27 Mar 2010 (Saturday) 

I'm pretty disillusioned at the moment. On the plus side, the stabbing pains that I had yesterday evening and last night seemed to stop about 5am. On the downside they were replaced by dreams about having kidney stones working their way through me and panic over not being able to find a seive to catch them in, because that was quite important. And the very fun continued dream about moving into my dream house with my fiance in florida, and finding that everything that we were doing was all for her and there wasn't really any place in things for me.

I went shopping on tuesday.
I saw some nice microwave pancakes and thought I could get some and have some with some bananas.
And then I wondered whether I really wanted them or could do without. But thought it'd be a nice idea.
And wasn't sure if that was really worth it.
Would I have enough bananas to last till next week?
I could get some more bananas and then I'd be able to have some.
But I'm not sure I want some.
Or I could have lemon juice and sugar. I already have those.
And after about a minute and a half of staring at the pancakes I got cross and shouted 'make a bloody decision!'. Ok, so 'shouted' in my head. It only came out in my normal voice out loud.

All of which annoyed me intensely that I couldn't make a simple decision. It's fine when I'm doing work stuff, or I'm focused but otherwise... pfft... no clue. It's easier when I'm given less choice or no time to decide - which I guess is what it's mostly like when I'm working 'cos I want to get on to something, so it's easier to make a decision.

Earlier in the week I was listening to 'Real Industrial Radio' - my current "I want to listen to something but don't want to make a decision" (hmm... maybe there's a pattern here!) radio station - and a track came on that wasn't very Industrial but was really neat. Transmission, by The Atomica Project was really nice, and convinced me to get some of the other things by them. Unfortunately, that track's on a compilation album and doesn't appear to be obtainable on its own (yet). Gravity, from Grayscale is rather nice as well. I've been listening to 'Grayscale' a bit this evening.

I also discovered that there's a new album out (last year!) - Controlling Crowds, by Archive came out and I had missed it, so my copy of that arrived yesterday, and was quite exciting! The album itself is... well it's a bit of a mix between the old and the new styles of Archive. I've not listened to it enough to really form much of an opinion just yet.

I'm working on the final stage of transitioning my music away from RISC OS. It's that tiny little stage that means putting spaces back into the filenames - which I'd removed because having 0xA0 (hard space) in the filename meant that they wouldn't come out right on other systems (ie linux and Windows). Since I'm not using RISC OS, the files can migrate. Actually there's another stage that comes after this which is to move all the tags to ID3v2.4 (or 2.3 if I'm feeling so inclined - 2.4 is better really for a few reasons).from ID3v1. Given that most of the metadata that I want to store is in the directory of the artist or album, it's probably 'easy' to do. In the "all you need to do is..." sense of 'easy'.

Chris gave me his little MP3 scanning tool yesterday so that I could find duplicate files - it scans for files and generates a database with the file details plus MD5 hash for the MP3 data portion of the file. I've needed to update it to understand ID3v1 and ID3v2.4 as both are present in my files, but not in his. It's Python code, too, which is a little more interesting. I'm not a huge fan of Python, but it's not like it's a huge problem. Just a couple of things to re-learn from the last time I worked with it.

There were a couple of comments earlier today from people about what Chris Bazley was up to - apparently he's on Facebook, and like a few of the recent (for some definition of recent) 'social' sites you can't actually see much unless you're a member . Which sort of prompted me to think about writing up something here. I kinda haven't had much to write here and I should try to change that. It's not really that I've not had much to say, but more that I've not had the energy to do so. Partly that's because I've not been using the laptop much - it's power supply connector has been flakey, and the battery is dead. However, now that I've got the little netbook, I should be able to use that to write stuff. Additionally, I've been trying not to use the computer after 8pm, mainly because I've been essentially wasting my time just sitting around doing nothing online in the evenings, for the past year for no effect. So... anyhow... that's clerly why it's now 11pm and I'm writing this lot. I argue that I'm doing something different - I'm not just 'sitting here waiting for the phone to ring' (if I can borrow a lyric! I don't mean that literally, though).

Also, Matt's been doing a few description articles on the techniques they used on their XBox (and others) games, which have been really cool to read, and I keep thinking that I should do something similar as surely there must be something interesting that I've done over the years that I could ramble on about as I clearly love to do. Only I can't think of anything. At least not things that aren't either obvious, or haven't been discussed previously.

Wow, The War Is Over, from Grayscale, by The Atomica Project is way more jazz than I like. Hmm. And the 'Iris Remix' of Gravity doesn't really have the same feel to the original. The beat is far to ...um... upbeat.

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21 Mar 2010 (Sunday) 

I'm sure I heard a woman yelling outside this afternoon - shouting "no, no, no!", and then a scream. I went outside to have a see what I could hear and see, but there was nothing. Simon heard nothing - well, he heard some people shouting, but that was earlier. I was dreaming of odd things last night, though, so it's possible I was confused... except it wasn't just after I got up. It's bothering me - I've got no idea if it was all in my head. Although I'm kinda hoping it was in my head because other than looking around I didn't do anything else about it. It's so easy to believe that I'm imagining things. Or it could have just been a telly.

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20 Mar 2010 (Saturday) 

I ache. My legs are really sore, and have been for a while. I think it's just to do with not exercising and not sleeping well.

I got a boxset of Hitchcock DVDs earlier this week, so it's been fun watching some of those. I've also been borrowing Cary Grant films from LoveFilm, which has been fun too!

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12 Mar 2010 (Friday) 

I've got myself a little netbook - a Samsung N130. It's quite nice except for one thing. It comes with a piece of software that I would class as a rootkit and which attempts to blackmail you. The 'Failsafe' software is installed somehow into the system and will not allow you to uninstall it. The only way to do so, according to their website is to force you to supply personal information (your email address and a password - I class that as personal because it's information that relates only to me and could be no more than trawling for spam addresses) before it will relinquish control and allow itself to be uninstalled. I'm amazed that Samsung are party to this.

Anyhow, I thought I'd ring their support line and give them an earful - might at least make me feel better. So I went to the nice website and clicked on the 'contact us' link and saw a support by phone link. Clicked on it, and nothing happened. Thought "that's bad" and tried Firefox instead of Opera. Same effect. Tried IE 8, and... same effect. So... that's good.

I view the source to the page and see that the support number in the UK for laptops and netbooks is open until 8pm on Fridays. Excellent, it being 7pm. So I call it. Little menu that asks what section I want - I want laptops and netbooks, so I press 2. Voice tells me that they're closed, and that their opening hours Monday to Friday are 8am to 8pm. I check the time and it's still about 7pm.

Clearly Samsung suck on both managing to provide contact details and actually being contactable on the line that would be there if they didn't suck on providing those details.

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7 Mar 2010 (Sunday) 

I watched a couple of films last night, for a change . 'Race To Witch Mountain' and 'Robots', which were both quite fun and I enjoyed . I've got 'Escape to Witch Mountain' as well, which I might watch this evening.

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