2 Feb 2000 (Wednesday) 

Yay. A new month. Cool, huh. Happens every so often. Well, I had Amanda and Mum here yesterday and the day before. Which was fun. Amanda's nice. Amanda seemed to take a strange interest in the fact that the diary is available to everyone on the internet. She's kinda like I expected and kinda not. Which is not unsurprising, as people generally are when you meet them.

They also brought up loads of my old stuff from home, so I'm sitting here with a large box of floppy discs to sort through at some point. I've sorted all the paper out now, I think. It needs looking at more, but it's not too much trouble. Only one and a half black bags of rubbish to go out. Since this is me, it was quite hard to do that, but it's quite reasonable really when I think about it. Almost everything I threw out was so mind-numbingly trivial, or could be obtained again. For example, I had to throw out The Time Machine, War Of The Worlds, A Christmas Carol and The Island Of Dr Moreau. I used to print out books to read whilst at uni, 'cos the printer was free and then take them home to read. Stingy ? Moi ? Nah... But I've got most of them on discs somewhere now, or I can download them, so I'm not so worried now.

There's all my old Uni stuff, my GCSE Computer Science project, my A Level Computer Science project and my final year Uni project. It's a lot of paper, but it's definately worth it because I can look at them and say "I did that. That was damned good." Most of it still is. Most people did dull things as their projects though.

I also found a load of letters to Helen that never got sent. They're all sitting in a folder on the side waiting to be typed up so that they're never lost. It's that thing about not destroying things, you see... I can then throw away the physical letters and they'll never be lost. That's the idea anyhow.

And today, I've got a headache. Why ? Because we've been meeting a deadline and it's been quite tiring. Plus we didn't get to bed until late last night 'cos we were chatting.

Oh, and Angela and a few others pointed out a couple of problems with the diary. Hopefully I've fixed them now! Thanks!

Lots of email today. 43 messages. I think most of it is likely to be DynDNS mailing list, but the rest... well... I'll just have to wait and see.

I've updated the statistics page a little. It now includes links to the days in question, so where the question isn't obvious it may help. I may include a 'reference' field at some point because "Do you think I'm doing the right thing" isn't exactly descriptive.

Thanks to the person that mailed me to say "It says January, not February". I've fixed that. Basically at the start of each month there's a few files that need changing and I tend to have forgotten what needs doing. I'll make it much better one day.

Interesting thing on the Buffy site. Go to a postcard I sent myself and then change the URL's number to show different peoples messages to one another. It seems that not all of the messages are there, but... well, it's strange to have it so open. You never know. You might find out something you weren't meant to. They delete them regularly, so if you're visiting this in a while you may find that you have to bump the number by quite a bit. Some of the messages look like plants though. To me, anyhow.

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3 Feb 2000 (Thursday) 

Looking through old discs today, I came across the following email I sent to someone. It's got not relevant to anything but I found it amusing...

> I hope you are well and I look forward to hearing all the gossip. Well, I'm fine... I recently was convicted on 17 counts of murder and am awaiting trial for the blowing up of the jury who convicted me. Richard's got a booming business running a brothel and is making millions. And Jason found the secret of Eternal Youth and is living up the wild high life somewhere in seychelles on his private boat. The uni has recently been condemned by the whole government for being 'Too crap for words' and will be sold off to Disney who, I hear, are going to use it as a special 'horror' ride in their latest theme park. Colchester itself narrowly escaped being hit by a nuclear strike from Chetchnya. I say narrowly escaped; Actually it took a full on hit, killing everyone within 10 miles of the centre. Nobody appears to have noticed yet. Other than that, nothing special happening. [ Old email, found lying around ]

Hmm... I'm wondering - basically I've this pile of floppy discs lying on the floor at the moment. Would anyone be interested in taking them off my hands ? It's just a thought, but there might be someone who is... erm... sad enough to be interested in some of the stuff I've done in the dim and distant past. None of it is amazingly interesting. Well, not unless you like reading the emails I sent from uni and seeing some of the strange things I have archived. Ok, it was a silly idea.

Coo... Some weird stuff on these discs - I've just found my A Level Computer Science mock exam and project work, as well as the Pascal work we did at the time. It's not particularly great, because most of it is assignments. Unfortunately, when I was bored I stopped doing assignments and started writing a 6502 Assembler and Interpreter. Some might say I could have done with a life. I had a girlfriend at that time too. Gawd, I was just as sad though.

Guttorm's StrongHelp manuals dated 8th June 1995. Wow. Before I got my mits on them and updated them to contain all sorts of stuff.

Julian's just rung up. It's 25 to midnight and Julian's just rung. Well, he's at uni. So he's allowed. Actually he rang to tell me Ally McBeal's on. Which is quite cool, so I'll leave an Alarm on.

Anyone else want to remind me it's valentines day ? It seems I can't quite get away from the fact that it's soon. Remember that it was Grandads birthday on that day too. Which is something that's generally hard to forget. Anyhow, all cards to Brickall Cottage, Weston Upon Avon, Warwickshire.

I love the ads for American Beauty. It's great. It's been nominated for all these awards and stuff. Apparently. But I haven't got a clue what it's about. And because they don't even make the effort to tell me, I really don't care to see it. The hype of films generally means that they have to say what every one else said about it because they don't have any story to tell of. Well, that's all I can think. Because that's all the impression they leave me with.

Budweiser update: The frogs got away !

I've probably not been watching telly much, but today is the first time I've seen the next Budweiser advert after the sign falls.

Well, I've copied 80Mb of Floppy discs so far. Logically that's around 75 discs, I guess... To look at the number lying around you'd think it was much more.

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5 Feb 2000 (Saturday) 

Apparently Julian and Simon are playing with Sky Digital at the moment. It seems like it's quite fun. I do wonder if it's useful though. Lots of things that are fun generally aren't.

The police inspector gets out of his car to investigate the murder in the museum. Civilian: Inspector, who has done this terrible thing ? Inspector: Well, I don't know; I just got here ! [ "Arriving at the murder", Midsomer Murders ]

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6 Feb 2000 (Sunday) 

Listening to some new music today from home. I've got Duke (Genesis) now, so I can finally say that I've got all the Genesis I ever need (well, actually I'm missing the early stuff, but that's not on CD at home either. And Dad sent up the Mostly Autum album which he likes. I took a random selection and picked 'Shindig' (track 7). It's really amazing. Well, I think it's great - it's an instrumental, running straight into the next track and it just builds up really well and sounds great. He also sent up Tristan Park who I didn't think much to in concert, but Dad says he's got into. Well, the little listen I had to it said it was all very samey, and I wasn't too impressed. I may just have to listen to it again when I'm less tired.

Oh, I hate module tasks with stacks in RMA. I do. Oh, yes I do. Don't even ask me about them. Ok ? I've been beating my head against a brick wall with this one and come to the conclusion that "It's impossible". Trust me on this.

Confession time. I sent Helen an SMS last night. I was tired. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine. So there you go.

Matthew's fixed my 'Serial hardware has gone walkies' bug, by the way.

Depressingly little email today. That is, none.

Rob Kendrick gets todays "Twat of the day" award for irritating me. I pop on to IRC to see if there's anyone worth talking to. There isn't. So I leave. Next I get a barrage of people trying to talk to me, because Rob tells them that it'd be fun. Yes. It's obviously fun to annoy someone that doesn't want to talk to you. People who do something to annoy me, generally annoy me. Odd that. There's nothing worse than someone who is trying to irritate you. He earns a further "twat of the day" award a denial of service attack on my machine whilst I'm trying to use it. Since that's against the AUP of most reputable providers, I'm slightly miffed.

Wahey. To further the general irritance today, I've got a little email from a webmaster (Warren Young at cyberport.com) who believes that users that change the default settings on their web browsers "deserve what they get".

Probably I get worked up too much over these sorts of things. How about I do something else ?

My Frankie Goes To Hollywood CD appears to skip on Black Night White Light. Which is slightly annoying. I think it probably needs a bit of a clean.

Lots of work on CMunge tonight. If I see any more of it I'm going to scream. I enjoy the work, but the stuff I've just done is very hacky. CMunge needs a little tidy up now, I think. It's to the point where I can't really keep up with what nastiness I've hacked into it. I need to reorganise the sections relating to the special casing of the handler routines specific to callers. Also additional error identifiers would be nice, so that we don't have to provide them ourselves each time (an add_error_identifier routine?). I don't know when the next version of CMunge will come out. I'm really not happy with the bits I've done today. It's very... icky...

... and I've not done any more discs today, so they're still spread all over the room. Matthew's parents were here today. I've not idea what they thought to my place being a tip .

I know, I know. I'm easily irritable at the moment, and I've got double standards about some things. But hell, I don't care.

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8 Feb 2000 (Tuesday) 

Let's just get this straight. I've just been looking at The Register's article about about some wonderful website that's been getting lots of awards. The site directly mentioned, if you care to visit it is CyberBritain. Be unimpressed. I was. I judge webmasters ability to understand the principles of the web by not their skill on implementing JavaScript, snazzy graphics or any other things, but on whether I can read it. If they provide the valid colours so that it 'works' on my white on black style then it's got past the first hurdle. This site didn't. Next is the 'have you got any alt tags on the images so that I can use a slow modem' category. It fails on that. Then comes the 'have you got a site that requires frames where they're not really needed ?' category. The many that pass the previous two tests (The Register doesn't pass the first, by the way) pass this because they know how irritating it is. CyberBritain fails there too. It's one big frame page with lots of tables in it.

"What's the content like ?" I hear you ask. Well, usually I ignore content on sites such as this, because I've not been able to read anything. But I'll make an exception, because it's meant to be so great. So, with my black and white clour scheme in place (I can't read it otherwise) I go wandering off... To find Weeting. No. No weeting. But that's not surprising. Methwold has a link; it is a link though. But because we've got frames it looks like it's part of the site. Of course, also because of this you can't navigate properly and pressing back takes you to the previous page that linked you to that frame - ie The Register article, and not the frame. To say that's irritating is to understate things. Of course, you just have to remember to use the frame navigation buttons instead. Irritating ? Yes. So basically the actual page provides very little content. Purely links. Yeah, links are fine. Let's see if we can find out how to contact the webmaster...

Oh dear. This is very cool. I can't find a link to a contact address - which is impressive in itself. But I in looking, I find that the 'Pr' of Promotion is linked. I think "Ok, let's see what it is". It takes me to 'SexySearch.co.uk'. Which appear to be a porn search engine and organised list of links. I've had a quick scan (well, you do, don't you?) to see what I think, and yes, you can find an amount of material you wouldn't probably want your kids finding at school. Why do I say that ? Because it was just before finding that link that I was thinking that it would be a reasonably useful resource for a kid at school to use as a research for projects on the local area. They always seem to do them.

Of course, as I read through the remainder of the article on The Register, I see that this is mentioned there...

In any case, I'm not all that impressed. Which seems to be The Register's impression. Anyhow, as I'm on this little thing, I'll pop to 'LastMinute.com' which is apparently the top 'British Internet Icon' and see what I think. Let's hope there's no porn here. I'm not intending to make a habit of giving quick reviews of sites, but just once or twice. Ok, it's taking ages to download, but I think that's just because NDirect are being slow.

Ok, we've got some white links on light blue. That's good. Oh, and black text on a black background. That's a "I forgot to define the background colour". A more rare failing, but still a 'duh!' award. Let's wander over to the 'valentines' part of the site. Remember it's not that far away. Get your cards in the post otherwise they won't arrive on time. Ok, this section has to have both backgrounds and foregrounds turned off. And I can't read the graphics in this way - it needs to be fully filled if people are going to anti-alias and not just made purely transparent. Let's try 'gifts'. Got to be interesting. I really don't like this three column view. The 'things' are in the far column and just go on for ages squashed up'. I'm going to try 'roses' because I'm like that - I like roses, I think they're romantic. Ah. Clicking on 'Next step' gives me an error :

A database error occured.

ROUTINE: GetBusinessConnection
ERROR NUMBER: -2147467259
ERROR: [Informix][Odbc Informix Driver]General error.
Insufficient Connection information was supplied


Response object error 'ASP 0156 : 80004005'

Header Error

/lmn/i_standard_expansions.asp, line 74

The HTTP headers are already written to the client browser. Any HTTP header
modifications must be made before writing page content.

Probably that means that "Your browser didn't provide all the information we need; even though it conforms to the standards we really could do with something that is an Apache-ism" or "Your browser doesn't conform to the standard, but we don't know how to cope with that, so we'll give the user an impossible to decipher error message on the grounds that they'll complain and tell us about the problem."

Of course, this means I've got to find out who to tell. Let's go hunting the contact address. Ooh! A 'Contact us' page linked from the main page. I have to go back to the root though, because it's using frames and I want to keep the error on the screen - so much easier to provide the name of the webmaster with the error page, don't you think ?

I think I come under the category of 'A customer' I guess... And that animated GIF in the corner is beginning to annoy me. Ok, that's them mailed.

I've been having something of a day for complaining to webmasters. I'd tell you about the TescoDirect fiasco, but it'd take too long. There's so many problems I had with their site, trying to even use parts of it was impossible because of the way it was set up. In any case, I mailed them to ask about the problems I was having and to see if they know how to fix them.

I am vaguely technical. I know whereof I speak, generally about things HTML or HTTP based, so I know that things aren't always as easy as I might make out. But colours being wrong ? What does that say for the other things, especially if you discount that and still can't get to the actual content. I'm not saying that my website is perfect, but it doesn't have any major bugs and I do fix them relatively quickly when people point them out (and usually reply to them if they supply and email address).

But then, I'm not an Internet business. And if you're an Internet business you just have to say so to people, they give you money and then you produce something that doesn't work. Well, the latter isn't always true, but it does seem that there are no 'big' Internet businesses that actually making money. Unless I've just been getting the wrong impression from the news stories I've read.

Anyhow, that's enough of an entry for tonight I think.

I'm back after watching a Friends, a DS9 and a Stargate. I shouldn't really watch Friends because it tends to leave me thinking... well, you know...

New version of Slige (485) today. All of about ten minutes to apply the changes I've made, but a further hour and a half to make it into a single non-library requiring file so that Dave Chess can have it back.

Music tonight was brought to you by Richard Marx (Hazard) and Phil Collins (the Face Value album).

Baring in mind what I've said above about webmasters talking about colours, I've had three emails tonight about one of the sites that had problems as the webmaster fixed it. I've not had a chance to mail back, but I will tomorrow when I'm more awake. Before I go to bed tonight I'm going to see if I can dig out Lemmings from the Games Zip disc.

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9 Feb 2000 (Wednesday) 

There are some problems, it appears, with Slige generated levels from my RISC OS version when Dave Chess compiles it on his PC with VC++. Which is curious. But what I'm going to try and do is to compile it under DOS with Borland Turbo C++ and see what happens. Since this is the only compiler I have for the PC at the moment I'll just have to cope - I'll download djgpp tomorrow if I get a chance. Admittedly I've had to download an updated pkunzip because nothing else supports zips split across floppies and that's how I archived it last time. There's a load of old things I wrote in that archive too. Weird how you forget these things .

Ok, so that's not a good idea; I can't seem to get it to do anything useful as it only appears to have about 380k free and doesn't want to use extended memory. This is what you get for using ancient DOS programs, you see.

I'm watching gcc take a 500k C file and munge it into something resembling code. It's odd how the visual representation of that is a flashing cursor.

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10 Feb 2000 (Thursday) 

25 to midnight is too late for Ally McBeal; I'm just too knackered by then (well, now) to be watch it with any real interest.

Music tonight brought to you by John Wesley...

"The Love Songs Album - the greatest love songs of all time" Oddly, it contains only tracks from about the last ten years. I'd be surprised if it wasn't so expected. (ok, that sounds obvious, but there you go)

Updated StrongHelp to use a Dynamic area today. No work on Slige. Sorry.

Four days.

One commentator today mentioned to me that they would suggest using splitf and joinf instead of using zip across discs. Yes, I'm quite aware of splitf and joinf and have been since I had to use them to transfer ARMLinux from uni - possibly the worst experience with DOS discs ever. It's not a case of using Zip for splitting files now, but when I originally archived Turbo C in '94, the only thing I had to archive such a large thing was PKZip. That's all. I'm probably going to offend the author but... come on, I generally know what I'm doing. There is a difference of six years between archiving that and my next use of it. There's been considerable change since then. My point was to say that it can sometimes be very hard to use yesterday's technology in today's world.

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11 Feb 2000 (Friday) 

Oh, LastMinute.com got back to me with a standard reply, so I've probably been ignored. On the other hand, I got loads of mail from Tesco yesterday about the problems I was having. They seem to be genuinely helpful, which is nice. If nothing else, I'll be happy to go back there because I got some response from their support people.

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12 Feb 2000 (Saturday) 

Spent most of today working on Zap 1.43. I'm trying to make it work like my old Zap. Unfortunately 'Standard' Zap is configured really badly. Or at least, it's not at all to my liking. So it generally takes about a day or two to get it to a state I can use. Since I'm jumping straight up to an alpha version I'm going to have lots of problems, but for the amount of bugs in 1.40 patch 8 (that I was using) you'd think that was an alpha too.

Nice comment on Katie's 'UnFAQ' :

If I go to a site, and I don't like it, I'll go away. [ Katie's UnFAQ ]

Very right. She uses tiny text and javascript where she doesn't need to. I don't like it. I'll go away. Pity really, 'cos otherwise it's probably quite interesting, but I don't like to have to squint to read the text to find out, or to emulate JavaScript in my head. Oh well.

Oh. Psycho Nanny from Hell on TV tonight. "The Hand that rocks the Cradle". It's about 7 years since I saw that last. Nasty doctor. Nasty nanny. Nasty greenhouse scene.

Speaking of that, Angela rang last night for a chat. She seems to be missing out on some kind of social life. I don't quite know how because she does more than I do socially, but then again it's all relative . I hope that after exams she is a little less stressed.

Music today from Mostly Autumn (The Spirit Of Autumn Past), Tristan Park (Looking Homeward) and Genesis (Duke). Mostly Autumn is really great. I can't really describe it, but it's very Celtus like in places, quite Galleon and a little bouncey in places. Shindig (track 7) is a gorgoues instrumental build up which is just amazing. I may have said that a few days ago, but it is. Tristan Park is very Galleon. I'm not into it much yet; it seems a bit samey, but that might just be because I'm not listening to it as much as Mostly Autumn. Duke is very light by comparisson to the others.

I've just about got Zap's templates sorted now. I need to work on its menu structure, because it's very naff at the moment. Once that is done I can go back to the Keymap and the colour scheme. Although the colours may have to be done at the same time because they really annoy me!

Oh, Jason rang tonight ! He's having a day out with Chris - he's at Essex Uni again for no apparent reason apart from the fact that there are generally cute women there. I miss it too.

That's what Mostly Autumn remind me of! Barclay James Harvest! Hmm... I'll just return to Zap'ing shall I ? Hmm. It's 2:30. Maybe bed is a better idea. Yes, I think so. Zap menus are done for now anyhow; I'll start on the keymap and colours tomorrow and see how things go. First thing - Ctrl-A is select all .

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13 Feb 2000 (Sunday) 

I was just thinking this morning about books that we read at school. In general they were obscure and dull, and I was trying to think of books that I have read that would be reasonable to read at school that wouldn't be. I'm very much drawn to "The Island Of Dr Moreau" because I think that probably has enough material in it to bring about some discussion and is actually rather a good book. From what I remember, the writing style is very different to a lot of things I've read. Maybe I'm only thinking that it would be interesting because I'm older and I'm reading it without the necessity. An alternative might be "War Of The Worlds" (notice a little pattern here? ) for which parallels to later works can be drawn, as well as discusssion about the fears of the time and then later the fears during the famous radio broadcast in the states. All that, culminating in modern day impressions of life on other planets. Yes, I think that would make a very interesting mini topic to do.

I'm really sorry to say it, and many English teachers will probably think less of me, but I really don't think that I gained anything from reading any Shakespeare. Considering where I'm living that's probably blasphemy, but they were interesting in a "Oh, it's got old English in it and it's cleverly written" way. Certainly the topics covered didn't warrant the amount of discussion given to them, and they might have been better covered with a more modern text that would give more scope for interpretation.

It's easy for me to say this, because I don't have to actually do the teaching, adhere to the guidelines set down by the examiners and the government and put up with unresponsive kids. Reading Shakespeare was dull though. However hard you might try to make it interesting it took up about a term and that was just in the reading of it, with very little discussion. I've just tried to dig out the essays I did on it. I can't seem to find them, which is odd because they should have been handed in with my final coursework collection. It's entirely possible that it was hand written and therefore I don't have a record of it. Pity.

But in any case, I do think that it would have been more useful to have read something different. Maybe I expect too much of school kids though - I know I didn't pay enough attention...

Impressively, NDirect's POP server appears to be down today. Which means no mail for me. Fun. I'll try later. To be honest, the problems I've been seeing with NDirect and the support I've got off them have got to be a good example of why people dislike ISPs and distrust them. In any case, I think it's a good idea to move to another ISP. Soon. At least as soon as I can work out who I want to go with.

Please look at "The Evil Henchman's Guide". It will help you decide on a career path. "The recommended method for checking to see if the Hero is still alive is to shoot him in the head".

Linus Torvals was on The Money Program. Now I was sure that his name had a D in it.

It seems that netdirect-announce@netdirect.co.uk is a globally writable mailing list containing all the netdirect customers. Yes. That's right. Anyone can just mail spam to that address and reach every customer they have. Dim. Negligent. Incompetent. Choose your own word.

Apologies to anyone that I've not replied to by email recently. I've just been trying to catch up with other work for a while. I promise I will catch up soon. Really .

Oh, and by the time you read this I'll know how many valentines cards I've received. It'll be none, but at least I'll know then. Hmm...

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14 Feb 2000 (Monday) 

Valentines day. No cards. Solitude, loneliness. But am I bitter ? [ "Valentines day", a poem by Justin ]

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15 Feb 2000 (Tuesday) 

Ooh. An email from Amanda today. It's bizarre; I didn't say much about them coming up at the time. It was good fun, erm... I'm writing this from memory, so don't expect much. We chatted for ages, went out for a meal, chatted over that, and generally had fun. Well, I enjoyed myself. Matthew was quite tired, I think. Um. That's it. I don't remember much. But since I don't remember anything from this morning, that's pretty good . Sorry, Amanda!

ZapJRF work today. I've just about fixed it to the point at which it does nothing useful. Which is a state I like.

Now who do I know that reads my diary at IBM ? Hmm...

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16 Feb 2000 (Wednesday) 

Julia (and Peter) rang tonight. Spent ages chatting to them about various things. I tried to explain what my nice blue jumper is like, but it's too hard - I don't know the words for different fabric types. Like I can't name female clothes well because I've never had a need, I just can't name fabrics.

I remembered to do some washing tonight, which is fortunate given that I've nothing left to wear now. That sounds awful, but I'm just too tired to care really.

X-Files tonight. A valetines episode with a metrologist who causes the weather by his emotions for a school sweetheart. But most importantly there was the cool flying cow crashing through the ceiling scene.

Doom is now able to disable sound completely and release the sound system so that the original handler can play to its hearts content. This is useful for playing MP3s whilst playing Doom. You lose all other sound though, unfortunately .

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17 Feb 2000 (Thursday) 

It's the show over this weekend so I shalln't write much in the diary (because I'll not be here!). Hopefully, I'll have a fun time. Today's been dull. Well, I watched a Star Trek and Buffy so at least something was good today.

Thinking I should ring Helen today (and yesterday) but I'm not. Doing good, don't you think ?

Updated Slige to have a random number generator - it's awful, but it does work for now. Hopefully it will aid David in tracking what mistakes I've made .

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20 Feb 2000 (Sunday) 

Nothing special today; added alternate map type to Doom, that someone suggested at yesterday's show. Watched some TV. Played some Lemmings. That's about it, really.

Music tonight brought to you by Neil Diamond.

Haven't even looked at mail recently.

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23 Feb 2000 (Wednesday) 

Meeting with Pace today. Got my Psion 5mx at last, which is kinda cool.

Oops! I managed to get the logic on my Nomic submission wrong! Hopefully this time I've got it around the right way!

Unfortunately, PsiFS doesn't work with my APDL IDE card. For some reason. Some might say that was a little annoying.

Had tea with Dad tonight - he's in Stratford for a course at the moment.

Lots of mail arrived over the past two days and I'm currently too tired to deal with it. Once I get the Psion sorted I'll use it to update my diary with more stuff. I have to work out how first though.

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24 Feb 2000 (Thursday) 

Right. My website is moving. Very, very soon.

I'm not sure exactly where it's going to, but it's going.

Expect this site to not be updated over the next few days whilst I move over to using another place.

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25 Feb 2000 (Friday) 

Fixed CMunge handling of files. Now uses a form of generalised file handling to prevent it leaving files lying around as was previously the case. A couple of other misc changes and bug fixes from work applied.

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26 Feb 2000 (Saturday) 

Designed some new graphics for Browse today - the little animation thingy in the status bar. It looks rather neat, if I do say so myself. I've also fixed a bug or two in the Doom frontend and main game. Previously, oversized M_DOOM graphics would end up writing all over the screen in a bizarre interlace-like way. The front end also kills DoomSupport when you quit it now so that it doesn't conflict too badly with other sound.

I've got the Psion connection working now . Hopefully I'll get a chance to update the code at some point to read the diary off PsiFS before updating the diary at some point. I'm not sure how easy that will be, and I could really do with a serial port switch (or another serial port!).

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27 Feb 2000 (Sunday) 

I've updated Doom+ to have an auto-extending vissprites array now. Previously it wasn't too necessary, but I've just tried playing Hell Revealed 2 and on level 9 there are some very nasty little effects where you can't see what's trying to kill you because there aren't enough vissprites available. I'll need to update the bubble sort too, but I've not got around to that yet.

Right... The webpages are nearly ready now... They should be able to go live tonight. All being well, that is. I'm not sure where this leaves the JavaScript and CMunge sites - I'll come up with a location for those later, I guess...

Right, well, everything appears to be fine locally...

Watched 'Escape From New York' tonight. Which was quite fun. Oh, and the final episode of Clocking Off, which was actually a really good series. Apparently it's back next year, which is a good and a bad thing. A bad thing because it's next year.

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29 Feb 2000 (Tuesday) 

Phew.

All done. I've got a new domain up and running.

I'd tell you all about the fun concert last night (Counting Crows) but I'm really tired. All right then... Well, we (Dad, Julian and myself) got there (De Montfort Hall, Leicester) at about 6:45. Meanwhile, Mum, Simon and Luke were stuck in Kettering because of an accident there. Which sort of left us a little stuck. Anyhow, we hung around outside, whilst Dad trying to keep in touch with them on the phone. Which was fun. We went into the hall and watched the Support band. They were quite good, but I've no idea who they were. There's something about Support groups. Maybe it's the mix, or maybe it's the fact that you're not there to see them so it's harder, but it's generally difficult to get an impression of them. I rather enjoyed what I heard in any case. Simon and Luke finally arrived just after the Support finished, and we chatted for a while. Mum and Dad went off for something to eat - we had one too few tickets, so they decided to just go off.

The concert itself was great - they opened with Mrs Potter's Lullaby, which was great. Julian has the order, and I don't doubt he'll have a review up on his page soon (I'll get the URL when he does!). From what I remember, they did (in order of album they are on, because that's how I'm remembering it!) Omaha, Mr Jones, Rain King, A Murder of One (which was so excellent!), Daylight Fading, Another Horsedreamer's Blues, Recovering The Satelites (which was great too), Long December, Walkaways, Hangin' Around, Mrs Potter's Lullaby, All My Friends, Colorblind, I Wish I was a Girl and St Robinson in his Cadillac Dream.

Now that I say that, it seems like a massive set, so I may have got that wrong. Julian will correct me, I'm sure, but it was great nonetheless. If I have a complaint to make about it then it would be that it was too short. Really, it was only about 85 minutes, which isn't that much. They were off at an hour, and then back on for the last couple of tracks. Maybe it's just me, but I was quite expecting two hours, which is more normal. Oh well... Maybe I got the start time wrong.

It's weird. I've not seen them before in Concert, so I really didn't know what to expect. The vocalist (I had to find a word there - singer is such a dull word, but vocalist is quite dull too) has a very different way of emoting in the song to many of the artists I know. Well, Fish is quite emotional about how he sings things, as are a lot of the other Progressive Rock things I like, but with Adam it's... just like he's actually doing it talking to someone... You know how you sort of ramble at someone about things... the sort of way that you talk, and you backtrack and you say things again but differently... If you see what I mean... It's like, you're saying things so that they understand what you're saying. A sort of desperate wanting for the other person to understand what you're saying and to see that you're talking to them from the heart.

Um... If that doesn't make sense then you don't know how I think . The strange thing is that it does come across in the studio version, but with him there is takes on a very different... feel.

Colour Blind was really amazing too, by the way.

Ok, let's try this mail thing out !

It's cold in here tonight; one of those odd nights where it gets very cold, very quickly. That's what you get for having a big room miles away from the thermostat .

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