2 Mar 2005 (Wednesday) 

In my looking for what the 'IM' button does on the Battlestar Galactica control joystick (yeah, it's an odd thing to look for) I found an odd link about a video comparing a F-18 to a Viper. Oh. It's 'Inverse manoeuvre'.

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4 Mar 2005 (Friday) 

I had a cunning plan earlier today. To reduce the noise that there is in the room, I could put a few of the server discs to sleep. The /resource disc isn't used all that much. As such, it can probably sleep after a few minutes idleness. Similarly, /mnt/laptop is rarely used at all - it's a dumping ground from when the laptop HD had problems, and now has general rubbish on it. And the /music disc is used only whilst the RiscPC is on, so between the time the server comes on and when I wake up, it's idle too. So, once the drives go to sleep the room is really quite nice. And I don't have to have my music on quite so loud to hear it .

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5 Mar 2005 (Saturday) 

Well, I'm fed up tonight. I've thrown away two days of work and just started again. It just seemed more practical than trying to pursue what appeared to be a bad route. I don't like discarding things like that, because it means that the time was wasted. There's always the advantage that you've learnt something from it, but it's usually so minor that it's not enough to mitigate the general failure to get the original working.

Oh well.

Press Gang series 3 is now up on Amazon, listed as being available on the 11th April. I haven't seen any special features pass through BBFC yet, though, so I'm not sure what it'll have on it.

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6 Mar 2005 (Sunday) 

Well, I've had a very cack day today. I just don't seem to have got very much done and... well lots of little things just making me fed up. It's just one of those days where you go through the whole thing on the verge of crying. And to top it all off I get an email today from Caroline. As if I didn't feel messed up enough, I have that to contend with too. Ah well.

One of those little things is that I don't seem to have actually done anything at all useful in months. It's been months of just maintenance on top of maintenance on top of (snore). And you look back over what you've accomplished and you think "is that all I've got to show for that time ?".

I'll go back to tweaking code and eating pancakes and hoping that I don't think too much.

Arse, I just can't concentrate on things now. Damned woman. Yeah, maybe I'm just blaming part of the day on a single email, which is unfair. I was fed up this morning and found I couldn't listen to U2 any more 'cos it just left me feeling too down, and now I've got to the point that even Roxette and Pet Shop Boys aren't helping to lift me at all. I could go and watch a film, I suppose. That'd give my mind something to concentrate on.

Oh, and Press Gang series 3 and Charmed series 1 are out soon (in that order). No commentary extras on Press Gang, but a few gallery's and PDFs.

It appears that my fingers and brain have become detached and they need to be very strongly prodded to do what they're told now.

On the plus side of today, I had a quick play at Hexen again. It's not right. I don't know what it is about it, but it just doesn't feel 'right' like Doom. I know I was getting fed up with it, but there's something missing about it that makes it feel a little bit botched together. I'm not sure what it is. The inter-level flicker is one thing, but that's not the whole of it... it just doesn't feel like the author (me) put enough effort in.

And mum comes home tonight and she's all upset too and I can't think of anything to say to help, which really doesn't put me in the best of moods after all this.

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7 Mar 2005 (Monday) 

Today I want to do calming things. I don't want to be thinking. Except that kinda everything I need to do involves thinking. I'm still all twitchy and checking my email every few minutes. I need to be calmer.

Caroline said something very interesting to me in an email earlier, suggesting that I'm afraid of what I write to her. I'm now trying to get out a coherent sentence that isn't waffle and actually says what I mean without dancing around what I want to say. Yes, I'm afraid of what I write, much as I am with other people that I care about and never want to hurt. I don't want to write something (this doesn't apply only to Caroline!) that means that we can't be friends. And therefore if I say exactly what the my mind is thinking there's a real danger that I'll do that. And I take my time when I'm writing in the diary, too because I know people might read it some day. I'm not managing to write what I mean. I used to be able to string sentences together, y'know ?

It's like my cursing her over the past day. If someone heard me they might assume that I didn't actually like her, but quite the opposite is true. The reason is more buried in the history, I think. It's a frustration and an annoyance with myself for being so flustered, confused and generally caught off guard by her. I remember quite clearly being absolutely over the moon, talking to myself, being very bouncey, happy and utterly unable to concentrate when she first emailed me. Not because I thought there will ever be anything more between us, but because it's Caroline. The "She's talking to me and doesn't hate me and everything that I am" feeling that's just so wonderful. After so many years of knowing that someone that you care about hates you so much, it's something of a release. That, I know, was a couple of years ago, but it's still a strong feeling. And I don't like that. Well, I like it because it's good to be happy, but I don't like the fact that I'm happy that after all this time just the idea of her talking to me provokes such a reaction. Why should, after all this time, I be so bothered by just the fact that I get an email ? I mean, it makes no sense.

So, the whole crux of this is that I want to be careful not to put any part of that friendship in any danger whatsoever and I know damned well that after so many years of internalising my own annoyance there are many things that I could say that would put that in danger.

I'm sure there's something important that you can learn from that.

I think, though, that I have managed to apply something of it, though, because I've written that without regard for what she or anyone else she knows might think of it, and I'm not minding the consequences if she or anyone else thinks differently. I've many years of people looking down on me over my general obsessiveness so it shouldn't bother me by now.

I thought you were singing your heart out to me; Your lips were syncing and now I see. [ A Change Would Do You Good, from Sheryl Crow, by Sheryl Crow ]

Why the quote ? Well, listening to it today, I remembered that I'd never written down why that bothered me, and as I'm sort of in that strange transitional mood where I'm writing things like that down, here it is...

I know that I'm not particularly inventive and don't think about things much - if you know me well you'll know that a lot of what I think is a reinterpretation of other things and there's nothing much 'original' that I can offer. It's a quite cute little section because it's saying "I know you're a fake" which is something that I think people can see about me if they think about it even a little bit.

Plus 'A Change' runs straight in to 'Home' which is such a gorgeous track.

So after that random cack introspection, I've got to do some random work. D'oh.

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8 Mar 2005 (Tuesday) 

Well, I've done all of about 20 lines of code today before I've had to leave things.

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9 Mar 2005 (Wednesday) 

David Chess pointed out the 'encyclopedia of misinformation and utter lies'. Which is quite a silly and fun idea in my opinion. I was going to submit an entry for Thursday, but someone had already added one. So, instead I wrote a quick entry for Monday for the laugh. It's more fun than work, anyhow.

"You never looked so bad", she said. "I didn't know that I could do all this", she said. [ Rome Is Burning, from Under The Red And White Sky, by John Wesley ]

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10 Mar 2005 (Thursday) 

I've just been looking through JFPatch to see what it did with debug areas. Debug areas were the one thing I never got to work with JFPatch. I don't know why, but DDT would just hang when loading them. Reading them by hand said to me that they were correct, but that doesn't actually mean all that much. DDT's always been a bit picky.

It's quite amusing, though, reading through the code. Firstly, it's not all that good in places - it would be so much easier in C. But secondly, it's a whole AOF export that happens within assembler, and I wrote it. Ok, so I didn't write the assembler, and it's really just a glorified pre-processor, but it's still quite cool. It's aim, when I started it, was to make patching easier and it fulfilled that easily. Once I'd done that, I wanted to make creating modules easier, rather than re-writing the same code over and over. And that it succeeded at pretty well too.

AOF came pretty late in the day, and mostly because I didn't understand or like ObjAsm at that time. "Learn slightly different assembler layout" or "Convert your existing assembler to export files in a way that works". These days, I'd choose the former, but back then I chose to extend the tool. I guess that's the first place I got a good feel for how the AOF files fitted together.

It's not like JFPatch is actually anything special - many AOF assemblers came before it and a couple after it, but still it was me having written it. Of course, these days, I've written programs that output AOF data directly, rather than going through any pre-processors or anything, but it was quite cute back then. Amazing that it worked so well really.

So I spoke briefly to Helen today, and I just hate this whole world. Whilst I'm being bothered by silly people sending death threats, Helen's having a really crappy time - and I knew nothing about it, could do nothing about it and was completely oblivious of it. There's only so much crying you can do over things that happened to someone else two years ago, but it's just painful to know that she's gone through that. I actually saw her only a few months earlier, too.

And of course, I immediately associate that frame of mind with how I felt after hearing about what Caroline's been through, and knowing that she wants to meet up some time just leaves me in a whole spinny world of confusion.

But, and this is the thing that gets me, I'm feeling crappy and yet they both had much rougher times than me. I've got it easy. The only thing I have to contend with is my own confusion generated by me, for me. So I should just stop whining and get on with things. Saying and understanding that helps not one jot though.

Apparently Helen told me her new diary and email address last year. I have made no notes of it and have no recollection of it. I'm... well, maybe... I just don't know... maybe I thought - against all available evidence - that I'd remember and never wrote anything down. Anyhow, I now know where she's writing things down and an address for her, so I'll try to track her a little better. Frustratingly, her journal doesn't seem to have an RSS feed so I'm writing a special parser for her webpage to turn it into RSS for me. Ok, I'm doing that for her, but I didn't even consider doing it for Julian's log ? Yeah, that's not particularly good is it ? The RSS feed, on the other hand, is quite good.

Not heard from Caroline in a few days; exchanged emails with Farren, nee Sue, yesterday.

Overall, feeling jittery. I could do one of those mood meter's like Julian has, but it seems too much like hard work.

On the up side of the day, I've spoken to Helen for the first time in ages, she seemed quite happy which was nice to know now. And the bulk of the people that I know who are likely to now have online diary's of some form. The people's diaries that I'm following right now are...

• Simon
• Julian,
• Hannah
• Helen (who has an anonymous diary)
• Chris Williams
• David Chess

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13 Mar 2005 (Sunday) 

I wrote another gadget today. It's not amazing, but it's pretty neat nonetheless. It's a little amusing that it's actually comprised of just one other gadget, which I wrote. And that gadget uses the ImageFileGadget, which I wrote. It's kinda nice to see the gadgets being used, even if it's only by me.

I'm toying with the idea of a gadget code creator. As a passing idea anyhow. Basically all the cack that you usually write and re-write can be condensed into known templates and we can build up a gadget gradually. It's not ideal but it could work quite well for most simplistic gadgets - or at the very least make a framework for building more complex gadgets yourself.

I'm getting odd errors from the /mnt/laptop drive - the one I used to back things up on when the laptop drive had problems. Some sectors are coming back with unrecoverable errors, which is never good. This is a Maxtor disc, so I've got the 'PowerMax' diagnostic tool to check that the disc is ok. This is all a bit weird to me because, as I understand it, most recent discs have a verify operation that they can do over ATA - it's just a command that you can tell the drive to do and it'll check the disc for you, reporting if there's a problem. And yet, I have to have a special program to do it.

What makes it more fun is that I don't (usually) have a floppy drive on the server; it's just not been something I've needed in years. So I had to find out why I don't have a floppy drive on the server - answer: I don't know. Find out how to make it work - answer: dismantle machine and plug in the cable to the drive . And then boot the thing on that drive. Of course I've managed to plug the wrong bit of the cable into the drive, so it thinks that it's drive 1. Fortunately the BIOS has a nice setting to swap the floppies around.

Anyhow, after fiddling, I've now got it running the tests that it claims could take about 20-30 minutes. So I'll go back to watching Stargate The Movie on the laptop, I guess.

Well, it's come back with a message saying the disc is failing and a diagnostic code 'ca6ad170'. Apparently Online RMA is available through their website if I give that code. So we'll see how that goes when the machine comes back up in linux. I'm going to have to back up some data, I think. Fortunately the disc isn't absolutely vital to the operation of things, but it is a little frustrating. I have the old 80G music disc I could use in its place I think - so that'd double its storage too.

Hmm. Apparently the drive's out of warranty, having gone out of warranty 25/4/2004. So, just as soon as I've finished my time machine I'll be popping back to return it. So I guess it's now time to dig out the 80G drive.

Amusingly, the 80G drive also appears to be a Maxtor. Might as well check when it went out of warranty. Also out of warranty, as of 14/8/2004. Anyhow, let's play swap the drives and we can do one of those backup things.

"hdc1 has gone 440 days without being checked, check forced". Yum. Wah, now I have to actually commit to deleting everything on the drive. Ick. I hate deleting stuff. On the plus side, everything on that drive is on the newer, bigger drive. It'll take a litle while to back up 40G, I think. I've got half an hour of Stargate left to go, though, so it's not like I'm just twiddling my thumbs.

Now I'm twiddling my thumbs. It looks, so far, like 3 files have failed to copy. That's fine with me.

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14 Mar 2005 (Monday) 

In the weekly search reports, someone wrote "Oh dear, are you able to say what rough times Caroline has been through?". To which the answer is "absolutely and definitively not". Caroline's life isn't really something I want to get in to, and it's not my place to discuss it here in the diary in any case. I know (some of) what's happened to her over the past years, and I know that it's been tough for her. And after all, this is a diary for me .

In any case, she was very happy when I met her last, so there's really not much point in dwelling on that past.

I've not heard anything back from Farren or Caroline about meeting up at the end of the month, yet. I'll drop them another line in a few days time and see if there's been network problems, or if they're just busy.

There's a load of searches for Helen in there too, but I think that was me being lazy and not using 'grep' . And there's even a search for the decompiler as well.

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16 Mar 2005 (Wednesday) 

I while back I found what may have been the most cool joystick in the universe. I don't think I wrote about it in here, but oh well. Anyhow, whilst looking for something completely unrelated I stumbled across a Keyboard which may the coolest I've seen in a while. Chris suggested it was similar to an old Amiga-style machine which is kinda is. It's still pretty... well, extreme.

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19 Mar 2005 (Saturday) 

After much back and forth, I've finally sorted out going to see Sue and Caroline. We're meeting in town on Friday. Could be interesting. Could be utterly terrifying. Plus I don't have my MP3 player to keep me company on the way, which is a little frustrating.

Mum said she had a Villa at Longleat for the weekend and I was welcome to come so after a lot of trying to decide if I wanted to or not, I decided I would. Only I'd said to mum that if I wasn't up by 1pm I wasn't going. And I couldn't sleep most of the night because it was so hot and then was asleep until about 2ish. So I missed out on that. My own fault for being lazy, I guess. Oh well.

What have we done over the past few days when I've not written anything ? Not a lot. I wrote a new module to messing about with key presses. It's not all that amazing yet, but it was only a 'spend time doing this before bed 'cos it's not worth starting complex things now' thing. Unfortunately it took be half an hour to debug the first friggin' line. Oh well. But it works and only took about 100 minutes from starting to getting it to do what I'd designed it to. There's a load of extensions I've got planned, but it's nice when you've got to that stage of "It does the original thing I wanted" and moving away from that to "doing the things that I would like but aren't totally necessary" is a little more daunting. It works; why fiddle .

Oh, and the only other thing that cropped up in the last week was a couple of dreams I had about Caroline. Following me around with a shotgun. I'm sure there's some great symbolic meaning to that, but I'm quite happy to just take the literal meaning and be scared. Well, not happy, but it's the simplest thing to think of .

I actually found myself saying "doh" today. I'm sure I've done it before, but it was a moment or two before I realised that I'd done it - I was throwing things in the bin outside and had just shut the door and gone back in to the kitchen when I found the two bags that I had originally wanted to put in the bin. "Doh" and then went out to put them in the bin - it was only then that I realised what I'd said. Silly.

And I've just been reading through a little ARM backtrace and it comes to 'CallVector' and I'm can see that the vector number's in R10, so I scroll along to that value and it's 6. "Hmm", I think, "what's it calling OS_Byte for ?". Yeah, I happen to remember that Vector 6 is ByteV and don't even realise that I've done that until a little while later. Useless crap in my head but I can hardly remember the things that are actually important.

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20 Mar 2005 (Sunday) 

I noticed something today about You All Look The Same To Me, by Archive that I hadn't noticed before. Well, I probably had but it's difficult when you just listen to the whole album. Finding It So Hard ends in a small section 'Did you fall over me, my love?' and then Fool (which, I think I've mentioned that I love) repeats the section. I hadn't really noticed that it continues over the tracks. 'Finding It So Hard' is 17 minutes long, though, so I think I'm forgiven.

I'm thinking of you In my sleep They're not good thoughts [ Goodbye, from You All Look The Same To Me, by Archive ]

I need to sleep; It's been a whole week, 'cos tears keep falling into my pool. [ Sleep, from Noise, by Archive ]

And I noticed yesterday that the song controls on the Archive site actually do work if you use Internet Explorer. I use Opera most of the time, and they don't work in there. It also seems that they actually include all the tracks on there so that you can listen to them from their pages. I've been saying this for a while - it's a great idea for people to hear tracks before they buy albums. Well, obviously, but if you don't listen to the radio, or you're not expecting to ever hear the tracks on the radio (because, let's face it, unless you're a with a big company and they really want to push you, you ain't going to get airplay), it's the only way to do it. The quality isn't wonderful listening to it this way - I can't check what quality it is because it's all flash based, but it's enough for you to hear the tracks and see what you think before buying the album. And they have all their stuff available for playback like this. That, I feel, is pretty impressive.

Just looking at the Marillion site, I see what they offer some Real player clips of the tracks they have done. Only that's all they are - just clips of maybe a minute at a time. I guess that's not bad to get a feel for such things.

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21 Mar 2005 (Monday) 

Another one of those odd dreams today. Rather fun, though . There was some stuff that came before the real section I remember, mostly involving general stuff at sixth form (or possibly adwick) about two or three days before hand, but I think that came in another dream earlier - I kept waking up and couldn't seem to settle.

Anyhow, it was Tuesday and, as we know, Tuesday's are always bad, being a full day with no free periods (hey, I dunno if that's right or not, that's just the way that it was) and I had 4 exams that day, Maths, Technology and Design, Physics and then Music. The first exam was awful, because I don't think I'd been going to the classes (Mrs Goodman was annoyed, I remember) so I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing and just bluffed my way through it (yeah, like you can do that in Maths ). Anyhow, I left my bag and stuff in the hall and then went out for a walk after the exam. I was all bothered by having to go to see Caroline at the end of the week so I needed a little time to kinda get myself ready, and so I kept walking out through the fields outside the school.

Somewhere out by the reservoir I remembered that I had Technology and Design exam and I was missing it. Panicing I began running back to school, out of the trees, through the fields, jumping cows (well, jumping, but they kept moving out of the way, which is a good thing because I was concerned what might happen if I landed on one as they're not slight things and even though they're lying down I'm pretty sure I couldn't actually jump over one) and trying to avoid fences.

So, getting back to the school, I'm knackered and trying to find where to go. I can't find my bag - I've left it in the hall, so I peep in through the door and there's my bag, at the far end of the hall, beyond about a hundred people doing some other exam and a teacher I know damned well won't let me get it. So, not knowing where I'm going, I head for office of the Teacher I have for the class as they'll know. I find them in their office (it's my old CDT teacher from The Grove whose name elludes me right now), and they tell me it's in the usual classroom. Rather than heading straight down the corridor to the room, I instead head out and come in the back way, through the art room, where people are doing an exam too - they don't seem to mind though.

In the classroom, I find the place covered in white sheets and covering paper. I mean covered. Every desk, wall, and even some parts of the ceiling and windows. And everyone's talking and discussing how to do the exam. It appears that the exam is to paint the room and yourselves in such a way that you become completely invisible by blending in to the background, and you can do it in groups and talk and help one another (don't even try to ask me what that has to do with Technology and Design). And we've got big spray guns - the ones with the long spiral cords - that spray black and white paint so that we can get a good look to the place. There are one or two red sprays too, but they're used carefully. The black and white don't mix to make grey, either. So we're all getting changed if we want, and putting on goggles so that we can do out faces properly, and it's really fun. And then I woke up.

Now why didn't we ever get exams like that at school ?

I watched Groundhog day last night, with French subtitles. It's definately not as easy as Friends, but there's a huge advantage in that you see same and similar lines being used in the repeated days so it gives me a little bit of a chance to get used to it. I'll watch it again in a while to see if I've learnt anything. I tried watching it with French audio and was lost within a couple of lines. I'm just not that good. Watching films with subtitles may not be the best way to learn, but it's quite fun .

Got a nice little email from Helen today, too, so that cheered me up as well.

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22 Mar 2005 (Tuesday) 

Well, I'm finally fed up. Long ago, in the very dim and distant past, I had a little program that monitored MP3s as they were played and recorded what was being listened to so that I could go back and check or - more likely - so that I could eventually write a program to decide what tracks will follow what. But it got lost somewhere.

At the moment there's a few things that monitor the playing music - obviously the most important thing about life is making sure that there's something worth listening to playing and that I enjoy it, and they try to ensure that that happens.

AMPlayer plays music; the module that is. We don't have no stinkin' front ends around here. Well, not unless we desperately need to play two tracks concurrently - AMPlayer front end accepts ctrl-playing of files to mean 'play as a different instance', so you can play two tracks (or more - up to about 5 before the machine is crippled, but you can always keep them paused so have lots of tracks 'ready to play'). Basically it's handy if you just think "Oh, I want to listen to blah" whilst you're in the middle of some other album. You ctrl-double-click the file you want to play and pause the currently playing track. Once the one file's done, you unpause and you're back where you were.

ControlAMPlayer automatically queues the next track in the directory, or moves up directories and back into the next one along if that directory's been exhausted, when a new track starts. So I always have something playing and it'll just keep rolling through the collection. And of course, there's the more important key-pad controls for pausing, skip to next, volume control, and 'open the directory of the currently playing file'.

AMPlayer_Upload is a desktop program that has no visible components - I never even notice it's there these days. Currently it uploads to part of the gerph.org site 'cos I haven't decided where to put it. It just sits there and FTPs the details when the track changes.

AMInfo is another desktop program, but it does have a front end part. It's really quite simple, though. When the track changes a window appears on the screen showing the track name, album name and artist, together with the album cover (yay, ImageFileGadget used for a real purpose ) and after a couple of seconds it slides off the screen. It also pops up when you change from paused to playing and when the 'left of the screen' notification comes from the wimp (ie hold the pointer at the left edge and the window pops up). I think it's quite cute . Eventually I'll add a TextArea for showing the lyrics too, but it's a little more advanced than I need at the moment.

AMPlayer_AutoQueue is another desktop program similar to AMPlayer_Upload in that it has no front end. Whilst running it watches for track changes and when they occur it writes to a file in Choices the name of the file that is playing and the current volume level (and any AMFilter settings that might be in place, too). When the program starts it waits about 5 seconds and then, if nothing else is already playing, it reads the file from Choices and plays it at the volume also in that file (and restores the AMFilter settings if there are any).

All of these components run on startup so the music I was listening to the previous night will be started a few seconds after the machine finishes booting.

Anyhow, there's nothing that keeps a full list of all the tracks that have been played. I think I'll modify the AMPlayer_AutoQueue program to do that because that's closest to what it's already doing. Tada. 6 lines later and we have Choices:AMPlayer.List which will have the time and track name appended when it's spotted as changing. Cool .

I'm trying to sleep earlier at the moment but it's not quite working out as I'd planned. However, I found out why it's been so hot in my room over night - I've got the heater on. This simple piece of knowledge certainly helps to solve that mystery . Hopefully I'll be conscious on Friday. I reckon it'd be a bonus to being there if I could actually string more than a few words together. That said, I do tend to be left without anything to say when I'm around Caroline. There's a mitigating factor though - Farren's boyfriend will be there too, apparently. Well, I say that - she asked if he could come and I saw no reason not to. I don't like saying no to things like that. And of course it'll be nice to see how Farren is (yeah, I'm getting used to writing that now - whether my mouth will be used to using the name is another matter).

I can't find anything to listen to. At least nothing that matches my mood. That might be because I'm not sure what mood I'm in. I'm just playing random, differently themed tracks in the hope that I'll find something that suits me. I think I've settled on Counting Crows. And John Wesley.

Good god it takes a long time to tag 58,000 files with CVS.

Oh, and I very nearly missed Serious Arctic today because I wasn't paying attention when my alarm went off. That would have been quite tragic .

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24 Mar 2005 (Thursday) 

I tried going to bed early last night. That was a big failure. As normal, I didn't actually manage to get much more sleep. And I had mum telling me "You know you have to get to bed early tomorrow if you're going out?"... Thanks mum, I hadn't thought of that at all. That said, whilst failing to sleep last night I was pondering what the outcome of seeing Caroline and Sue tomorrow will be. I came to the general conclusion that I'll feel crap; it's just to what degree I'll feel crap. And from that, I pondered why on earth I was bothering to go in the first place. I mean, if I know it'll make me feel like cack, why should I bother going ?

So I was tempted to ring up and say that I can't make it. I say 'was', but I'm still deciding whether I want to that.

(much later that day!) Caroline's just emailed me to say that based on the diary comment she thinks that I hate her. I ... replied with some stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't hate her. She provokes many feelings, but hate for her isn't one of them.

I'm actually a little bothered that I don't have anything to listen to on the way there. I'll try taking along my baby MP3 player - Simon's got my CD player, sadly.

Last Joey episode tonight, too.

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25 Mar 2005 (Friday) 

Well, that was a weird day. I met up with Caroline and Farren today and went out for lunch and some drinks. I think at first I was just too freaked by seeing her and found it quite hard to talk to her, so I think for about half the day I just listened to her and Sue chatting which was painful. Anyhow things settled down and I found from somewhere that I could actually do this and talk to her and stuff. Unfortunately I made her miss a train whilst I was trying to get a ticket, but we just chatted for another hour and that was nice.

Anyhow, I came away feeling happy. I'm not sure how long it'll last, but I'm happier than I've been in a long while, so I may just go to bed at a sensible hour - I didn't get any sleep last night - and be comfortable with myself for a change. Oh, and I forgot to get a photo, but promised to get one next time we meet up. Which implies that I hope that we will meet up again, sometime.

The other thing that cropped up was that they reminded me what Mr Kirby and Mr Wiseman's names were - Mr Kirby was my form tutor in lower sixth and helped me a lot in trying to understand where I was, and Mr Wiseman was my form tutor in upper sixth and wasn't strict, wasn't put-on laid back, but just... oh, I don't know... he was just casual with us, and friendly. I don't remember that from the other teachers. Maybe I'm remembering over-fondly, but I do have this sense that he was like that.

Rain, sea, surf, sand, clouds and sky Hush now baby, don't you cry There's a mocking bird Singing songs in the trees ... Rain, sea, surf, sand, clouds and sky Time will see your tears run dry There's a mocking bird Singing songs in the trees [ Mockingbird, from Barclay James Harvest, by Barclay James Harvest ]

Well, that entry's taken about 4 hours to write.

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26 Mar 2005 (Saturday) 

Yesterday's entry came out in the RSS summary as being 42 paragraphs - there are only 5 paragraphs visible . Maybe I should strip out any private sections before I do the paragraph count ?

The answer to 'I'm not sure how long it'll last' was 'around 5 hours'. Ah well, that's better than normal, I suppose.

I'm migrating all my email to linux now. I've become frustrated by the constant flipping from Linux to RISC OS when I want to do mail-things. The problem is that I read mail and reply to it in linux and then move over to RISC OS to store the actual messages in Newsbase and read them with MessengerPro. Which seems like a huge waste. Why not just keep everything together ? So that's what I'm doing.

It's part of a big Plan. Whether my Plan will work, we'll see but we have a goal set, we have an initial set of steps to move toward that goal and... so far I'm not doing very well on moving toward it, even after only a few hours. But I'm going to be gentle on myself as I've never been all that good with plans and I've never really put the effort in to follow them through. This is a good Plan. This time it is right. It will work. And nobody will have to get nailed to anything.

Well, hopefully. Either that, or I'll feel utterly fed up in a weeks time and nothing will change. We'll see. Friends know what's happening and whether they think I'm right in my Plan or not is unimportant. This is For Me.

Saw the first episode of the new Doctor Who today; quite fun. Odd to see that it was a single episode wrapping everything up - or maybe I just thought it did... we'll see...

I could do with having a 'diary-submission-by-email' thing so that I could post diary entries to myself. Only thing is that's not possible now that I'm moving mail away from RISC OS. Oh well. I could always move the diary to XML and XSLT-it instead. Oh the terror.

Everything about you is how I'd wanna be, Your freedom comes naturally [ Bliss, from Origin Of Symmetry, by Muse ]

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27 Mar 2005 (Sunday) 

Finished off migrating email today. That was somewhat tedious. Reading some of the very early emails had some quite amusing results - I've got emails from Chris whilst we were at uni, and ancient spam and course notes and all sorts of bits and pieces all the way back to (sporadically) 1996. And then I got really depressed when I realised that some of the middle stuff was when other people I cared about had hard times and I was oblivious, so I stopped skimming the mails and thinking about that and just went back to blind filing.

Mum and Dad are looking, again, at places in Spain. It's odd; they want to take the cats with them. I don't know how I feel about the whole idea to be honest. I mean, I have a Plan now, albeit only 2 days old, but it's a plan. And after so many years of having absolutely no focus whatsoever, I think I'd like some help with it. I'm not good at asking for help, am I ? Let's see if the Plan is still working out in a few days time. We're talking baby steps here. Rome wasn't built in a day.

I found the whole huge conversation I had with myself back in '02 about Caroline; it was somewhat surreal to be reading a historical record of an internal conversation between 3 sides of myself. But, I think it was accurate, even still.

Grendel seems to be very affectionate at the moment, which is nice. Either he senses that I want a cuddle, or I'm just not feeding him enough. He's a cat, so it kinda goes without saying that it's the latter isn't it ? .

For tomorrow I must remember to migrate my address book to pine too, 'cos so far I've managed to mail 5 people who's addresses came out as 'blah@buttercup.gerph.org' 'cos they don't have aliases, and I've had to re-send them.

Julian's not feeling so well today, so Mum and Dad are going down to see him tomorrow. Aww.

I've just skimmed back on the diary to check that I'd actually linked to the correct entry and read on a tiny amount more in the public bit. Immediately following Caroline getting in touch I cite Bliss, by Muse, because it seemed to be appropriate to how I was feeling. And yesterday, I cited it, too. And reading the entry is just strange.

It's odd; it's been three years (ish) since then, and we've exchanged only a few emails. I've promised her I'll try to stay in touch more often.

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28 Mar 2005 (Monday) 

I'm a little jumpy today. Damn.

Mum and Dad are visiting Julian today.

Bah; Grendel was crying so I put my lunch down went to see what was up, and when I came back, Greebo's standing up on the chair, eating the cheese sauce off my lunch. So, I've had to give him the rest of it. Bah, cats and Cheese!

What have I achieved today ?

Well, I've managed to talk to David Gamble which was second on my list; I'm still working through the 'first on the list' item, but that'll be done by the evening. I tried to get hold of Angela but her mobile rang out to answer phone (and I have no idea if that's current eve) - finally I found another number and tried that and got someone else who said she's away at the moment. So that sounds promising. So far, then 'catching up with friends' is working out ok-ish. I said I would try to keep in touch with friends and it seems to be working. I meant to phone Sue as well, just to say thanks for a nice day, but it's 8pm now and I don't want to bother her too late.

I've transferred my (short) list of people's birthdays from !Alarm to 'remind' under linux. Now I get a little note to tell me that people's birthday's are coming up. Hence why I wanted to ring Angela - I don't know her address! It'd be nice to have something more... well, structured for recording reminders, but for now that'll do. I'm not into whizzy interfaces and stuff, just something that works and - equally importantly - has a data format that is transferrable. One of the things I've known for a long time is that data format transparency is much more important than whizzy features. Hell, we've just seen it with moving from Newsbase to Pine; if the messages had been in mboxes (which are arguably the simplest form they could be in) then I could have just copied them straight over. On the other hand, they weren't that hard to take over and even if Newsbase wasn't an option any more (eg the RISC OS machines had all died) I could still have done things under linux after recompressing the relevant files.

I don't expect to be tied to any one system ever. That said, I've just spent a lot of time playing with Excel, so maybe I shouldn't feel so smug in that statement.

My treat to myself if I get today's list of things done is to write the music-played-to-diary converter. I'm not sure I'll get to do that, to be honest. I'm being relatively relaxed so far but I'm actually working steadily and seem to be going well.

Caroline actually emailed me back earlier, too, which was quite surprising. Oh, and I dropped off to a few people a number of absolutely ancient (some going back to '96) emails that I'd found in my searches. Some are sweet, and some just make you groan at how long ago things were .

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29 Mar 2005 (Tuesday) 

I went to do a stupid thing today. Everyone told me I was stupid. I chickened out and ended up in Cambridge. Saw Peter and Julia instead. Turns out I would have been stupid.

I can't do this any more. Too many nights of crying myself to sleep and getting myself more upset over things that have happened years ago. I need... something else.

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31 Mar 2005 (Thursday) 

Private entry, I'm afraid.

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