6 May 2001 (Sunday) 

Updated quite a few things on the site... oh and there's a silly set of pages up at my NTLWorld account. I've stuck up a quick guide to using Doom+ front end, which is quite amusing.

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7 May 2001 (Monday) 

From a site about Robin Beck :

In 1998 she was hired to sing a CocaCola commercial in New York for the territory of England. The song "First Time" became so popular that Coca-Cola decided to back her in a full length version of the song with new lyrics. [ The Territory of England ]

The amusing bit to me is to see us described as 'The Territory of England'. That's something that I've not seen... um... ever...

Jello Biafra: Who would win in a fight, Luke Skywalker, a Klingon, or Mike ? Simon Pegg: MIKE! Jessica Stevenson: Definately. [ Who would win in a fight; Channel 4 chat about Spaced ]

Cleared out loads of email tonight. Lots had piled up over the past week because I'd not been dealing with it as dilligently, and I seem to have just got a batch of delayed emails, too. I'm not below 400 yet; but maybe I'll have another binge of replying tomorrow .

Diary has been pretty empty recently. Not much happening. That's why.

I'm currently sitting up, waiting for Angel to start. Why do I bother ?

Spent a little while today looking back at my old webpages and things. There was a lot more stuff on them. Not always useful, but it was there.

Someone was trying to find a copy of NetGame on my site - I don't think it's here; I have a copy in CVS that needs updating, though...

Coo... I think Angel's on earlier next week. Bloody hell.

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10 May 2001 (Thursday) 

Whee! The exciting thing for the day is... (drum roll) I fitted the new RISC OS ROMs to Virginia. No longer need I use broken Flash ROMs that sometimes fail to start up. I can now boot the machine without all that tedious mucking around rebooting every third time. Well, that's the theory. Since the Flash wouldn't even go to the desktop, I'm pretty sure that the image in it was just busted.

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14 May 2001 (Monday) 

Not many diary entries recently; been far too tired to do anything useful with it. Today was the 'tidy up SVG for release' day. It's pretty neat, I feel now.

Tidied up some of the icons on my website. The old 'Acorn' logo has gone now, because I've known for a long time that it's very outdated, but haven't had a chance to replace it. It's much nicer now, albeit a little obscure. The 'program' icon on the software page has been updated too, as has the DrawPlug icon. They just looked so awful in their un-antialiased state, but are much better now.

Spent the last week playing with firewalls; golly that was fun. I can now set up, manipulate and display firewall rules. Coo.

Lots of email over the past week (like 40 unread and replied to so far); it's just building up. One day this week, I'm just going to have to go through them all and try to do them in one binge.

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15 May 2001 (Tuesday) 

So, I've been watching Friends at night for the past week or so. It's been ok, and quite uplifting for the most part. But I've just reached mid-season 3, and Ross and Rachel have split up.

It's like... you know it's coming, but how can it happen ?

And the rest of the season is just lots of resentful and hurtful comments and nastiness. It's like someone just decided to take the bounciness away and replace it with a whole lot of heartache and pain.

So obviously, it being 3am and feeling like cack, I have to now write something cool and interesting, whilst hopefully listening to music that isn't terminally depressing.

It's a 'Heroes Never Die' moment, I think.

I was thinking about this on the way back from Cambridge a little while back. When I die, I want that played at my funeral. What I was thinking was... Everyone has a Hero. Whether it's me or whatever, doesn't matter. There's someone there who you look to for your answers and you miss with all your heart when they're not there. You should remember them. You shouldn't try to hide your feelings and forget them.

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17 May 2001 (Thursday) 

Like a lot of strange TV programs I like, Now and Again varies from the Whimsical to the Bizarre. But I think that aside from the first three episodes, the thought of Theo cutting up his old college roommate and donating the organs to hospitals is possibly one of the scariest.

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19 May 2001 (Saturday) 

Spent most of the day sleeping.

Wrote the front end to FTPUpdate this morning... Well, Saturday 1pm to about 6:30am. Looks very nice if I do say so myself .

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20 May 2001 (Sunday) 

Ok, I'm going to admit to being very dim now. There's a track I loved from when I was at high school, 'Gimme Hope Joanna', which was really great. Well, it still is, but I didn't realise it was about Apartheid. Just goes to show how naive you can be as a little kid. Why do I suddenly know this ? Because I saw an advert on the telly for Eddie Grants greatest hits and I remembered that Joe (I think is was) loved it when I was at school.

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21 May 2001 (Monday) 

Bah. I missed Angel tonight. Why ? Because my alarm went off for it at 2:05, and it started as 11:55. So, do I thank Channel 4 for moving it earlier, or curse them for moving it in the first place ?

There's been so much criticism of the RISC OS Select scheme. It's quite astounding. However, there comes a time where you just have to say 'enough is enough' and leave it be. This, I think, is one of those times. RISC OS continued quite happily when I left, and I'm sure it will continue after this criticism. Just that, I think it may have to do so without me.

There's only so much bitching and complaining that I can take. What's it really mean to be commited to a platform ? Does it mean doing five months of unpaid work for it ? Well, probably not. In any case, I don't think that the community deserve any further versions of the OS if, when presented with the terms under which they can get it all they can do is complain. I think it has to be said that if the market won't accept what is offered to it, then market pressure is the reason that the offer fails. And if that offer was a reasonable one, then it means that there isn't a market for what is offered.

Which, basically, comes down to 'Acorn were right to ditch the desktop market', and that RISCOS Ltd really shouldn't have tried to salvage it. If the market is just unable to support itself, then there is no point being in it.

Played around with importing GMail too. Not amazingly interesting. It was pretty trivial to import, after all. But it means that I now have GMail and ExtEdit in the repository, which is useful.

Redesigned the software page into multiple little pages. Took a little while, and I had to update to the latest HSC because the one I have didn't do what I needed (no arithmetic + operator). Of course, it didn't work once I'd got it, so I had to actually start understanding the code and add a number of functions to handle auto-promotion of numbers to variables. Not too tricky, but it's interesting code. It's actually quite well structured; I'm not too adverse to it.

In theory, my Buffy DVDs arrive tomorrow. That's the theory. Who knows if it's right or not.

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24 May 2001 (Thursday) 

Saw 'The Mummy Returns' last night. Quite cool. Special effects are dodgy in places, but it's neat in others. It's a very enjoyable and silly film. Definately recommended, and don't be put off by thinking 'this is just silly' in the first few minutes - remember that you probably thought the same for the first film. If you did think that, then I'm sure you realised pretty quickly that it's a film that must be enjoyed for what it is, and not taken at all seriously . Oh, and just imagine that Scooby Doo lives in the same London that they do and you'll feel right at home .

Tried updating ControlAMPlayer to use the latest version of AMPlayer's service calls, rather than regularly polling the system. Unfortunately, this highlighted a bug in the JFPatch generated non-Ursula service entry sequence that I did at the end of last year. So, I've ripped out the Fast Reject handler option. We now always use Fast Reject code, which simplifies the code generation massively. Actually, if I were to remove the non-Ursula support, it'd make it easier, but I'll leave it in for now.

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29 May 2001 (Tuesday) 

Pace management are about as far-sighted as a particularly short-sighted species of bat suffering from advanced myopia, blindfolded on a dark night. [ Blindness; Kevin Bracey ]

Kevin's being very hard on the Pace Management. I'm surprised he can get away with that sort of thing, really...

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