How To Get Ahead In Mail Server Administration

Day One

Somebody is taking the piss.

Given that I received no instructions from my employers on how to get from the hotel to the building where the course is being held, and no faith in directions anyway after last night's fiasco, and given also that I have a paranoid fear of lateness, I awoke at 7 a.m. in order, after a hastily-scoffed breakfast, to run around the centre of London like a decapitated chicken asking various startled coppers where the hell Middlesex Street was. Having staggered about in large circles in a state of utter bewilderment for the best part of an hour, only to find that the course was being held two doors down from the hotel (aaargh), I collapsed in a sorry heap in the lobby and begged the receptionist for a large espresso like a dying vaquero gasping for water in the desert. This was at 8:55. Five minutes to spare, hurrah!

At 9:45 my fellow students and I were still sat on our bums in the canteen (well, I say "canteen" but what I really mean is "poorly-lit, sparsely-furnished hallway with a defunct coffee machine in it"), wondering whether the instructors had decided, in a sudden fit of socialist sympathy, to throw in their lot with the train operators and go on strike as well. Having missed a goodly part of the morning session, we scooted at breakneck speed through the introductory material, thus ensuring that the slower pupils among us (not me, obviously, as I am extra-clever) have no idea what is going on, which I feel is an excellent foundation for the rest of the week's work.

Lunch, in Central London, involves either (a) spending twenty smackers on a cup of tarcoffee and a small, limp sandwich which looks as though it's been in someone's boot for a month, or (b) buying something decent from a supermarket and eating it outside, which necessitates a constant skyward vigilance against precision-guided pigeon-offerings.

Update: The afternoon has, by contrast, consisted mostly of exercises which state "45 minutes to complete" but which, unless you have the intellect of a bowl of porridge, can safely be done in fifteen, allowing me to do more interesting things such as type this splurge you are reading. I await tomorrow with bated breath.

I am absolutely knackered. I spent the best part of five hours last night travelling about 100 miles. No, it's nothing to do with the top speed of the Pastamobile, benighted lump of scrap-metal though it is. The M40 (the main motorway between London and the West Midlands) was like a car park; it would in fact have been quicker to park on the hard shoulder outside Oxford and walk to London. Having made it to Heathrow at about 9:30 I took a cab to the Tube station (8 quid), and then sat in a train for 45 minutes next to a large and smelly man from Eastern Europe whose idea of fun on a Sunday evening was to expound his views on London, the war, English beer, women's underwear and life in general, in a loud and obnoxious voice, letting out the occasional fragrant burp for emphasis. Then, as if the evening's early events had only been playing a warm-up gig for some real heavyweight rock-legend bastard occurrences, the Central line was closed, preventing me from getting to Fenchurch Street by train. Hence, another 9 quid was spent on a taxi to Fenchurch Street. Then the hotel turned out not to be on Fenchurch Street at all, as promised by the nice lady on the front desk, but in Liverpool Street, which happy discovery occasioned a decreasingly serene journey on foot for half an hour, as all the taxi-drivers had by this stage given up and gone to bed. I finally arrived at the hotel at 11:45, in an advanced state of annoyance and smelling like someone who has been liberally shat on by a flock of pigeons. I am now taking bets on how long it will take me to get back home on Thursday. The reserve is three hours but I expect lively bidding.

Well, the Pointy-Haired Ones have me signed up for this four-day course in London, where I will be learning how to manage mail servers. What fun, I said to myself upon hearing the news, given that I've been managing the mail servers for almost six months. What foresight, especially considering that they refused to send me on the same course six months ago and I've been flying by the seat of my pants ever since. Anyway, they've put me up at this travel inn in the middle of the City, right? Okay. It's a travel inn. (A motel, for non-Brits/Aussies.) Does it have parking? Does it my arse. Are there any helpfully proximate public carparks? Yes, if you don't mind walking from Guildford. So, think I, I will get a train. The much-maligned British railway system may not be what it used to be, it may be a fading shadow of its former steam-driven glory, but by God it is still British and that's good enough for me, eh what? No bloody chance; every train company which runs from Warwick to London is on strike today. Just today, when I have to get there. Bumholes to the lot of them.

So, this is the current plan:

1) Drive to Heathrow (about 1.5 hours)
2) Stash the Pastamobile in the long-stay carpark
3) Take the shuttle bus to Terminal 2 (20 minutes)
4) Walk to the Tube station (20 minutes)
5) Take the Tube to Liverpool Street (about an hour)
6) Walk to the hotel (the receptionist said 10 minutes, which means 25)

This mission to be undertaken whilst carrying a company laptop roughly the shape and weight of twenty bricks (and with approximately the same degree of useful functionality), plus enough clothing to cover a quick Antarctic expedition (I am a compulsive packer). We will be timing you, Private.

Everyone else is doing it, so why can't I? A submission for Adrian Bedford's Truly Horribly Wretchedly Awful Novel Synopsis competition:

Burning Wings at Sunrise

Sally Rivers, a struggling young New York writer, is working on her first science-fiction novel, in which a race of aliens from another dimension have infiltrated human society in preparation for a planetary takeover, a story about which she has had strange, haunting dreams since childhood. With the help of Tex Cassidy, a rugged, hard-drinking, maverick investigative geophysicist on the edge, she finds out that her writer's block is due to massive electromagnetic interference with her brainwaves, emanating from a giant nest of pigeons on the roof of her apartment building. They discover to their horror that pigeons are in fact transdimensional energy-based lifeforms bent on the conquest of Earth, and that her novel, seen by the pigeons as an attempt to warn her species, is being deliberately suppressed. In a desperate race against time, she enlists the aid of the pelicans, another alien species who have protected Earth from the ravages of the evil pigeons for millenia. In the final apocalyptic showdown, she uncovers her own hidden powers as the Pigeon Queen, born a pigeon but hidden inside a human body by rebel pigeons, and in a selfless, suicidal act of heroism, destroys the pigeon mothership from within by converting her body into pure energy in a cataclysmic thermonuclear explosion.


Less than zero chance of publication for that one, methinks.

Still having considerable difficulty attaining the horizontal nature. My brain, poor fevered organ that it is, refuses to serve last orders before midnight at the latest, and often insists on staying up drinking with its friends Liver and Pancreas until 2 or 3 a.m. Consequently I'm developing a noticeable tendency to twitch, mumble involuntarily, and occasionally drop off during the working day. Short of some impromptu chemical abuse (e.g. a swig of Mr. Daniel's finest and an antihistamine) I still can't see how I'm going to get some decent kip. Hey... it's just like being a student again! Always did my best work after midnight. Well, okay, my only work.

I've just spent my lunchtime listening to a whole load of perfectly ordinary-sized people moaning about their weight and discussing their favourite diets. The choice is as near to endless as one is likely to be able to shake a stick at. The current front-runner appear to be the "Atkins Diet", which I am told involves stuffing your face with as much protein as your poor, overworked digestive tract can handle, whilst avoiding the tiniest morsel of carbohydrate like the plague.

To which I say, frankly, bollocks.

If you are seriously overweight, fine. If you are so enormous that you have started generating your own gravitational field just in order to allow chocolate bars to orbit you within easy reach, fine. If you have a genuine eating disorder, fair enough. You are all entitled. Otherwise, sod off and have a plate of chips. It is not going to kill you.

Aspiring dieters: I've got one for you. It is called the Hermit Diet, and it goes something like this:

Day 1
Breakfast: 1 slice toast, margarine, anchovy paste
Lunch: Rare steak with sauteed onions
Dinner: Stuffed chillies with garlic pesto

Day 2
Breakfast: Fried onion hash browns
Lunch: Deep-fried Stilton cheese with garlic dip
Dinner: Cabbage soup with spring onion croutons

Day 3
Breakfast: Roasted garlic cloves with smoked kippers
Lunch: Garlic fricassee with raw onion garnish
Dinner: Fillet of garlic with baked bean dressing

...and so on. The Hermit Diet has several obvious advantages:

1) You will be immune to vampires.
2) You will be assured a high vitamin and mineral intake.
3) You will smell like a week-dead donkey and no-one will come within fifty yards of you, which will spare them the ordeal of having to listen to your whining.

[sits back and waits for the searing flames of retribution]

Pigeons, right? Pigeons are phenomenally stupid things. They really are. I've just been watching one for the last ten minutes. It's been repeatedly leaping up and flying straight into a large and pretty solid-looking tree outside my office window, landing in a heap and a small puff of feathers, shaking its head and looking stoned for a couple of seconds and then doing it all over again. Is the tree inadvertently trespassing on its territory, and therefore the pigeon is trying to frighten it off? Is it trying to soften the tree with its head in a sudden fit of woodpecker species envy? Alternative suggestions are welcome.

Anyone familiar with snowboarding will either know, or not know, that when you achieve a certain level of proficiency at it, you can start trying out trick jumps. These are given names, such as "Chicken Salad Air", "Stalefish" or "Canadian Bacon", which are assigned by the Unnecessarily Exotic Jargon Association of America, are often related to food, and don't look anything like the trick being performed. This is important. For example, a "Mute Air" involves grabbing the front of the board and wiggling a bit, whereas you would expect it to involve leaping in the air with one hand cupped to your ear, shouting, "Eh??" Ludicrous, I know.

Well, anyway, having been boarding for a few months now I decided last week to upgrade my status from Beginner to Lunatic and attended a jump session at the local snowdome, the difference being that they put up a couple of rails and three little ramps on the slope for people to jump off. Lemon squeezy, I hear you cry. Yes, provided that you don't try frantically to stop halfway up the biggest ramp while travelling at 40mph because some pillock in flash new snowboarding gear has decided to wander gormlessly in front of it. In the event, I landed flat on my back and lay serenely enjoying the sensation of my lower vertebrae puncturing my back muscles for a few minutes, before dragging my sorry carcass off to the kiddies' slope to be laughed at by four-year-olds.

There is a happy twist to this tale; apparently my innovative manoeuvre has been accepted as a new trick by the UEJAA, and has tentatively been named the Psycho Gerbil Mangler. I am reliably informed that this makes the pain worthwhile.

Okay.

Having been (a) persuaded that I should try my hand at this blog stuff by someone who looks vaguely like a seal, and (b) nagged by my dad to try writing a book for, oh, I dunno, about 10 years, I thought I'd give the first option a go to start with and see what happens. All aboard the HMS Delusions Of Grandeur, please; give your tickets to the giant otter in the purser's uniform on the way in and don't forget, the dining cabin serves fresh seafood pasta at eight o'clock sharp, and it is very good.

The blog options pages on this thing are a real eye-opener. A Midaean wealth of settings from which to choose! A veritable feast of pointy, clicky, taggy and brackety things, lightly basted in a fine Java sauce and served with a medium-bodied HTML Sauvignon. Delicious. Now if I can only get the poxy thing to work, I will dance a little jig of joy.