bump is now 34 weeks old - 2.2kg which is about the weight of a cantaloupe melon, and 45cm long. Next midwife appointment is on Monday - must remember to ask about the whooping cough jab, since they haven't mentioned it to me yet! Our NCT antenatal classes are 10 til 4 next Saturday and the one after - which actually now turns out to be a bit of a nuisance, since we were hoping Evan and Gina could come and visit, and mum and dad wanted to pop down too - and do us a huge favour and bring some baby things from Steph and Dave. I'll be on leave by then though - since this week will be my last week at work - so perhaps we can work something out.

Speaking of work it's been another pretty busy week - some useful scripts written, some more showing Julia of various bits of the postmaster job, some fixing of people's broken email programs (I've gone off Eudora even more than usual) and some success in finding good ways to make other ones work (getting Thunderbird to display more information from our LDAP email directory than previously thought possible). Lots of things ticked off my to-do list, and only a few items remaining - one of which is to have a go at some of the interview questions they're planning to ask my maternity cover! Could be fun, but mildly intimidating :) Apparently the advert should be out early next week. I've also been tidying out my desk and starting to fetch things home - bit of a panic as I thought I'd lost an important key but it turned up again in one of the things I'd brought home. I've been tidying my desktop computer too - and am now busy downloading all the odds and ends of personal stuff that has accumulated at work over the last nearly 11 years. Only about 40 minutes download time remaining :)

Mike and I are still ticking along nicely enjoying the easy life - Les Mis was great last weekend, and we had a nice dinner out too - though it ended up being somewhere else and with a long wait. It turns out all the chain restaurants on the leisure park are insanely busy at around 7pm on a Saturday - who would have guessed! Planning on taking it pretty easy this weekend - some bird watching in the garden for the RSPB, and someone coming to pick up the two bedside tables that have been lurking in the living room for the last couple of weeks :) I bought haggis for Burns Night, but we ended up having something else and it will be our tea tonight instead - yum. All in all life's pretty good.

So, since last week we ordered a crib for the bedroom from the NCT. Steph and Dave have kindly offered to let us have Ollie's old cot for when the baby is a bit bigger and moves into their own room - but I particularly like this one as you can securely attach to the side of the bed and lower one side to provide a sort of bed-sharing feature. And even if we decide we don't get on with that it folds up beautifully and has its own carry case too - and is a much better size for our room than a full size cot would be. It arrived on Thursday night (dropped round by our next door neighbour who we hadn't seen in a while and was delighted to hear our news). We've put it up today - very quick and easy and no tools needed!

Today at 32 weeks we're up to 1.7kg and 43cm long - which is apparently the weight of a fresh coconut. I'm starting to feel really quite *big* now and no doubt that will only accelerate over the next few weeks. Hard to believe there's only 6-10 weeks to go! I'm still feeling mostly well, though very tired. Bump is still wriggling away - which is always reassuring - no matter how well my midwife appointments go I can't help having moments where I worry. But at my last one on Monday my BP was fine, no protein or sugar in my urine, uterus is measuring the right size for the number of weeks, and my blood test results from 28 weeks had come back normal - apparently my iron levels have actually gone *up*. Still gaining weight within guidelines too - though nearer the top end after Christmas for some reason :) All good.

At work I've finally completed the one major project which we wanted to get done before I start my maternity leave - which was to get our new internal mail server into service. It's been running as a test service for quite a while - but now those few users who still have an actual local mail account (mostly test accounts and system accounts) are running on an Exim/Dovecot system on linux, rather than a Sendmail/UW IMAP system on an elderly HP! We had a few teething problems on Thursday when we swapped the delivery over - but it does all seem to be working fine now. I've got just 3 weeks of work left now - and just a few odds and ends of scripting to do, plus continuing to help Julia understand the bits of my role she'll be covering. They do have leave to employ someone as maternity cover, but that won't start until March since before then I'm actually on maternity leave. I think they're still drafting the job description and haven't advertised yet!

Apart from that it's been a pretty quiet week. I've actually made some progress on knitting the scarf for Mike which I originally hoped to have finished by *last* winter. Perhaps it'll be done for next year. BHF had a collection locally, so all the unsold books went out last week (hopefully they arrived to take them away before it rained!). I've also contacted them to take some unwanted furniture so they'll be coming round tomorrow to collect two old bedside tables and two DVD/CD racks. And the latest Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson book has been picked up from the Post Office - finally the Wheel of Time series is complete! Though I'm going to insist on finishing the Tad Williams I'm in the middle of before starting on it.

Looking forward to a quiet week at work next week and then Mike's parents coming to visit next weekend. It will be lovely to see them!

Argh, I've got an SQL query which works fine if I run it from Access, and which I think has no errors, but if I try run it from Perl I'm getting an error from the database. Can anyone tell me what obvious thing I'm doing wrong?

( code )

Any clues? (Apologies for some long lines, I do intended to split it up a bit more eventually, but at the moment I think it slightly aids readability)

Ah, it seems that in fact the oracle database does *not* support left outer joins, and that the reason it works in Access is because Access translates the query into a form that this version of oracle does support. Many thanks to Paul for popping in to explain (I could have just gone and asked him obviously, but he's been rather busy with exam marking recently). What a nuisance, since this is obviously a much nicer way to do the query than faffing about with a "where not in (subquery)" or similar. (We suspect it is supported in the new version of Oracle Paul's working on migrating to, but sadly I think my code is needed before then).

Double correction: it does support them, but with weird syntax. The following code works:

( more code )

As most of you know I work for the Engineering Dept of Cambridge University, mostly dealing with email related things. We have a bunch of people with a shared role account on hermes, the university mail system. They're using two different mailers to access it, and saving messages in IMAP folders. They're nearing quota, and want to archive old material in a format which is accessible (in particular) in both Outlook and Eudora. We have shared filespace, but could do with ideas as to how on earth to store this mail in a way that they can all access it.

So far it looks like the best answer is to continue to run our own IMAP server, so it can be used for such archives. We were hoping to run it down though. Hermes is hoping to provide larger quotas in future (currently at 250MB default, up to 1G, which this team are already allocated), but don't intend it to be used as an archive.

Will write at some point about a) sisters hen-night and b) moving house, but I'm a bit busy at work this week as a result of b) and will be at a course all next week, so it'll probably have to wait til we have internet at home. Suffice to say: thanks to all who helped, and we're very happy.

I'm one of the lucky ones. My paperwork has just come through, including the diagrams showing roughly how the new grades match to the old grades. I've been mapped directly across from my old point partway up the COIII scale to the equivalent point partway up new grade 7. This gives me a slight payrise (the scheme was intended to be about 1.5% on average), which if you backdate it to January and take tax off will pay for my new bike and leave a bit over to go out to dinner and celebrate on, and is just in time to be paid in this month's pay packet on Thursday. And in September we'll be getting the normal annual cost-of-living increase, I think that's going to be 3%. That's normally in August so will be backdated by one month too. I'm not even going to do the maths, I'll just wait and see. Being partway up the grade means plenty of space for progression anyway, my colleague John as a COII is also mapped directly across to grade 7, but right at the top of it.

I know other people are still waiting, so *fingers crossed* they're not one of the unlucky ones whose new grade is lower than their old one. There's a guarantee to keep paying them at the current rate for four years, but there go four years of expected increases, and what if you're still "overpaid" at the end of that, do you take a cut at that point? Hopefully there won't be too many of them. But the marking scheme did make it hard for anyone who isn't managing people to come out much higher, so it's a bit worrying for more senior computing staff.

Elsewhere on LJ a friend said:

Puzzled
A week ago UK university academics rejected a 13.1% pay deal over three years. Last night they accepted an 'improved' offer of 13.1% over three years. Way to go!

As someone who has been involved in the dispute I commented, and I figure I may as well reproduce it here.

The "improved" offer differs in the third year.

In the old version it was fixed at 2.5%. Now it's the higher of RPI or 2.5%, with option of review if an independent study of HE finances and pay says it could be higher. They've also added vague assurances about not pressuring people to catch up on the marking, and on those universities which have done so returning docked pay (given that the work it was docked for not doing will now be being done).

And no, they haven't accepted it yet, they've just agreed to ballot the union members on it, and to suspend the industrial action in the meantime. From what I've seen all of the keen activists will be voting No, it remains to be seen what the rest of the union will think. If they just went with the two year offer leaving the third year to be negotiated later, and made the assurances on docked pay more concrete then I think the union would be more likely to accept.

(It's complicated by the fact the two unions involved have now become one joint union as of last week!)

Offer here: http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/pdf/l/k/2006payagreement06-09.pdf

Commentary here: http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/pdf/r/4/he2006payoffer_commentary.pdf

Gah, they're reporting it in the radio news as being accepted too, even though they mention the ballot. *shakes head at quality of news reporting*

I'm curious to talk to my mum about it actually, as her local union is much more active than I've found things here in Cambridge. And of course since the majority of the Action Short of a Strike has been in not setting exam papers or marking work it's had much more of an affect on her work than it has on mine. She's been under a lot of pressure the last few weeks which has been very much missing for me. It'll be interesting to know if she's relieved to be able to go back to work properly (of course she's still been working fulltime, just on other aspects of her job), or if she thinks it's a sell-out. Listening to the activists mailing list today though has been instructive - they're very cross with union leadership getting even this close to accepting the offer. Surely there must have been *some* reason they didn't hold out for better though? I get the impression that they've been told that if they push for anything more than national negotiation will break down entirely. I guess right now it's just a case of wait and see.