If you bothered to read my blog post of last week you will be o’too well aware that I’ve developed a slight hearing issue, I bought an app and I’m not happy about both.

Well to be honest I’ve been too annoyed as of this week to blog much and unlike my normal blogging done well in advance of the publishing date I’ve been slack and sort of let them all publish leaving half finished drafts that I can not bring myself to finish let alone read again. So this brings me to the blog today. This is pretty much as close to live as you get for me nowadays. I’ve just finish bashing my head into the table over and over again trying to add some additional void functionality to Olex2. In fact I’ve succeeded in doing very little other than calculating the area of the largest radius probe for you. Great work there. I may as well have just typed 1000000 lines of code reading “hello world”, “hello world”, “hello world”……….. for the amount of good it would have done.

No matter - I have learnt my lesson this time - honest governor ”I’m not playing with things I don’t understand”.

So what has been happening with me over the past week? Well I’ve been made very, very angry by irobot - why? I’m so glad you asked. I have two irobot devices one is a roomba and the other a scooba. My scooba is just about 6 months old and last Sunday but one it broke down. I rung the technical support help line they said “a technician will ring you back in five minutes” - a week later (well 6 days) and no phone call so I rang again. This time 18 minutes of being on hold and I got a nice sounding Dutch gentlemen tell me I should ring the technical support line. “Erm I did” I replied and another 2 minutes on hold he came back and told me “yes the technical department is closed” ring back on Monday. So I was too angry to do that and in fact I had only calmed enough to ring today. I should also mention I was really angry at the Dutch man and told him that the website did not have the correct phone number, that the people I spoke to on Sunday clearly were working so how could it be closed on Saturday, etc, etc. So today I discover the phone numbers have changed and the hours are now posted. It does not really mater as after ringing them up they still told me to just enter all the information on their website. O’for fuck sake really. Bloke A could of told me that two weeks ago, and bloke B a week ago why it was left to bloke C I don’t know.

Anyhow I did it and of course there has been NO REPLY so I have a rather expensive bit of kit sat being broken - another life lesson learnt. Well I say broken - I have discovered and interesting game I can play with it. You see the problem is that the right wheel drives a very lot less quickly than the left. In short in drives in a clockwise circle for a bit then it has a panic and drives backwards which makes an anticlockwise circle then it stops and goes “duhhoh beep, beep, beep, beep, beep”. So the game is put the bottle of whiskey on top of the scooba and if it makes it out of reach you can not drink - if it does not then you can. So far I think I am winning and well the whiskey is loosing. Probably - not really certain how you work that shit out.

So bearing all this lovely learning of life skills you’ll be surprised to discover that something else also happened to me - yes something else! We the hiss has now become more of a tinkle - don’t get me wrong the hiss is still there but now there is a sharp tinkle inside the centre of my head. Interesting stuff no doubt? I’m sure you are riveted to know this. Did I also mention how much I hate Italians especially the one who stolen my fiancées purse whilst she was in Milan? Well I hope you get eye cancer and your sperm and or eggs dry up. Well I do.

So I should conclude this random almost extremely mental blog post by just saying how tired I am of it all - that reminds me no one at where I work has bothered to help decide about the experiment we are doing at a very important research facility (for the last time) so I’m now exceptionally late with the safety paperwork for that also. Still tired you, like inside tired, just why are we bothering at all tired.

One final note - I’ve written a lot about DLS in the past as well. Well to top off last week there was the closing date for the beamtime proposals. We have a BAG which is like a PMA but different. I don’t care you don’t know what these thinks mean - it is not important to this other than we are suppose to add a 1 page update and any additional samples safety data to their great website by the closing date. I of course got lumbered with it and again technically I’ll not actually be attending that time as my contract will have expired and well frankly I will be elsewhere. So the stupid website kept accepting the forms/pdf and then pretending it had never seen them. This lead to many phone calls and emails and the end result was it still did not work but worse still was the fact that I’ve done these updates every 6 months for the last two years. Yes you’ve fucking got it in one - they have never been added into the system it has always fucking rejected them although pretending it had accepted them - so that is pretty much 4 days of my life I will never get back again.

Ok whilst I am venting I might as well conclude with the final great thing of the week. I’ve been collecting very long data collections over the entire weekend - about 48 hours per data collection. O’fuck off I know they are not long but they are when you are on our rotating anode. Stop it I know for fuck sake. Ok so I worked from home on Monday and as usual the person who got the machine on the Monday had to email me about 1 million times with request for help. I being me just did it and  helped. I’ve now had chance to move the data and process it only to discover that it did not complete. In fact it stopped on Sunday due to and I quote “a fault that required it to reset” and “I don’t know why it would do that” being the technical help from Rigaku. BUT because of this fault the next user just closed down my fucking data collection he did not bother to pay proper attention to what was going on and of course he also caused the hardware to trip by opening the enclosure whilst it thought it was still live. This is just fucking typical. One one occasion I sat and pressed return 1206 times over a 7 hour period due to my colleagues data collection crashing - by crashing the stupid software crashing nothing more. Loosing an entire day’s worth of data collection time. But not when it comes to my data collections. So in short I think that I am a mug for doing all this stuff. Which I am. AND YES this make me tired inside also.