Today, we’re off to Ireland for a week. (Well, we actually get back next Sunday, so it’s about ten days all told, but that includes the driving across from Norfolk to Wales – and back, of course – which is adding another day on either end)

In a fit of dubious sanity, we’re driving across this time, so we can take Hound. How she’ll handle the ferry I currently have no idea. I’m hoping she’ll be fine and just sleep all the way across – it’s a vomit-comet crossing rather than the normal big jobs, so it should only take a couple of hours.

Whatever, it’ll be interesting – and I do think Hound’ll love it when we get to Glenbeigh (on the Ring of Kerry) with all the beaches, hills, and everything to run around. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether we’ll actually see all that much of her…

At the moment, today is my last day in the current contract. It’s been pretty good – I started back at the beginning of April, for a two-week contract – so to have ended up doing two months here has worked out quite nicely.

The job/work has been OK – but the commute has been bloody horrid. For some reason, the A11 and A47 seem to be some kind of magnet for crap drivers, and there hasn’t been a day yet where I haven’t been cut up, or forced to slow down because of people (to use one example from today) travelling at 50 mph in the outside lane and staying parallel with the cars on the inside lane rather than overtaking them.

I don’t mind commuting to work, and the drive is far easier than it would be to take the train – in fact, taking the train is nigh-on impossible, as the first train from home wouldn’t get me in ’til 9.15. (at which point I’d still have to get from station to office) So I’ve been doing 400 miles a week just for work – not cheap, but them’s the breaks when you live in the arse end of nowhere.

I’ve currently got no idea where I’ll be working next. There’s a few options already, but I’m not sorting out anything confirmed until we’re back from Ireland. Then we’ll see.

Last night, we got woken up by Hound at about half three. She was totally orbital and pretty distressed although initially we couldn’t work out why. Usually she’s only like that when she’s been ill, and puked in the house. And she was certainly stinking – although that was (I figured out later) just her frightened/terrified smell – when she’s in that state, she gets evil farts, and they pollute the entire atmosphere of the house.

Anyway, I let her out into the garden just to let her vent out whatever was bugging her – and that was a mistake. Because the actual reason she was orbital was because there was a thunderstorm coming. Cue Hound barking insanely at the sky until she eventually came back in.

And at that point we still had to deal with a Hound in orbit. She eventually calmed down a bit, and came to lie under the bed (along with trying to burrow her way through the wall) but for the first half hour or so she was just mental.

I don’t think we’re ever going to break her out of her terror of thunderstorms. We might be able to lessen it a bit over time – although personally I doubt even that – so we’ll end up just figuring ways of managing her during the storms. When we bought a new bed last year we looked completely mad by checking whether there’d be enough room for Hound to creep under it – but there was a reason for doing so, as last night showed. Now we just need to figure out how to make sure she doesn’t do the burrowing-through-the-wall thing while she’s under there…

Mind you, the storm was fantastic – not that Hound thought so, of course.

Got a BT Home Hub? If so, you really need to read this on the Register, and then go off to BT’s site and follow their instructions for making it properly secure rather than leaving the security settings at their defaults.

Thankfully, we don’t have one of these abortive pieces of crap and instead have our own wireless router/firewall thingy.

But it’s scary to see just how insecure the BT Home Hub is by default…

Later this week, the @Media conference will be going on in London and for the first time in three years, I won’t be there. The timings would just be too tight, what with it being on Thursday/Friday, and with us supposed to be travelling to Wales (and then Ireland) on Friday.

In fairness, it’s saved me something like £500 all told – and in light of the expense of the car this week, that’s probably a good thing – but it’s still a bummer to be missing it. For me, there’s a whole bundle of things I’d be going to see if I were there – except of course that I’m not – so I know it’ll be a worthwhile investment to go next time.

All told, I’m disappointed I’m not going this time round – but I’ll definitely be there again in the future.

Just a very quick “Happy Birthday” post for WordPress, which turns 5 today.

Amazing to believe it’s already been going that long.

And I suppose that one day I’ll upgrade D4D™ past version 2.1 – the main reason I haven’t is because I know it’ll be a pain in the arse, because of the adaptations I’ve made to the template etc. along the way. So the upgrade will probably come along at about the same time as the redesign.

In other words, sometime.