1 Mar 1999 (Monday) 

Today has been shopping day so we've bought lots of stuff and spent a little money (obviously!). Other than that nothing much has happened except Matthew has got the telly working in my room now (thanks) and I cut my finger whilst washing the knives (typical, huh ?!).

Computer-wise, you don't want to know. Newsbase has been increasingly unstable and is 'nearly' at the point at which I'm going to ditch it. I'm trying out MessengerPro as check to see what it's like. I'm not sure I like it so far but tomorrow I'll try to have a proper look at it.

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2 Mar 1999 (Tuesday) 

I had a very weird dream last night that Julian was getting married to some girl and I thoroughly disapproved, especially as they wanted to get married across the bar at the Inn and didn't care if it was done legally, just that it was done in kind. She seemed quite nice - kind of a cross between Angela and the girl in the dream a few nights ago. For some reason the party was dispersed and we were being pursued by a number of people who wanted to do something medical that didn't seem appealing.

The chase seems to have been set in the stylised version of Essex university that tends to crop up in my dreams. That's the one that has a maze of pretty hedgeways and statuettes as you approach it from Boundary Road on foot; it also has older centre buildings but then nothing much ever happens around the buildings so that's not of much consequence.

I do remember that this girl called me her Brother-in-law which was odd (well it would be!) and that Julian was incredibly talkative (which isn't unnormal but seemed it for the situation).

I have a feeling that it's partly triggered by thinking about Suzanne recently and partly by the fact that I'm generally quite lonely and it's a 'worry' that Julian will find someone before I do. If you see what I mean. If you're not me then it won't make much sense and since I'm me, you're not.

I've had a little more of a chance to play with MessengerPro now. It's actually rather nice aside from the message icons in the main window which I don't personally like. It's certainly got a lot more features that I like than the old version. Unless something goes seriously wrong I think I'll keep using the new version. Fingers crossed .

At least I've redesigned the icons to make them bareable now. The first set I did were 'ok', but didn't show up the 'replied to' message too well, but now they work quite well. Well, I think so.

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3 Mar 1999 (Wednesday) 

Nothing much happened today. Played a little Network Doom+, Heretic, and Hexen. Hot water was fixed. Matthew went home to sort his computer out, Andrew's still at home for various reasons. Nothing much else really. Watched Buffy and X-Files though.

Oh, and I rang Helen to tell her that I've settled into my new house. She did mention to me that it's now March which reminded me to update the diary archives accordingly.

I think it was today that I did auto-fading on the DarkHorse screen savers. To my mind they look quite impressive when you do this.

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4 Mar 1999 (Thursday) 

I'm on my own for most of today, so I was going to make use of my time by fixing some things on the computer that need doing. That said, I actually ended up writing a HangFire variant for the RO4 screensaver system. I'm not sure how much people use this, but Andrew likes it so I've done it. Next should be Delirium, but I think that's not going to be such an easy job.

Angela rang today, wishing me well with my new job and hoping that I'd settled in well. We spent ages chatting and I think it annoyed the other two a little because of it. Sorry.

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6 Mar 1999 (Saturday) 

Well, I've actually started my new job with RISCOS Ltd now, so I can tell people. Erm... there's not much more I can say really though is there. I've got to memorise all the source, so I've not got time to write diary entries!

Yay! Acorn Gaming have given Heretic and Hexen a full 5 star rating which is very, very pleasing .

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11 Mar 1999 (Thursday) 

As you may have guessed, I'm too tired to write up diary entries at the moment. Maybe at the weekend I'll write something...

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12 Mar 1999 (Friday) 

You know how some days you just feel like you're in a film ? Well, this is going to make no sense, but I feel like a whole section of my life was just a film that has been plucked out and played to the masses. I know that sounds odd, but it's weird to see so much of someone on television and wonder what is real and what is an illusion. When you see something like that, it's just... well, odd... there's nothing more you can say about it...

And all I'm left wondering is how much I was a fantasy and it was all a game. I know I'm prone to bouts of paranoia, but this is just eirie. It really is just too wierd.

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16 Mar 1999 (Tuesday) 

Doom has had a few new improvements since it was last worked on that I've not noted down here. Most notably you can now name players in the game so their messages appear 'correct' when you kill them (or they you). No more of this Green has killed Indigo; we've now got more useful messages like Matthew has killed Justin, or Justin committed suicide which gives a much better impression whilst playing the game. The main problem now is that you can't easily tell which colour is which player, but I'll come up with a way around that soon.

I've also knocked up a very quick desktop ID3 editor. It's nothing special, but it works.

A late addition to Doom is now that it can tell you how many times players have been killed (as well as their colour) if you so wish. This makes network games much more interesting as you can keep a record of how badly you are doing .

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18 Mar 1999 (Thursday) 

RISCOS Ltd can now confirm that Serial Doom works just as well as UDP Doom, albeit for only two players . A new feature added to Doom today that makes it about 50% cooler in network games, making network games about twice as good as they used to be before features began being added.

Someone was asking about ReformC in the newsgroups, so I've stuck that on my pages too. I hope it will be of some help to them, or someone anyhow.

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24 Mar 1999 (Wednesday) 

Nothing interesting happened today, except we played with NFS a little.

Yesterday I was quite annoyed that Kira was intending to charge people for continuing the work on RealAudio that we had started. It had always been my intent that the entire source would be freely available to all, but her posting implied that she wanted money for doing work based on what we had freely contributed.

However, after discussing it with her last night on IRC, we've found that we are going for the same kind of thing and it was merely that she wanted to continue work from the free sources at the stage we left them. Consequently the Source Code is now freely available and anybody can continue with it.

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26 Mar 1999 (Friday) 

Ok, I feel really awful tonight. I managed to send a large attachment to one of the Zap mailing lists and probably pissed off a large number of people because of it. I have absolutely no idea why I was stupid enough to reply to the list, but that's where it went :-(

Oh well!

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