I was supposed to go to the gym last night, but got distracted by trying to set up the various devices here to use US Netflix. There are services “out there” that do the trick, they work through a combination of overriding the netflix related DNS and then proxying some of the requests so that they appear to come from the US.
In the end I “rolled my own” server using a combination of squid for the proxying a bit of iptables to make it transparent and running a bind server. It’s a neat little setup and works on the apple tv, laptops, phones and tablets. I’m quite happy with it and have been enjoying Parks and Recreations and Mad Men (and some “Shut up and play the hits”).
Getting the service working on the laptop took no time at all. It was the ipad/apple TV side of things that took a good couple of hours to work out. Consequently the hours slipped by and before I knew it, it was too late to get to the gym and too late for some fun with the resistance bands.
Today I’ve been better. We were due to demonstrate some software that we’d been writing and have been waiting for some styling from web designers since the start of the week. It’s essentially just a tweak, but it feels like it has been left to the last minute. I had holding emails from them on Monday and Tuesday. Spurious questions that sounded technical but were, in fact, bullshit. Trust me, I can see these things from a mile away. My guess is that they only started looking at it today and realised that it was a bigger job than they first thought.
They sent me an email about an hour before the presentation finally saying that I wouldn’t have anything. Bugger. So I frantically pulled together bits of code, downloaded some bits of HTML stuck it all together and wrapped our software in something that would pass as what we should have had from the designers. With about 20 minutes to go, I was at least able to grab a coffee and get the rest of the stuff ready. I was not happy.
Still, the presentation went well and I think that we’re hurtling towards finishing the project. We will sit in a pub for three days solid when it’s done. I’m sure.
Jude’s not been able to get home this evening. The Thelwall viaduct was closed because of the weather. She was stuck on one side of the Manchester Ship Canal and the rest of us on the other. It seemed best that she stay over at her Dad’s in Lymm, while we struggled by, pushing beans around a plate and waiting for the lights to go out. Well, not quite, but we really did think the power would cut out on a couple of occasions.
After the children went to bed it was time to try and get some running in. It would have been fun to go outside for a run. Well, I was thinking that I could have gone in one direction and kept going for three miles. If I’d gone the right way I might have achieved a four minute mile, simply because of the wind behind me, but it would have taken about four hours to come back the other way. As it was I stuck to the treadmill (which I loathe), struggled through three miles of plodding and then was knackered at the end. Probably not ideal to be running at 9pm, but there was little choice today and given that I missed the gym yesterday, I had to do something.
Since then I’ve been enjoying the delights of the netflix. An episode of Mad Men down and I’m writing this with the “story of creation records” on in the background. It’s been a reasonable day, it would have been better if the web designers had done what they had promised, but that’s just one of those things, I think.
There must be a Ride video out there somewhere that I can embed here….