30 Oct 2004 (Saturday) 

The little lump of JavaScript I knocked up specially to try to hide things on the iPaq didn't work and I couldn't work out why. I'm not bothered, but it does give me a nice opportunity to make it work in general.

It's not so bad; I've made it use a cookie so if you see a 'hidcal' cookie for my diary, that's all it is. In theory it should keep the setting the next time you come back. In theory it will turn itself off on the browsers I know can't do what needs to be done, but I can't test with everything. In particular, I've marked 'Oregano 1' and the 'PPC' browser on the iPaq as being unable to handle the code so it won't even appear with the link to hide the sidebar.

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29 Oct 2004 (Friday) 

A highly productive day involved with making a lump of code work correctly without having packed structures support in the compiler. Not the most thrilling of things to do, but surprisingly little of the 300ish K of code actually needed any change, which is very reassuring.

Of course there's the problem of whether it's actually doing the right thing in all circumstances, but I'm pretty confident I'll find that out

I briefly snuck a look at Hannah's iPaq tonight - sorry Hannah; it works on our wireless network now that I know it's MAC address (one odd thing about the Access Point is that it won't tell me the MAC addresses of the systems that have not been allowed access - whilst this isn't a problem as I just disable the access control, tcpdump for the address they're using or look at the DHCP logs, add it to the list and then reenable, it is a little tedious).

The thing that's very obvious is that the diary looks naff. Why ? Because the iPaq is criminally small in its display and, more particularly, the cute little calendar I put on the right side is now a detrimental feature of the site.

I knocked up a nice little block of JavaScript code that would (in a very rudimentary way) identify the browser it was being run on (PPC 240x320, for the iPaq) and if so replace the HTML used by the diary with nothing when you clicked on a link. The only problem with that is that whilst it works on Internet Explorer on XP, and on Opera, and on Netscape, it resolutely fails to do anything on the iPaq's Internet Explorer. I'm not sure why and it's now late so I won't bother to investigate much further, but it annoys me because the code should be pretty simple, and should work. I might ask some people who might be more likely to know the answers tomorrow. It's reasonably cute to just remove the whole section from the page and have everything reformat correctly, but it is a little annoying that it doesn't actually work on the one browser I actually wanted it to work on.

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28 Oct 2004 (Thursday) 

I no longer want to even think about the amount of work that goes on when you reinitialise the Internet module. Firstly all the Internet using modules spot that the module is dying. They mark themselves as being dormant and flag all sockets as dead. Then the whole system comes back to life and things start to wake up. As they do so, they trigger other things waking up and a few moments after the module started you've got a working system.

On the system I have here, it's probably the most complex I've seen. The following happens (this is how I understand it - there's probably a bit I've missed and I'm basing this on what should happen, not what does happen (some components may not actually provide the functionality I've described)) :

• *RMReInit Internet
• Internet module issues a service to tell the world that it's dying.
  • Freeway marks its two sockets dead.
  • ShareFS marks its socket dead.
  • LanManFS marks its sockets dead, flagging all servers it was logged on to (well, none here, but it would) as being dead.
  • NetI marks its sockets dead.
  • InetConfigure marks internet as gone and sleeps.
  • Resolver marks its socket dead.
  • ZeroConf goes to sleep.
  • DHCPClient goes to sleep.
• Internet module removes its frame filters from the device drivers - Each of the three frame types is released from each of the three devices which are present. Each frame free should elicit a FrameTypeFree service from the driver - that's 9 services for those frames.
• Internet module is now dead.
• New Internet module is loaded and initialises.
• Internet module issues a service to find the drivers.
  • EtherH attaches its details to the list.
  • EtherY attaches its details to the list.
  • EtherX attaches its details to the list.
• Internet module issues a service to tell the world that it's here.
  • InetConfigure reads the current configuration and sees that it's set to dynamic.
    • InetConfigure starts a DHCP session on the first interface (ex0).
      • DHCPClient issues a request for an address.
    • InetConfigure starts a ZeroConf session on the first interface (ex0).
      • ZeroConf sends out an ARP probe on the interface on a random link-local address.
  • Resolver claims its socket.
  • ShareFS claims its socket.
  • Freeway claims its socket.
  • Freeway attempts to enumerate interfaces with Internet addresses but fails 'cos there aren't any yet.
  • LanManFS claims its socket.
  • NetI claims its socket.
  • DHCPClient knows that it was previously controlling eh0, so issues a request for an address.
• Response arrives from DHCP server for ex0 interface, offering an address. DCHP client sends a request for that address.
• ARP probe not responded to by ZeroConf (on ex0); tries again for the same address.
• Response arrives from DHCP server for eh0 interface, offering an address. DCHP client sends a request for that address.
• Acknowledgement arrives from DHCP server for ex0 interface, confirming the address is now allocated.
  • DHCP client configures the address on the interface, causing Internet to issue a service to say that the address has changed (and interface is up.
    • Freeway enumerates the interfaces and broadcasts its objects to the all the interfaces.
    • NetI auto-configures the Econet-network address to be the same address as the interface (within the limitations of Econet network addressing). It then issues a service to tell clients that the NetMap has changed.
  • Resolver system variable is set according to DHCP response.
    • Resolver changes its internal state to reflect the new system variable
  • Hostname and domain are set according to DHCP response.
    • Resolver changes its internal state to reflect the new system variable, splitting the Hostname into its Host and Domain if necessary.
    • Resolver issues a service to tell the world that the host name has changed.
      • FreewayHosts changes its registration with Freeway to indicate the new host name.
  • Default route is set according to DHCP response.
  • Other system variables for the various servers are set according to DHCP response.
  • Gateway is configured according to DHCP response.
• ARP probe still not responded to by ZeroConf (on ex0); tries again for the same address.
• Acknowledgement arrives from DHCP server for eh0 interface, confirming the address is now allocated.
  • Similar sequence to that above for ex0; notice that this means that some actions are duplicated and some are overridden by the second address. Just don't think about that for now because it gives us big headaches - most components cope well enough with this situation at present. For brevity, I'm omitting the lot above.
• ZeroConf still hasn't had a reply to its ARP, and nobody else has issued an ARP request for that address and so it must be safe.
  • ZeroConf configures the address for ex0:9, causing Internet to issue a service telling the world that the address has changed.
  • ZeroConf issues a service to tell the world that it controls ex0:9 now.

A new module I've written does more in there, but I don't worry about most of the bits. It's working, and it's working very nicely thank you very much. Graceful degradation of the components when they are killed and restarted, together with retention of settings such that they can be automatically restored on return. About two seconds after the Internet module returns you can happily use the network as if nothing had happened.

I'd like to point out that I've missed out the fact that some of those operations weren't actually happening inline but on callbacks, or that the order was different. In addition some of the operations are duplicated - on interface change and interface up and down, a few modules spot the state and recache information from the Stack. Two of those modules - DHCP and ZeroConf also write to SysLog (who's sockets will be reclaimed as appropriate if configured to server mode) to record their state as the stack restarts - as I recall, if its logs are set to be remote it will buffer the messages until there is a route available, which means that you would also have SysLog watching for interface configurations in order that it might try sending packets again. That said, I have a feeling that SysLog merely uses a incremental back off, rather than merely stalling until a possible address is configured as address doesn't necessarily mean that there is a route. Either way, it's more complexity I've missed.

I'll also point out that EtherY isn't configured by this process purely because it's not actually plugged in to anything at the moment - it's hard enough testing two interfaces, one of which is aliased without having to get the infrastructure in place and keep what's meant to be happening clear in your head for three interfaces. Forgive me, I'm a bear of very little brain.

Obviously applications are oblivious to this, and many other modules don't pay a blind bit of notice, but I care about the rest of it.

Next time you're bored, try killing SharedSound and SoundDMA, and then reinitialising them, whilst you're playing an MP3 with AMPlayer. All being well your music should just roll on without missing a single beat - I can't even hear the change. It's a little bit more obvious an example of resilience in the face of the removal of part of the system. What's actually happening is not quite as complex as the Internet stack restart, but I think it's much more fun - partly because it's actually understandable, unlike most of the Internet restart sequence :

• *RMKill SharedSound
• SharedSound issues a service to say it's dying.
  • AMPlayer notices and registers itself directly with SoundDMA - your music continues.

• *RMKill SoundDMA
• SoundDMA issues a service to say it's dying.
  • AMPlayer notices and can't do anything so stops - there's no sound system so your music has to stop.

• *RMReInit SoundDMA
• SoundDMA issues a service to say that it's alive.
  • AMPlayer notices and registers itself directly with SoundDMA - the music continues where it left off

• *RMReInit SharedSound
• SharedSound issues a service to say it's alive.
  • AMPlayer notices and registers itself - the music keeps on going.

Yeah, it's a little simpler. Actually I've omitted the SoundScheduler and SoundChannels registration which also takes place alongside the initialisation of the SoundDMA module, but that would just make it look like the mess for Internet . Alternatively you could ReInitialise SoundChannels and see that afterward all the voices that were previously registered are still there - they've all re-associated themselves with the channels.

Of course, I've thought a lot about how the Internet stack functions in order to write that lot. Ah well. Oh, and don't write in telling me that I've got the order wrong, or that there's race conditions in what I've said (there are, that's just the way it is), or that I missed X, Y or Z, or even that there's a bug in X, Y or Z. I'm probably aware of the problem, and if I'm not I probably don't want to worry myself with it right now.

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27 Oct 2004 (Wednesday) 

Nothing much appears to have happened today. David Gamble rang, which was rather nice, although we stopped chatting to go watch telly. I wanted to see Die Another Day. Which is odd as I have it on DVD. Oh well. Anyhow, not too bad, but it did seem a little jumpy to me. And some of the bits looked like rather dodgy CGI creations.

It's 2:50 and everyone else has gone to bed. There's nothing in my mailbox and nothing on usenet worth replying to.

Bored.

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26 Oct 2004 (Tuesday) 

Long ago (whilst looking for Peter's projection maps), I found a nice map which shows the relative populations of countries, in the shpe of the countries themselves. This is obviously a scaled down and greeked version of a proper version, but it's quite cool anyhow.

The first thing that you notice is the amount of orange. In particular the 'top' block of orange that indicates China's population (a quick look at WFB says that that was 1.2 billion in '95 - that's the only version of WFB I've got right to hand), and below that the wedge that is India's population (950 million in '95 - I don't know what date this data is based on, but it gives you an idea).

The next thing you notice is that the UK is pretty big. That is, it's bigger than you think it ought to be given the size of the rest of Europe. And similarly that North America is small, again in relation to other areas.

But anyhow, it's kinda cute.

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22 Oct 2004 (Friday) 

Well, I saw the first episode of Battlestar Galactica today, after the mini-series previously. What do I think ? Well, it's still far too camera wavey. The theme music's... well, it's pretty poor. Yeah, I'm comparing it to the original - what else can I do ? Ok, so it's meant to be darker, and yes, it is. It actually reminds me of the theme to Enterprise. Not in any way related to the music. But to the 'this is wrong' feeling you get with it.

I couldn't really care less for the whole Baltar-is-a-cylon thing, either. It seems... well, it's a bit dull to be honest - I don't want to be thinking 'is he a cylon ? is he just unhinged ?' all the time, because I don't really care. Actually, that's not true. If he wasn't always seeing the cylon woman all the time, I'd actually feel better about the thing. Why ? Well, that's a good question. I think it's because it's not adding anything to the story. So, he's a little unhinged, or he's a cylon, ok we've established that. For those viewers that come in part way through the series you might need to re-inforce that fact, but we can probably see that from the way he acts. The fact that we as viewers have a view into his mind is... Well, it's like having a voice over telling us what he's thinking. And that comes to the crux of the problem - in the mini-series she was used as a means of explaining to us, the viewers, what was happening. We know a number of things because Baltar worked them out with, or was told them by, number 6 in his mind. And do we really need to have things explained by an individual whose sole purpose is to justify things to one of the characters ?

So, that's Baltar. Having the cyclon 'wuh-wuh' sound in the background whenever Boomer's on the screen... I've not decided yet whether this is tacky or just treating the audience as idiots. I'm probably going to settle on 'both'. If they intend the series to be dark and to be engaging then they have to also believe that people will stick with it. Are they going to do so if their intelligence is being insulted in such a crass manner ?

There's the matter of Helo (I think it was) who's stranded on Caprica. Firstly, I don't understand the relevance of this - attempting to escape from a Cylon occupied world whilst they're watching for anyone at all in order to wipe them out seems like a pointless task. Ok, you might attempt it, but nobody else made it off world - the only ships that were declared as being part of the fleet are those that were in transit at the time. In order to get off a world which has already been bombarded by a massive nuclear attack (I pondered on why the cylons didn't just drag a few mile wide asteroids to the planets and use them instead of wasting time nuking the cities - an asteroid travelling at... well, asteroid speeds could more readily create more damage and chaos by effectively wiping out life without the necessity to 'attack' anyone. You just impact the planet and then sit above it, picking off anyone that tries to leave. Basic seige strategy. They're machines. They can wait. Simpler in terms of manpower... sorry robot power, too.) one would have to locate a ship. That's not going to be easy as ships will be the first thing that will be attacked on occupying the planet. Cylon ships won't respond to humans, 'cos... well we're humans and we work differently, so no point in attacking a Cylon landing party to obtain one. Assuming you get one, it must be FTL capable otherwise it isn't going to get far. It also must be fast. Fast enough to get into orbit before being detected - and as the only thing leaving the planet whilst the cylons are watching for someone leaving the planet, one assumes that's going to be hard. Obviously you can't FTL jump from within the atmosphere - they already said it was dangerous from within the magnetic cloud and I would imagine taking the ship and (I expect) a few hundred cubic metres of air through an FTL jump might have an adverse affect on the ship on arrival.

I presume they're hoping to use him to locate the rest of the human fleet because he doesn't know that Boomer is a Cylon.

Those faults aside, reasonable story - although I'm not convinced that there is a good explanation for the exact 33 minute delay between attacks - reasonable characters, and utterly awful camera work.

Will I watch it next week ? Does the camera work annoy me enough that I won't bother ? Well, I'm also missing half The West Wing during the time that it's on as well. So that's an added disincentive. And there's also the fact that everyone else is home at that time too, and they're annoyed that I'm watching it (well, annoyed that I can't concentrate on it with other people talking in the room). So, maybe I won't bother. I'll see.

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21 Oct 2004 (Thursday) 

I've finally spent some time to sort out my email. Around mid-2002 I stopped reading mail with MessengerPro because the amount of spam was becoming excessive. Instead I switched to using Pine with its rules for filtering the spam away. This was very successful for about a year. However, even that became impossible, with emails taking longer to be processed than I could be bothered to wait. So eventually I installed SpamAssassin. Best move. So now I have very little spam - of course this is also tempered by the fact that NTLWorld have decided that 'justin.fletcher' is actually an inactive account. Which is amazing as that's the account I dial up with and have done for the past 4 years. Anyhow that email account has been dead for about 5 months now and I'm not ringing up to complain any more - it's just not worth my effort. Ok, maybe if I'm in a really bad mood and want to shout at someone I will. But not yet. Close, but not yet.

Anyhow, there's been a lot of interesting things that I got in my mail - some more so than others. There were a number of correspondences that had got lost and I'd re-found from way back in 2000. Lots of annoying mailing list things that never really got sorted especially, but the funnest thing that I found is an email from Helen, from her birthday in 2000 - yeah, that long ago - thanking me for her present. I don't remember what it was, but I hope she liked it - I guess so, given the reply. Sadly my memory doesn't really stretch to remembering such things. The diary doesn't say what it is, except that I decided on it and then sent it. There's nothing marked private around that area to remind me what it was. I suppose I could ask. But then I don't remember what I gave - why should she remember what she received. I don't even remember what I got last birthday, never mind four years ago.

Oh, and the other thing that was interesting about my mails - well, there were a couple. One was a few exchanges with Iain Truskett, who sadly died last Christmas. That was rather odd to read. I mention that also because there are a couple of references to him in the diary around that period as well. The other one I found that's worthy of note was an email to myself at the start of 2003 with simply a URL as the body.

NTL, as I mentioned above, are shite. At the moment I'm trying to get a connection to them that actually stays up. They suck in a way that you cannot really imagine.

I thought I wanted to write some code this evening, but it turns out that I don't. I'll leave it until tomorrow.

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20 Oct 2004 (Wednesday) 

I've updated the diary scripts to make every single diary page into the new style, with the calendar down the side. I'm not convinced I like it just yet, but it's done. It'll be a big upload, as the diary sources - without the HTML markup - is 1.3M, but it's worth it, I think.

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19 Oct 2004 (Tuesday) 

A new day starts and I've just read through what I wrote to Helen last night. I think it might have been better all round if I'd not bothered.

I've written a MIME media types StrongHelp manual generator today. It's quite funky really. And further, I've abstracted the text processing code in the drafts processor so that it can be shared by both the scripts now. The drafts code can, optionally, include every single draft in it. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of auto-paginating and generally making the documents usable. On the other hand, I believe that I may have created the largest StrongHelp manual ever. It also takes a reasonable length of time to be generated.

It weighs in at 112M. I thought I was being silly with the PRM manuals, but this is an order of magnitude more . It's actually quite cute. Obviously it's not perfect, but it's cute nonetheless. I won't be generating those for distribution though, I think.

Time may fly - and I will search the world for you. Rainbowed skies - and I would cross the seven seas for you. [ Bitter Harvest, from Contagion, by Arena ]

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18 Oct 2004 (Monday) 

Yay. Finally replied to Helen. Haven't replied to anyone else yet, though. And I did kinda whitter about a film I'd just seen. I think I may just be very tired and so randomly spout what comes in to my head. I think I also said something rather weird about dates too. All of which poor recollection means that it's 7am and I really should have been in bed some hours ago.

I also seem to remember I have an email from John Melia lying around in one of my inboxes that keeps getting put off being replied to. People I have known must hate me. I suck at keeping in touch. Maybe I should make a deal with myself to reply to one personal email per day. Well, one personal email that isn't from someone I chat to regularly. That way I should be caught up on my mail by around 2016.

And I still haven't sorted out the older diary entires to be like the main entries.

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17 Oct 2004 (Sunday) 

I've just noticed on some article that the capsule docking with the space station is 'Soyuz TMA-5'. Now, whilst I'm all for using simplified acronyms for things that are complex, but 'TMA' is just a bad one. It's actually the different variations - the 'T' variation has three seats amongst other improvements, the 'M' variation has the 'T' improvements and improved control and emergency systems. The 'A' incorporates the features of these earlier variants as well as improvements required by NASA for use with the space station. More information can be found on the rather nice site about it. It's a pretty impressive craft, to be honest. It's small, it's robust and it gets the job done.

But 'TMA' is 'Tycho Magnetic Anomaly'. Not that I'm going to get them confused, but still it's the same acronym. From the Arthur C Clarke books, 'TMA-1' is the anomaly found on the moon, 'TMA-2' is a similar anomaly found in orbit around Jupiter, and 'TMA-0' is another anomaly found later on Earth. 'TMA' is better known as 'The Monolith'.

Anyhow, TMA-1 is also a Serbia originated anti-tank land mine.

What have I been doing all day ? Well, actually I've enjoyed myself writing some more of the Internet drafts StrongHelp manual creator. It's far from perfect, but it's around the same sort of level that the RFCs manual is at now. It even shares some code with it, 'cos I'm lazy like that. Or organised, depending on how you look at it.

I've put off replying to Helen again. Damn. I keep thinking 'I'll put that off until I have time to concentrate on it' and then never set aside that time. Do I set aside this time now ? No, because it's half seven and my eyes are blurry. I don't like myself sometimes. But we know that from my dreams. Sorry Helen.

I have a vague memory of a recent email from Angela that may have got lost, too. More sighs .

I knew this of the Diary, but it didn't seem a big deal at the time - the historical diary entries (ie 'not this month') all use the old style diary format with the large calendar. It's just annoying me now 'cos I was reading bits yesterday and it didn't look right. Not that it matters in the long run, but it's another thing that I need to sort out, 'cos it's untidy.

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16 Oct 2004 (Saturday) 

I've now watched Galactica on telly - rather than the .AVI film that I had downloaded. I'm much less impressed with it now based on the camera work. The director seems to come from the 'wave the camera about randomly in what might be the right direction' school of filming. Whilst I'd assumed that out of focus and wobbly movement were artifacts of the compression, it turns out that that was what was intended. I'm sure it's one of the US police shows that I've seen it done in and it just looks like it was made by someone that's just bought themselves a video camera, rather than looking at all professional. Anyhow, first episode of the series starts on Monday so I'll see what that's like. If it is as truely poor as the bits I've just seen then I'll not even bother watching the others.

I got a lovely little email from Helen earlier today but I've been too busy to get around to replying to it, so what I've decided is that when I get finished - and hopefully before the sun rises - I'll get around to replying to her. Apparently she's not engaged, which is... well it's amusing to think that I thought that she was. Well, it could have been - She's gorgeous, she's clever, she's got a great laugh and she's fun to be with - Why wouldn't anyone want to be with her, after all ?

Of course, I went around with a great big grin on my face after getting an email from her. For some reason, she always brightens up the day. On the other hand, I can go around with a big grin on my face after getting poorly worded spam, so maybe I shouldn't read too much in to that. Not that I get that much spam these days - all hail SpamAssassin.

Oh, and I spoke to Claire (and more particularly Justin who was having a Windows problem that I was quite blatantly out of my depth on - 160G discs appear as 131G to the Windows installer for reasons that are unclear. I was sure that XP supported those larger discs, even as boot devices. Anyhow, the hunt for more information goes on with that. Must ask talker people tomorrow, 'cos they're clever) yesterday, and she mentioned that I don't ever seem to have the webcam on. I keep moving it around to try to find somewhere that it isn't staring at a wall, showing a flickery monitor or (worse) staring down at my lack of hair. At the moment it's sitting beside the laptop facing me. Which is fine, except that it has about 1/3 of the image filled by the side of the monitor. If I stick it on top of the monitor you get a nasty glare off the top of my head. If I put it on the other side of the monitor then it's staring straight at the ceiling lights.

Oh, and the cam's running off the laptop using PuffinCam which was written by Ian who I chat to daily. This gives me an excellent opportunity for me to bitch about the tiniest little things that it does and for him to say 'ah, don't care about that'. Seriously, it's really handy to have it written by someone nearby 'cos it means I can actually use something that I can say "I know the guy that wrote that". Which is rather funky. I know, I use a lot of other people's stuff, but it's still nice to use other people's things. And there's the advantage that I've not been near it, so it should work.

News over the weekend - well, the news that I get on FeedReader - is always depressingly slow. It's not like I actually watch much. Mostly it's science and space-science news that I try to keep up with. Mainly because they're oh-my-god more interesting than anything computer-related. But it isn't half dull at the weekends.

Oh, and I've had two rather neat submissions saying they like the diary's smaller format. Which is nice. What's not so nice is that my automated scripts to process that into a page don't seem to have worked. Hmm. It appears that it was still partially a manual process for sorting the responses. And it appears I've got a few more question responses that I never noticed.

All fixed now, but I did end up spending half an hour reading July 2000 which may not have been the most sensible use of my time, but it was quite inspiring. I actually made some worthwhile diary entries back then, it seems. Albeit, with typos - which I believe I've corrected now. And I've switched from Roxette's Hits to 'Strangers on a Train', which makes me feel better as it's much less poppy .

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15 Oct 2004 (Friday) 

I'm in the shower today and 'Get Out' is floating around my head. Which is good and I think 'Hey it's not Yummy, Yummy, Yummy'. Which was a mistake. So now I've got 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy' back in my head and I'm trying to use a little bit of Jean-Michel Jarre to try to flush it out. Seems to be working so far.

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14 Oct 2004 (Thursday) 

One thing I like about Simon and Hannah working nights is that I can read their diary's as they write them. It's almost like being in touch with them . Ok, so there's always email and the talker's always there, but they are supposed to be working and unlike me they can't just chat if they want to. Ah well.

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13 Oct 2004 (Wednesday) 

I decided to update the style of the diary, because it has bothered me for a long time that we've got this huge space taken up with the 'calendar' block at the top of the page, rather than going straight in to the text. And since the text is actually a lot more important than the dates of other entries, it should be more prominent. So that's what I've done.

I tried putting a side-bar on the left, in the same style as David Chess' log, but that didn't look right to me. So I've put the side-bar on the right. This has the added advantage that the page will be fetching the text first and rendering it immediately, which is better. It has the disadvantage that once the right hand side-bar has arrived, the text will reformat to accommodate it which might make the text jump around a little. Hopefully this won't detract from people's reading. Not that there's much chance of that.

Oh, the other thing about yesterday that was disturbing was that I ended up with 'Yummy, yummy, yummy (I got love in my tummy)' floating around my head for reasons which are too dull to relate.

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12 Oct 2004 (Tuesday) 

I woke up today from one of the evilest dreams that I've had in ages. The fact that you make up your own dream and that it's nasty really must say something about yourself. I'm not sure I like the fact that obviously I don't like myself if I'm making up such nasties. I mean it's ok to point out blatant insecurities, and faults, but bundling them all in to every scene and making you live it is just plain cruel.

Anyhow, today's was simple. It was now - as in around the present day - and I was living, um, somewhere. Little street, small house, still single (obviously - and this is just easing me in). And for a short while Jason, who I knew from University, is visiting with his girlfriend. Now, I don't know anything about who Jason's with. I think my mind just brought Jason in as a Friendly Face. Some other people were there, too, in particular Chris and Julian. Anyhow, the girl that Jason was with was Caroline. And she was being all Caroline. By which I mean, 'so typically Caroline that I knew it couldn't be anyone else because no-one else would act so wonderfully/annoyingly/frustratingly/unpredictably/oddly'. Which is obvious, as it's my dream and it would want to ensure that I knew exactly what I was being shown in a way that I would obviously feel for.

So anyhow, the entire dream revolved around them seeing one another, and my trying to be completely ok with the whole idea. Because, after all, it's been so many years since I've even seen her, never mind since we split up. The group of us went to concerts; we went for food; we played basket ball (or rather they played basket ball and I took pictures - "hey, let's just throw in the fact that he doesn't get to join in with other people, and we'll stick it in a sports scene, which we know he'd not like anyhow" (well, I did like watching the game, but wouldn't have liked being involved in it, but didn't like being excluded - yup, it's a triple whammy just in that one scenario!).

There were some other bits that I don't remember, but I do remember the end. We were watching a film - on two telly's. For some reason, we'd missed the beginning, so we were watching the earlier half of the film on a small telly and the 'current' half on the larger telly. Which is obviously a dig at the fact that I can't concentrate on two things at once. There was a small section that made me smile (maybe some part of my mind wanted a little let up in its relentless onslaught of self-admonishment) - at one point in the film, there was a short monologue (I don't know what the film was - I have a feeling it was black and white) which was repeated later in the film, and the timing was such that the two were synchronised perfectly. That was quite cute.

And I've just realised why it was there. Oh good god. Because that little 'oh that's cute' smile, made me forget a lot of the preceding part of the dream and get more comfortable - setting my up for the next fall. Caroline was sitting beside me - Jason and Julian were on the other sofa in the room, I think for reasons of this set up - and I was amused by the telly so I felt more comfortable; I rested my head on hers and then realised what I was doing and moved away. At which point I found that she had fallen asleep and her head fell toward me. So I had to put up with it. Short of waking her up, there wasn't much I could do. A few minutes later she woke up and tried to hold my hand. Which I didn't want to, so pulled my hands away, but she kept trying. So I said to her "will you stop trying to hold my hand ?" and she replied "I wasn't trying to hold your hand, I was trying to make you hold mine."

And I woke up then.

It's all a bit disturbing and nasty. I don't like dreams like that. I realise that they have little bearing on the real world, but 'the real world' is only what we perceive it to be, and they can be pretty effective in getting across a perception.

Of course, it isn't really Caroline in the dream. I know that. It's the memory of the Caroline that was, ten years ago, and the extrapolation from that. Which is frustrating in part because the last time I met her - a few years ago - she was pretty much what I had expected.

I don't know what to make of the dream, but after I got up I did end up thinking a little. I remember saying - probably even in the diary - that if I could go back in time I wouldn't change anything, because that wouldn't be me. Well, I'd like to amend that; I definitely would change things with Caroline, if I could. Not because I think it would have worked out better, but because I was such a bloody idiot that it never had a chance. Maybe it never could have worked. I don't know, but it's the thing I think I regret most in my life.

Anyhow, I'm keeping away from anywhere I might get angry, as normal after such things, so no usenet and talker today.

Ah yes, and after such dreams, we have the day punctuated by 'grrr... that woman' at any little thing. Which obviously means 'me', 'cos it's only me that I'm angry at.

In most of the world, users see phones as a fashion items, and change them frequently - often more than once a year. [ Mobile Phones; The Register ]

Yup, that's the actual line (including the grammatical mistake). Apparently phones are a fashion item. I shouldn't be surprised that people treat them like that - I mean you only have to look at the number of people selling odd covers for them or different ring tones; obviously there's a market of gullible people out there for that kind of thing - but still, are people really that... um, well, I don't even know the word for what I mean... fickle doesn't cut it. Ah well. Call me simple for treating a phone as a phone, and if it works and I can use it, it's fine.

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5 Oct 2004 (Tuesday) 

Damn, I'm tired. It's 5am and I've not written up what I didn't write up about the day before last because when I went to bed at 8am I was too tired write it up.

But anyhow, I discovered that Helen has a website all to herself - it's been registered for years, and it's got a mini-log thing on it. Admittedly it was only updated over the summer, but it's in FeedReader now, so I won't miss out on the exciting things.

Why the interest in Helen again ? Well, obviously there's the fact that I'm a strange obsessive person. But more relevantly, someone was looking for 'Engaged' and 'Helen' on my site. Which is a curious combination. So either it's someone from my high school (who was just interested in who this Helen person was), or someone who knows me now (except none of them would care one jot about either things, I think), or someone who knows Helen (who wanted to know about when I was engaged ? you see that's where that idea breaks down). So, the leading contenders are 'Someone who knows that Helen's engaged, but not who to, so tried my diary', and 'someone who wanted to know if I ever got engaged, and wanted to know about Helen'. The former is very tenuous, the latter is unlikely.

I toyed with the idea of dropping Helen an SMS saying just 'Congratulations', on the grounds that playing the odds can't hurt too much. But in reality, the odds are something like 100-1 I'll be right and she'll say "Thanks" without thinking that it was at all odd, 2000-1 that I'll be right and she'll be surprised that I guessed that, and 1-200 that she'll go "huh?" and I'll look bloody stupid.

So, in the end I did nothing, which has a 1-1 odds of not looking stupid because of it.

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4 Oct 2004 (Monday) 

Apprently, Salt is bad for you. So much so that the UK govenment has dedicated a whole website to telling you that.

Yup, that's salt. Also known as Sodium Chloride. NaCl in chemical terms.

Obviously one of the more important issues the government should be tackling. Can we assume that we'll be getting a Tobacco site some time soon ? Course not. A little disproportionate a reaction ? I think so.

Friends today on channel 4 - just to stress that this wasn't one that I watched, but purely because I was skimming the listings and it looked odd, as given by the Channel 4 website:

"The One Where Ross Can't Flirt" Intimidated by Emily's huge tough friends from England, Ross agrees to play rugby with them - with painful results. [ Mismatched listings?; Channel 4 ]

Why's this a mismatch ? Well, TOW Ross Can't Flirt is in series 5 and it's with Caitlin, the pizza delivery girl he's flirting with (and Rachel's being all derogatory about Ross, 'cos he's never been good at flirting, but she takes pity on him and gets Caitlin's number for him - this is all after the disasterous wedding to Emily where Ross said Rachel by mistake); the episode described, however, is TOW All The Rugby, and takes place in series 4, whilst Ross is still seeing Emily (and whilst Rachel is seeing Joshua, a cute customer from work she gets to dress up).

Ok, so that was far too much Friends knowledge just to point out 'look, they made a mistake' .

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3 Oct 2004 (Sunday) 

I've been keeping such odd hours recently. And I haven't got nearly as much done as I think I should have, which is a pity.

I was going to bed last night, and I'd just popped down for a drink before actually getting in to bed, and I thought to myself 'I'm hungry, I should get some supper'. And then I went upstairs and got in to bed and left myself feeling hungry. So what's that about ? I'm always doing that. It's odd.

And given that I know that if I go for periods without food I tend to bite my nails and get headachey, and then get annoyed because I can't type 'cos I've bitten my nails too much, you would think that having something to eat would be something that I wouldn't mind doing. It's like the box of biscuits that's sitting on top of the stack of PRMs and other books beside me. It's there, and I'm thinking, I want to eat something, but I don't.

Saying this, I'm having some biscuits anyhow. But is this just another side of 'if I use them then they'll all be gone, so I'll save them until later', which is a rationalisation I use too much. Dunno; but I'll just file it away with those other odd little things that I have no idea about myself.

Reminders to myself in case I forget - although it's a little pointless as it's not like I read the diary to remind myself of things like that, but anyhow - Stargate SG-1 back on Tuesday at 8pm. Fortinately that doesn't clash with anything anyone else watches, to the best of my knowledge. There's also Atlantis starting up, too, the week after. I'm not sure how the scheduling works on that. And the week after that (I think it is anyhow), Battlestar Galactica starts up. Which may be more difficult, 'cos I think that's on Monday so it'll clash with Corrie if it's on at 8pm. I'll work something out, I'm sure.

Someone's pointed out I posted the wrong entries for August 2004. Doh, thanks.

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1 Oct 2004 (Friday) 

Well, I've had about the worst morning ever. I've not slept too well, so I've got these disjointed dreams which have been trying to kill me.

First we have Grandma and Grandad's house (with huge extensions at the back) which was in a town that had some form of curse that meant that if gold got in the sun you would die painfully. That wasn't so fun, especially as we found a large amount of gold in a box right under the front window. So there was a lot of racing around the house trying to find places that we could hide this gold that would never get the sun, and all the while running from something invisible that was trying to kill me for letting the gold into the sun. Oh and the gold didn't make life easy and kept rolling all over the place, molten like.

Then there was my brother dying and being brought back to life by a strange coven, which I discovered whilst I was doing an autopsy on him. So, as you do, I took him home and put him to bed and then had to go and infiltrate this coven, which I did by magically changing my appearance to look like R2D2 and going to a party at their headquarters. Finding a helpful looking boy, I snuck away and hid in a car to ask him about the coven. Unfortunately, the disguise wore off and he could see me as me so there was nothing for it but to dive off the edge of the cliff beside which the house was located. Which was quite impressive as I was in the back seat. So, I opened the doors and pushed the boy out whilst we were falling and then got out myself just as we hit the water - there was a sea beyond the cliff and some water breaks. I had to swim around the breaks to get to the boy and then returned to the pier where the his mother and the rest of the coven were waiting. Fortunately they were all happy that I had saved him, and didn't question the fact that I'd been there in the first place. I asked to see Marjorie, who was the leader and she and I became called some form of truce; as a parting request I asked if I could be changed into a cat for a bit. It's a pain trying to open fridge doors when you're a cat. And even if you can, trying to lever tins open without a thumb is quite tricky.

And after that it gets a bit blurry, but I have a feeling I died a few more times.

Can you believe it's October already ?

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