Last nights dream was one of the more annoying I've had in recent months. It's not that the content was that disturbing, but just the implication that I'm as confused in my dreams.

Chris's given me a rather snazzy little SQL query which will find albums that are missing tracks. So I've been going through my music and trying to work out why there are bits missing.

I sometimes boggle the way that people relate places. Sometimes it's easy to see why people are being vague. Saying that Reading is 'Near London' might be reasonable if you don't know the UK that well. But I was surprised today to see "Chelmsford, near Suffolk". Suffolk is a county. Chelmsford is in the county of Essex. Suffolk isn't (to the best of my knowledge) any better known than Essex. It... makes no sense. But apparently the author of the biography for Tom McRae on All Music Guide felt that it was an easier clarification.

Tired and fed up this evening. I'm not really sure what I'm doing, to be honest.

On the nice side, the Squeezebox is pretty nice to have on at night, set to the 'sleep' setting, so that it fades out nicely. That's quite cute.

I realised a few days ago that Faye, on Questionable Content, reminds me of Velma from Scooby Doo.

I sometimes wonder why I bother. I don't actually have any answer to that.

Nothing much to tell today. The day seemed to fly by, and I didn't leave work until about 7pm, 'cos there wasn't much reason to.

This evening I've been sorting out my music a little more. It's not perfect but it's a lot better than it was.

I'm back now. I've spent the weekend back with parents. Or, more specifically, I went to see Caroline on Saturday, and saw Mum and Dad briefly in the evenings over the weekend. Had a nice day out in Peterborough with her. And I got to play more Dominos with her later. It's always really sad leaving, though . I just want to spend another few minutes, a few hours, a lifetime, longer...

The only problem today was getting home where - and this is quite silly - I got off at the wrong station. I got in at Liverpool Street, got on the tube. Hammersmith and City line, because Circle and District were out of service. I looked at the map, picked off the station I recognised and got off there. Wandering out I followed all the signs to the railway station, increasingly thinking "this is all very familiar... it shouldn't be this familiar... I've not done this trip in over a month and it's far more familiar than that".

It wasn't until I was just about to get to the actual station - I was at the bottom of the steps that I realised that 'Kings Cross' wasn't where I wanted to be. I'd been there on Friday when I'd been going back to Mum and Dad's, which is why it was familiar. But it's not where I wanted to be to go home. And so, laughing as I did it, I went back to the barriers to go back on the underground. Fortunately the guard let me through the barrier when I showed him my ticket, but I think that may have been the silliest thing I've done yet. My mind was just completely on auto-pilot .

I've just finished watching "Fools Rush In (1997)Comedy, Drama, RomanceSparks fly and cultures collide in this romantic comedy about a casual night of passion that turns into the love of a lifetime. Alex Whitman is a New Yorker sent to Las Vegas to oversee a construction project. There he meets Isabel Fuentes, and some serious chemistry brings them together for one night. But Alex doesn't see Isabel again until three months later, when he learns she is pregnant. On a whim and prayer, he proposes. However, there's more to marriage than a Vegas chapel and an Elvis impersonator, as Alex and Isabel soon learn.Fools Rush In" . Really quite fun film, if a little sad.

I've changed Mum and Dad's mail from being POP3 to being IMAP, because they want to now access mail from the laptop and the desktop machines. A short-sighted decision of mine to use POP3 initially. Plus, moved them over to Thunderbird, becuse Opera mail sucks for organising things . However, I'm stuck on trying to get them to share address books.

I can't seem to get my head around LDAP configuration. It's just not sinking in tonight. I did understand bits of it a while ago, but it seems to have gone now.

Lots of stuff today but not of very much interest. I was still in work late today, because I was annoyed at not having got something completely unimportant working. Oh well.

Then I came home via Sainsbury's, very wet - because it decided to rain just as I was leaving. I dried off, started getting tea, spoke to Mum and Claire, and then Caroline rang, and then Chris rang. Finally ate tea, played around with my music database a little. Then spent the rest of the evening playing games with Caroline.

And it seems that Caroline is around this weekend, so I'm going up to see her. As I'd not been planning on that because she'd said or implied that she was busy this weekend that does mean that I've got to work out what I'm doing tomorrow.

I'm reliably informed that a recent badminton tournament final being held in Glasgow was watched by an audience of around 2 billion. This bothered me at first because the number of people in the world is (IIRC) around 5 or 6 billion and having that many watching telly seemed... odd. Apparently it's reasonable - the final was between China and Indonesia, so the figures are almost believable.

I'm playing with date processing today. Nothing special; just converting human-readable freeform dates into something that is processable manually. Bits of it work fine, but it seems to not understand that it shouldn't understand '2006 02x06' as a date. Not sure why. Too tired to think right now.

It's past the middle of June now. That's really quite annoying. I guess it just reminds me of the fact that in a year's time I probably won't be in any different a position than I am now. Which I'd like to say is fine, but... it's really not.

Oh well, I should try to sleep. I woke up at about 6am this morning but did manage to get back to sleep for another 2 hours or so.

Very busy day at work today, trying to fix things that I broke before the weekend. Frustrating, but quite fun too.

Justin Fletcher, from Australia, found me today and dropped me an email. That's quite cool .

Oh, and in chatting to Jessica a few days ago, apparently my name was amusing to her. That's only a little bit bothersome.

Sometimes I think I'll never learn Were all those promises in vain ? Do the wings of fire still remain ? [ Affairs Of The Heart, from Black Moon, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer ]

I've remembered why I was in a bad mood on Friday. I had a very bad dream involving Caroline and it annoyed me far more than usual.

I'm strong on the surface, Not all the way through. I've never been perfect, But neither have you. So if you're asking me I want you to know... When my time comes, Forget the wrong that I've done. Help me leave behind some Reasons to be missed. [ Leave Out All The Rest, from Minutes To Midnight, by Linkin Park ]

I'm still not sure whether I like Linkin Park in general; they're coarse at times, but then there's gems like Leave Out All The Rest. Actually I thought that the next track ( Bleed It Out) was poor when I first heard it - not least because of the rap-sections and the repetition of 'It doesn't matter how hard I try' (q.v. In The End), but it actually works quite well. It amused me anyhow.

I suppose that others will have made a comparison between Shadow Of The Day and With Or Without You, from The Joshua Tree, by U2. Listening to the two together, it might just be the backing riff that's vaguely similar, but I get this whole U2 vibe off it. It's that guitar. It's just too similar!

I've had a lovely evening playing games with Jessica and Caroline. It's been really fun. I had been settling down to watch Pirates 2, when I saw she wanted to play some more. Hey, Caroline wins out over pretty much everything, so it's not exactly a hard decision .

I finished the artist image fetching today. It's pretty reliable, but it has fetched a lot of images. I updated the script that makes thumbnails from the covers so that it makes thumbnails from the artist images as well. This works quite well - it means that you can view the top-level Artists structure in 'Thumbnails' mode and the artist images will appear. It's really quite cute like that. I'd still far prefer it to have artist logos, but we can't have everything.

I've also decided that if I wake up early I go in to work. Presuming, of course, that it's not, like, 6am. At least I can be productive there. Not that lying in bet cursing stuff and the fact that I'm not sleeping isn't productive.

I've also realised, this evening, that I don't know how to get the external drive back to work. I don't have a bad to carry it in. I could do with a little bag for things like that. Hmm. In the meantime, a Sainsbury's bag will have to do, I think.

I think I'm probably going home this coming weekend; I'm not sure what Caroline's doing, but in any case it'll be nice to go home. If nothing else, I get to see the family.

Today I've been doing backups. Not of anything important. Just of music, so far. My USB drive is now about half full, and has a complete copy of the entire music collection on it. Tomorrow I'm going to start the backup of the other bits of the server. Probably not really necessary to back up the entire disc (although that would be nice in some respects) partly because it just won't work well when backed up to NTFS. I should at least back up useful stuff like /home, and maybe /var/cvs.

I've also imported the remaining CDs into the collection, and obtained the lyrics, covers, years, discographies, bios, reviews, members, and homepages. It's possible that this could all be automated so that when things change the server automatically fetches all the bits. Another time, maybe ?

I also watched Thursday and Fridays's episodes of Passions today. It's quite amazingly bad, but funny. Not Soap (1977, ABC)Comedy/SoapSoap: the TV show that made Soap Operas funny! Soap is a tale about two sisters, Mary Campbell and Jessica Tate. While the Tates are a rich family, the Campbells are just another blue-collared family, but they go through amazing and crazy situations. This series will make you travel through a world of crazy and funny situation that happen all in the family.Soap funny, but still pretty silly. I'm not entirely sure what exactly is going on, but hey it's amusing nonetheless.

I've started working on automated fetching of artist images as well. All Music Guide has a number of them per artist, which is cool. Last.FM has a number of them per artist, which is also cool. The only problem is that adding these images to the artist directory usually doubles (or more) the number of objects in the directory which just makes it a whole lot more difficult to navigate around. So I may have to re-think this.

One annoyance, though, is that there's nowhere that seems to have a collection of 'artist logos'. Since you usually recognise a groups logo more easily than the members of the group, it would be kinda handy. But I've not been able to find any site that even tries to collate them.

I'm backing up stuff today. My big external drive's arrived and I can now back things up on to it. The only frustration is that over USB 2 it's going to take ages to backup around 300G, and for backing up my music, I'm going to have to lose all the question marks from the filenames.

If I have to remember how to back things up in the future, the magic incantation is 'rsync -v -t -h -r buttercup::artists1/ Artists1/' and similar.

I've been in a bad mood for the last couple of days, partly due to tiredness and partly due to things around and about. Oh. well.

My XKCD posters arrived today. I ordered the map of the Internet and online communities maps. Quite geeky, but still very cool.

A little fed up tonight, despite that.

It's really hot today. In keeping with my general policy of waking up earlier and earlier each day, I woke up at around 3am this morning. Fortunately, I did fall asleep again after I found out that was the time. As I'd got to sleep in the first place at around 1:30, I was quite tired still - but I am still very tired now. I just don't seem to be sleeping well. Going to bed feeling bad probably isn't helping - I seem to wake up feeling as bad in the morning.

Well, I've got next to nothing done this evening that I meant to do, but I've had a thoroughly enjoyable evening chatting to Caroline and I'm not - yet - feeling bad about it. That's almost progress .

I forgot to buy some yoghurt, so I couldn't make tomorrow's tea, tonight. I'll just have to reorganise when I'm having stuff.

I fitted Simon's HD to the server today, formatted it and copied stuff on. So now we've got far more space on there than before. Should make it a whole lot easier to organise things.

I've also tried ordering some disc recovery software today, which was less than successful. When trying to use the key that was given, the software refused to activate - very annoying.

Yesterday was quite like Thursday, from a 'waking up' point of view. I woke up early and then wondered again why the alarm hadn't gone off. When I checked the clock it was 6:11. This morning, the same thing happened, only it was 5:39. I feel so very tired now.

I've looked around enough to know That you're the one I want to go Through time with [ Time In A Bottle, from The Essential Collection, by Jim Croce ]

Such a sad track, but one that I'd forgotten I liked - Caroline reminded me of it earlier today whilst we were chatting. She also made me laugh a lot with something she said whilst I was waiting for her to go to her parents. I don't remember what it was, though.

It's now nearly midnight and I'm not really all that tired. I'm kinda tired but not so I'll fall asleep.

Oceans apart day after day And I slowly go insane I hear your voice on the line But it doesn't stop the pain If I see you next to never How can we say forever ? [ Right Here Waiting, from Greatest Hits, by Richard Marx ]

Hmm. It turns out I still can't listen to that without crying.

On a more cheerful note, it turns out that Simon has a copy of American Pie, by Don McLean - and I don't. Which is shocking in its own right.

I met a girl who sang the blues And I asked her for some happy news But she just smiled and turned away [ American Pie, from American Pie, by Don McLean ]

I need to go to bed. Having now made myself feel really awful and... awful, and it now being well after midnight, I need to sleep. I've been awake since around 6, so I really need to sleep.

Oh, but whilst I remember, I've put a little sign on the inside of our door in the flat, from Questionable Content 413 : "Danger! Outside world lies beyond this door". I thought it was reasonably fun.

I suppose as I'm still awake I should probably say something about my day. I've spent most of it looking through Simon's CDs. He's got a lot, many of which I ought to have really. Basically I was just killing time, 'cos Caroline said she wanted to demo Skype video chat to her parents. So eventually I got to do that, which was reasonably fun and didn't involve any yelling whatsoever. And later that evening I had a chance to chat to her as well - albeit during tidying.

Some of the rest of the time was spent watching Hustle (2004, BBC One)Comedy/DramaFrom the makers of Spooks and acclaimed writer Tony Jordan comes a slick and stylish new drama. An action-packed blend of humour and intrigue, following the fortunes of a gang of expert cons on the loose in London. They are specialists in the way of the grifter and all are keen to liberate cash from the amoral and undeserving. From faking film sets and expensive paintings to double-crossing the duplicitous head of a bank's security system... THE CON IS ON.Hustle. And some was spent catching up on Questionable Content. I'm up to 853 now, so I'm nearly up to date.

You've already had a conversation about magnetic penguins this lunch time ? [ Magnetic Penguins; Vicki ]

Probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you know that someone didn't know where Penguins were from, and... no even when I try to explain it, it just sounds weird!

I woke up well before 7 this morning. Couldn't work out why my alarm hadn't gone off and then looked at the clock and it was 7am.

It's now 9pm and I'm so fed up I just can't be bothered with anything. I just think I'll go to bed.

I've had a bad day today. I'd been dreaming about trying to escape from people with guns who were chasing me and Caroline and we had to get away from them in a really decrepit car. I woke up in a bad mood because of that, and late because the alarm didn't go off (upgrades to Java prevented SoftSqueeze from starting, and I'm still not keen on buying myself a Squeezebox because ... of stuff), and at work I managed to make so many stupid, stupid mistakes. Whilst the day wasn't a complete write-off, it was very frustrating. On the way home I designed some cunning (TM) enhancement to Fortify, which I then implemented - that turned out ok, although the bubble-sort in there might not show me in the best light.

After that I thought I'd ring Caroline, but now I've ended up feeling worse and I know that that's just not good. I don't know what I'm doing.

I was dreaming this morning that I was lonely and needed something to keep me company. So I got three tiny kittens - one little girl kitten and two little boy kittens. When I got them home they sat in front of the fire and curled up together. I had to think of names for them so I wanted to call the little girl Caroline, but then decided to contract that to just Carry. The little boys I couldn't think of names for so I decided to leave them for a bit. I watched them play together on the rug for a while and then fell asleep. When I woke up, only Carry was sitting on the rug and I couldn't find the boys. I searched the room and they weren't there that I could see. I began to panic and started searching in other places they might have got to - even going out of the room whose doors had been closed all the time and searching downstairs.

Downstairs turned out to be the engine and sleeping area for a large ocean liner. And then my mobile rang and I had to answer it (wondering at the time why it was that when I'm in the middle of a metal box I get a good signal). It was Alison (who I hadn't spoken to since I left the Grove) ringing to see how I was and catch up because she'd just found a very old message from me. So the dream split-screened to both me and her - me searching the house for cats and her... well she was in Norway with her husband doing some work around the Fjords. In her half of the screen she was standing on a gantry around some ice-bound fjord, with some people behind her removing some ice and helping a bird out of its nest.

When I got off the phone with her, I went back upstairs to see where else that I'd not looked and I found the two kittens. Snuggled up together in one of the flipflops that had been left by the hearth, and which I just hadn't seen because they were so tiny.

Back in the real world. I got a call at work today from Dave today, asking if he could come over - so we went out for tea together. Really quite nice seeing him after all this time. See, I'm almost being sociable .

Phil pointed out that the diary was broken; I'd forgotten to add the 'July' HTML files to those that were built. Which just goes to show that this whole process should be far more automated than it currently is. Should all be fixed now.

After being in a rotten mood last night when Caroline wanted to talk to me, I felt pretty downright awful this morning (despite chatting to Phil, which was quite nice). At about 10:20 this evening I was really just feeling "I wish I could talk to her", but it's a bit late so I really don't think she'd appreciate it.

It's stupid this whole oscillating between being annoyed and wanting to chat. I dunno.

Bah, and now I want waffles and syrup.

I was sorting out mail today and I stumbled on an email from Viv Allen. Very strange to read as she died a couple of years ago .

Oh gawd. I've just found a load of emails from people I know on the Nettle Users mailing list back in 2002, including some from Miah Gregory. I honestly thought I was seeing things when I saw the name because it's so out of place. I believe it's the same Miah that works in the same place I do.

It's Friday today; there's nothing much to tell. I feel really awful and I don't know what to do about it. And it's a whole new month.