Month: October 2001

I AM 65% GEEK.

Nerd, Freak, Geek, Dweeb. Sound familiar?
That’s okay, cause I will be the richest
person at my 15th year high-school reunion.
If a “con” isn’t happening that weekend.

Take the GEEK Test at Fuali.com!

I AM 39% GOTH.

Goth ny night, normal by day. Deep in my
heart I know I am evil, but not on the
company’s time. I do need to eat.

Take the GOTH Test at Fuali.com!

I AM 8% PUNK.

It’s not a fashion craze, or even a cool thing
to do. I should just swallow it, get Lost, and take my friends
with me.

Take the PUNK/POSER Test at Fuali.com!

Hellish Halloween 🙂

Nothing happened.

Well, sort of. I went to the Cambridge Posiemeet. I was tickled lotsly, hugs happened, jokes happened, geeking happened. It was a Good Meet, and well done to Rosie for doing it.

Unfortunatly that plus the Nottingham meet plus Other Stuff means I can’t go to the Other Meet I was going to go to this weekend. Which is bad and nasty, because there are people I wanted to see again, and I keep flaking out of the meets at the last minute. *sigh*

NSD launches on Thursday. I eventually wrote Pareidol, the engine that runs it, yesterday in a few hours. It reuses code from the Calendar and Archive systems of Klind, which means I’ve finally got the hang of reuseable code, which is always A Good Thing.

It is built on Shellscript and PHP (No SQL, this time) and will be a wonderful thing if me and Lonecat can keep it running. We have content for a good four weeks, and some spare after that, but I *need* to be writing more…

Still no job, must get arse in gear. I seem to be labouring under the terribe apathy that stikes me whenever I get into this point. Normally by the time I get to the point of apathy over my life, I have a new course, a new year, or a new school to throw me into some kind of life, but this time I have nothing. It all depends on me.

and I need to get my self displine working, or I’ll spend the rest of my life where I am.

Insomnia. I lay in bed this morning trying to get to sleep (It was 4am) and it occoured me to list the points at which me and Lonecat should have guessed we would become a couple.

So, In no particuler order:

The Karioke Thing.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Karioke. And no, she didn’t.

The Movie Audition

At least one person assumed we were at that point, and this was July.

The Poetry

Me? Write Poetry? and then deny it? Naaaaaah

CCDE

For so many reasons. It was fun

When our signitures matched

This was simply becase there were two lines of the song I *really* liked, and Lonecat was using the other one. Really. I mean this. This was *nod* forshadowing. This was *months* before, FFS! Ahh, sod ya.

When people meeting us for the first time assumed we already were

We were Just Good Friends, Kay? Really.

I think I’d better give up there.

Anyway. Tomorrow I’m in Cambridge for a meet. Neatocoolstuff.

Update:
Ruthi has since told me that she guessed in about
June.
*scared*

And yet I still haven’t done anything. Okay, Nicholas, Get your act together.

I saw Titan AE just now (It’s 0325, and I’ve just finished watching it) and I have to say that it rocks most mightily, It’s a *very* good film. It has humour, plot twists, excitement, stuff, and romance. In fact, it has a level of Guy-Gets-Girl that I would have found distressing two months ago.

Now, however, it doesn’t. Although it does have a sequence of lines (Right at the end, Fact Fans, so I won’t quote it) that is so much like something me and Lonecat would say that it actually hurt.

Must go to Bath. Soon

It makes me jealous, it almost does. Lonecat has this wonderful social-life down in Bath, filled with fencing, fun, and actual projects whilst I’m secluded in this room. I could go out and see friends, but I can’t afford it. And, in the case of many of my friends locally, neither can they.

So I decide to go to Cambs for the weekend, which I can’t afford either, but will give me extra resolution to get the money together to move there.

Spent the day doing nothing. Played Diablo II. Completed another quest. Finished Assassin’s Quest. Sat for an hour dreaming of stories I will one day have to write. Went on IRC. Sat in silence for far to long. Read. Managed to miss my girlfriend leaving IRC by six minutes, exactly the same as I always do.

It’s like a weekend here, parents and brothers both had days off. My family isn’t good at extended times together, and I hate the tension atm.

I need to do something, to start a regular job. But there are no jobs around here that I am even vaguly interested in, and I don’t really want to remain here anyway. I want to move to Cambridge, to start Project Geekhouse with Ccooke and Lonecat. To, in fact, be within 100 miles of my girlfriend would be nice.

But no. I have every reason in the world to be activly job seeking. To move away from this hellhole, to move towards Lonecat, to have enough money to go to all these meets, and to junot be quite so soul-destroyingly bored.

So why can’t I just get *on* with it?

I’ve screwed up.

Again.

This was a realisation on Saturday Morning. I’ve mucked up my life – again. I’m unemployed, although no longer unemployable, and I’ve spent the last four months wallowing in self pity whilst pretending to be doing freelance work.

In that time I have been paid once for one evening of fixing computers. And whilst I have several projects on the go, my ability to get paid and be able to spend the money on, for example, getting out of this dead-horse town is reliant upon other people buying publishers, or needing contractors, or, basically, giving me things to do.

And I have absolutly no idea how the hell to do what I’m doing. To be Freelance, and survive. And so, as of tomorrow morning, Aquarionic Designs will cease trading as a web design company. Not that that will make any differance at all to my daily life, but it means that I’ve finally realized the important thing about all this that I have been blinding myself to since June:

I’m incapable of doing what I actually want to do, so I’m going to have to find a company who will pay me to do something else.

Thus has my entire future been changed away from what I wanted to be. This idea depressed me, and so I went to a meet I couldn’t afford anyway, and then had to spend double the amount I expected to pay because my last train from Nottingham was delayed past the point I could have got all the way home with it. But I saw people, geeked, planned, aquired a Printer and lots of Salty Liquorice (Thanks Supermouse), as well as the lending of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as Robin Hobb’s new book, and a CD (Thanks Ccooke). Now I have to work out how to get to Cambs for the Posiemeet.

And then back to Bath to see lonecat again.

na@delirium:~/bin$ cat random-album.pls | playfile

That’s the result of today’s work. Instead of randomy going though 1800 files in a horrible disjointed fashion, the new system plays the contents of 293 directories in a random order. Which means I get the whole of The Divine Comedy’s Regeneration, followed by Spiritualized and then Splashdown, floating me on a wave of deep music before dumping me into the cold reality of the Happy Happy Joy Joy Song.

Okay, it’s not perfect yet 🙂

Following on from the reconstruction of Aquarionics, the modernization of the scripts that admin parts of my home network and the creation of the Calender system, on top of the reinstallation of Linux onto my workstation, it looks like I’m back into ‘Hacker’ mode. Yay of much positive yayness.

Now to get my life back together…

Here it is. The one. The Only. The fantastic and incredible! Aquarionics 3.1! Yes, it’s less fully compatible than the old one was, but it’s also got the ability to be even *more* compatible. Thus:

Changelog

Added: Stylesheet based design, which means I can define a new stylesheet and the whole site changes. You can test this by clicking choosing a skin out of these that we have right now: Noir, Foolish Writings.com, Classic (The previous design) or the Default. Also available is the Text Mode, which is what people who don’t have stylesheet support will see.

Added: Calendar. See that little box to the left? That will have where I will be, and when. It’s cool. It’ll even be colour coded, when I get the stylesheet ready.

Added: +1 to the version number 🙂

Cascading Style Sheets are fun.
I’ve spent most of the day playing with them, and creating Aquarionics 3.1, which is emmense fun. Aquarionics3.1 is skinable, which means I can drop in a new style, and users can choose how they see my site, or I can force certian designs on certian days, or I can randomize the layout for every person (Or even every visit, but that would be silly).

It even has a Text Mode version, for those people who hate any sort of colour.

In the great traditions of Aquarionic Designs, the first version has only one picture – the title logo. It’s really fun and exciting, although not very for the rest of the world, But it means that I can confuse people without even having to touch the server, Yay!

And thusly and verily was the empire forged on values of PHP, HTML, CSS and not having the same design running for two whole months.

The interestingly indie mike redesigned his site, and now looks nice and colourful and doesn’t crash Netscape anymore. Yay. But this got me thinking. Look at the site. I mean, it’s blue.
Aquarionics has been blue since it started. It was blue and yellow for a time, but then it was deemed Too Bright, and thus was the tasteful scheme of Blue and grey (The white bits on the site aren’t actually white, but very light grey. This makes it much easier to read. Strange But True) that we see before us now.

Dull, isn’t it?

And, as people will testify, I am a colourful person. Stories have been written on my colourfulness. Whole tribes of pigmies have been driven blind by my shorts.

Okay, that last one is only sort of true.

But anyway, Blue and Grey looks sort of professional, but also is very, very dull for a personal site. Save the proness for when I’m being paid, I say.

Also, The current Aquarionics Design is a bastardisation of HTML4 and CSS2, and only works by coincidence, and I have been convinced by Sarabian and Aquarius that CSS-based design is the Right Thing, and so Aquarionics3.1 is CSS based. This means it doesn’t work in Netscape 4.

It works in NS3, because it doesn’t even *try* to support CSS. But NS4 breaks it, because it understands some bits but not others. So I’ve had to treat it like a five year old, and not let it get at the complex bits.

*sigh* I hate broken standards.

NS4 users won’t lose any content, but will get the same display as a NS3/IE3 user. This depresses me, but if I’m going to design to the standards, I have to work around brokenness. See this page on web standards for more details.

Anyway, The new design of Aquarionics is in Testing, and the three people who know of the address of the test server, plus the various people from #afp who checked it out for me are giving me feedback. This good.

Still somewhat headachy, If this lasts any longer I might have to go see a doctor. For the first time in about six years.

Bath then, since I sort of skipped over the actual weekend yesterday.

I just spent 48 hours with the woman I love, geeking and walking and talking and doing stuff. Little things, like cooking, or writing content for a new site, and the complete and total disbelief that anything this nice could possibly be happening to me.

I’m lucky. And I’m enjoying the luckiness for a bit.

But with pleasure does come pain, and so I am now going to go find some Aspirin for this headache.

It’s odd to think I’m posting this from the new interface, but you are reading it in the old one.

Anyway. TTFN…