"Life? Don't talk to me about life"

Another day, another round of password updating and profile editing
(thanks LastPiss, anyone got a recommendation for a good password manager? 1password? )

YAFUS
(Yet Another Fucking Useless Site)

this lot do the whole "tell you what the rules for a password are AFTER you've entered the new password"
(hey, at lest they told me eventually , some sites take an "invalid" password and then don't let it be used to re-login in with, either for charlen or character composition. Or jsut don't tell you what their "rules" are and leave you guessing how to generate a password. So not surprising folk'll just user 1234 or similar. idiots. (the website "coders" that is, not the poor dumb schmucks having to use their shitty UI/UX))

but on on clicking "SAVE" to exit their profile edit page , it gives me
"OOPS... SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT Please enter a properly formatted E-MAIL ADDRESS."
No, go fuck yourselves , you incompetent bunch of cretinous coders. it is a valid email address as per RFC822. fuck off.

many places dislike a "+" in email address. this lot let me set the account up n months ago though using it.

ah well, onwards to the next YAFUS !

day 10 of NewPlace
(has acquired name of RuneHamn. We have a rune stone outside our front door. yay!).
boxes unpacked and stuff put onto shelves.
Now to just figure out which stuff is where on what shelves , and try to remember processes for where things now are.

Paperwork continues to be a PITA, Skatteverket invented tax debts to Kronofogden and Försäkeringskassan being a cunch of bunts means I now pay each month for the pleasure of working ones arse off for Ericsson (after rent and the cost of living and the invented 2019 tax debt etc is garnisheed from my wages).
Remind me next time I am contracting to get a decent bunch of supply chain pimps, contract management, tax advisors etc who don't go an disappear off the scene for 6 months without telling anyone or filing paperwork that should be filed etc and other shenanigans that have left me here in "exhausted, dazed and actually past caring what happens next" states of bureaucratic "Brazil" style existence.
Hey ho.
Seaside soon! Sandcastles! Ice Creams! Rocks! Friends and Talking Old Toot till the cows come home!

so...
erm...
Is this thing switched on?
testing testing 1,1,2,3,5,8...
No idea if the import from LJ will work, I think I pressed the right buttons and twiddled the right knobs...

well, coming to end of current contract at Ericsson in Stockholm,
1st was 1year from 2013-12-01,
2nd was a renewal for 6mth from 2014-12-01,
3rd now is another renewal for 3mth from 2015-06-01.
At this rate of halving duration we'll be renewing for a day at a time soon!
Alas this shorter contract is my decision, as Ericsson are shedding lots of permies and letting contractors go, I was on the kill list (as I have a now unapproved agent supplying me to e/// due to a different e/// reorginastion) till someone spotted I was rather critical on their current urgent project so they wangled getting me in (with yet another agent in the supply chain between me and e///, 6 now, zarking ridiculous...) but at a almost unacceptable rate cut, so I said I'd do the next 3 months to see the BIOS development on the project to a good handover to production / support point, but not the requested 7 months to the year end.
Hey ho.
Wonder what the place will look like in 3 months time...

Dear Microsoft. Just fuck off and die already, there's a good company? I hate Secure Boot, guaranteed to fuck up anything. Also want to find the Asus BIOS engineers and bash their heads together. I want to boot the UEFI Shell from a memory stick to do some UEFI Application development tests of code I'm writing. Stick is MBR formatted so Secure Boot should have nothing to do with it, FAT32 partition, and have done so before from my Asus Z97-K test motherboard after previously lots of angry swearing and Setup change attempts at the zarking thing, but this time it just plain refuses to let me boot UEFI Shell. Removed the keys (PK KEK DB DBX) from SCU menu, set OS to 'other' and the Secure Boot status says "disabled". yet try to boot the UEFI shell and a popup comes up saying "secure boot is enabled, turn it off to boot an untrusted OS". grrrr. Tried flashing latest BIOS, yup, that's still as buggy. tried setting admin/usr pswds as some googled forums suggest, nope, still secure boot disabled but not letting anything boot as secure boot says no. double grrrr...

For the latest contract I'm working at Ericsson in Stockholm on x86 UEFI BIOS ; my office is apparently SEKI 30 06 525A (Ericsson's naming convention (probably global) with SE=Sweden, KI=Kista, 30=building#30 (which is at 6, Färögatan, Kista, Stockholm) 06=floor6, 525A=corridor 5 (it's a weird building), office 25 [I am not a number, I am a free man! well, not quite free, but remarkably reasonable rates, all things considered].

Whilst pootling from the office tonight through the rather labyrinthine layout of SEKI 30, my mind being occupied with linux OVMF UEFI builds running under qemu & sorting out key enrollment, I somehow decided to take the spiral stairs down rather than the usual lift journey, got a bit discombobulated at what I though was floor 2 and exited from floor 3 (I think) to the right rather than to the left. And ended up in the open quad in the center of the block. With lots of dark and snow. And not where I expected to be, on the usual street side. turn around, access card lets me back in through the outside door to a short corridor, but doesn't let me through the 2nd revolving door into the building proper, beeps at me and demands my PIN code. "What zarking code!", thinks I. embarrassed panic time, look for intercom or anything, nada. Think's I'm either stuck here till someone spots me, or perhaps I could walk round the quad and bang on office windows and plead to let me in (claim insanity or something (oh and let me in please)), or build a rude snowman, or ...

After a number of random numbers stabbed into the keypad as a code (9999, 1111, 1234 etc) I remembered that yes, they did in fact ask me to add a PIN code to the photo RFID card some 7 or so weeks ago back when I had to go through the induction blaze of all the new things in one day thing. Phew, my usual code works, relief and cue the cat thing of "hope no-one saw me doing that", then onwards through the evening back to the apartment and safety. Blert.

Whilst the GCL work lappy (Lenovo W530, core i7, 32GB RAM) is a PITA for cables falling out of every orifice, it don't half shift at doing work. Compiled the EDK-II source freshly snaffled from git repository & using MS VC 2012 (express), it took under a minute. Do the same at the E/// office on the poor HP EliteBook core i5 thing with but 4GB RAM & it takes 10 mins or so...

Trying to order tickets to the Fields of the Nephilim at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire for 31 Oct (yeah, I know, clashes with WGW, what can one do!) is quite stressful.

Barclaycard can fuck off and die, their customer services numbers are all 0844 and I'm not paying them to answer my question as to why the ticketweb.co.uk site declined my purchase.
Did call the international customer svcs number which is a more friendly 01604.
However the Indian call center chap was difficult to understand and had to be repeatedly asked to slow down.
Eventually transpires that from their point of view and what they can see, the card's CCV is not matching. I know I entered it right.

I also *hate* the visa VillifedByVisa with a passion, it *never* works right. Possibly as I use Firefox and NoScript so have to allow sites as and when they want javascript confuses it. Or it's just rubbish.

Call to First Direct was much more pleasant. Scottish accented lady whom one could actually understand and very helpful.
As with the barclaycard visa, the 1st direct visa had been transaction declined by the ticketweb site due to CCV incorrect.
Lady suggested that ticketweb could be busy and possibly servers timing things out and thus being wrong.
I shall try again in an hour or so (she thought perhaps olympic tickets sales or other may be clogging the servers...)

Reminds me of why I like First Direct. An 0845 number (inclusive with BT Anytime tarriff), and people I can actually understand who are helpful.

Wheee sugar rush (bounce bounce bounce) - thanks eurydice13 for the birthday party hosting with lots of cool people and a most excellent tiramisu.

Today's also the last day of the 4 weeks amitriptyline 25mg tablets prescribed by the pain management clinic at the Royal Surrey Hotspital in Guildford. I should have heard from them a week or so ago with a follow-on consultation to see how I got on with them. In fact I'm not too bothered by their (alas somewhat typical) failure to communicate at this point, as I'd like to see if there are any problems coming off the pills, other than the expected return of the it's-not-sciatica-but-we-don't-know-what-it-is pains in groin/upper thigh region. Have noticed over the last two weeks though what with the diminishing of the chronic pain that my L4/L5 disc problems have also receded, in fact have only needed to take a couple of tramadol one day for too much pain there. This is a good thing, am wondering if the reduction of the chronic pain means I'm not tensed up / protecting my back as much and consequently it's a lot happier with Life. Yay for the drugs.

Went downstairs to the kitchen to nuke a couple of slices of tuesdays cheep pizza (two XL pizzas for 15 quid, lasts me for days (as long as I don't get fed up of pizza) & then into the freezer to make it keep) for breakfast, did that and remembered the kitchen was clear as C&J were away playing ukelelalelililos somewhere, and I had thunked about doing some culinery crimes whilst it was free for me to make a mess in :)

600g mince beef from fridge (a few days out of the freezer), 4 cloves of garlic (oops, but then, noone loves me so I can eat of much of it as I like), two onions, the mushrooms didn't make it as they were too sad and old :(, a tin of napolita tomatoes, tin of chickpeas, and a generous quantity of frozen petit pois. Couple of beef oxo cubes as stock (have run out of vegetable bouillon, must go shopping soon!). In the wok/frying pan thing, bubbling away now, the mash is made, the oven is on... and I'll call that Lunch later! (and freeze the rest for other days noms)