Ok so it’s going to be another of those, “oh my I haven’t updated for quite a while I really should get round to it”, posts. Been a nice and hectic time since new year with quite a few events.
New Year’s Eve was a great party even if it was really very expensive, was great to have time with Bethan and to be able to let my hair down and party for once. First time I’ve danced in quite a long time. I spent the evening getting really quite drunk, saying “good bye” to alcohol and dancing like a loon.
The next week was the most hectic week I’ve had at work so far, and it was only 4 working days long! The main crux came from the fact that we had until the end of the week to get our product through testing for Microsoft Certification for SQL Server 2000, and all was not going well. By Thursday we were pulling our hair out, apparently our product was causing and ASP.net Recycle as Windows 2000 was detecting a Deadlock within the application, now we had been researching the problem for about a month by this point and no matter what we did [at one point we went through changing every string concatenation into a string builder call] we couldn’t replicate the issue on our own lower specification test machines, also we couldn’t isolate why the .Net Garbage Collector wasn’t cleaning up enough of the memory that we knew could be collected (we used a number of memory profilers to be sure we weren’t holding onto references). We then became more and more certain that the problem was being caused by the vast amount of memory (3Gig) on the test machine, and that the GC collection was taking longer to run because it had so much to trawl through. Anyway eventually we found a fix to make sure that the Garbage Collector kicked in when less of the memory was being taken up, and on Friday afternoon we received conformation that the product had passed. So we are now clear to go for MS Gold Certification. After many early morning and late nights in the office it was good to get a fix, even if it was to a built in MS bug!
So it was a nice relief to be able to go skiing the next week, back to La Plagne!
It was a great week, La Plagne always feels like going home when I visit, was great to see people that I used to work with, plus my brother booked him and Phil to come out last minute to surprise my mum which was awesome, she was thrilled. Weather was brilliant, but we were wishing for a bit more snow by the end of the week. My dad and myself had an amnesty on the alcohol for the week too so yet again I got drunk a couple (read many) times. Anyway I’ve put some photos in the gallery.
Now I’m back and I’ve been suffering from a chest infection since I got back, but am finally feeling better.
I had to queue in the police station yesterday as some bastard has stolen £200 from my bank account by cloning my debit card, and using it across London. It wasn’t the nicest news to get on Tuesday, (and I’m usually very vigilant about using my card).
Anyway had a bit of a wasted weekend (no surprise there) built my uncles computer for him and today I just slept and chilled infront of the TV, anyway that’s it for the catch up.
ANDY you still alive?
