The meeting goes well and fairly quickly, and I’m left with three hours to kill before my late train back. I’d much rather get open returns, but one must always count the pennies when dealing with expense claims!

I figure that it wouldn’t be too much of a wait if I made my way over to St Pancras, and sip a couple of quiet ones at the Baby Betjeman, where I could use the wireless and get on with some stuff. So, I make my way back across town and just miss the 5pm mad-dash – which was nice.

However, disaster strikes. The Baby Betjeman is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it lies in peace. Well. It’s closed, anyhow. All that’s left is the giant parasol and a chalk noticeboard saying that they’ve closed up because the ‘proper’ Betjeman pub is nearing completion – at the end of April! Bollocks.

The only other option is the on-platform ‘Champagne Bar’, which is entirely as pretentious as it sounds. I find a seat by the bar and order a cup of tea, in true British stiff-upper-lip style. However, tea doesn’t last 2 hours and curiosity gets the better of me, and after supping my (rather bland) tea I take a look at the drinks menu.

This place sure does sell a lot of plonk. For obvious reasons, though, they only sell a few varieties by the glass – meaning that if you want to sample an 1990 Krug, you’ll be stumping up a few hundred quid for a bottle. There is nothing non-Champagne-related on the menu, apart from a couple of sparkling wines.

Madness and boredom takes me, and I order a ten-quid glass of Bollinger. The cheapest Champagne on the menu – something I’ve never heard of, and likely to taste of cat’s piss – is £7.50 a glass. I figure if I go with a ‘name’ I’ve heard of, it’ll at least taste good while I’m struggling to get over the cost. It is, actually, very nice – but worth £10 for a single glass? I think not.

It’s only after I order and drink my Bolly (darling!) that I notice that some other people at the bar appear to be drinking lager. At least, they’re drinking something that looks like lager out of large goblets. I double-check the menu, and no – there’s no lager or beer on there anywhere.

When the barman (or, more probably a ‘Champagne Waiter’) asks me if I would like another drink, I ask for a lager. He replies, somewhat nonchalantly that they do not have any lager. I gesture over to two guys clearly drinking lager and express my disbelief in his assertion. “Oh, zaht is zee beer, made from zee Champagne”.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Beer? From Champagne? You what? I tell him I’ll have one, even if just to see what the hell it really is. It turns out to be Kasteel Cru, a lager brewed with ‘Champagne Yeast’. “Made from Champagne” is stretching it quite a bit – but, it’s only £3.75 and for fizzy (naturally!) lager it’s not too bad.

Speaking of stretching the truth – I noticed that the Champagne bar at St. Pancras claims to be – with no hint of irony whatsoever – “the longest Champagne bar in Europe”. This is fine, except for one thing.

The bar, itself, is a small square – there are four seats at each side. It is, by no definition of the term – ‘long’. Evidently, I’m not the only person to notice this and a fellow Kasteel Cru drinker pipes up and asks a waiter. The response is that it’s the length of the seating area – which runs down a fair length of one of the platforms which makes it the longest. There’s tenuous links and there’s tenuous links… really!

On the train back I watch the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-laden new movie – “No Country For Old Men”. It is everything I hoped that “There Will Be Blood” would be – full of suspense, mystery and damned fine acting.

Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as the pathos-driven local Sheriff, and – who-da-thunk-it – Josh Brolin can act, playing the hunted ‘man in the wrong place at the wrong time’ – but the show is totally, and utterly stolen by Javier Bardem’s psychotic hitman, Anton Chigurh.

If there’s a list of top movie psychopaths, then Anton is right up there with Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci, Goodfellas), Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet) and Hannibal Lecter. Woody Harrelson and Trainspotting debutee Kelly MacDonald provide excellent supporting parts. The only let down is the ending, which is disappointingly inconclusive.

Up fairly early as I have a long day today – travelling down to London for an overnighter. It is, by happy coincidence (as these things often are!) also LONAP‘s 10th Birthday Party this evening too, at The Old Bank of England on Fleet Street.

The train journey is uneventful, and I’m sure the 3G service that I use (O2) is getting worse. I manage to sustain a connection for a few minutes, but the signal is so shonky that by the time I’m at Chesterfield it’s gone. I can’t even connect up directly on my phone. Crap. So, I spend most of the journey guiding Birmingham City through the mires of a underachieving Premiership season in Football Manager 2008. I wonder how long it’ll be before the board get sick of me and give me the boot?

The afternoon meeting I have scheduled with our datacentre account manager is pushed back until tomorrow, which is both a blessing and a pain – but it gives me some time to catch up with work, before heading across the city to Temple station for this ‘do’.

Networking, in the social sense, that is, is something I’ve never ever been any good at. I think it’s a trait that most geeks share – there are comparatively few technical people who’re comfortable in these situations. Which makes the LONAP Birthday Party quite an odd event – a room full of geeks with poor social skills attempting to ‘network’! It’s largely unfounded though – after a few ESB’s people’s tongue’s loosen and even I manage to ‘mingle’ and spread the love for the behalf of my employers. It’s a good night, and I make my way back at about 11:30, somewhat inebriated.

In days gone by, I’d tick off beers I’d tried in the official programme with a pen or pencil, and scribble a score out of 10 next to the beer. I utilised my technological wonder that is my E90 and jotted some notes for each beer along with a score.

Started with one from the Sheffield Brewery Company and tried their “Seven Hills” – a very hoppy light ale which is the sister ale of their “Five Rivers”. I scored it 6/10. Too light in colour and hop-heavy for me.

Then tried the Acorn “Old Moor Porter”, hoping for deep Porter flavours, but instead found it to have a very ‘Bacony’ taste on the tongue and didn’t really enjoy it. 5/10

Moved into the St George’s room and sampled a Fuller’s HSB – I’m a massive fan of their ESB, but HSB – their acquisition from taking over Gales’ brewery in 2005 – had been an unknown to me until now. It’s an excellent premium ale, and a solid 8/10.

I then moved into my most familiar territory – stouts and porters – and enjoyed an excellent (9/10) Wentworth Oatmeal Stout, followed by an exceptionally quaffable ‘Cumbrian Legendary Ales’ (sorry, no website) ‘Craife Crier’ porter. Anything described as ‘sherberty funky malt’ simply has to be tried, at least once! Legendary indeed – I could drink this stuff until it drips out of my ears! Dangerously drinkable at 5% – very easy drinking. 10/10.

Moved into the ‘Midlands’ room and chose a Red Rock Brewery’s “Humber Mild”, which is a lovely tasty mild with porter pretenses. 8/10

Time is being called at the bars for a dinnertime break, so I ask the nearest barman for his choice – he hands me a Butcombe IPA. IPA’s aren’t usually my bag, but this is sublime with no bitter aftertaste at all. 8/10.

We try our hands at the tombola, and I win a prize! A Theakston’s T-Shirt, two sizes too small. Damn. Oh well, Emma can wear it in bed!

We decamp to the identikit Wetherspoons-style bar next door to grab a bite to eat whilst the festival restocks for the big Saturday evening session. This proves to be a bridge too far for me – and I end up throwing up half of the ‘Surf and Turf’ I’ve ordered. Utter crap. I do enjoy asking for rare steak and recieving some frazzled to a crisp crap instead!

The pub is so busy/poor (delete as appropriate) that there’s no cutlery, and Ian resorts to stealing cutlery from a CRIPPLE to fill his belly. Deplorable.

We return to the festival and I try an Elland Brewery “Nettlethrasher” which isn’t half as interesting as it sounds, and turns out to be fairly average session bitter.

I then try a Thornbridge ‘Voland’ porter. It’s 8% and tastes every inch of it. It’s thick, dark and very strong. 7/10.

Last, but by no means least is a quick trip to the continental beers tent, and a dabble with a Huyghe Delerium Nocturnum, which is the famous Delerium Tremens’ stronger brother – fantastic. Amazingly drinkable for such powerful brews – 9%. 8/10.

Before we leave, I decide it’s a great idea to suppliment my free T-shirt and get one in my size, and one for Aimee – so I spank 20 quid on T-shirts. These are the silly things you do at a beer festival, then.

We stop off at the Hillsborough Hotel on the way home for a couple – their selection is disappointingly ‘pale’ – with no strong or dark ales on offer. We leave around 10:30pm, and taxi it home. A good day, and, definitely, time for bed.

My job, managing a team of sysadmins, DBAs and support staff for ‘a large internet retailer’ means that I get to be the lucky punter whose phone number appears on DNS WHOIS records. This is something that ICANN stipulate should always be present in WHOIS data, and as a responsible retailer, we provide a working, real number. It happens to be mine.

These details are ostensibly a ‘Technical Contact’ – supposedly used by other internet professionals to report issues and other operational problems with that particular domain name. The trouble is, I get a fair amount of non-technical calls from it. Everything from customers wanting to place orders, to returns, to complaints, to Chinese people wanting to sell us stock, to recruitment agencies wanting to sell us people. Everything. Everything, that is, except Technical issues.

It got so bad a while ago that I got our phone guy to record a polite message which gets played before the phone rings at my end, which tells callers exactly what this number is for. It even gives them our dedicated Customer Services number. This is great, and the number of ‘fake’ calls has dropped significantly, but we still get people ringing through wanting anything other than technical assistance.

For some, I guess it’s that they think they’ve found some ‘magic’ number into the company, which will bypass any form of queuing and will get their order-related problem dealt with quicker. This is wrong! We can be as sympathetic as possible with reference to any problem, but, unfortunately – ultimately – we can’t actually help. Really, we can’t. The best we can do is to transfer you to our Customer Services team, and you’ll land right at the back of the queue.

Others seem to use the line as a backdoor into the company, even saying things like “Oh, I know this is the wrong department, but could you please transfer me to your ‘X’ department” – If you actually needed that department in the first place, you’d have a number. Don’t call me, I won’t put you through.

From a frustrated customer’s point of view, I can see the logic – you ain’t getting the result you want from regular CS, and any other method is viewed as a possible other route into the company. It’s something I’ve experienced myself – with the likes of BT and Barclays. Someone’s fucked up and dropped the ball, and you want answers. The trouble is, it’s almost always a fruitless exercise – all you end up is angrier and no further on in your quest to solve whatever clusterfuck has happened.

In short, don’t do it. Please.

Ended up working a little late and got home after Aimee’s bedtime. A depressingly frequent occurrence. Today, I’ve spent only around an hour with her this morning when she got up, and for most of that, she was bouncing on the bed, and, invariably – on my head. Her energy first thing in the morning puts us both to shame, when we wake up bleary-eyed and unable to crawl out of bed in the morning. Perhaps I should take something from it, really.

We agreed that I’d give Emma a lie-in in the morning, and deal with Aimee when she woke, which I did, but because I’m working on-call today I got dragged to my laptop at about 9am when Nagios told me that something was broken at work, so I had to disturb Emma for her to look after Aimee.

Aimee is such a handful now. She’s walking, and by God does she want to use those legs. She runs round the house like crazy, and being on her feet – it brings a _lot_ more into her reach than ever before. She got an absolute shedload of toys for Christmas, but does she want to play with them? No. No, She wants to paddle in the dog’s water bowl, or swing on the tv unit door, or repeatedly switch the damn tv off!

As it turned out, the work issue was a non-issue, so I resumed parenting duties and let Emma have a relax until 11-ish, when I got called out once more. A real issue this time, at least!

Emma prepared a gorgeous lamb dinner, and we had cheesecake for pud. The Jersey gold double cream dolloped onto the cheesecake was nothing short of amazing.

When we returned from my mam’s yesterday, the boot of the RX8 was chock-full of presents, clothes and all of Aimee’s paraphernalia. _Too_ chock-full, as it happens, as I discovered when I unloaded yesterday to find that a virtually full tin of SMA Progress powdered milk had popped open all over the contents of the boot. Cue twenty minutes today spent hoovering it all out. Bah.

Also fitted Emma’s new stereo to her car. She’s been missing a CD player in her car for ages, so I picked up on her (unsubtle!) hints and bought her a Sony MEX-BT2500 CD player for Christmas. It’s quite a nifty toy – having Bluetooth as well, making it an excellent hands-free phone system in the car, as well as a CD player!

I’m a bit annoyed about the Halfords fascia that I had to buy for the CD player – Skoda, like nearly every other car manufacturer, like their head-units to be uniquely shaped. So when one buys an after-market unit, one has to buy the associated piece of plastic to fill the gap left by the old stereo. This piece of plastic Halfrauds manage to get away with selling for FIFTEEN QUID. Madness.

Had the last of my Christmas beers – an ESB and an ever-dependable Old Peculiar whilst watching the depressing mess that was Spurs’ 2-1 away defeat at Villa. Berbatov looked totally disinterested, as he has done virtually all season, and I feel resigned to the fact that the stories about him being off to the Chavs or to United might bear some truth. I’ll be fucking pissed off if we sell him to another English team. It’s one thing to sell off your star players, but selling them to another team in your league is something that only ‘selling clubs’ do. Being a ‘selling club’ is something Spurs have tried desperately hard to escape from – refusing to sell Berbatov in the summer, and holding United to ransom over Carrick until they coughed up an extortionate fee. I’d rather we sold him to Real for £25m, than to the fucking chavs for £35m. Well, we’ll see. All I ask in the mid-season transfer window is; Juande, Daniel, Damien, whoever is in charge of buying players these days – for Christ’s sake buy us an EXPERIENCED centre-back and someone, anyone, anywhere, with a left foot. A creative midfielder wouldn’t half be good too. Thanks.

I bought myself an Xbox 360 over the Christmas period – it wasn’t a Christmas present, well, other than to myself, but I found myself quite taken with some of the games found on this platform. The PS3 is just too damned expensive, and I already have a Wii – which Emma enjoys, but I find the games a little _too_ cartoony and lacking in depth. Sure, flinging the Wiimote around is fun, for a while, but playing something like Medal of Honor with a Wiimote and Nunchuck is more than a little frustrating. Plus, we’ve got this nice HD plasma TV, and it’d be nice to have something that took advantage of the HD part of the TV. So, I plumped for an Xbox 360 ‘Arcade’, which was _way_ cheaper than a PS3, and does omit a hard drive, but these are readily and cheaply available on eBay. The money ‘saved’ on buying the cheap version was quickly spanked on games – the bundle I bought had Forza Motorsport 2, Viva Pinata and an extra wireless controller – and to that I added FIFA 2008, and pre-owned versions of Halo 3, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Dead or Alive 4. Emma thinks I’m mad, and it’s a waste – which is possibly true, but, hey, you’re only young once. Eh?

TTFN.