Quite alot more tills

The final 100 tills have arrived making a total of 200. There's quite alot of stuff in there.

Geeky Work Stuff

So, this is my current work location for the next 4 weeks - It's an old machine room at the customer's site. We're using it because there's not many places you can lay out 200 tills. The pic only shows 100...the other 100 arrive this week.

So, it's me, the tills and my beautiful automated scripts.

I'm in need of human contact!

After the night shift

After working Friday and Saturday night 12 hour shifts and then Sunday night as a 16 hour shift, Dan came home yesterday lunchtime, shattered and ready for bed, only to realise he'd forgotten his key. Knowing that I wasn't at work at IBM, but on the customer site, he couldn't just pop in to Thorpe Park to get my key. So, completely exhausted, he had to sleep in the car!
When he woke up, he was thinking a bit more clearly, and remembered that he has a sister who lives less than a mile away, so he went over to Vanora's for tea, crisp butties (thanks Bazza) and chicken and chips (in a butty as well!).
I didn't get home until about 6:20, and poor Dan was completely cross-eyed by then. He *tried* to stay awake 'till 7, but failed. He went to bed at 6:50.
Lets hope that the 12+ hour kip over night has set his body clock right.

Working hard in Mac

This was saturday evening and we were all full of curry. Still a few days to go on the whole upgrade project. But it seems to be working. Technical info (SAP Upgrade from 4.6 to ECC 6 with a 1.4 TB database)

Penguins

Venice is famous for its glass. The first time I visited the city (back in 1996, with Sarah) we were looking in the glass shops, and couldn't believe what awful bad taste it was!!! Dreadful chandeliers and glass flowers and trees. Definitely skillfully completed, but I can't say I'd give any of it house room!
This time we both thought that some of the glass pieces were actually quite nice, there's a new style of glass making with sparkley bits in it which has a lovely effect. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of rubbish there - very expensive rubbish - but there are some bits we actually liked.
We did consider some of the plates or goblets but in the end we didn't manage to agree on an individual object (no surprise there!!)
So in order to buy *some* glass products as a memento from Venice, we bought some nice little glass pengies to add to the collection in the downstairs loo!

Venice Pics

Well I managed, with the help of norbert, to upload a couple of pics whilst we were away, but here is the official album repository.

Arrival

Wanderings

Birthday

Food & Drink (I'm going to do a blog post on the food!) Not posted yet

Dan's Knee (not posted yet)

Other bits which don't fit into a category!

Last Day in Venice

Well it's the last day – sat at Venice airport thinking it's back to work tomorrow! Can't believe it's gone so quickly. A week almost seemed too much, last Tuesday. Now it doesn't really seem like long enough at all. I'm glad we've had our time here though. Lots of relaxed wanderings without having to stress about fitting it all in. We even managed a complete DO NOTHING day, where we just read, ate, and slept. THAT'S what holidays are for!!

I hesitate to say, but I think even Dan has enjoyed this unusual city – the little bridges over canals which turn at unusual angles around (and under) medieval houses, lots of fab bars and restaurants (a superb one we found yesterday was called 'Hell's Kitchen' in behind St Mark's square; not called that because of the TV Show, but because many of their specials are flambeed at your table.) We went for the safer option, wine, and tapas-like starters.

The bar was on the corner of a canal, and like our hotel, had a canal entrance (I love that!) The pic is the view from our table – right along the canal. Fab.

Ice Cream Trouble

I've not ever had a problem eating ice-cream before but today, I managed to drop the whole of a 3 flavour cone down my front!

11th July

Birthday celebrations continued today with the 'Secret Itineraries' tour of the Doge's palace. This was something Dan booked and gave me the tickets for whilst we were at dinner yesterday. We got to walk past the long queue of people waiting for tickets and straight in to the ticket office – and exchanged our booking reference for some stickers (yay!) and our tickets into the museum, with strict instructions to be at the meeting point at 10:45.

Our guide, Elena, then got us kitted up with listening devices and then took us up to the main floors of the palace after first having explained that we were going to be up in the roof of the palace, into the secret parts of the building.

We couldn't take pictures up there (or, I guess, or it wouldn't be a secret itinerary!) but we were taken up into the roof space where there were rooms there occupied at one time by the chancellor. There was a secret courtroom, torture chambers, prison cells (where Cassanova stayed for 18 months) and an entire room built (by the Venetian shipbuilders, the Arsenalotti) to look like the inside of a ship, which was a 'copy room' where 10 copies of each document signed by the chancellor was blindly copied out by illiterate copyists – hence the content was unknown to them!

Fab – a winner Dan!

The pic shows the wall of the inside of the palace...the rooms were above the 3^rd floor windows, see the round porthole 'eyes' at the top, that is where these rooms were – noone knew.

Birthday Lunch - more info

So, birthday lunchings were at 'Osteria Da Franz' famous in Venice for the seafood dishes. Franz himself cooked and served.

For my starter I had tartre of swordfish, Dan had the baby octopus

Mains: Dan had seabass, I had fiori di zuccha stuffed with cod

In between was a pasta course which we shared – spaghetti in a tomato sauce with sweet scampi and chilli

After was a really really good tiramisu followed by killer coffee and biccies.

I had no idea until I looked on the website that loads of famous people go there! Check out Nichoas Cage!