Friday 29th November 2013

And so another week hard at the coal face comes to an end. Not that I have ever seen a coal face, other than in black and white films. I don't do anything now that means getting my hands dirty, unless I buy a packet of chilli crisps and the flavouring comes off when I put a few of them in my ham sandwich. Because a ham sandwich isn't crunchy enough unless it has crisps in it.

Obviously.

Not, the end of the month means KPIs. KPIs are what keep modern businesses going; they are Key Performance Indicators, and at the end of the month I calculate KPIs to see how ell, or how bad we are doing. I do get the feeling that no one looks at the KPIs once I have spent 5 hours calculating them, making lovely graphs and pivot tables. I don't even know what a pivot table is, really, when push comes to a shove. And it is entirely possible that is a waste of time,, but it keeps me off the streets.

And in a stunning turn of events, I actually spelt entirely correct in the paragraph above, but I though Chrome had broken and was not going to tell me I had spelt it wrong. But I got it right.

Spelling is not my strong point: see I left the r out of strong then, but I went back to put it back in before Chrome told me about it.

Good Ian.

Where was I? Oh yes, KPIs. Spreadsheets, pivot tables, graphs, autosum. The day goes by in a flash.

That was Friday.

Except for the bit where I go to the butchers. And Tesco. Then the weekend has arrived.

What else has happened this week? Oh yes, the death of a comet. And then its rebirth. Or partial rebirth. Or not. I think. Comet ISON headed from the Oort Cloud in towards the sun, skimmed the sun's corona. And fizzled out. It just went out like an old light bulb. An old light bulb travelling at close to 600,000mph.

It broke up the whole Twitterverse said. And in the end the NASA webcast said so. So no amazing comet for December then? No comet of the century then?

No, and yet, maybe. Something survived. At first they thought it was dusk, then something of the comet's nucleus. and now, who knows? well, we all will by Tuesday when the tail might be visible. That I watched the whole thing via a NASA webcast and followed what the geeks were saying via Twitter made this into the first astronomical event I have felt I have taken part in.

Other than that time I was at 33,000feet to see that eclipse over Cornwall. The one the rest of the country and those folks on Concord failed to see. I saw it. I was on the way to Las Vegas. for work. In the RAF. And the pilot said we would see the eclipse and he would fill in a flight plan so to make it happen. And so we all got to see the eclipse. From 33,000 feet. Then we flew to Vegas, checked in our hotel. Four star hotel. Then hit the Strip. All on rates. And go very, very drunk. And played pool. Until dawn. When we got thrown out of the pool hall.

That was quite a memorable day. All in all.

I did not see an eclipse this week. Nor a comet. But I might see a comet next week. And so might you.

In medical news, Nan is out of hospital, and is OK. She is only answering the phone if it rings more than 8 times. Because she's 99 years old and that must make sense. Somehow.

There were some other days this week, but they were mostly crappy and mainly involved getting up in the dark, driving to work, work, driving home, cooking, washing up, and stuff. See you all tomorrow when some non-work related stuff might happen.