My off-day

bram.usThe day started quite roughly with a headache from here to Tokyo. Although I didn’t do anything special last night (read: alcohol) it was there and quite heavy. I only went to the movie theater the night before (“Hannibal Rising”) and got home quite early … maybe the headache was a sign?

White noise

And yes, it was a sign as I found out about fifteen minutes later. Whilst cruising to work on the mental autopilot and taking in a rather slow car I noticed a white vehicle parked in a rather odd angle on the right curb. “Hmmz, could that be a poli..” *FLASH*.

Flits!

Frick on a stick! After a year and a half of driving without any tickets they caught me speeding … and just at the moment whilst taking in a car!

Several meters further I saw a cop jump on the road holding up his hand and was told to pull over.

  • C : License and registration please
  • B : [searching] … this paper too?
  • C : Jips, that one too

  • C : You know why we pulled you over sir?
  • B : Erm … I guess I was driving too fast.
  • C : Yes indeed your were. Any guess fast you were going?
  • B : I think about 100 km/h
  • C : 106 to be exact
  • B : *tripple frick!*
  • C : Ever gotten a ticket for speeding before?
  • B : Nopes, the first time today sir
  • C : Let’s see … that’ll be € 50 + (36 * € 5) you’ll have to pay. We’ll send you the ticket.
  • B : *Wow*

After that he handed me a card with the rates on and I was allowed to go. Whilst looking at those rates I noticed I was rather lucky … had the cop car stood 20 meters further I surely would have been caught driving 110 or more. When driving 40 km/h faster than allowed, they are obliged to take away your drivers license (don’t know for how long) and send you to court.

What were you planning on doing today?

After having finally arrived at work and having our little daily speed-meeting dubbed “De Ochtendspits” I set off to finishing 3 projects by the end of the day (the end of the month you know). However, it didn’t take long for other stuff to break in … Since I have the mailing software we use installed on my pc, I got asked quite a few times to apply a fix here, do a fix there, implement that, etc. in a mailing. After each fix the mailing was sent out a test-list from whom more feedback was received mail after mail. Problem here were the special characters that didn’t get encoded properly.

Other sidetracks of the day were:

  • Our server all of the sudden had a hiccup or three due to some service going to 100% CPU (got it fixed after quite an extensive search)
  • Addition of a few more sites to our server and removing some old ones, along with some other server maintenance
  • Our daily Trackmania Nations session during lunch-break 😛
  • The live pushing, setting folder access privileges correctly (had to find that out since I didn’t make those projects and the colleagues already were gone ‘with the wind”) and exporting the databases from our inprogress server to our live server and bumping into an mysql 4.1 <> 4.0 inconsistency
  • Helping out some colleagues with their projects an revising some of their code
  • Some phone calls

As you can see I was quite busy today and started going a bit nuts of all the shizzle getting in the way of my 3 main projects of the day

What did you do today?

At 6.30 I called it today and went home (driving a sharp 70, not 1 km/h faster) only having finished 1.5 out of the 3 projects I had to do today … a bit disappointing since I know I would have gotten there without the other shizzle; but hey, tomorrow a new day, not?

B!

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Unless noted otherwise, the contents of this post are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and code samples are licensed under the MIT License

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3 Comments

  1. Made it on to the camera again today, whilst calmly driving to work 🙁

    Some progress though: was driving 79 … that’s a decline (thus improvement!) of 25%. The ticket will even decline with 63%, resulting in 50 euro.

    Think I’ll be driving a sharp 70 next time cos’ that’s already 235 euro down the drain this month :S

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