Today was a day like any other. Except for the rain, which was blue.

Got to sleep about 1ish and woke up at 5:30 this morning; only woke up twice in that time though.

A week's gone by and I've not felt like writing anything. I went to see Claire and Justin and the kids last week. I had a lovely time really, although it might not have seemed it - I really was very tired and got myself more worked up nightly. However, I got to go with Claire and Justin to take Bethany to the bus stop, and to pick her up at lunch time. And I got to play with Alex a lot. Bethany doesn't seem to like playing with me and tends to hide herself if I say things to her. Occassionally she's ok and she'll want to do something with me, but it wasn't common. Claire took Alex to the doctors and I came along too, which was quite fun - although not for Alex who cried a little when he had the innoculations.

I came home very tired and a little confused. Ok, quite a bit confused and tired. I was walking down the platform at Paddington and asking myself 'where the hell am I ? I don't want to be at Kings Cross!' and then realised that I was in the right place and everything was ok. That doesn't happen often, but it's usually quite fun like that.

Last night I set up my old server so that it works - I've got a spare disc and the machine's otherwise completely functional so it might as well be set up to work. I got it set up and it does work. I don't have much use for a 500MHz linux server, but should the need arrive, it's there. Unfortunately I forgot that it would boot up automatically early in the morning, which it did at a stupid time this morning, waking me up. So I lay awake in bed from about 5:30ish.

My first day back at work after my break, so I was very nervous last night, but not half as nervous as I was about going to the Doctor today. I don't like going to the doctor. It's not really "I don't think there's something wrong"; it's more that dealing with someone official is always daunting. Anyhow... Simon had come with me when I registered last week and kept me reasonably calm - despite forgetting my phone number. Today I was on my own.

I managed to go there, wait for a short while without panicing too much (although I didn't read as much of my book as to remember any of it!), and then went in to see the doctor. I was pretty fidgetty and shakey, but I managed to talk to him and explain the problem. After a bit of discussion he's prescribed me some Citalopram. I'm hoping that it'll help, but it'll take some time.

Anyhow, I had to got and get the prescription - which I've also never done before. So that's two new things today.

I also tried Hot Syrup Sponge Milkshake. It's nice at first but it's too sweet really - it gets sickly quite quickly.

So I've been pretty miserable recently. I'm hoping that will change. Quite which way it's going to change I'm not sure, but it will.

I'm feeling pretty crappy right now because ... well I know this is still going to take a lot of work and because I guess I still don't believe it'll play out all that well. Still, at least I'm trying.

My neck's aching when move it this evening, and I'm quite cold and shivery. I'll put the blanket on for a bit.

I'm travelling today, to see Claire and Justin. I've spent most of the day feeling very paniced on my way. I'm not sure whether its Simon saying "What's the worst that can happen" or just tiredness but there it is. On the plus side, I slept quite a bit last night. Managed to wake up only 3 times in the night and slept though to 7am.Partly though that's just down to extreme tiredness rather than feeling any more settled.

I had a really horrid day yesterday; I had a lovely time with Caroline and Mark and got to see some butterflies, but I was incredibly tired. I had intended to stay for only a short time because I was tired, but I ended up staying, and slept not much at all. I missed seeing most of My Fair Lady, too, which is disappointing. I woke up at 0:40 for some water and couldn't get back to sleep, so gave up and decided to try to work out what my problem is. I know I've had Claire and Dad saying I should do something about it, but Caroline asking if I'm ill and saying that going to bed this early isn't like me - it is and I've been going to bed early for quite a while - made me realise that it's probably something I should sort out.

Particularly, as it's making my concentration near non-existant and my frustrations over things are increasing - and that's hurting things.

So anyhow, I made some notes, which took a bit with the little concentration I had and then tried to sleep again; got to sleep around 3ish, only to wake at 3:40, 5:40 and then 6:40 (odd that it was hourly). Couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to get up and read my book instead.

Fortunately Caroline woke after a bit and then we went to the station. Sunday works meant that it took from 11:15 leaving the station near her until just after 4pm to get home. Particularly fun was the hour when I just couldn't stop crying on the way home. I must have looked something of a sight to other people on the train. I gave Simon a call and asked him to meet me at the station, so I could at least get home safely and have a chat to him.

I just hope I can sleep tonight.

I'm aching a bit this morning; it's a bit annoying. Oh well.

Very tired this evening, and I'm hoping that I'll sleep, although it's quite late now and I've not yet. Oh well again.

Fortunately I've got a few hours travelling and then I get to see Caroline. Yay.

My legs and arms were killing me this morning. Which usually means that I slept very badly. Tiredness and a vague memory of waking up many times backed that up a bit. But the day's got quite a bit better since then.

I've spent this evening making something pretty. Well I think it's pretty and I hope it's going to be liked. I've been planning this all week and seeing it work out has been just excellent .

I may not be particularly practical, but at least I try!

Today seems to have been a very expensive day all told. Not least of which was buying my tickets for my break to see Claire and Justin! Whee! On the plus side, I had a letter today telling me that I've got some shares from Standard Life which I got in 2006. Which is quite cool - I didn't know I'd got them. 2006 was a bit of a ... mess.

I woke up late this morning, after having gone to bed ludicrously late My own fault. Who'd have thought that going to bed late when I'm already very tired and having difficulty sleeping would leave me tired ?

I had a pretty long day today. I left work about 9 and just had something small for tea. I sat up with Simon for a bit and watched a bit of No TVDB available for /mnt/external13/TVSeries9/Gulliver's Travels/Gulliver's Travels.tvdbs Gulliver's Travels (1996, Hallmark Entertainment)Adventure/Family/FantasyAll star adaptation of Jonathan Swift's satirical tale about a normal man who, after returning home following eight years of absence, relates fantastical tales about how he was thought to be giant in the Land of Lilliput, but was only six inches high in the Land of Brobdingnag. He also tells of his visit to the floating island of Laputa populated by scientists who are so obsessed with reason that they act with no common sense. Finally, he tells of his journey to the land where his disturbing likeness to the bestial Yahoos and his inferiority to the intelligent horses there makes him question the very worth of his humanity.Gulliver's Travels - he's not feeling too well today. Unfortunately it's now well after midnight and I'm really tired (quelle surprise).

Although I'm tired, I wanted to feel I'd done something useful today, so I've been trying to fix my not-playing-videos problem. I uninstalled all the codecs on the machine that I could see related to the videos. Rebooted a few times. Downgraded media player. Reinstalled xvid codec. Still problems. So... I tried playing some other videos. Worked fine. So I thought "What's different ?"

My answer... the recordings from MythTV which are done nightly and encoded to AVI are also automatically run through an script I use to read information about them and that generates a .txt file beside the .avi. With that file there, I get a crash. With it gone I don't. Why ? VobSub filter.

Toqir also brought me a present today - something that I'd asked if anyone had spare... and he did... whee! Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Today seems to have been pretty unproductive. I spent a lot worrying about nothing and not really getting very far.

Didn't sleep amazingly last night, although I did manage to get to sleep a little better. I tried to use the principle of distraction to stop my mind wandering - leaving the DVD player playing helped. I had bits of Friends (1994, NBC)ComedySix young people, on their own and struggling to survive in the real world, find the companionship, comfort and support they get from each other to be the perfect antidote to the pressures of life.Friends season 8 on, which is pretty dull but distracted me from thinking too much.

Only problem is that the Kiss player rolls on when it gets to the end of a file, so it was about 5 episodes down before I turned it off.

This evening I've finished off my tax return and I've ... actually, not done much else.

My main desktop's having a problem at the moment and seems to be having issues with playing certain AVIs. It crashes media player. It crashes GSpot, amusingly inside kernel32.dll. Something's clearly up and I don't know what. I'm almost tempted to just wipe the machine and start again, except I like my settings like they are and don't want to have to mess around with reinstalling things.

Anyhow, sleepy time now.

Really aching this morning. My legs feel like they've run a few miles. I remember dreaming about some stuff vaguely but it's kinda gone now. Nothing particularly on the 'leaving' theme as I recall, though, which might be a good thing.

However, when I did wake up - around 8 - I knew something was wrong because my alarm hadn't gone off. The server had crashed again. So I decided to try to upgrade to the latest version, to see if this would fix it - it's been crashing on and off for a bit, with problems with page allocations. I tried upgrading to 2.6.27, which is (apparently) stable. However... it hangs when it gets to the port multiplier initialisation. So I'm back at 2.6.26 again. Oh well.

I have an External drive box for my videos. Essentially this is where all my films that I've copied from DVD and the like live. Initially the plan was to get 2 drives and buy more as necessary. I've now got 4 drives in it and it's going to be a little while before I need more, fortunately (as there's only 1 bay free). Actually I've got 3 500GB drives and 1 1TB drive, so I could always juggle these to get more storage if necessary. I've seen comments about the device only supporting drives up to 1TB, but I'm not sure of the reasons for this.

Being external to the server meant, in theory, it's easier to take offline upgrade, and move about. This isn't quite the case as I've not quite sussed how to force drives to get particular /dev identifiers. Nonetheless, it's a pretty good solution. It uses eSATA for the physical connection to the server, and I've not pushed that to any great degree. With a bit of thought I might be able to work out whether I can get more throughput from it than from a single disc - it's meant to be the 300Gbit/s version of SATA, so the 50MB/s I get from the drives means that I should be able to access multiple drives simultaneously. But, as I said, that's not something I'm really that bothered by, as it's mostly for videos which are pretty slow (comparatively).

Anyhow, the bridge board on the case has a problem. It's small. So small that the LED cables from the front of the case barely reach where they need to be plugged in to. They just reach. However, there are two rows of pins. Which do you plug the LEDs in to ?

Well, after a bit of faffing today (because I'm not feeling up to any thinking today and I just want to feel I've achieved something, even if it is "making some little lights work"). I've found that the row of 5 pairs of pins beside the backplate is the activity connectors, and the ones in front of them (away from the back place) are just power indicators (as far as I can tell). The LEDs have coloured wires. A red one and a white one. To make the LEDs work the red wire should be at the front. That is, the white one is at the back, nearest the back plate.

Across-ways the order of the pins matches the SATA connectors, so that's pretty easy to follow.

Now, some other notes. The LED cables get tangled. They're also hard to untangle once you've got drives in place. It's difficult to know which cable goes to which LED. So, if you get one of these, put some sticker labels on the cables before fitting drives. Even if you're not going to use the LEDs. You might in the future and you'll be frustrated and messing around trying to find which is which.

So, in essence...

• Label the cables before fitting drives
• When connecting the LEDs, the activity connector is towards the back.
• When connecting the LEDs, the white wire goes closest the backplate.

Of course they might be doing a different bridge board now, but it seems to work. Oh, and I'm using linux kernel 2.6.26 with this - upgrading to 2.6.27 appears to cause the system to hand on boot whilst looking at the port multiplier board. The port multiplier board I've got is a cheap one from span which has worked wonderfully. It's a JMicron 5:1 port multiplier and it's been pretty good for me.

And after all that faffing, the LEDs on drives 2-4 don't seem to light up. Either I've plugged them in wrongly, or I've misunderstood. So... I'm giving up for now.

One trip in to town so that I feel like I've done something useful, and a little bit more faffing so that a friend of Caroline can access my music, later, and I've decided to tidy up the 'server room' (otherwise known as 'the eaves') and try again. Fortunately... it turns out the LED connections weren't pushed in enough. That's all. I now have pretty lights on the front of the case.

So... that seemed pretty worthwhile. Ok, so in the grand scheme of things it's not really worth it but at least I feel a little bit like I've achieved something.

Oh, and try out the demo of Multiwinia.

Just tired now; it's a bit frustrating. I hope that being more relaxed will kill that, given a bit of time.

Today's dreams are brought to you in association with Happy Fun Days - the best way to ... hang on... nope... that's not it... Today's dreams are brought to you by the letters T and B, and the number 7 helped a bit.

I managed to sleep a little last night - not much though, as I kept waking up being too hot (which, given the weather a the moment is surprising). Obviously I must be sleeping a bit because I've not gone mad and I've managed to dream, which means I must have slept a little.

First dream was more a continuing theme each time I woke up - I was worried that I'd approved an API without really thinking about it and whilst people were still discussing it. I was really worried that people were going to be annoyed at me for ignoring them and not doing my job properly.

The other dream, which was longer and more concrete, was Chris and I at university. We were out at a cafe somewhere, looking at our course forms (I don't actually remember having forms for the courses, but there we were). Every course we were looking at we were rejecting, because we knew that people were putting far less effort in and getting through the course. Which meant that we were putting in a lot of effort that others were bypassing because they were doing things differently and we could not. So we were trying to work out why we were still staying here. Actually Chris worked this out and was explaining it to me.

So we finished our drinks and went back to the house and started packing. We had to do this whilst avoiding going near any small cuttings of loft insulation because they had some infection on them which would kill us.

That's pretty much the whole of it.

gerph: cmj> In my dreams (just as in reality) you're a lot cleverer than me cmj: you both dream and live in some alternate reality? [ Clever; Justin and Chris ]

There's a tiny discrepency in how the full and non-full versions were presented, WRT the summary of the entry, which should now be corrected. Sorry to anyone that gives duplicated entries to.

Continuing the 'things used in adverts', I don't like mondays, by Boomtown Rats is being used by Five US to advertise House - and is amazingly obvious from the distinctive opening piano . I had actually forgotten that that was on there. (Season 3, episode 15, 'Half-Wit')

Woke up many times last night . But I don't remember any dreams now.

I miss Grendel.

More dreams this morning. I woke up about 4:15 from a dream. I was on a train with Caroline. She was in one carriage down the train and I was a couple of carriages up the train. I heard her calling my name and came down the train to see her and it turned out that her ticket wasn't valid and she needed another one. That's all I really remember from that. I got back to sleep but woke up about 6ish from another dream, this time spinning around work.

The Moog's got a job at Google! Whee! That's pretty impressive! He's starting in a couple of weeks in London.

Jogu: cats are hard to understand gerph: they're not too bad gerph: If they're nuzzling they want food gerph: or stroking gerph: or to go outside gerph: if they're padding on you, they're happy gerph: if they're scratching you, they're not gerph: it's a pretty good bet at any given time that they want food [ Cats; Joseph and Me ]

Pretty tired this evening. Mum's birthday today. Hope she had a nice day.

Matthew did mention one thing - actually I think he's mentioned it before but I've been too lazy to do anything about it - about the RSS feed. It's too short. Whilst I've followed the principle of RSS - that they be 'Site Summaries' - it's not always that useful for the higher bandwidth world. So there's a new feed in town - just an RSS one, because I couldn't be bothered with the Atom (plus I'm not sure that my RSS to Atom converter understands embedded HTML, or rather whether the Atom it produces is at all valid). http://gerph.org/diary/diary-full.rss gives a link to the RSS feed. Golly, the excitement...

Oxfam are using New Born, from Origin Of Symmetry, by Muse in their adverts. Five are using Unbelievable, by EMF in their adverts for something called 'Unbreakable'. Clairol are using Bette Davis Eyes, by Kim Carnes for some hair thing.

It's rather sad what happens when you see adverts on telly .

I got woken up abruptly at about 6:15 this morning by a dream I was having. Not really all that disturbing, but it wasn't reallly what I wanted.

Wow, Knight Rider (2008, NBC)Action and Adventure/Drama24 year-old Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Sarah Graiman is set to follow in her genius father Charle's footsteps. Her life takes a dramatic turn when men try to abduct her. She receives a mysterious phone call from KITT, a car of her father's creation, letting her know that her father is in danger. Sarah and KITT set off to recruit her childhood friend Mike Tracer into helping them figure out who has her father and is trying to steal KITT. Mike, having just returned from serving in Iraq, is jaded and reluctant to help, but eventually agrees.Knight Rider looks like it might be far worse than the pilot, from the first 10 minutes of the series first episode.

I've been feeling like I've been getting very confused with work recently. Fortunately my Team Lead gave me a really helpful run-through of how things worked and what they do. I'm hoping that I'm going to get somewhere with things shortly. It's all new and, if not exciting, it's interesting.

Looks like the diary's been broken since late last month; I missed a > from a tag and it failed to build. So everything from the 22nd to the end of the month wasn't updated. Should be there now, if I've fixed things properly. Thanks to Alex for pointing that out .

Today I had Hedley trying to scare me with a bedtime story (ok, it was only 11am, but that's as good a time as any to go to bed). Maybe I just have a different scale of 'scary' . Friday's dreams weren't so memorable - I went to be about 6pm and didn't dream all that much. Saturday I was being eaten by armies of ants and beetles. There were also rows of little green stick men as well, which might indicate that it's Multiwinia influenced. And there was a lot of confusion over work things than kept rolling round and round.

But last night was ace. I had dad telling me that I would never amount to anything, that I'd done nothing useful with my life and unless I did something amazing in the next week I was going to be kicked out of my house and nobody I knew would ever talk to me again. That was great fun.

Chris is back from his Beer trip now, so I spent a little while chatting to him tonight. I'm still pretty tired though, so I'm sleeping very shortly.

Very tired at the moment. Went to bed about 6ish on Friday, and tried to sleep. Got woken up about 8 and couldn't get back to sleep for ages. Saturday wasn't much better and my dizziness was a bit worse then. Today was a little better dizzy-wise, but I'm still really tired - my duvet seemed to turn 90 degrees over night and I remember dreaming about being covered in bugs. Today I've just been trying to remember what I'm doing for long enough to do it - I had to go out to get some stuff for washing which was about the most complex thing today. My head's just being a bit spinny now. I've done an hour or so of work this evening, which is far less than I intended. Oh well.

I've been tired and dizzy for the past couple of days. It's kinda fun in a strange way. Or maybe that's just the dizziness talking.

I watched Ian Hislop's programme about the railways tonight. It was amusing to look at a particular station afterwards and look at the Beeching Report to compare how it actually affected things.

Cold and tired today. Still feeling pretty fed up and down but upbeat about it, if that's possible. Whilst I know that things aren't going to get any better, I'm sort of getting to understand that. It shouldn't be so hard to accept things the way they are, but I've never been on for change.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. There's just more tunnel. But the tunnel is at least somewhere you know.

Quite an expensive start to the month - although the start of the month is usually expensive anyhow. I've paid back the money I borrowed from myself last month, and ordered a load of XKCD things, and some stuff from Amazon. Might as well get it out of the way .