1 Feb 2005 (Tuesday) 

It's February today. Golly doesn't time fly. But anyhow, the diary's updated to be all consistent again. If you were looking for the lyrics game, it was at the end of last month so you'll have to press the button to go to the previous entry to see that - I've filled in all the answers now.

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5 Feb 2005 (Saturday) 

My MP3 player's died it seems. Which is very annoying. It doesn't play MP3s any more. The counter moves and sometimes if you hold it right you get sound. And the FM radio part puts out sound. So it's something between the decoder and the sound output that's failing. It's not likely that it's something I can fix, though .

I've been listening to Under My Skin, by Avril Lavigne more recently; it's actually as good as 'Let Go' in places. 'Nobody's Home' particularly grabs me at the moment. And 'Together'.

So I get up today and the house is empty. Which is bad - I can't find Grandma. She's not meant to be out anywhere today, and there's no note to tell me anything. So I'm trying to find a number to ring mum on to ask if there's been a problem (they might not have woken me) and her mobile's off. That's not surprising so I'm trying to find the number to ring her desk and in walks Grandma. She's popped down to the shop to get some milk. Which I knew we needed but I was going to get when I got up. But it would have been nice to know that.

And the reason that I knew we needed some milk was because the previous night I had been expecting mum to call to say she was on her way home at about 8ish (though god only knows why, because she never does), and I could ask her to get some more milk, and it's only when she gets home at 9:30 do we find that we should have sorted tea out ourselves.

So last night, she says "I've got to be back by about midnight because I'm up early in the morning", to which I say "so I'll expect you about 2ish then?". And 1am comes and goes. And 2am comes and goes. And 3am comes and goes. So finally I ring the office - no answer. And I ring security and she's just leaving. Is it too much to ask, just once in a while to be let know what's going on ? I know I've got the memory of a goldfish at times, but it just bothers me when I don't know what's happening outside of that lack of memory. I'm just expecting to try to ring one night and for security to say "Oh, yes, she left her keys with us six hours ago; isn't she home yet". Take any time I'm given, and add on 3 hours. If it was a period I'm given, triple it.

Thinking about it, it's probably not worth checking that she's there or not. Because, practically, if she's had an accident on the way home, in three hours there'd nothing we could do for her anyhow. Ah, I think that's her coming in now.

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6 Feb 2005 (Sunday) 

Simon's put up a lyrics game on his diary. He's used an interesting different form - each of the answers starts with a different letter. Makes it a little easier in some respects but frustrating in others.

One of the things that you notice about the other 'weblogs' is that they're (generally) confined to a single entry per (uniquely addressable) page. From a content management side, this makes things a lot simpler, I imagine. Plus it allows individual entries to be referenced directly. Both of these are advantages from the author's point of view and they enhance the mutual appreciation society that grows from link-backs (my diary has that partly but the entire month is referenced, using fragments for each day's entry). The reason for my structuring as months is partly historical and partly practical. Historically diaries are grouped into months - or at least that's how I've always seen them. Practically the page will become huge if it's left to grow to (for example) yearly boundaries. Additionally, because I manage the pages by hand (rather than a fully automatically) I have to move things around every month - moving more regularly would be tedious. This is just the way the Diary's been since it started. David Chess' diary is organised on a weekly basis, with one page per week, using the week start as the reference point. The more common weblogs provide a mechanism for people to submit responses immediately. I don't quite understand why that's a major attraction for some people, but then I have a different viewpoint for my diary in that I write it and don't care that people read it (yeah, that runs against the quiz thing earlier, but then that was just fun for people who I know read anyhow), and generally believe that people are idiots and should therefore not be able to affect the content of my site without my permission. On which topic, Chris (Williams) has had strife recently with the SU-paper he works for getting slammed with comments over a relatively innocuous article (well, it wasn't amazingly controversial IMO, although suffered from a few failings of style rather than of content) with responses which were unbelievable for students of a University level. But I digress a little.

All of this, though, leads me to wonder about the most practical form. Personally I dislike sites where related information is spread over a number of physical pages, connected by a 'next page' option. It just seems to go against the whole point of the web presentation form. Admittedly it's mostly papers that do this, but I've come across documentation that's been split by subsection into different pages, so you end up jumping back and forth all the time, where they should have split by chapter. And on the other hand, I've come across documentation where 100's of K have been used for a single document (of HTML) - the Wimp section of the PRMs is a perfect example of this, running at around 450K of HTML (IIRC). Somewhere there's a reasonable breakdown for these things, and it'll vary between the use - from diary to paper to documentation to general website. I think I've found my happy medium with the monthly split for my diary. I think the LiveJournal (spit) split of dialy is kinda necessary for its feedback system to work, but is generally too small.

Another odd thing, kinda unrelated, that I noticed a while back was the redundant button in Internet Explorer's page properties box. On the filer file properties it has the same box, but you can change its settings - eg change the association of the file or its attributes. The IE box though has 'OK', 'Cancel' and 'Apply'. 'Apply' is correctly greyed out because there's nothing to apply, but 'OK' and 'Cancel' do the same thing - why present a UI component that's utterly redundant ?

Yay! Press Gang Series 3 is now certified PG by BBFC, so that'll be out soon .

Julian's been updating his website to have lots of other things on it and he's also set up a little redirector from julianmfletcher.co.uk to his uni site. Lots of stories, some of which are good. Some of which are hidden, too.

You know how some days nothing quite goes right ? Well, today is one of those days. Lots of little annoying things. But on the plus side I workd out why the RDP connections weren't working to the machine downstairs - I'd been giving the wrong address for the machine. Simple and dim, but at least I know now. And I have managed to clear nearly 3G off the /music drive by deleting duplicates and rubbish. But it still feels like a bad day. And I was going to be so much more productive with my time, too .

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7 Feb 2005 (Monday) 

Well, I've seen Red Dwarf US pilot now. There's not a lot to say, really. It's not amazingly poor, but it's relatively clear why it didn't work. It's just... well, there's something wrong. Trying to bundle a few of the jokes from later episodes into the first doesn't work (if you know things, I guess). Lister doesn't work - he's not enough of a slob. Holly's almost ok; and I'm not at all impressed with having Kryten in the first episode. They have Holly explaining things that come up in later episodes which is ok, I guess, but it leave less scope for those episodes I think.

Yeah, it really doesn't cut it; maybe I'm looking at it with slightly 'original-tinted glasses' but there's something missing.

I went downstairs to feed the cat and have some of the microwavable pancakes that mum left me. I wanted a cup of tea, so went to the fridge to fill the kettle with water. Got the water, filled kettle, returned and turned on the kettle, and then started to empty the dishwasher. The cat meowed at me to remind me that I said I'd feed him. So I went to the fridge for the cat food, and there was none open. So I get a new tin from the cupboard and go to the draw to get a spoon for it... and there's an opened tin with a spoon in it beside my cup. I don't remember taking it out of the fridge. But I must have done - it's cold and nobody would have left it out there. I know I joke about it sometimes, but it's annoying to have these little problems remembering what I'm doing. I don't think there's anything wrong with me; it's just my mind being lazy and not bothering to remember things. But I do wish it'd wake up sometimes and at least try to help me along.

And I dropped the last of the pancakes on the floor before I put it in the microwave. So I'm all annoyed at that, too.

On the plus side, I'm exceptionally impressed with the results of my 'findgaps' tool at splitting up one of the MP3s I have. Instead of a single 89M, 6 and a half hour MP3, I now have 43 little MP3s of between 3 and 10 minutes long. Obviously things don't always turn out so well, but that's pretty impressive, I think.

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8 Feb 2005 (Tuesday) 

StarGate's on half an hour later today and for one and a half hours. Which is a little curious as we're nowhere near through the series. At least, I'm pretty sure we're not near the end of the series. So it seems odd to have a finale type episode. As far as I can tell, we're half way through the series.

Ok, that's bizarre. It's February 8th today. And I'm just trying to work out why there's a 90 minute episode of SG-1 on, and so I try SG1 Series 8 guide to find out why... Sure enough it's listed as 90 minutes, but it's also listed as being shown on March 11th. Checking Sci-fi.com for its US listings agrees with this - Sky is (apparently) ahead of US Sci-fi channel. I'm kinda amazed at that to be honest. SG1 Archive does state that episode 20 is the last episode of the season; the previous seasons having 22 episodes.

Yup, I've just checked a little further on the SG-1 Archive site and it is indeed labelled with a UK showing before the US showing. We just don't know when we've got it good obviously. Or at least I don't .

Well, yes, that was quite a cool episode. Leaves a few questions, but it's quite fun that it's not the last episode actually. And apparently there is a Series 9 coming - and a series 2 of Atlantis, which is quite good to know.

Bah, I've just found that what I'm trying to do isn't actually possible because the APIs in the Toolbox are so incomplete as to not actually allow for the things that I'm doing. So I'm going to bed instead. Which just means that I now a stunning new gadget that does absolutely nothing visible (except spew debug all over the screen). Oh well.

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11 Feb 2005 (Friday) 

Quick entry tonight because I've been putting off writing anything and now I've got a few things I want to write and I haven't really got the time.

I've been looking at some music videos - I'm not a huge fan of music videos in general, but some are really cool. This is kinda triggered by something that was on telly recently and reminded by a video that was on this morning before I went to bed. Fatboy Slim's 'The Joker' video has a load of little kittens in it, going to town, buying catnip and then going to a concert. Which is probably not the best thing to go to sleep thinking about after seeing it at 6am. But it looks amazingly cool .

Anyhow, from that I started looking at other videos that were around, and some are really poor whilst others are... well less poor . Of those that I looked at, the couple that are weird that I looked at included Can't Stop, by Red Hot Chill Peppers (which is slightly beyond description), and by Total Eclipse Of The Heart, by Bonnie Tyler.

But, the reason I mention this is really because I also tried the video for 'Beat It' which I only kinda remember, but from the first few bars I immediately remembered not it, but being at school. You see, and I doubt this'll make any sense unless you were at Coddington or similar things were done at your school, one Assembly was some of the girls doing a choreographed dance to 'Beat It'. It was very impressive at that time, and although I don't actually remember it any more these days, I do remember that I was both impressed and amazed that they'd put all this extra work in, just to entertain us during Assembly.

I believe that this was the year before we did our Ghostbusters set during assembly. I have no idea how I got dragged in to be Egon in that, but I do remember it being loads of fun doing the rehearsals and then a lot of terror performing it. Actually that's not true. I remember it being lots of fun and I do remember the rehearsals a little - partly because it was during lunch time, and I'm not exactly the outsidey type - but the actual performance is almost a complete blank with a shroud of terror over it. If you've ever remembered something that's just completely empty memory by overlaid by a feeling of terror over the top, you'll know how unsettling that can be .

Of course, I don't remember much about school sadly, but I do remember a few things. I remember the wet lunch where we watched Robin Hood (as mentioned in the diary!). I remember my first lesson on starting the school (lots of images and terror again). I remember quite a bit of my penultimate year in smatterings of images. I remember no faces, but I remember vague desk positions. I remember little bits of the Computer Club. I remember lots of games of Bulldog, and quite a few rounders games. I remember chasing a girl around the field - I don't remember who and I'm ashamed of it now (and wasn't particularly fond of it back then either). I remember getting told off about my project cover for Romans. I remember 'someone' (I know them; I was friends with them, but have no idea their name ) getting into big trouble with Mrs Wild, and I remember being very full of myself about things on that (for reasons I'm not going in to here because they're complex - there's a whole backstory that I do remember). I remember Mr Wild (at least I hope to god that's her name) was really pretty, and not like a teacher. Oh god, I've just remembered some of the books that we had read. I'm not sure if I like little flashes like that.

Oh! I thought I remembered only one name from back then, but another's come back to me - I remember Carrie-Ann Knight (at least that's how I remember her name - it might be different to that, but that's what I remember). Not so much what she looked like or much about her, but more a shape of a person - you know the sort of feeling of how they were. I don't know why. I don't remember having any particular crush on her (or anyone in the class that I remember) so it's entirely possible that having a cool name like that made me remember her.

Oh... and whilst writing about that I've just remembered our Whitby trip - which was memorable for many things, one of which was playing tig and managing to get away from someone through an almost athletic dive under a wooden railing (which doesn't seem like much, but it's actually something I'm genuinely proud of - it doesn't happen often). The other reason, and person is Neil. Now, Neil was a lovely lad. In general there wasn't anyone that was disliked in the class (that I know of), but Neil was one of those people that people liked. He was a little slow. I don't know what was wrong with him - or for that matter if there was, because he was always very quiet and he had both a slower take on some things and looked at them differently to everyone else. I liked him because he was different. That's the wrong way to phrase it. I liked him for many reasons, but as I was always seen as different (hey, the 'new' guy in the class always is, even if it was a couple of years they've been there) and I liked him for that, but also because he didn't mind anyone else's opinion, he didn't force himself on anyone. It's not like the class was full of politics or anything(!) but he was just happy. He never seemed to not be happy with himself, which was a wonderful thing.

Why am I rambling about Neil like this ? (oh god, I hope that was their name - my memory sucks so ) Because it's a pity that I never actually took much time to be friends with them - now that's true of a lot of people, but Neil was different because he was slow or whatever. He offered so much better a perspective and - I found out even later, after we went to Grove - he was a quite funny person. But the reason I mention him, other than remembering him in these ways, was that when we were at Whitby he asked the teacher if he could tell a story to us all - and so, after going up to the church (I think it was), we all sat around and Neil told us the story of Dracula. From memory. With, I remember, an incredible understanding of the way to tell a story and of getting the audience to listen. Well, I don't remember thinking that at the time, but what I remember of it says that that's what it was.

And I remember going on down to the cliffs to find fossils and look at the rock formations too. That was fun. I wouldn't say it was the best holiday I've ever had, because I can't remember them all and wouldn't be sure, but it probably comes close.

I remember visiting The Grove on the one day we went in there before starting the school. After that, things become more solid, although a hell of a lot of memories revolve around the library or Angela. Amazingly there are things I do remember about those that have stuck. Of those things, a lot just jumped out at me but the one that made me laugh out loud was the end of first year. We were in our registration room - I want to say 'form room' but I have no idea if that's the correct word. In any case, we were trying to decide which forms (there's that word again - maybe it is the right word?) to go in to next year. You see Warwick house put all the first years into one form and then split them up from the second year onward (which seemed at the time to be a bad idea because you didn't stay with the same people year after year and things changed, but in retrospect seems reasonable). We had to decide which forms we were going to go into. I remember deciding mine based on where Angela was going. The thought occurs that maybe I'm a little obsessive .

Actually, I think it was kinda sweet and kinda dim at the same time. That said, there wasn't much else in the way of criteria to choose though.

I do find it annoying that I don't remember the names of people back at school. If I had recorded my thoughts back then, maybe I would have some record of things. I have a vague memory of writing lots of stories in jotters though, some of which involved people there. I don't think anyone ever read them though. I also remember the end of term when we'd done Robin Hood in the school play one year that on that last day when we were all having a sing in the class, everyone decided to sing my alternative version of one of the songs we'd learnt for that. Which I can't now remember! I know I used to even recently. And what use is Google when it doesn't remember alternate versions of songs you sang in class plays when you were 12 ? I mean they may whitter on about wanting to have all information everywhere searchable but they just can't do that kind of thing. I wish my memory helped here. But in any case, they all sang that version - and I didn't know that everyone knew it and I didn't know that they were going to. I remembered going incredibly red. In fact, I think the only other time I remember blushing that badly was ... Ok, typing past the tears... There's two times - one was after saying something rather silly in answer to a question to the class and having one teacher make a comment about Angela in a Science class, and another - the 'laugh-so-much-you-cry' was coming in from break with a few flowers in my hair and making some comment about them to a friend only to hear the teacher (who was deputy head) call across the room "Yes, you look very nice Justin"... just as one of the other deputy's walks in to ask if there's anyone in the class he can spare to have their photo taken - so he suggests me and a girl from the class. Whilst I'm trying to stop myself for being quite so red we go off to have our photograph taken with a load of other kids in front of the school - one boy and one girl from every year in front of the main office. So if I looked a little... rosey on that picture, you now know why. Apparently, Angela told me that 5 years later, after I went to Sixth Form, they finally changed the school prospectus to have a different picture.

It's frustrating that I can't 'record' those memory's somehow. Well I can; I just have to keep remembering them, I guess.

I've got some things I want to stick in here about responses from people over the past couple of weeks to things in the diary, but I'm too tired to dig them out at the moment. Sorry.

I had some other things I wanted to write in here, but my reminiscing has taken up about an hour longer than I'd intended. Somewhere I must have a copy of it though.

I'm just reading the Ofsted report on Coddington school; it's interesting to see how it's doing - I don't know what it was like when I was there though and I was ill-equiped to judge the school's quality whilst I was there, obviously. There's a new computer suite, apparently. I'm not at all sure how that fits in to the school, but the school is smaller than I remember so it's possible that one of the classes was converted - or a whole new building may have been added - it is, after all, quite a few years since I was there. I remember almost nothing about any religous teaching at primary school - we might have had it, but I just don't remember it. They apparently have a much more controlled religous teaching apparently. I do now understand what the Assemblies were for, although it wasn't clear at the time.

"All pupils sing in assemblies, in church and for special performances." - "in church" ?!

One other thing of note was seeing Matthew Perry in The West Wing today. Quite odd. Actually it was all in all a very good episode.

Ok, that's enough reminiscing for one week - I could spend ages trying to find out things about the past and getting nowhere. I think, though, that from all of this the schools I think of as being where I grew up must be Coddington and The Grove. I don't think I ever really settled at Adwick, even though I started in 3rd year.

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13 Feb 2005 (Sunday) 

I had dad asking me yesterday why the CDs that I do for him come up with the names of the disc, artist and track in his car and yet the CDs that he buys don't have that information. So I had to explain it's down to the way I write the discs - the writer here can put CD-Text on and I use it because of that. It's really surprising that commercial CDs don't have this information on. Surprising because it's part of the data that's written to the disc by the writers anyhow. And more so that they don't provide for this as it would provide a definate consumer advantage - after all if the consumer equipment will read it then having it on discs sorta makes that equipment useable. It's not like it's a new thing, either.

Oh, I've just remembered the thing that I was going to say before - the Channel 4 mini-interviews. Between programmes Channel 4 do little snippets of interviews with the people that are on the programmes they show. So we get to see lots of little bits of the interview where they all answer the same question. It's different and it's quite fun.

Oddly enough someone asked a question on usenet today that I replied to, for which I referenced CD-Text. Odd how they both came up on the same day.

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14 Feb 2005 (Monday) 

I got my first valentine's card that I've received in... well, years. It was very sweet. It's from my cats. Aww.

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16 Feb 2005 (Wednesday) 

I've just remembered that there's been a very long running Lyrics and Quotes quiz that I've been doing. At the bottom of every news posting for a number of years, there have been little tag lines. Originally these were auto-generated, back in Fido-days and would, if you collected them all together, build up the lyrics to a song. Later, when I moved to Usenet, the taglines were generally set to a single message that remained for a period of time (private emails were more commonly like this but with a pretty tagline). Then I went through a period of not using any taglines at all (around 1999-2000) which is quite sad. But then I came to use Pine regularly again - Pine's odd in the configuration I use because it only sets a single signature for all messages. I could probably do it with one per destination, but I've never had the inclination to work out how. So the default signature includes a "Don't distribute this unless I say otherwise" notice so that I don't have to repeat it on every message - and because that's not correct for a public usenet posting I edit it out of every single message that goes to usenet.

That might seem a little tedious, but I quickly thought "what can I use for a tagline", and the answer was "something I can see, here or am thinking". And so we have this strange situation where the taglines on the end of the messages bear little relation to the actual thing that the message was about but have lyrics from a song, something that was on the telly, or maybe a sentence from a document in front of me that seems odd. And sometimes they're just pieces of random advice. There have been times where the comment has been appropriate to the article. And sometimes where it's not, but usually they're just odd and different. It's something, I think, that sets my postings out from the rest. They're a little unique.

Google has many of the postings in its groups search. I don't know if they are all there - I don't have records of my Essex postings, sadly. There are some very, very stupid postings there, so just skim to the bottom for the taglines and don't read the text, ta.

On the other hand, some postings I'm very pleased with.

First part of the final episode of (this season of) StartGate SG-1 tonight. Any US readers should look away now, 'cos there might be spoilers. They go back in time to Egypt and steal a ZPM from Ra, but get stuck there and have to leave a message for themselves. Only the world's slightly different - the StarGate was taken with Ra when he left, rather than being buried by the people of Egypt so wasn't there to be discovered and experimented with by the army; Daniel ended up teaching English to non-native speakers, Sam didn't join the military, and Jack's retired and happy to stay that way. And no Teal'c because they never went to Abydos, Daniel never met Sha're, she was never taken by Apothis to be his bride (because she would never have been in that position to be captured - plus Ra would have been pissed at other Goa'uld using his StarGate, I think), and therefore they would never have followed him to the palace where Teal'c was First Prime. Other side effects of this are that Kinsey is President - which, unless he had aspirations to be President much earlier or wasn't blocked (after all, it was Jack that forced him to announce that he wanted to run for President so that he could escape the NID squads surrounding Kinsey's home), sets things at a contemporary period - and, assuming that Anubis is still around, he's sure to have wiped most of the other Goa'uld out by now (the Replicators are not the same threat that they were because they have a) captured the Asgard ship 'The O'Neal' (although it won't be called that) and therefore have much more technology than they would otherwise have b) won't have been treated to the concept of 'betrayal' by Samantha, although the other human form replicators may be worse - but also won't have been left in a slow-time envelope for a couple of years because that was due to the intervention of the lesser technology brought about by SG-1 to escape detection, as well as a number of other things), one assumes that the time loop averted by SG-1 when one of the ancient's machines is used by an alien scientist on P4X-639 has been averted by some other cause - possibly one of the other high-technology races, the Tollans would have probably have been wiped out by Anubis anyhow (as their homeworld was - presumably, given the failure of their long range communication - destroyed by Tanith), but Narim and his party would have died anyhow because SG-1 would have been unable to rescue them from the planet as it was desctoyed due to a its shifted orbit. Without the Jaffa rebellion spurred on by Teal'c betrayal of Apothis, the Jaffa would not be a credible force, except as footsoldiers of the Goa'uld. The Tok'ra will have had a very hard time, as they would be pretty much on their own without any assistance from Earth or the Asgard, although that may be a bonus because the SGC have brought various Goa'uld down on Tok'ra bases. Of course, without a Symbiote, Jacob Carter would have died a few years ago of cancer, as would Selmak unless they could have found a separate host for him. The Aschen would still be around - the Aschen were (most likely) destroyed by their own greed whilst trying to access the gate addresses given to them by SG-1 which started with a black hole, and 'went down hill from there'; if the Aschen had been around, I (me) am relatively sure they would probably take some form of revenge against the Tau'ri for that. Langara, and its world would have been destroyed - the Naquadria bomb detonation having triggered the conversion of the Naquadah to Naquadria which would have subsequently have destroyed the planet. Oma Desala will still be on Kheb because Apothis would not have forced her to leave with the Harcesis (as the Harcesis doesn't exist in this timeline) and it is not on any Goa'uld gate maps. And, of course, there is no Atlantis team - there being no way to know that the Ancients moved out to Pegasus. On the plus side, Pegasus is in a much better state because the Wraith won't have awakened and begun to ravage it en route to Atlantis. And they do have a ZPM now, so could power the ancient site in Antarctica - if only they knew what it was or that particular genes are needed to control it.

So, we have a very different galaxy. And the title of the pair - Mobius - indicates a return to a beginning, albeit a different beginning. As, I believe, there is another series coming, there are three choices - either we can continue on this time-line which would be interesting but incurs so much potential for continuity problems that I certainly would not envy the writers ("They can't meet those aliens there because that relies on the knowledge gained by the technology produced from the encounter with some planet which no longer exists because it was wiped out three years before the StarGate was discovered"), they can restore the timeline to how it was (a magical universe reset at the end of a series ? I don't think so - series finales need cliff hangers of some form or other), or we can have a restored timeline with fewer issues. I seem to remember somewhere seeing reference to Ra returning in the next series. If that's correct then there's going to be some problems with Teal'c at the very least - he's only there because (as above) they went to Chulac to save Sha're from Apophis, and Sha're was only taken because she was in the pyramid with the other people; something that Ra would never have accepted, unless she was a handmaiden - in which case he'd be well pissed.

Of course, we've also got to accept that Teal'c, Jack, Daniel, and Samantha have now been dead for 5000 years.

Hmm. So there you go, I guess that's the effect that the SGC have had on the Galaxy over the last few years, albeit only in snippets and bits I remember (or bothered to look up).

We also have the issue that Samantha received the information back from Atlantis, so it's possible that we will be having some other communication with the people of Earth - and of course for that story line to continue, we need to be reset to a reasonable state from this alternate timeline.

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17 Feb 2005 (Thursday) 

It looks like I can no-longer upload to the NTLWorld site. So I'm going to move everything over to the gerph.org site permanently now, I think.

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18 Feb 2005 (Friday) 

It's amazing what you find lying around when you look. I was hunting for more disc space, as you do, and found a drive I didn't recognise. It wasn't recognised by Windows (which is unsurprising, as I didn't believe I had any Windows discs left any more) so I stuck it in the RiscPC. It appears to be 'Hera' - a 40G disc I used as backup in my main machine up to mid 2003.

It raises the interesting question of whether any of it is actually useful, or whether it might not be easier to just wipe the entire disc. I'll take a copy of the few bits that seem worthwhile and lose the rest - I've got a full copy elsewhere. Nice to see it again, and nice to know that I've got another disc to put things on.

I have a feeling I've had an unproductive day - you know that sort of jittery feeling you get when you think you should have got more done - but it's actually been quite reasonable. Maybe I'm just feeling jittery. Plus, it was a Friday, so it was West Wing this evening; that usually makes the day feel different. I think it's just a pent up jitteriness from having been doing maintenance work for so many weeks.

Maintenance, you see, is just re-working things. It's not actually going anywhere - you don't actually gain much in real world terms. Well, you gain maintainability, stability and usability. Which is great, and you obviously need that - hell I spend so much time removing bugs rather than adding new things in that it shouldn't be surprising, but still... there's a sort of morbidity to maintenance that leaves you feeling that after you've finished it you're not actually that much better off than when you started.

I've got a few little projects - well, I've got a lot of little projects, and a few big projects - that need finishing, and they're all quite interesting because they're 'new' in that they do things that haven't been done, or at least haven't been done in this way, before. They might stop the jitteriness, but I don't want to jump to them until the maintenance is complete. Which only adds to the jitteriness, because you know damned well that you've got something interesting coming but that you're not doing it yet.

And I know damned well that tonight, like last night, will no doubt provide me ith wonderful dreams of GadgetDefRec's chasing WindowPtr's and generally providing much surrealness.

I think part of that need to do something new - aside from the fact that I need to - is that I think I need to do something impressive. I can't think of anything in recent years that's actually been impressive. It's all been rather mundane. There's a usual 'ooh that's exciting' and then you realise that it's not actually impressive. It's just different.

I think I've just worked out why today seems unproductive though - it's because I've been staring at code for a couple of hours investigating an externally reported problem and not being able to find any justification for it. Which sort of means that you've got "Here's what I've seen" (two hours staring) "Nope, I can't see any reason for that" - which is effectively a lost couple of hours. I'd like to think that I gained an understanding of the code that I didn't otherwise have, but all I've really got out of it is a little bit of fear and confusion over how such simple operations can be made so complex with that code.

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20 Feb 2005 (Sunday) 

Well I got rung up to be asked lots of questions about how I felt about lots of political crap in this country. Quite a few topics came up - Economy, Immigration, Health Care, Policing, Iraq (two questions), Education, Fox hunting (three questions). But no direct views on Terrorism or measures being taken by the government, or about ID cards. Maybe the latter is just out of perception and there's no point in asking people's opinions on it. Obviously it was somewhat of an odd survey when, because of the way that I avoid current affairs, I answer 'undecided' for most things. Plus it's not helped that some of the questions are phrased in the form "Labour say that the Tory's plan to do blah will do blah; does that make you more, or less likely to vote for Labour ?". Because it's a stupid question - asking whether a statement to counter a second statement that includes a conclusion which may or may not be factual is impossible to judge and doesn't in the slightest change my opinion. It's a political form of the playground "If you do what she says you'll get spots".

I don't mind answering surveys, but I think in the future I'll ask whether it's a political survey and decline if it is.

I've had quite a good day today; lots of squashed bugs. Lots of little bits improved to be useful rather than just 'kinda handy but not really'. And lots of updates to make the bits that I hadn't finished work properly. Not all of them yet, but many anyhow.

Unfortunately in the last hour my mind's kinda got away and I've designed a whole new protocol for doing some things which is ludicrously over-ambitious and probably wouldn't be used by anyone but me. But on the plus side, I can ditch most of the crazy stuff and I'll be left with the core useful bits. Eventually anyhow. Because it's a 'new thing', I don't really want to start on it just yet; so I've left some notes in the headers about how it'll all fit together and I'll flesh that out at some later date.

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22 Feb 2005 (Tuesday) 

Mum and dad and grandma have gone to spain for a week, so I've actually got the place to myself for a change, thank god. However, despite mum allegedly buying stuff in for my yesterday, there doesn't actually appear to be very much for tea, so I guess I'll be going to the shop tomorrow.

I let Greebo out at about 1:10 'cos he was racing around the place like a mad cat. I went back at half past and he didn't want to come in. The garden was dark and there wasn't much to see. It's just gone 2:15 and he's finally come in, but in the last 45 minutes about 1/2 cm of snow has fallen and settled. Which is quite pretty!

Final episode of series 8 Stargate SG-1 today. Quite cool. Lots of little amusing bits, but the one that sticks in my mind was Rodney saying that he liked the name "Gateship 1, because it's a 'ship' that goes through the 'gate'" - which is amusing because on Atlantis (in the alternate timeline where he went to Atlantis, obviously) he called it that, but John called the ship a 'Puddle Jumper'. Seeing Daniel getting shot was mildly amusing, too.

At the end, though, we're left with a universal reset with one important difference - we now have a ZPM... which will be sent to Pegasus for the Atlantis team over the course of the next few episodes. At the end, Jack told Sam to get packing; I may have missed something, but does that mean that she's going to Pegasus too ? I think I just missed something in general.

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25 Feb 2005 (Friday) 

I've just spent a day resurrecting some code that I originally got in '99. It's not the most fun of things to work with and I've had to restructure about 75% of it because of design and implementation problems. However, the code's now significantly faster, deterministic and actually works - as opposed to the original which would slow the entire system down, had non-deterministic behaviour and would fail under pathological conditions. And the memory handling is better too. And there's even a new feature.

The person who wrote it was clever, and I'm in no way saying that I'm cleverer, but there were a few things they'd done which were quite wrong. I think that actually the problems I was seeing come from a lack of testing on their part and a lack of understanding of what was in their head by me. It's very hard to know the direction a person was thinking when they wrote something and what you think of as being a foolish design decision may have been perfectly sane to them because of the goal they had in mind at the time.

In any case, I'd like to think that the updated version it much more reliable. 'Better' is a difficult term with software updates because it's always possible to improve some features and yet not have a 'better' version because you've mananged to do so at the expense of something more important. But I think it's better. For my definition of better.

Then again, obviously I think that my version is better or I wouldn't have done the things I did.

However, I've only tested the basic external-facing interfaces, rather than the functional aspects of the code so whilst it's improved in principle, the testing will have to wait for tomorrow. So tomorrow I'm writing something to use it. Probably lots of headaches.

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26 Feb 2005 (Saturday) 

Oooh! Snowy outside!

I looked at the Google Answers thing earlier today. Interesting. Some people ask really obscure questions, but there are some that I can't believe that people would pay tens of dollars for. Odd. But I guess if you're willing to pay and don't have the time to research then it's worthwhile to some.

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27 Feb 2005 (Sunday) 

Still snowy outside. Not too much, but still it's snow. Oh, and I've just realised why the cats haven't bothered me for few hours. I'm going to get a real yelling at .

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28 Feb 2005 (Monday) 

I'm surprisingly bouncey and hand-clappy today. However, that may be down to tiredness. I do tend to jump from quite fed up to bouncey with almost no reason at times.

Mum and Dad home tomorrow, which is good. It's nice to be on my own once in a while but I do tend to go a little crazy being on my own.

Eek. It's March tomorrow.

It's half past 4 and I'm bored. So I think I'm going to cook some food, watch a film and then go to sleep. I can't seem to get my head into gear over what I'm doing and I've just rung Simon at work I was so bored. It's snowing again outside though.

And the network keeps dropping out. It's annoying. I'm wondering if it's got something to do with the weather. But that's just really an idle wonder rather than based on anything sensible.

I made tea tonight and as I was draining the pasta the thought struck me "That's not spaghetti." So I had some bolognaise with spirals instead. It just amuses me that it took me until the pasta was actually cooked and about to be served to notice that I'd done it wrong. My lack of memory - or lack of concentration, which I think is more the problem - annoys me at times, but I'm glad I can just laugh at it now and again.

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