Sorry, too tired for a diary entry today.
Nothing special happened today though. I tried ringing Helen. She had the
mobile turned off. See, told you there was nothing special.
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Note: This entry has been modified to correct a temporal mistake that I
do not wish to perpetuate (it complicates the 'forward chronology'
generation). Essentially a mistake in the date processing code left '16 Oct
2067' as the date on this entry and as it was amusing I retained it as the
date in the form '16 Oct 2067 28 Sep 1999'. Because this is a
non-standard use of my day entry, I've now abandoned that and we just have a
regular entry. This note purely indicates the nature of this change - it's
not actually relevant within the diary's content anyhow.
I found out that a new version of Slige is out (474). Ported that tonight.
It took longer to diff the changes (49 minutes!) from the last version to
this one than to produce the diffs and patch my changes in - Dave Chess did
loads of work it looks like! The reason I wanted diffs from 464 to 474 was
purely to see if there were any interface changes that meant I needed to change
the front end. Since there aren't it's going out as is.
Hopefully Resolver is now stable again after I've removed my numeric's code
now - I'll return to that at some point, but I've misunderstood something
fundamental I think. Internet BootP is now very cool; it should basically pass
on the results to Resolver which will then extract the data it needs. Since
the routes have already been set up by BootP, the actual work needed to boot
off a remote machine is trivial - a simple call to ioctl. I may even update it
to do that from a *Command.
Can't really say much else for today; we're looking for another house. That's
fun. Um... Erm... Oh, and I'm still transferring the power supply home and back
- my parent's died last week, so I've had to replace it with mine.  Until
I get mine fixed I'll just cope with nicking it each night.
I've got this little PDF file for the 6811 stuff to decode at some point. Not
tonight though. And probably not tomorrow - that's Ally McBeal night, so I
guess it'll have to be Thursday.
Matthew wants playlists in AMPlayer frontend. I'm not sure I can really be
bothered to add it though, because I'm just too lazy  .
Anyhow, I've got to get some diffs for Dave Chess ready I guess... Should
just be a case of running the MakeDiffs script and watching as it churns out
a little file of diffs.
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I fixed the ShareFS bug today. Need I say more ?
Oh, and someone found the cookie. Which was very cool . Well, someone
other than John Tytgat who found it far too quickly. And Dave and Richard,
but they're testing it daily, so they don't count (for these purposes!)
either.
I've had a quick play with converting the motasm docs to StrongHelp today
too. Which was quite fun. Well, if you like that kind of thing - which I do
 .
Nothing done on CMunge because of all of that. I'll probably look at it
tomorrow or the day after .
I was wondering today about adding a 'checkpoint' file to ControlAMPlayer.
That would make it possible to reboot the computer and have the music continue
from approximately the location it stopped.
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Nothing much today; I was just too tired. Some more things in Doom 'tiny'ed
and a ControlAMPlayer now fades out when you skip tracks.
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Nothing much today really. Had a litle chat to Peter. That's about it really.
Mostly this entry is short because I can't think of anything interesting to
say (no change there then!). Oh, ndirect have broken their pop server, so I've
no mail at home at the moment.
Oh, I added 'tiny text' to Doom, so you can now have the HUD messages
displayed at 1bpp.
Coo... Just remembered, I wrote a FreeCell script for SPatience too. That's
really quite neat .
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I'll be brief with the entry tonight. Two SCL bugs fixed - qsort and strcoll.
A few bugs in Doom fixed - quite how they got into 2.05 and weren't spotted
by anyone until now (well about a week ago) I've no idea. Sometimes I wonder
if people actually try things... and then I wonder why they've tried
some silly things. Oh well...
Coo. I got two nice emails today - one from Dominic, who I knew from Methwold,
and another one from Sue... It's odd - why all of a sudden have people decided
to contact me socially (if you can say that for email) ?
The bugs list has kinda exploded now - because of the link on the RISCOS site, people have started mailing
it. Basically this means that our policy of 'answer what people ask' has had
to be revised to the planned but never used 'ignore anything that's not from
registered or semi-commercial developers until you're not busy'. As a result
of the fact that we're quite busy, the list has filled quite rapidly.
Speaking of the website, I got to see the new jigsaw bits on that; they look
very cool, I think. Oh, and there's a nice version of Webite - well one that
works anyhow - available now. When I say works, I means 'works with the BSD
sockets interface' because it would be unfair to say it didn't previously.
On the crusade front (and I really ought to organise these results better!) :
- Jan Van Hanegem (of Argonaut.com) says they're working on a non-Flash
site (currently it's only working on Flash systems)
- 'IMADMin' (for lloydstsb.co.uk) have passed me on to someone else, so
at least I know my mail is going somewhere!
- sanjose.com doesn't have a webmaster, I'll try postmaster
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I spent most of yesterday once I'd got home working on CMunge so that I could
give Robin a more fun version today. He's added the header generation now,
and with the stuff I've added it should be able to do pre-processing, AOF
generation and handle throwback now; all in all it's very cool. I'm very
impressed with it - it's cool . I mean the whole program, I don't mean
my bits, because they were just trivialities really.
Today I've updated AMSpectre to have a 'size' option on it. Just for Chocky!
Oh, and I've released BCTD too, because I seem to remember a number of people
asking for it about three months ago and I never got around to drawing icons
or writing up the !Help file. Now that I've done that it's up there for all
to see. I doubt whether anyone will really care, but then again if it's there
people can't say that it wasn't available. Odd, though, how a few people have
lots of people using their programs regularly and without thinking about it
(I'm thinking of Joseph Heenan here!) and others (eg me!) write lots of things
and very few people use them. I put that down to the former having written
things that are useful and the latter having written lots of rubbish. Well
that makes sense anyhow!
Sue seems to be mailing me quite regularly now, but I've got to try to steer
clear of talking about Caroline. It's generally a bad idea because I'll get
stuck going down the same road I usually do with that sort of thing (as indeed
I did today ). And in any case it's ancient history - we've better
things to talk about really .
Chris is at an interview today in London; I got a lovely SMS from him -
"It's the wrong Stratford, Gromit!" which made me chuckle. Well, it made me
chuckle once I'd got back into the skin that the beep had scared me out of
anyhow .
On the crusade front we have a black mark for :
- dates.com - webmaster bounced, trying postmaster
- swing.co.uk - postmaster bounced, that's a very bad thing (requirements
for internet hosts)
- cmdrtaco.net - postmaster bounced, another bad one
- porch.ccta.gov.uk - connection timed out after 3 days
I've also started annotating the photos from my holiday now, so hopefully
I'll be able to put them up on a website soon. Whether that will be here, or
at another location, I'm not sure, but I'll try to keep them here.
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More results of the great 'let's make websites readable' crusade coming in...
The mediocre :
- 'help7' (of deja new) says they will submit my report; no idea what that
means, but I assume they are dealing with it.
- Castle Technology rang this morning to say they were working on it.
The bad :
- cr.nps.gob - webmaster doesn't exist, and postmaster loops back to itself.
- cmdrtaco.net - webmaster doesn't exist, trying postmaster
- lloydstsb.co.uk - 'Message not deliverable' but no idea why not, trying
postmaster
- pontins.co.uk - 'unable to open mailbox file', trying postmaster
- swing.co.uk - webmaster doesn't exist, trying postmaster
- tesco.co.uk - webmaster doesn't exist, trying postmaster
It's getting to the point where I probably ought to write a program to deal
with the bounces from sites. Oh well...
Another nice mail from Amanda today. She seems like quite a friendly person,
so at least it's not a psycho at the other end... Or maybe it is and mum
doesn't like me after all .
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More results from the attempts to make webpages visible today!
No marks to :
- Historian.com - their webmaster doesn't exist, I had to send on to
broadcast.com
Today I've spent my time scanning in all the photo's of my holiday and
basically trying to organise them into a useful state. This hasn't been easy!
There's only 126 of them, but they're not all in order. I'm /hoping/ I can
recognise them. In theory because films are together I should only have to
move blocks of 24 around, but within those blocks some have become mislaid
elsewhere and so the block may have (say) 23 or 25 pictures in it (the latter
of which will have a photo that doesn't belong). Couple this with the fact
that there are photos of 'when we went to x, but got lost an thought that it
was pretty enough for a picture anyhow' which confuses me .
I had a nice phone call from Angela to wish me happy birthday today, and Mum
and Dad's card arrived too - it had gone to 54 by accident. Oh well. Matthew's
away at a friends today, and David's gone home for the weekend, so I'm on my
own.
Also had a chance to play quake today too. Whilst it's nice having the
polygonal objects (especially the monsters), and the truely 3d map being nice
to move around, I found it difficult to play and 'confusing' in parts.
Possibly I'm just used to my overlay map. It was also very dark - something I
really don't like in a game. The flies buzzing around dead bodies were a
lovely touch though.
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My birthday today! Woo... Yes, I'm 23. Feeling only a little old though
. Yesterday I wrote !Annoying. That's basically an application to email
webmasters when their pages were annoying because they don't display
correctly. The particular case I find annoying is that of setting the
background colour to white and then leaving the text as the default - on my
system that is white. As you can imagine, this makes life quite hard :-(
What else ? Oh, I got a birthday card from my aunt and uncle, and from/
Grandma, and from Dave and Catherine (which I was surprised to get as it
was waiting on my computer when I got in!) but not from Mum and Dad yet.
Theirs seems to have been lost. Oh well.
Nothing else really. Except... Robin's back on Monday ! Yay ! So today, we
reorganised the office such that it's a little easier to get around and so
that the cables aren't flying everywhere .
For making their webpage changes so that I can see them, full marks to :
No marks as yet go to :
- Lycos - an automated reply (I've not had a human response yet)
- MP3.com - an automated reply (I've not had a human response yet)
No marks at all go to :
- Acorn Computers Ltd (ok so they don't exist, but there you go) - no
webmaster user.
- Tesco.co.uk - no webmaster user
- The Register - no webmaster user (odd...)
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Tired today - I didn't sleep well last night, so Matthew had to bang on the
door a few times to get me up. I swear I didn't hear him until the third
time, but I do vaguely remember dreaming something about someone at the door.
Anyhow, because of this I'll make this diary entry brief.
Well, that and the fact that nothing much has happened today. I've been putting
together the stuff for 'patches' to earlier versions of RISC OS which should
hopefully fill all the minor mistakes that were left over in the releases.
There weren't many, and none were particularly severe but they need fixing
.
I got a little bit of a chance to speak to Helen today, but she was just
leaving (now there's a surprise!). Plus I spoke to Mr and Mrs Naulls too,
briefly which was rather nice... Not long till Peter's back, and then Julia a
month later ! The photo's are back from holiday now, so hopefully I'll scan
some in and put them in a mini gallery on my pages. Not that anyone will care
all that much, but at least it's something to look at. And I really
want Peter to see that photo of his Mum and him - I think it's just great!
I got an email today from a friend of Mum's from work today. It's kinda
strange being known as Kath's son, rather than as me! Well, I shouldn't say
that because it's not fair really - it implies that there's something
different about that, and I guess that if there is then Julian and Simon got
that a lot in being 'Justin's brother'. Ah well... Hopefully I won't scare
her off too much  .
Nothing else really today; I got to see Ally McBeal, which was good 'cos it's
still just about as good as before. And I've nearly finished The
Eleventh Commandment. I say nearly; I don't think I'll be awake enough to
read the remaining few pages after writing this .
Hmm.. Did a little work on Doom last night, and hopefully a couple of people
should get copies tonight. All being well. No idea what's new over the last
lot I sent out, but there you go... I think there's a few minor bug fixes
over 2.07's last outing (beta 9?), and a couple of changes to the internals.
Oh well, let's go to bed and see if tomorrow offers excitement, fun and...
erm... ok, so I've run out of words to go there!
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Today was full of joy. Well, not really, but I watched two Voyagers and the
Midsomer Murders which was quite fun. I also found a minor kernel bug related
to one that Matthew had found a little while back (yay, I can now call KeyV
any old how!), and I've implemented a Serial mouse joystick which is quiet
amusing. Basically, my keyboard has a mini joystick built in, so I wanted to
use it. It's a serial mouse in its implementation, so - by calling the right
bits of PointerV - I've made a simple Joystick module that works on the
serial mouse data, whilst the normal mouse continues as normal.
The only problem is that due to a few design flaws there isn't any way to
detect the mouse buttons and redirect them to the joystick - they still
appear to have come from the mouse unfortunately. Oh well.
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Ok, I got back off holiday a little while ago so let's catch up. I got back
on Wednesday - 24 hours late ! The main reason for this... well, let's see if
we can describe things in a little more detail...
The return trip was meant to be easy - 4 hours from San Francisco to Detroit,
1 hours wait, then 8 hours to London. Unfortunately Detroit had some horrid
thunderstorms, so we flew around for about an hour. Then it was decided that
we'd better land so that we don't fall out of the sky when the fuel runs out.
A move which I think most people agreed with after a little thought. So we
landed at Saganor (I don't know how to spell it!) airport, about 50 miles
away. This is a tiny airport. Really tiny. Some of the passengers were
complaining that they couldn't get out at the gate. The pilot explained that
it was a small airport and so they couldn't. Given that behind the two 757's
that landed behind us (there were two in front too), there were a couple of
props that came in, and the fact that the little refuelling lorry had to do
about three trips for each of us 'big' planes, you would have thought they'd
have realised .
Anyhow, after about 3 hours there was a small party going on in the middle of
the plane, I'd finished the Rhino book (O'Reilly JavaScript book) and things
were getting just a little tiring ! Soon after that, though, we took off -
only after getting on to the runway and sitting there for another 20 minutes
- air traffic control had thought the storm had moved off, but it hadn't,
obviously.
We landed a little while later, the pilot saying that some flights had been
held because of the storm, but that some had gone off before it got too bad.
As a result, connecting international flights were being given a priority and
we had to get off first. So, off we trudge to the gate for our flight to
London. It had gone. Here, we met Simon. He was trying to get back to London
for work early in the Morning. Given that it was now 10pm - 4 hours later
than we should have arrived - this was looking bad. After a brief word with
the guy on the desk we decided to go to the ticket lobby to be re-issued
tickets. As we were leaving, two girls asked what the situation was, so I
quickly summarised what was happening and off they came with us.
Suzy and her friend - who I've forgotten the name of, sorry! - came with us
to the ticket lobby queues. These were snaked three deep when we arrived, and
growing quickly - we'd been the third plane to land, so we'd got there quite
quickly, even though it was one hell of a trek from one end of the airport to
the other (Detriot is quite a big air port!).
Suzy, Simon and myself went off to see if we could pick up our luggage,
whilst Dad and Suzy's friend held our place in the line for us. After about
half an hour of searching we finally got word that the luggage wouldn't be
on the carousels, but would be transferred to the first available flight to
London so that it would get there even if we didn't! Some people at the
query desk were really annoyed and... well, there was a one sided
shouting match going on beside us...
We returned to find that they'd moved about 5 foot in the time we'd gone.
This didn't look overly good! Dad went off to ring Mum to suggest she not
try to pick us up and we'd make our own way home whenever we arrived.
Unfortunately Mum had set a BT wake up call and so - assuming that this was
the call - she just hung up. Dad re-rang and explained the new situation and
all was well anyhow. One down side to that (other than having to ring again!)
is that on the pay phones it was $10.75 to ring the UK for 3 minutes, which
is a little much really, but we had to...
Meantime, Simon and Suzy had gone off to get food and drink, which was
greatfully received - although they'd run out of ice, their cooler wasn't
working well and there was no gas left in the carbonater. Other than that,
the Pepsi was gorgeous !
After an hour or so, Suzy went off to ring their friend that was picking them
up - as they should have been up by then - to tell them not to bother. Ok, so
this isn't interesting, but it's going to be some time in this queue so I
thought I'd fill the time with some interesting stuff. By this time, we're
down to the end of the second curl of the snake.
I'll fill some time by saying what I did today - well last night really...
Whilst away, I bought an infrared keyboard with some cool buttons on it -
well, it's got the CD controls, volume and a few others. I've now worked out
how to use the PS2Driver to reprogram so that some special keys are now
generated by these buttons. As a result, I've now got ControlAMPlayer set up
in 1.10 to use only these buttons as its controls. This meant some fun and
games writing the autorepeat code and such like, but now that it's done it's
quite nice!
Ok, so I need a special keyboard, PS2Driver, and version of the
ControlAMPlayer module for it to work, but it's nice anyhow! The main thing
about this keyboard is that the keys are very low which seems to be very
tiring for my hands, the keys are a little close together, and it doesn't
have a numeric keypad which is a little annoying. Alas, that's life.
Oh, look, we've reached the front of the queue - I've truncated a lot here,
because it took much longer than the time it took you to read that, but it
was fun to do anyhow and I can't take up that long writing things! At this
point we decided to go up as a group and get our tickets. So we go up and,
after about 45 minutes we have tickets - on three planes - for us, a wash kit
each, a hotel reservation and money for breakfast. We're all at the same
hotel though, which was good - the Crowne Plaza. The queue, by the way was
(this is 2 1/2 hours after we started, note) about half as long again as when
we started !
Simon's flight was via Amsterdam and got in at about 7am to Gatwick. Suzy and
her friend's flight was also via Amsterdam, but got in at 10:30am to Gatwick.
Our flight went via Minneapolis and got in at 10:10am. All these arrived on
Wednesday morning. So we go to find the hotel courtesy bus. Can we find one ?
Can we heck!
I'll cut this bit, because it involves an hour of watching busses, asking
attendants, considering a taxi, ringing the hotel (no answer), swearing and
asking more people.
Finally, the bus arrived and we jumped on, very tired and relieved. It's
about 2am now. Off we go, picking up one of the flight crews from another
plane who had also been put up there. The Crowne Plaza is big. And posh.
Well, too posh for us anyhow . An 11 floor hotel, with lots of glass
and lights in the foyer (on to which some of the rooms look - the roof of the
foyer is a sloping glass roof to enclose the medium sized pool that is on one
side.
We get our rooms - on the fourth floor - and wander off. It's about 2:30am
by now, so I'm obviously checking out what's on the TV. This is nice though,
because it's got lots of cool bits on the menu for special features. It's
here (on the 'Account status' menu) that we find that hotel considers us to
be 'Distressed passengers' who have nothing to pay. Anyhow, we get up in the
morning and check out. At lunch we meet up with Simon and chat for a while
before wandering off to the airport (well, to get the bus to the airport).
The girls aren't answering the phone in their room, so we assume they've gone
already - theirs was an earlier flight than ours.
When we get to the airport we (with Simon) went off to see if the girls were
there and say our goodbyes. It turns out (once we've walked the length of the
airport again!) that they have been upped to First class because that's the
only seats that were free. So we're thinking 'Lucky buggers' and go off to
check in ourselves. Back to the other end again (right by where we came in!).
Because Simon's flying international, we say good bye to him here because he
has to check in at a different desk. Anyhow, we get our tickets and find that
we're in 'World Business Class' for the second leg. It seems that NorthWest
don't do a First class on their transatlantic flights, so WBC is the front
bit which we assumed was First class - in which case WBC just means First
class really.
We go off to our gate for the short wait it will be - I've got a new book, a
Tom Clancy, and Dad's got one too. The flight to Minneapolis was easy,
although I think we got some odd looks from other passengers when we cheered
at the news that there was bad weather over Minneapolis and it would take a
few minutes to contact Air Traffic Control to see if the situation would
worsen. I guess that our sense of humour just doesn't fit well with some
people .
Next I remember, we're in Minneapolis - about an hour and a bit's flight.
At Minneapolis we go through the normal thing of finding the gate and things.
Then they say that the flight is overbooked and they are asking for people to
volunteer not to take this flight, but take another instead and get $500's in
vouchers. I was really expecting nobody to take that and for them to start
selecting the last people to book - which would obviously be us because we
were there to fill the flight (though quite how the flight could be
overbooked if they knew there were places on it on the computer I don't
understand!). Actually it would have been rather nice for them to select us
just so that we could have argued at them about them messing about. But that
didn't happen and we got on the plane. In World Business Class .
I've never flown like that, but there were a few things about it that were
nice. Like getting a couple of glasses of wine before we've even taken off.
Like getting nuts in a little bowl (including my favourite - cashews!) and
then getting refills - that beats the little packets you get in the normal
seats! We've got a little display of the flight in front of us (and on
channel 28, but I'll get to that in a minute) showing where the plane is at
the moment, the airspeed, height, temperature and some other things - that's
on the main wall at the front.
Anyhow, we take off - after being given our headphones, menu (yes we have a
menu for the meal!) and a wash bag - and I have to work out how to get the
little telly from my seat arm. After a little pulling, shoving and prodding
it comes out (it's not really that hard, it just seems like it first time)
and I can watch the movies. During the course of the flight, I got to see
EdTV and Entrapment (again!) which kept me amused a while. When food arrived
I had to work out how to get the platter that it goes on out of the other arm
which is similarly hard. We got a little table cloth over the platter and
then the food on a tray on that. I was momentarily confused, as I was sure
that we were meant to have a choice of meal, but I wasn't given a choice, but
when the stewardess said "Enjoy your Appetiser, Mr Fletcher" I understood -
ok, I was very surprised they called me by name.
Anyhow, that was Salmon and salad and things. Then there was the main meal
which I had a Chicken, erm, thing... And then the desert which was a
cheesecake, grapes, melon, Kiwi fruit and peaches. Oddly, this was quite
enough food for me!
The rest of the flight was dull - well apart from the movies, reading my book
and helping the couple beside me with their telly's.
When we landed, we got to get off first which might seem great but in reality
it meant that we just got to wait longer for our luggage. The luggage wasn't
there - that's an easier way to say "we waited for about an hour and it
wasn't on the carousel". So we went off and filed a report for this. The
girls there and the guy were very helpful anyhow. They suggested that we
might wait around for the flight from Detroit that came in in about an hours
time. We went off to find mum and get something to drink. Presently we
returned to the arrivals area to see if we could see the girls as their plane
from Amsterdam should be there now. We waited a while. They weren't around so
we assumed we'd missed them or something else had happened.
Anyhow, we rang through to the baggage claim people to ask if we could check
the carousel for this flight and they went and let us in - an elaborate
procedure, even for staff. After a little while we found the luggage on the
carousel and I was forced to do a mini victory lap . After thanking the
people we returned out to see Mum and Julian. We were just about to leave
when Dad spotted Simon coming from the departure gate. It turns out that his
flight had mechanical problems and had only just arrived, together with the
girls flight !
Anyhow, we said our hello's and goodbye's then went off home.
... And that was just the trip home!
Flying out was quite easy - by comparison it was very dull - we watched
Shakespeare in Love, Once Upon A Yesterday (a romantic film in the vein of
Somewhere in time, or Groundhog day - ok, so they're very different films,
but if you've seen them you'll get the idea!), and My Favourite Martian.
On arriving at about half past one in the morning we finally found our way to
the car rental place and picked up the car. After a little driving around we
found a motel and stopped the night (a small place, just off the 101). Then
we headed towards San Jose, initially via the 101, then taking a detour over
the San Mateo bridge (I think it was) and down the 880. We must have spent
most of our time just driving around and seeing things, stopping if we saw
something interesting and just going around the area. Eventually we stopped
at a motel off the 237 where we stayed for a few nights - this was quite nice
because it was easy to reach!
Next day we went up to Half moon bay and then down the cost and back home.
The mountains around there are very bare and can be very pretty in places.
From there you can see some nice bits of the bay area. Half moon bay and the
coast are quite pretty.
Next day, we met Julia for the first time - quite scarey at first, but she's
a wonderful girl and nobody killed one another . A few days after that
we decided to drive to Mono lake (east of San Francisco), down the road there
to the bottom of the forests and then back to San Jose. So we set off...
Most of the day was spent crossing the bare area between San Francisco and
the mountains. It's hot, and it's bare, and it's dull. Then we got into the
forests and hills and finally into Yosemite National Park. It costs $20 to
enter, but that's for up to seven days. It's a gorgeous area. And big.
There's lots of things in there to see, a few fires and a lot of height. It
was strange to see the continued height signs - 2000ft, 3000ft, 4000ft and so
on... The highest point we reached that was marked was 9925ft at the east
exit from the park - quite a height!
Eventually we got tired and the light faded, so we stopped at White Wolf
Lodge in the park. This is at around 8000ft so far as I remember and you're
in tents on concrete floors with beds in them. It's Cold at
night. Take lots of warm things if you're stopping there at night. In the
morning Dad found frost over the car - yep, it's cold!
After this we drove further east to Mono Lake. This is a salty lake with lots
of calcium towers in it - these were created from creatures that
lived over the hot vents in the lake which excrete calcium that lined
the edge of the vent; because the lake had been diverted to provide water for
Los Angeles, they were exposed. The lake doesn't provide water like this now
and so it is slowly returning to its old levels.
From here we drove north to Lake Tahoe. This is a big lake which provides a
form of 'seaside' for people of the area.
The we drove West back toward Sacramento. We slept at a small town on the
way. I don't remember anything about there!
On the way back we stopped at a small stream which was very pretty and (above
all) gave a break and a chance to splash some water . Here there were
some little squirrel things (they may have been Momet's - I'm not sure) that
were skittish and yet not to scared of us). Finally we drove back to San
Francisco via the Richmond/San Rafael bridge (I don't know it's name ),
and then over the golden gate bridge. The bridge was covered in cloud and we
couldn't see a thing  . There's a strange effect around San Francisco
because of the mountains, the cloud rolls in toward the city, but hits the
mountains and has to go over them. As the road on the other side drags the
cloud down toward it little wisps pass over the road and give a very eirie
look to things.
Now we made our way to Julia's to meet Peter and Jeff (ok, quick summary...
Julia (a.k.a. Speckles) marries Peter. Julia's sister is Christine (a.k.a.
Avey). Jeff is Christine's Husband. Michelle is Julia and Christine's mum.
Tom is Michelle's husband.) so that we can go and get checked at the Tuxedo
place to see that we're the right sizes. I was measured at a nice place in
Stratford. I forget the name, but if I remember I'll let you know because
they were very helpful! In any case, we didn't know if the measurements would
be what this place expected. It turns out things were just fine.
The next week was busy. I'll skip some bits. We went to the Tech Museum in
San Jose with Peter, Santa Cruz on our own (boy is that coast cold!), and the
Winchester Mystery House (which if you ask I'll tell more about - it's
fascinating!) and eventually had to be ready on Friday night for the
rehearsal. The rehearsal was about 45 minutes of just going through what was
to happen the next afternoon.
Anyhow, we then went off for something to eat and then home. Unfortunately
I'm now very tired and I've just got to the wedding. The wedding was
wonderful - Julia's uncle, Roger - a Judge -, did the ceremony and then we
had lots of photos taken. Ok, so I skipped a lot there - walking in, not
losing the ring and stuff, but you know what that's like if you've been to a
wedding before! Oh, the wedding's at a 'country house' called 'The Ainsley
House' and took place at about 4pm which was just about as hot as I cold
take - it's a gorgeous place and it was lovely!
Afterwards we had food and I chatted to some people. I had to sign the
marriage licence thingy, as Best man, as did Christine. Roger asked if I
could mail it, but unfortunately I had to decline as I didn't know how the
next few days would be as I had to fly back to the UK on the Monday (see
earlier for more fun!) and it had to be sent within 48 hours. Oh well.
I got to chat to Mark Brinicombe for a little while about Californian life
and things - not too much about computers though . He's a really nice
guy. Unfortunately Neil Carson and his wife had left before I got to chat to
them. Apparently Dad did though.
On Sunday it was present opening at the club by Julia's house. This was quite
fun, but there's not much I can say in the diary really!
Then Monday was the 'get to the airport and fly home day' which I've
described. There were lots of other things I wanted to say, but it's 1:30am
now and I want to sleep. Wow, that's 19k of text - not nearly as much as I
could say, but still enough for most people to ignore it!
Anyhow, bed!
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