This morning myself and W went for a walk around Polruan - both to get away from everybody, and to salvage at least something from the holiday.

We did the short coastal walk - about 5 miles - and added various detours onto it - one of which took us on a nature trail through various coppiced woodlands alongside the river Fowey. We were warned by my parents before setting out that it was a hard route with some big hills - for some reason it goes into one of their ears and out the other that W regularly walks half marathons, and that I cycle miles every day, and have run quite a few medium distance races recently… It goes without saying that their “big hills” were not steep or long at all.

Anyway - we now find ourselves back at the house once more, and have just had a phone call from the hospital. Dad was calling to tell us that we are setting out on the boat tomorrow at 6am (i.e. as early as sensibly possible). I’m not sure how he’s wangled that yet, but I’m sure we’ll find out later. If there’s some wind tomorrow and we get good conditions it might just still be on to reach the Scilly Islands.

I’m now keeping my fingers crossed.

It came as no surprise that following Rossi’s 10th place in Assen, he is whining about the MotoGP races being so close together. If he had been in the lead of the championships he doubtless would have kept very quiet indeed.

Last weekend confirmed everything I ever want to know about the snivelling little shit that is “Rossi”. Following a huge accident at the first corner of the spanish GP at Catalunya, 5 of the top 6 riders in the championship were knocked out of the race with either injuries or broken machinery. Rossi therefore lucked in, and trundled around for the win - which was fine. What wasn’t fine is that he then celebrated in such an arrogant fashion - holding a finger up to the crowd to signify his “number one” status… I turned the television off and found something else to do.

It’s becoming more and more clear - the people who “support” Rossi are on about the same level as people who “support” Manchester United, or Ferrari. You can infer whatever you want to.

Okay - Jim survived and is okay - he’s still in hospital while they figure out why his heart stopped, but he’s sat up, is talking to people and is otherwise fine.

His wife is staying with my parents, and (as I overheard while she used their phone earlier) she plans on staying with them for a while.

Bang goes our holiday right there.

I know it’s terrible to have this point of view, but if nothing changes by the end of the weekend, myself and W are probably going home. Bang goes several weeks of doing extra work at home and at weekends, and bang goes any chance of any holiday until September.

All I have to look forward to now are weeks, and weeks, and weeks of overtime and working weekends that I agreed to in order to have this holiday - only of course the holiday hasn’t happened.

As you can imagine, I’m not happy.

We were supposed to have been on the boat by now, sailing out of Plymouth Sound. Instead we are sat at home waiting for my parents to return from Dereford Hospital in Plymouth.

My parents had arranged for some old friends of theirs to house-sit for them while we were away sailing. They are an elderly couple, and have done the job several times in the past without incident.

They arrived just after lunchtime, and we all sat together chatting around the dinner table when the old man - Jim - suddenly became very vacant and turned white. It’s probably worth poitning out at this point that he is 79 years old, and had triple-bypass surgery some years ago.

It rapidly looked like he was having a heart attack, and everybody seemed to start doing exactly the right thing. I have to say I was impressed with the emergency services down here - within 10 minutes of making the call to the emergency services (who stayed on the phone the entire time with my Mum), first the local doctor on call arrived, then the hospital helicopter.

Myself and W raced down the drive to signal to the helicopter, and they landed in a field across the road (an amazing piece of flying, incidentally - the house is on a hillside).

Shortly after that paramedics arrived and we all got out of the way while they did their work. Well - until they wanted to get Jim to the helicopter, at which point they needed a big strong lad to help carry the stretcher.

I haven’t told the rest of the family yet, but Jim had a cardiac arrest halfway down the driveway (out of view of everybody) - we had to drop him to the ground, and they had the paddles out. It was slightly surreal seeing it “for real”, with the paramedics shouting “CLEAR” as the whine came from the machine… luckily Jim burst back into life, and we got him into the helicopter.

Mum and Dad have taken Jim’s wife to the hospital (about 25 minutes drive away) - I’m really not sure what will happen from here on in. I’ll write more later as we find out more.

I have been working on a project for work all weekend (complex programming geekery), and am finding it difficult to get it out of my head.

I just walked into town to go and get something to eat for dinner, and found myself thinking about classes, methods, and other such programming geekery for much of the time.

I’m now sat here with my third glass of wine since I switched off Visual Studio, and know that I still have some stuff to arrange for tomorrow - a 6am start to go into London and visit a client.

Perhaps it’s good that I’m going on holiday on Wednesday. Forced break. I need it.

It’s 01:00 on Saturday morning, and I have been programming all night. I am relatively pleased though - I now have a complete database wrapper class that I can use in the rest of the code I’m going to be writing this weekend.

The main aim for the weekend is to invent methods to communicate with a big database schema - so I’ve effectively built the first layer of the foundations so far. Tomorrow will be filled with diagrams, and writing of lots of methods.

Bizarrely, tonight was probably the hardest bit - because now I have the database programming done, the rest should follow relatively easily.

I’ll write more through the weekend. It’s worth pointing out that I am going to be only pretty much all weekend as I work on this stuff, so feel free to message me and annoy me :) (jonbeckett73 on Yahoo Messenger)

It’s now 22:06 and I find myself finishing up on some work that I brought home with me. Maybe time for some television, some quality time with my other half, and then turn in for the night.

This weekend is going to be filled with work. I have my new laptop from work now, so at least have a platform to use from home. The backpack I’m going to be using to transport it is big enough to mistake for a “King of the Rocket Men” backpack though…

For those interested in techie stuff, it’s a Dell Inspiron 9400 - it has a dual core processor, and 2 gig of RAM. Beyond that I don’t know much about it - other than the fact that it has an absolutely HUGE screen…

I promise to find time to write something interesting soon - honest.

I am on a course for the first few days this week (or “taking a class” as the American’s among you might better understand).

The course is for some more technical geekery - it’s for a workflow product called K2 - part of the whole Windows / SharePoint / Office juggernaut that seems to be rolling across the IT landscape at the moment.

So far in the course I’ve had a huge advantage, because I’ve seen and used the product before. Hopefully today we will move on to some elements that I know nothing about.

Anyway - I’ll try and write something interesting later when I get back.

We have just been watching “Celebrity Weakest Link” on the television, and laughing our socks off at the lack of knowledge they seem to have.

I’m not sure where they dredged the collection of so-called celebrities from - they were at best Z-list celebs - those who are known for being things like astrologers, or participants in reality television shows…

Here is a selection of the questions and their answers…

Q. What is the common name of a meteorite - a falling what ?
A. Comet

Q. What is the second letter of the word Aardvark ?
A. R

Q. Is Michael Stipe famously a vegatarian, or a rastafarian ?
A. A rastafarian

Q. What’s ten plus sixteen ?
A. 160

Can you believe those answers? We couldn’t. The scary thing is, kids look up to these people…

When I got home from work last night there was a parcel at the back door, and even though it had my name on it, I thought W must have bought something on E-Bay, and thought no more of it.

When W got home, she said “that’s parcel is a present for you…”

So - I get the scissors out and start cutting into the cardboard, and in the mass of bubblewrap, I discover a NES!!! A “Ninteno Entertainment System”. I had one of these when I was about 13 years old, and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Memories came flooding back as I dragged the lunch-box shaped machine out of the bubblewrap.

Unfortunately I’ve only got one cartridge that works for it so far - “Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour”, but I’ve already bought some more on E-Bay and am getting read for a retro gaming evening :)

I can’t actually remember what games I used to have. I know I had Duck Hunt, and Gyromite (with the robot), but I also had some latter day classics - things like Excite Bike and RC Pro Am - and Super Mario Brothers of course.

I can still remember the cult that was “Super Mario Brothers”. Kids at school used to take a pride in knowing more secrets about the game than each other, or how fast they could complete a particular level.

What fun I’m going to have over the coming days. The NES brings my museum of old games machines one step closer to completion - there are very few machines (that were available in europe) that I don’t have now… and all of it has been bought relatively cheaply on E-Bay.