Monday

So, it's the first Monday of the month so I have to battle the university's IT systems, or some of the more overgrown backwaters of them, to run a little process that is reasonably important to colleagues across the faculty. I started early so that I could set it running and get on with my day. In simple terms I fire up the work PC, connect the VPN, open an MI system, make a swift edit to a fixed query and run it. The resultant data is saved to an Excel spreadsheet and then imported to another legacy system. The import takes a while but once I'm there I can walk away and do other stuff. This morning it took a couple of hours to get to that point.... No single point of failure and some of the problems are probably still out there because I just had to keep rebooting the PC and start again. The MI system often forgets itself so I have to run a little utility which reinstalls it and then I have to reboot the PC and fire up the VPN again. The VPN was falling over for fun and that meant that I couldn't use the MI system because it needs a secure connection and I had to reboot the PC because it thought that the VPN was still flying when it clearly wasn't. I'll not bore you further with the litany of my woes but it wasn't the best start to the week. From there I've had chats with colleagues and sorted a date for an important event in East Grinstead so the day has picked up