31 Oct 2007 (Wednesday) 

Another night waking up from horrid dreams. Last night it was being the last people left alive after a huge flood had wiped everyone else out. And then drowning. Which wasn't all that fun.

I realise that my sub-conscious hates me. I just wish it would be a little more subtle and let me sleep some nights.

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28 Oct 2007 (Sunday) 

I spent a lot of last night being killed repeatedly in my dreams. Not that I tend to dream much normally these days for obvious reasons, but when I do they tend to wake me pretty sharpish. Whilst I doubt that those dreams will come true, I'm increasingly convinced that the others probably will. What do you do if the things in your dreams come true ? I don't know, but I don't want them to.

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27 Oct 2007 (Saturday) 

Odd little day today. Picked up a free lightbulb from Sainsbury's which was nice, bought myself a very nice bratwurst at the little market in the square (in the Market Place outside work... fancy having a market there.. who'd have thought ?). Then I updated discovered that SlimServer has AudioScrobbler built in to it in the latest svn's. And that they're using protocol 1.2 which I didn't know was live. So I've updated my AudioScrobbler documentation and the RISC OS client I wrote to work with it. The document isn't quite complete, but I think it's a little more readable than the official one (which has been improved quite a bit so the difference isn't that great in terms of implementing a client based on it).

Which doesn't negate how bad I was feeling this morning, but at least it's something different.

It takes time and big mistakes for us to realise We need each other like the air we breathe, ain't nothing we can do And no-one else will ever make me quite as mad as you do [ Highway 5, from Prince Of The Deep Water, by The Blessing ]

I've decided that Highway 5 will go quite nicely into Wicked Game, by Chris Isaak.

Browsing music on the Jive is really quite cool. It's not perfect but it's a lot better than the regular remote. By miles.

I decided to watch Speed this evening - Caroline's not been around - and I was amused to see the police captain in it. He's got the same voice as Henry in Eureka. Which is pretty much because it's the same guy. Amused me anyhow. Oh my! He's also Miles Dyson in Terminator 2. That's just so... cool. And he was in The Equalizer and Miami Vice as well. How neat.

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26 Oct 2007 (Friday) 

A friend of mine summarised his life in a single Dilbert strip. Todays Dilbert strip might be a nice summation. In case it goes, which is quite likely for Dilbert strips, the text is thus:

Dilbert: Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs. Rubbish guy: Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent. Dilbert: Why are talented people so busy ? Rubbish guy: They're fixing the problems made by people who have time. [ Drunken Lemurs; Dilbert ]

I'm not entirely sure that I'm not a drunken lemur in this case, though.

OR...

Today's XKCD (wasteland; 'you make forgetting look so easy')

I guess... I'd have to go with the latter one.

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25 Oct 2007 (Thursday) 

I was very surprised today to find that Martin at work likes Lacuna Coil. It's not really something I'd have expected. Well, that's just cool.

Other than that, though, the rest of the day has been quite amazingly awful. I feel lost in the middle of a sea of nothingness and don't really know what I'm doing now.

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23 Oct 2007 (Tuesday) 

I was dreaming last night that I had travelled forward 12 years. I was a little older but I was no happier, and it wasn't a whole lot to look forward to. So I had a very crappy day today.

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21 Oct 2007 (Sunday) 

I whacked my hand against the surface in the kitchen at work today and it's killing me now .

Another weekend gone.

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20 Oct 2007 (Saturday) 

I've reported 6 bugs, and made 4 separate forum posts this morning. And that was before I got out of bed. [ Bug reporting for Jive; Justin ]

Now if only I could say I fixed 6 bugs before I got out of bed, that would be so much cooler.

Jogu: what ancient old phone do you have? gerph: Sony CMD-J70. gerph: It makes phone calls. gerph: That's pretty much what I need from a mobile. Jogu: should we contrast that with what you expect from your remote controls? [ Odd expectations; Joseph ]

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18 Oct 2007 (Thursday) 

What in the world would I do without a good rant now and then. I woke up this morning at about 3am very annoyed by work things, by Simon and by a couple of other things - and at the very end of the list, by Caroline. I couldn't get to sleep until about 6:30, and then slept through until 9:45. Not helped by the fact that I felt ill when I went to bed and worse when I got up because of not sleeping well.

Then got to work and had a lot more annoyances to deal with before finally coming home and having to deal with other stuff. I'd like to say there was a bright spot in the day, but I even managed to annoy Caroline. I don't know why I even try.

And tomorrow is friday.

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17 Oct 2007 (Wednesday) 

Really, really dull and frustrating day today, doing a review. And being generally annoyed at stuff. Got fed up at about 5:30 so I decided to go home. Plus I had a headache. So I started to go home then remembered that I didn't have a remote to play with and had intended to buy a multimeter to check the contacts, and I hadn't. So wandered across town to get one and then headed home. Still ended up at home before 6.

Testing the contacts I found that the power wasn't reaching the cradle. Which was good news as that confirmed what I thought about it not charging. I had a look at the special slide-on connector for the UK socket and it seemed to be showing a voltage. Whilst doing so, I noticed that one of the prongs that connected the adapter to it was bent. With a little force I managed to make it work which was quite cool.

I posted about my experiences on the thread I started previously about how I was getting on. And a couple of hours later had an email from Logitech thanking me for my feedback, saying they'll take a note of what I'd said and... could they have the cradle and plug back to look at - they've sent a new one off to me and it should be here soon. That's just... very neat.

And the 'sort albums by year' bug patch that I put up not long ago has been looked at by people at Logitech, too. I doubt they'll accept it as it is, but... well, it's kinda neat. Being listened to is always nice. Surprising, but nice.

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16 Oct 2007 (Tuesday) 

I woke up around 7 this morning, crying at something or other, and then fell back asleep again. It wasn't until about 8:40 that I got up and realised I probably ought to go to work. Today's been intensely dull, doing reviews for other people. I don't mind, I suppose, but it does hurt that I've not yet got around to fixing my own things .

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15 Oct 2007 (Monday) 

My Jive remote's arrived today. And stopped working. I think it's just out of battery. I hope that's it anyhow. Otherwise it's... not doing a whole lot . I do hope that it's not really dead because I'd hate to have killed it so quickly .

No Caroline around tonight.

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13 Oct 2007 (Saturday) 

I got an email last night to tell me that my UPS delivery was on its way. I didn't know I had a UPS delivery outstanding so this was a surprise to me. But it wasn't spam. It's my Jive remote test hardware. Yay. The UPS tracking tells me it's currently en route to the UK. It left Sunnyvale, CA and went to San Jose, CA. Then from there to Louisville, KY and on to Philadelphia, PA. And now it's flying to East Midlands Airport. Should be getting to me around the 15th, apparently. We'll see how it goes. Because of that, I've installed SqueezeCenter (SlimServer's new name) 7.0. Or at least a nightly release of it from the 12th - I already had a 7.0 installed, but it's an old 7.0, coming just after they started changing the plugin format and configuration page styles.

So I've filed a number of bugs based on the problems I've had so far. It's not too hard to do. Most of the faults are pretty easy to repeat.

It's been mildly amusing anyhow. Certainly made things more interesting than a usual Saturday.

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11 Oct 2007 (Thursday) 

We do what me must because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. And the science gets done. And you make a neat gun. for the people who are still alive. [ The Cake Is A Lie, from Portal, by GLaDOS ]

Can't be bothered with a whole lot today.

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10 Oct 2007 (Wednesday) 

Ideally test code should be more robust than the code it's testing as clearly it has to deal with the errors that you didn't anticipate. Otherwise it's a bit pointless having written it. Which leads to the question of why you didn't put the robustness into the original code when you wrote it. And the corollary of that is, of course, that if you had written the code to be as robust as was possible then you would both not need any test code, and would be incapable of writing the test code to be more robust. [ Test Code; Me ]

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7 Oct 2007 (Sunday) 

The laptop's wireless card stopped working this morning. Can't work out why it's not working. It's spewing out Unnumbered xid frames, according to tcpdump, rather than IP bootpc frames. No idea what that means.

And the HD in the server for the music appears to be playing up as well. No idea why that is. Lots of timeouts and short reads coming from it. All in all today has not been a very nice day.

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5 Oct 2007 (Friday) 

Another cool XKCD / Bunny cross over today.

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4 Oct 2007 (Thursday) 

Very tired at the moment, and I seem to have made more of a mess than usual whilst shaving - which is more down to just not paying the blindest bit of attention to what I'm doing.

Not really much exciting happening at the moment really. I finally got around to reorganising one of my programs so that it can use a selection of websites, in theory concurrently - although I've not worked out the 'how' of the concurrent bit at the moment.

I've got not much in the way of nails now. I guess I must still be hungry. Tomorrow's curry and doughnuts day, though, so that's always something to look forward to.

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