Waiting for a Bacon Sarnie

... at Happy Harry's.

I think they need to work on their branding. Harry looks a bit creepy to me.


I've got to the bottom of the problem that was plaguing me the other day - which is not to say that I've solved it. I've got to the point where I can fully describe a very specific failure to the people who run the service we're using. I just now need to find the right person to talk to. That's another whole problem. It hasn't been easy getting to this point because of a host of other bugs in other bits of software causing confusion and delay.

I want to describe some of that for the record, not expecting anyone to read on! This is for the future me to look back upon in relief once I've escaped this kind of work!

First, there was a small problem in our own software which was misrepresenting the error by not displaying the appropriate message. That was hiding the fact that automatic updates on the service we had integrated weren't working, causing a data file to expire and become invalid. Once I'd worked out why that was and fixed the issue, full of misplaced optimism as usual, I discovered that although the updates were now downloading and the update process being executed, the data file itself wasn't being written to. It remains expired and invalid - presumably because of some arcane permissions issue.

To diagnose all this I have to log on to remote servers, which because they sit on the secure health service network, require the creation of a secure channel called a virtual private network. While using this I'm locked out of all other networks. To regain access to the internet at large I have to log out of the VPN, which is fine, but a bug in that software means that I can't log back in a second time without rebooting the whole computer. That wouldn't be such a complete pain but for the fact that the operating system consistently hangs while it is shutting down due to a driver error. This causes the whole reboot process to take even longer than it used to when I was running Windows 7. Progress always comes at a price.

So I get home on a Friday evening and the last thing I want to do is sit back down at a computer. I'm afraid I'm becoming more and more anti-social here. Collapsed last night to watch Nebraska with the boys ... in glorious black and white. It was somehow a rather appropriate film to see considering my mood. Possibly not to everyone's taste (and not my lads) but I thought it was beautifully done.