Evil dream this morning had Caroline dying. So that's sort of set me up for the day being particularly shit.

In a time where the sun descends alone, I ran a long long way from home to find a heart that's made out of stone. [ Fading Like A Flower, from Joyride, by Roxette ]

I hate the end of the month. It's so damned depressing.

Is it asking too much to be given time To know these songs and to sing them ? Is it asking too much of my vacant smile And my laugh and lies that bring them ? [ Stars, from Halflife, by Lacuna Coil ]

In the vague hope that in the future it will be understood that the first place on the Internet that used ELIFETOOSHORT (at least the Internet according to Google), I mention that David Chess noticed that it had 0 hits. It will now have at least 2.

Carrie doesn't live here anymore You could always ask at the corner store Carrie had a date with her own kind of fate It's plain to see [ Carrie, from Platinum Collection, by Cliff Richard ]

I want to come when you call I'll get to you if I have to crawl They can't hold me with these iron walls We've got mountains to climb [ Broken Arrow, from Robbie Robertson, by Robbie Robertson ]

I found today that I've got a live version of The Grateful Dead doing a version of Broken Arrow, by Robbie Robertson. Quite cool. Although when I mentioned this to Caroline she did question how... 'thorough' I like to be with my music. Tra-la-la.

My little moneybank's nearly full now. I tend to stick in spare coins when I come back from work, and it's nearly filled up. I'm not exactly sure what I can do with it. I might just start on another money box, I suppose. 'Moneybank' rings a bell with me now. I'm not sure why. It'll come to me I'm sure.

The canal's gone back down to a sensible level now. After all the rains of the past week it's a good thing really, 'cos it's been a bit much.

I woke up this morning feeling so very tired. So I just stayed in bed. I finally got in to work about 40 minutes later than usual. Not that that bothers me, 'cos I'm usually leaving at about 6:30-7ish anyhow, which is way longer than I need to. Mostly because I've got nothing much to come home to really. It's an evening of sorting music and then... well that's about it really.

I watched Eureka (2006, Syfy)Comedy/Drama/Science-FictionThe sleepy Pacific Northwest town of Eureka is hiding a mysterious secret. The government has been relocating the world's geniuses and their families to this rustic town for years where innovation and chaos have lived hand in hand. U.S. Marshal Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) stumbles upon this odd town after wrecking his car and becoming stranded there. When the denizens of the town unleash an unknown scientific creation, Carter jumps in to try to restore order and consequently learns of one of the country's best kept secrets.Eureka this evening, though. It's still quite fun and I don't think it's dropped off that much at all. Which is reasonably impressive. I'm pretty sure that the scientist who made the weather machine was Zelenka from Stargate Atlantis (2004, SciFi)Action and Adventure/Science-FictionThe story of Stargate Atlantis follows the cliffhanger episode on Stargate SG-1's seventh season finale "Lost City", where SG-1 found an outpost made by the race known as the Ancients in Antarctica. After the events of Stargate SG-1 season eight premiere "New Order", the Stargate Command sends an international team to investigate the outpost. Soon, Dr. Daniel Jackson discovers the location of the greatest city created by the Ancients, Atlantis. The story unfolds when the members of the expedition encounter the Wraith, the race that defeated the Ancients ten thousand years ago.Stargate Atlantis. Could be wrong, but that's what I thought.

I had an awful night last night. I went to bed at an almost sensible time, and then woke up at about 20 past 1, from a dream where someone was warning me off something and then stabbed me in the leg. And then I woke up at before 7 and felt awful as well. I hate me.

Today has just turned out to be really crappy. For a couple of reasons which aren't particularly important, but really which just remind me that each day is just a day and I really shouldn't care about all that much because I'll only be annoyed.

On the up-side today, though I've added a couple more checks to my magic SQL searcher to check for other invalid data. I'll see tomorrow, when it runs automatically, whether it's actually helping to identify things that can be fixed easily.

And I've fixed the lyric indexer so that its automatic 'strip the redundant indentation' code actually works now. Previously it looked right but did nothing. So now at least I've got it working. Regular expressions can sometimes be a pain.

There is, apparently, a Simpsons movie which is coming out soon. So I heard from Alex today. Ian seemed a little surprised that I was completely unaware of it. Well, very surprised actually. Oh well.

I spoke briefly to Claire and Justin this afternoon, 'cos I'd not heard from them since the baby was born and I just wanted to check that everything was ok. They seem well, which is good, and he's well, too.

I seem to have had a really crappy day today. I probably have only myself to blame.

Lots of rain and thunder and lightning today. Power cut in the office, so we lost about an hour and half to that. Apparently it's been pretty wet . Last day of term today, so Caroline wasn't about much at all.

Some things are better left unsaid But they still turn me inside out [ Why, from Diva, by Annie Lennox ]

I've found it. The MP3 player application that I've always wanted. It's called MP3Toys and it's everything I could ever want in an MP3 player for Windows. It has a gorgeous album selector that is so much better than I could think of, with lovely album art use. It integrates with last.fm. It displays lyrics. It allows you to 'just play a track you've thought of'. It allows you to bind global key presses to control it - ControlAMPlayer style. It allows queueing on an album-basis, not just a track basis. It can restart exactly where you left it. It has selectors for similar artists, new artists, by years, by genres, and by ratings. It even comes configured by default to show albums sorted by year.

I can now abandon my quest for the perfect playback application. I've found it. And the author seems to be nice about feedback as well. Squeezebox is great as a hardware player, but this is the PC application to end all MP3 players.

Today feels like a strange day. I'm not exactly sure why. I've not spoken to Caroline in a little while - well, other than emails and text messages, so that's a little odd. That's a little sad. I've been really tired recently as well. Actually, ever since the psychotic swans dream. Hmm.

I can't think of much to say tonight. There's not much happening and I don't really have a whole lot to... Oh, hang on, I've just remembered why it was a strange day. I spend most of it ranting on the talker, which was entirely triggered by a couple of comments someone made on one of my reviews. See, I'd almost forgotten about that. Grr.

Couldn't be bothered to do any more sorting out MP3s tonight. I'm down to the many 'duplicate tracks that are already on albums' reorganising. Tedious.

I woke up this morning very, very confused about what was real and what not. I had just received a phone call from Karina Stenquist telling me what she was up to now that she'd left Mobuzz, and was a little disoriented. I got dressed, had a shower, and made breakfast (not in that order), and then turned on the telly. A face smiled back at me and said "Hello, I'm Justin", and I knew that it was Justin Fletcher, and I wondered to myself, "Who am I, if that's Justin Fletcher ?"

A very confusing morning.

I reported a bug in TagTuner late last night - it was chopping off the first letter of lyric lines because it thought that the lines should be CR-LF when actually they're mandated to be LF only. This morning I had an email asking for an example file (which I'd offered), so I sent it. And this afternoon (about 4ish) It had an email from the author saying that it's fixed and a new version uploaded. I've just tested it and it does appear to be just fine now

Now, I don't want to say that Tag Tuner's the best editor, but it is actually quite nice, and that kind of turnaround on a bug report is generally a very good sign.

I'm pretty certain now, having used it, that id3lib is just broken and makes your life very hard. Certainly the command line id3v2 tool is half-baked and doesn't actually do what I want - which is to allow lyrics and pictures to be added from the command line. So I've added support to the tool for doing that. It's not the most impressive of code and my C++ skills are limited, but it does actually do what I want and should be usable.

Caroline sent me a couple of lovely photos today. They're actually the only images I have of her, other than one picture I keep in a tiny frame by the bed. So it's kinda exciting to have other pictures .

The swans (both of them) were out on the canal when I went in to town this afternoon, and I got to see the cygnets quite close up for a change. Aside from being grey still, they don't really fit the name cygnet any more. They're pretty big.

I had a really good day at work today, despite not actually spending that long at my desk - it seemed that people wanted to talk to me a lot. Admittedly it's to find how I'd got things wrong, but it still seemed like a good day. We had our doughnuts as usual, and curry for lunch. Only thing is that I managed to cut my thumb on the metal container, so it's quite hard to type. Good thing my job doesn't need me to do that much.

Caroline wasn't around all day today which was quite disappointing. The day seems to drag on when she's not around, even when it is a good day. I got a bit worried when it got to 2pm, and dropped her an SMS. I was more worried when she hadn't replied a few hours later. But when I got home I had a chat to her, so that obviously was better.

We also got some new stuff at work today as well, a little bag, some mints and a nice pen. All stuff advertising the 'careers' website, as we're trying to get a load of new people in. It'd be nice to have the bonus for finding someone, except that I don't know anyone who would be suitable who isn't already here, or who isn't happy elsewhere.

My laptop memory also arrived today, as well. So I've now got 760M available now, rather than the 300 and something that it had before. Probably won't make a huge difference, but I'm hoping it won't drag when toggling between applications.

I was in work late this morning, because of a scary dream about telepathic killer swans intent on taking over the world. Also, Angela rang me in my dream, from the Isle Of Wight, which seemed to be less infested with swans. Fortunately I was hiding out in Grandma and Grandad's old house when the mobile rang, and it was on vibrate only, so the swans didn't hear it go off.

We went out after work today and had food at a place in town. Quite nice, but I'm not exactly sociable, and I can't concentrate when the place is noisy anyhow .

On the way home, I noticed only one of the swans with the 4 cygnets on the canal. I'm now worried about where the other one is.

Well we had a very fun Friday. We had some interesting news about the office, which might or might not pan out. We had doughnuts as usual. We found out that we can't use the kitchen any more and have to use the 3rd floor kitchen instead, because they're actually going to make our kitchen bigger. We had a different curry place as well. I think I managed to help out Bruce with one of my extensions to Fortify, and I talked someone through doing a review. Now admittedly they've been here longer than I so they know all the bits about it, but I at least went through the process so that they've officially done a review. It's quite scary because I've not been here that long and I'm not good at talking to people. But it seemed to go ok. And on the way home, I saw the swans were back and still had 3 cygnets with them - although they're a lot bigger than they were! It must be about a month since I've seen them.

I've also 'finished' my little SQL script to tell me about the broken MP3s in the collection. Of the many things it does, one is to tell me when an album is 'broken' because of missing tracks. Chris came up with that 'cos it's a bit complicated for me to do. But it does show up a lot of gaps. Some that are in albums that I have had for ages so I don't know where the gaps come from.

And I've updated my little cover fetcher to be able to fetch covers for albums that we don't have. The idea being that we can accumulate the covers in anticipation of getting the albums. Well, it's not entirely sensible, but it might come in handy in the future.

And I had a nice chat with Caroline this evening.

Hey! I saw Robin today!

I was at work, as normal, and I looked up and there's this guy on the other side of the room waving at me, and it's Robin! He was here to see some other people, but came over and had a chat with me for about half an hour. Admittedly, I'd got very little done in the morning anyhow, 'cos I'd been talking to other people either because they asked me questions or I was asking them stuff. But it was cool to see him!

It seems that Caroline got upset because she thought that there was something that she's said that upset me. So upset people all around then. It's so frustrating to manage to say the wrong thing all the time .

I have a tale to tell Sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well I was not ready for the fall Too blind to see the writing on the wall [ Live To Tell, from True Blue, by Madonna ]

I watched the last episode of Studio 60 (2006, NBC)Comedy/DramaAaron Sorkin, the mastermind behind "West Wing" and "Sports Night" brings NBC's next great drama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Featuring an all-star cast in front of and behind the camera, such as "Friends" alum Matthew Perry, "West Wing" alum Bradley Whitford, plus the talented Amanda Peet, D.L. Hughley, Richard Schiff and veteran Ed Asner. Sorkin, who will handle much of the writing duties, makes sure this vehicle promises to be the fall's most buzzed about new drama. So come take a fascinating look behind the scenes of Studio 60, a fictional sketch-comedy series on the NBS broadcast network. Problem is the series seems to be going down the tube fast. Everyone involved with the late-night dud seems to have one problem or another, including the current Executive Producer, who just had an on-air mental meltdown, and time is running out fast. Enter the networks Chairman of the Board (Steven Weber), a new network president (Amanda Peet) looking to make her mark on the net. Her answer is move is to bring in a pair of fresh-faced writers (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) to try and save the series. Will it work?Studio 60 today; and wasn't amazingly impressed. But also not unimpressed. It was ok. And I watched the penultimate Doctor Who (2005, BBC One)Action and Adventure/Science-FictionThe Doctor looks and seems human. He's handsome, witty, and could be mistaken for just another man in the street. But the Doctor is a Time Lord: a 900 year old alien with 2 hearts, part of a gifted civilization who mastered time travel. The Doctor saves planets for a living - more of a hobby actually, and he's very, very good at it. He's saved us from alien menaces and evil from before time began - but just who is he?Doctor Who of series 3. Ok, but... not sure what's happening. All in all it's not been the best of days.