Well, I've heard nothing from Caroline since Saturday's email, and I had at least expected something from her if she was going to reply. Which means, I guess, that she doesn't want to meet up. No matter. I don't think I actually mind. Yeah, I don't think it's bothering me. It might just be because I've had a chance to apologise, or because I really don't care as much as I thought, or even because the idea of talking to her would be so weird that I just want to avoid it. Whatever the reason, that's that.

And did those feet, In ancient times, Walk down to get Ice Cream ? [ Jerusalem, for Ice Cream vans ]

Little bit of a storm today. Lots of thunder and lightning, but only for a little while. Kicked out the power on the PC though, so it's sitting there doing its fun fsck of the all the discs .

Freenetnames is playing silly buggers at the moment. You pick up mail, delete the messages that are there, and then disconnect. Then you do the same, and the messages are still there. So, since you're picking up mail every five minutes whilst there is a connection, you're getting many many duplicates of the same emails. They're just not actually deleting the messages which is less than useful.

Glancing at the read mail earlier I noticed a subject line for an message I'd missed - "Save £££ with CD WOW! - Free 50p Gift Voucher when you order!"

You'll have to forgive me for saying 'that's a contradiction'. 50p is not '£££'. And the offer is only available once per item, so you're actually only saving 50p/item.

I'm powerless to change your world. I'm powerless to stop the hurt. I'll give you my heart, give you my shoulder. [ Heart And Shoulder, from Siren, by Heather Nova ]

"It's not too bad" or "It isn't too bad".

I found myself saying the former in a conversation today. Both are saying the same thing - "It is not too bad" - but I'm not sure why the latter feels nicer. Of course, I'm sure there are other phrases you could use in place of it, but I'd prefer to know why the latter feels better.

<Watching video> Rachel: In about ten seconds, you'll see Ross kiss me. Ross: And in about five seconds, you'll see why... Rachel (on video): You know, when I was backpacking through Europe <Ross kisses Rachel> [ Who came on to whom ?; Ross and Rachel; Friends ]

... which will make a whole lot of no sense unless you actually saw last night's episode.

I'm so astoundingly selfish at times. I'm wittering on about how my life is, and Caroline's, by the sound of things, seems to have been significantly worse. A wise woman once said that 'everyone has their own pain that they deal with'. Mine just... doesn't seem all that great by comparison.

There are one or two odd corollaries of this, though. One is that I really resent Mum's derogatory comments about Caroline. She's said similar things about Helen - who she never even met - and I find it quite hurtful that she makes such comments about people who are friends of mine.

Heather Nova's 'What A Feeling' has a sound so astoundingly similar to John Lennon's 'Jealous Guy'.

You know, I've got almost no work done for the past four days. Time to call it a day and get on with things, I think.

I've just finished watching 'Three To Tango'. I only went down to say 'night' to Julian, and ended up watching it. Oh well. Fun film, though.

Could I have been a better man ? Was I really all to blame ? Was it me that was the problem ? Was it me that dealt the pain ? Did you never mean to hurt me ? Did you only try to show that you really truly love me, that together we're alone? [ Shadowplay, from Internal Exile, by Fish ]

I appear to have ended up listening to music around 7 years old. Having realised this, I'm listening to something else.

Have you come here for forgiveness ? Have you come to raise the dead ? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head ? [ One, from Achtung Baby, by U2 ]

Simon got a t-shirt for his birthday which he'd been asking for for... well, a while. On the front "Everything I know...", on the back "I learnt from the Simpsons and Pop Up video". Which I think is really funky. Simon's a real hoopy frood, though. Mine is 'everything I say comes from song lyrics' which is most definately less catchy.

So, I'm sitting here trying to work out how to fit 63 error codes into a block which only has space for 48 and maintain binary compatibility. And at the same time there's a mini argument going on...

... but I've hidden it because there are personal details in there that I don't want viewed externally.

It's just gone 9am. I've got to go to the dentist in an hour or so, and Caroline rang about 15 minutes ago. I - finally - got to sleep around 7:30, so I wasn't exactly the most... um... ah-ha 'eloquent' (ok, so it only took 5 minutes to remember the word, but imagine that, but on the phone)... of people.

Anyhow, a little weird.

I can't put together sentences at the moment, so I'll try to write more later. Uh. Maybe.

Some may sing the wrong words to the wrong melodies. It's little things like this that matter to me. [ Stolen Car, from Central Reservation, by Beth Orton ]

Argh! 'Erin Shore' precedes 'Forgiven Not Forgotten' ! [ Argh! Erin Shore!; Me ]

And the one eyed furry toy that lies upon the bed has often heard her cry. And heard her whisper out a name, Long forgiven... ... but not forgotten. [ Forgiven Not Forgotten, from Forgiven Not Forgotten, by The Corrs ]

I keep getting these little flashbacks to Downham now. A lot of them are exceptionally good reminders of why they've not been remembered until now. I didn't - yesterday - remember much about Downham, but now... now I remember more than I think I want.

I wanted to listen to the concert version of 'Round here' that Counting Crows did at the Astoria gig last month (or the month before - time is an illusion). Why ? Partly because it was... uh... unique. I'd never heard it sung with quite that level of animosity. I've never really thought of it as an angry song until that version. I'm not sure I prefer that style, but it's different, and I think a different view on tracks can be beneficial to showing how the track might have been.

Everything about you is how I'd want to be Your freedom comes naturally Everything abut you resonates happiness Now I won't settle for less [ Bliss, from Origin Of Symmetry, by Muse ]

Yeah, I'm just filling time by listening to music on a vaguely typical theme to fill time.

There was a great chunk here about Caroline, but I have decide on reflection to private it as it's really only for my benefit and contains details which should not be public.

I didn't know that DeLorien was audited by Andersen back in the 80s. Coo.

Which segues really badly to the email I received today.

I got up. It was 3pm - I have rotating days, so this is nothing too special, except that I'm meant to be reverting to normal time at the moment, but that's not going to happen now... but I digress - and I started to run a bath. Turned the PC on, and ping 'something' so that the network connection goes up and my mail gets picked up. Clean teeth, return to see lots of email. Looks like loads of spam. Do a quick scan to see what's real and what's not. There's loads of porn spam that I get, a load of spam for search engines and a little bit of spam over non-computer related products - ever feel that computing is a self financing industry ? um... I'm digressing again... sorry.

So, I scan the subjects and from addresses to mark as deleted a load that look uninteresting. Then I rescan the list to make sure I've not deleted anything real, or missed off any spam that needs deleting anyhow. Usually there are a few that are ambiguous because they use subject lines that could relate to me. The number of these is very low - "Thanks for your help", for example, gets ignored because I very rarely help anyone these days and if I do the people know they don't have to thank me; "Nice to talk to you last night" is similar, 'cos I don't meet new people on the 'net any more (yeah, I'm very insular now, but that's only because of the extremely weird people you meet out there and the fact that I can't keep up with the people that I do know). But sometimes, there are emails that warrant a litte more look. This scan and rescan usually takes a couple of minutes and wastes time, but it's worthwhile to avoid having to read the drivel that comes in otherwise.

One such email has the subject 'Beauty on the fire' which rings a bell, so I look at the from address - "Natalie Imbruglia" and it's an address at bmg.co.uk which means it's promotional spam, but one I'm happy to accept so I undelete it.

One such email was marked as from 'Caroline' with the subject 'Web site'. The lack of a surname is typical of a spam, and the subject line of "Web site" is typical of a way to get your attention without meaning anything. So, I look - the bath hasn't finished running yet, so why not? - and it looks very much like a search engine spam from the first line. But, the next line becomes a little more personal, and I'm interested. If this is spam, it's good. It's got my interest and left me wondering what they want. I scan the mail and read the end paragraph thanking me for my support - not a usual spam thing, in my experience. There's no address to contact with my money, and no significant signature. Just signed 'Caroline'. And I'm wondering who I could know with that name.

Then I notice the end of the line. 'nee Webster'.

A couple of missed heartbeats later, I'm re-reading the mail - properly this time.

So. Caroline Webster. Wow.

Writing up to here has been easy, because I haven't had to write what I think about this. I don't know really. Well, I do. Ish. The question that runs through my head is 'How vindictive am I ?' and think about how hurt I felt at the time and that this screwed up my life for two years. But that's not fair. I did feel hurt, yes. But that's to be expected. And did she screw up my life ? No. I did. I was the one who made myself feel bad, because I think I thought that it was expected and that became a rather nasty feedback loop - something that is quite hard to break out of when you're an obsessive person. So, I only have myself to blame for that. And I do, even still.

I still blame myself for being moody, abrupt and uncommunicative with her when things weren't so good. I avoid problems rather than confronting them. I have a bad memory for the most part, but my memories of that time are a mix of the really great time I spent in her company, and the long periods of silence because of something trivial and unimportant.

Since that time, it was a thing for about 3 years to try to find out where she was, just to see how she was getting on - as a friend, honest! - and was snubbed by her parents. Which I guess is understandable.

Oddly - this is true - yesterday, I was pondering over the last 'conversation' I had with Caroline where she was (rightly, I think) annoyed at me (although not for the right reason - I wasn't intentionally making things hard for her; I was genuinely interested), and I was still quite bright and cheerful and asking how she was and things. The reason I was pondering it, I forget - you know how you go over these things again and again ? - but as I was thinking over it, I was thinking how incongruous my and her attitudes were. It was as if I hadn't even heard what she'd said and was just talking to her as a normal social call. I guess I was just blocking out things I didn't want to hear. I was hearing but not paying any heed to them, which I think sums up part of what was wrong at the time.

The other thing that sprang to mind at the time was a conversation on returning from the school where she'd come all the way up to see me, after we'd split up. I was arrogant, impulsive, selfish and (probably - I don't remember being, but I may have been without realising) rude to her at the time and I have no idea what on earth I was thinking. That is a memory that replays once in a while because I'd quite happily shoot myself for making such an arse of myself to her.

So, what do I feel now ?

I'm not sure. I'm interested in what she's been up to. She's married. Which is... I don't know... I have this unfocused view of time which relates only vaguely to reality (one example is turning on the telly and seeing part of a film, then turning it off, then turning the telly on five hours later and having some nagging feeling that the film should be where I left it), which means it's somewhat strange to know that she's married. But, I don't think that bothers me. Maybe that's my blocking out things I don't want to hear again, but I don't think so. I'm a lot more balanced now. Well, ok, a little more balanced now.

I don't actually have a reference to Caroline on the 'Friends' except in a comment :

Odd how there is nobody at Downham Sixth Form isn't it ? You'd think there'd be somebody I'd liked there wouldn't you ? (22 Dec 1998) I've just read that and it took me a moment or two to realise that there was someone and I was being sarcastic! It's odd when you waste sarcasm on yourself! [ Hidden comment in 'friends'; Me ]

She's in the 'about' section in the Diary, though.

It seems that the last time she was in the Friends section was when I was at University, so the page vanished when I left.

So, do I want to write back to her ?

Yes. Going through this here, I think I know where I stand on the whole thing. Do I think that she'd wish she'd not contacted me after reading the diary ? I don't know what she'd think. The diary has scarier things about me than this in it, so I am surprised that she contacted me at all having seen any part of it. Or maybe she hadn't; maybe she'd only found it in passing.

However, she found me. I'm left to ponder why. I am the obsessive one. Hell, what am I saying ? I don't know her any more. A lot can happen in 7 years, and I don't remember much about her really. I remember little bits, but those are the bits that you focus on and are reinforced and warped by the continued recollection (simple repeated recall reinforcement), so whatever I may remember is going to be a twisted view from afar and unlikely to be like the reality of then, never mind the reality of now. Best to just put aside any preconceptions and just think of her as a friend with whom I've lost touch.

She found me, and she took the time to apologise to me for how she treated me. Whether that's because she wants me to apologise for treating her badly at the time, or through genuine need, or because she wants something from me, I don't know. (ok, I'm cynical; I can't help it - I just think about these things) I don't think that her motives are particularly relevant to this though - whatever her motives, it doesn't really matter.

The other thought that occurs is that if she reads this entry she'll be wondering if I'm still as self-absorbed as I was then, because given the over-analysis here it might seem that I am. Maybe I am. I probably am. "Just my way of getting through the day, dear", as Basil Fawlty would say .

In other news (!) I've had an email from Simon Forrest today too. Now that I do feel very guilty about not having read or replied to yet, but this other email has kinda occupied my mind for the past 5 hours.

And my Simpsons season 2 DVD arrived today, too.

And Enterprise is on now.

And in other news... there's an Icecream van that drives around here. Normal Icecream vans play music to tell people that it's there. Yeah, ok. For reasons which are unclear, this one is playing 'Jerusalem'. I may be alone in thinking it's weird that Jerusalem is being used like that. Maybe we could have something more classical as well. "Ride of the Valkaries", would make a cool tune to play to announce its arrival.

Featured music of the day: 'Numb', Archive.

I believe that Caroline found me through the Friends Reunited site, which implies that I've probably got some email waiting for me at the old @innocent.com address. Let's check shall we. I'm using 39% of my mail quota. Which is invariably all spam. Oh, it's just like christmas. Nope. It's all spam there. Ah well.

She has a daughter, too. Which is nice.

Yesterday I thought I'd hit rock bottom. But today... today, there's rock bottom, fifty feet of crap, and then me. [ Rock bottom ?; Rachel; Friends ]

Now, of course, I'm worried at what Caroline will write back. But, on the whole, I don't reckon she will so it's one of those mild butterflies that will be unimportant in the long run.

Having written out a huge email to Alan Wrigley in response to a usenet posting (which I don't generally reply to because it's filled with ignorant, rude and downright annoying people), I get the whole thing bounced back at me because he's put a bollocks email address in the from field.

So, do I go hunting around for a valid address ? No. It merely reaffirms my belief that people on usenet don't want to be helped, and consign the email to the bin. Oh, and be very annoyed, because I've just wasted half an hour on an ignorant bastard who wasn't deserving of that time.

Acorn User reaches its 250th issue The September issue of Acorn User is the 250th (and the 50th produced by tau Press) -- a totally unprecedented feat in specialist computer magazines. [ Acorn User 250th Edition; Acorn User ]

Dr Dobb's Journal has been produced since 1976. It's a good deal more specialist than Acorn User. I do a little maths and err on the side of caution. 2001-1976 = 25. 25 years at one issue per month is 300 issues. Obviously some strange usage of the phrase 'totally unprecedented' of which I was previously unaware.

Claire: Didn't you just love it ? What was your favourite part ? Brenda: Oh, I don't know, there were just so many parts. [ Charlotte; 6 Feet Under ]

I'm still not sure what to make of Brenda and her family. Claire, we can get a grip on, but Brenda is - intentionally - a loose cannon. You never quite know what to make of her. In case I forget, or you don't know, the quote refers to the book 'Charlotte' which is about Brenda's childhood problems.

And then we have 'Highlander: Endgame'. I freely admit that I can't follow some films. There were many times when I missed a line, and the whole next five minutes were lost on me. The end fight scenes were jumpy, and I'm sure that at least three shots were repeats of those only about 2 minutes earlier. As for continuity... well, within the film it might have been good. It might, but I got lost when some of the flashbacks ended and 'now' took over at least twice. Continuity back to the previous films... uh, no. Ignore the films. Think of it as finishing the TV series. Which is a pity, because the TV series worked well.

Made doom work with 3D glasses. That was a little pointless.

Suzanne's had a little baby girl. Aww!

Ported new LibXML/LibXSLT. Not had a chance to tidy up or release yet.

People get annoyed at having trailing cables all over the house. Not least when they trip over them and so consider them a danger. So, you think "let's do the wireless thing". Then you look at the price and you reconsider. And then the house is decorated and trailing wires don't really seem sane. So you look again. And you've read up since then on the different ways you can do wireless networking.

Upstairs you have your linux box (buttercup) which runs your dialup connection through a 56k modem, your Risc PC which you use for everything and your test/build machine which gets used most of the time for trying stuff out when you reckon it'll kill the machine if something goes wrong. All plugged in to a switch. Normally you'd run a big cable downstairs (along the corridor, down the stairs, across the porch to the living room) where the other machines live. These are a Risc PC which usually does dial up on an old 14k4 modem, and a new Windows 2000 machine (familypc) which is hoped to encourage the rest of the family to be better educated in Windows than you are .

The two choices which appeal are two wireless network cards running in Ad-hoc mode - one in the buttercup, one in familypc. This seems reasonable, but you don't really want to break the linux box because you can't afford to be wasting time fixing it. So, the second choice is better - that of an Access Point upstairs and a wireless card in familypc. The other main option would be two Access Points to bridge between the two systems, but that would preclude the addition of (for example) a laptop with a wireless card (the APs can only talk to one another).

So... Ask Ian what he thinks. Basically he agrees, but with a lot more justification than you've uncovered in your travels and some good specifics. So... a little while later you've ordered a NetGear ME102 access point, and a MA401+MA301 wireless PCMIA card and PCI adapter.

An email arrives in a few hours to say that the order has been received and another email will be sent to confirm it. Nothing further is heard for two days. Then, you go downstairs and your brother says "Did you get your parcels ?". And there's this big box with bits in it. It's just like Christmas. But without the arguing or the tree.

So you take the lot out of the boxes and see what you've got. Grab a little Philips screwdriver to fit the PCI card and you read some instructions. You sneer at the 'this will take 10 minutes to install' on the Access Point instructions.

You plug the Access Point into the power. You plug the USB connection in. You install the USB access software from the CD. You run the software. You change the ESSID (it's the 'domain' in which the system runs) so that you know it's yours. And you're done. 4 minutes. But you still don't know if it's working, 'cos it's not talking to anything.

So now you do the 'take the machine apart and fit the interface'. That's pretty easy, as these things go. Getting the case back on causes a few minutes annoyance as the little clips don't fit in the right places the first few times.

Now we turn the machine on and stick the CD in to install the software. This goes painlessly and we select the ESSID that we used on the access point. We get green lights in the system tray, and things are looking good. You can guess we're going to have problems can't you ?

Pick up the Access Point to plug it in upstairs. Then you find that you've not got enough sockets for it. Ok, we can lose the test machine for now. Plug in. Return downstairs to see whether the machine has got its DHCP off buttercup. No. Not yet. It takes an age for it to obtain a DHCP after it's backed off for ages, so we'll just reboot it - that'll be quicker than waiting for it. Reboot. Login. Coo. A network address. Pinging the server works. Golly.

Let's look at the 'net, shall we ? Well, IE works, so we seem to be up and running.

Consider the second problem, though... there's a RiscPC downstairs that needs to talk to this network too. "Piece of piss", you think. "RISC OS can do packet forwarding with a single command. Windows bloody well ought to be able to". Ian reckons it'll be hard and that you need extra software. All I want, though, is to packet forward - nothing special. It just takes input from one interface and sees that it's destined for another network and feeds it out of the other. In this case from wireless to ethernet, and vice versa. We take out the cross-over cable from a machine upstairs and replace it with a normal cable (which we bought because we foresaw this eventuality).

Plug the two machines together and assign them static IPs on a new subnet (the normal network being 192.168.0.x, we're using 192.168.1.x for this two interface network). Return upstairs and ping the downstairs RiscPC from the upstairs RiscPC. Nothing happening. No route between the machines! Set one up through familypc which you can ping quite happily. Ping the RiscPC again. Nothing again. Oh well, that's to be expected - You didn't think that packet forwarding would be enabled by default.

So, now to find the option to enable the packet forwarding. This is hard. Spend about an hour looking for this and being distracted by other side issues. Finally, you find it, hidden away in some other documentation. The phrase you're looking for if you need to enable this is "IpEnableRouter" in the registry. You find it in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters section. Set this to 1. Do this, and then reboot, because you aren't sure when changes to that option take effect. Once rebooted, from the downstairs RiscPC try pinging buttercup. Nothing. Quickly realise that you're pinging an address on another network so should have a route in there. Set one up. Still nothing. It needs a route back... Plug the monitor back in to familypc - you've only got one monitor for the two machines - and telnet to buttercup and set up a route back. You can do this, because family appears to be on the same network as buttercup because it's using the wireless interface.

Still not getting anything. Hmm. Curse for a bit. Hunt through the registry for anything else that might be wrong. Spend about an hour and a half on this and other investigations. Still getting nowhere. Return upstairs to see if you can find anything on the 'net in a nicer environment. Note with interest that the RiscPCs ping is still running and some of them got replies. "Something" that you've done in the past two hours or so has worked. You don't know what. But it didn't seem to from the other end. Spend a little time thinking and playing with this idea from downstairs.

Use tcpdump on buttercup to see where the packets are going - they're arriving at buttercup but they're never leaving... that seems odd. You begin to see the problem. Your firewall. 192.168.1.x is a foreign network. The firewall is blocking all your connections because it believes them to be external to the internal network. Add a few rules to allow the local network to talk to the outside world and (more importantly) to buttercup. Ping buttercup from downstairs RiscPC and... they come back. You have a working network.

Now you have to mess around making the familypc's address static rather than DHCP'd because you need to route to it (add an entry in dhcpd.conf), add the route to the new network (entry in /etc/init.d/networking), tidy up the firewall script so that people can't exploit a faked internal network that you've had to add, add entries to the hosts files, and configure the Risc PCs to have permanent settings.

Setting up the wireless part was easy. Setting up the packet forwarding system was less easy but once you know the issues, not too bad.

One thing that seems to have come to light since then is that directed broadcasts don't seem to be forwarded by familypc. There's an option to forward broadcasts in the registry. It doesn't seem to actually forward the packets though when enabled. This might be a good thing, but for what I wanted, it isn't so handy. The only explicit reference I've found to it claims that this option only forwards broadcast bootp packets, which is sensible, but it'd be useful if it was more powerful. It'd actually be very funky to DHCP via this mechanism, but god only knows if that'd work.

A lot of the information about 'RAS' (Remote Access Service) applies to this kind of network, so if ever you need to look this up, you might like to look at such references.

Later, you talk to your friend Dave and he suggests (again) daild to do dial on demand on buttercup. You've put this off in the past. It caused a few problems. This time you can address those issues. Installing it works pretty much straight off. Golly.

And now we have RiscPC and familypc able to trigger dialups without bothering me. So much nicer.

Quite happy.

Sometimes The Perfect Element, by Pain Of Salvation is so Pendragon like in its guitars. Falling could just be Pendragon, and the follow through from Falling into The Perfect Element is just great!

In his head a thunderous cry of desperation Tearing voices from his past scream for his attention [ The Perfect Element, from The Perfect Element (Part I), by Pain Of Salvation ]

It seems that John's method of dealing with any criticism is to run away and create a separate moderated mailing list. It seems unfortunate that he seems unable to actually take any criticism of his work. Alas, that's life I guess. It's a pity really, because ViewFinder is a pretty neat bit of hardware - although probably not worth 200 quid - but if you can't actually report faults and expect them to even be discussed then it would seem a little spurious to suggest that it was getting any form of post sales 'support'.

Took a deep breath and ordered some wireless networking gear today. I'm hopeful that it'll work.

Received my copy of The Perfect Element (Part I), by Pain Of Salvation today, which is really cool. And with it, a copy of Half Life Generations which I will get around to playing at some point.

And Grendel seems to be wanting too much attention at the moment. He just won't leave me alone .

I'm sitting here listening to music (as I do every day!) and looking at Amazon's recommendation (which I do rarely). And at number 18 in the recommendations is Are you sitting comfortably?, by IQ. Which is currently playing. Strange .