Month: November 2001

Today I panicked people, so I shall explain why:

If there is one thing I like, it’s feedback. It’s people telling me what they think in a constructive way so that I can improve upon it, or – even better – giving me ideas for how I should do something a differant way.

I’m fairly heavily involved in the Maskerade project, and when the idea to create a web-application to display pictures that people want displaying came up, I offered to do it.

I spent the next four hours coding. Learning bits of PHP I didn’t know, applying them, making sure the system was secure against Bad Stuff. (This is a system to upload things to the server I pay for bandwidth on, as such, this is a thing that could go *horribly* wrong if it wasn’t secure)

And today I showed it to the first person who wasn’t me.

“It’s totally useless”

Thankyou. This I appreciate. Spending half an hour complaining about something I can’t fix. Because the person to whom I showed it wants *anybody* to be able to upload stuff. And since this is supposed to be a resource for a dicussion, it has to *stay there*.

Do you know what happens to *anything* on the internet that allows you to upload things?

Somebody finds it, and uses it to distribute porn.

it happens to Yahoo, Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Easyspace and all the other webspace providers. It’s happened to *every* *single* anonymous gallery that used to be around, and I seriously can’t afford the bandwidth. And I said this.

I might as well not have bothered wasting my time.

I wouldn’t have minded if anything said was constructive, but bashing everything I did is not any way to make me want to continue to help.

So this is why I stormed out of #afp.

In case anybody cares.

In other news, I bought Civ3 and am in the process of playing it to death. With the assistance of Pol, my CDR is now making costers instead of doing nothing, and something secret is coming soon. Oh, and I will upload NSD. Promise.

I met someone at the dog show
She was holding my left arm
But everyone was acting normal so I tried to look nonchalant.
We both said, “I really love you,”
The Shriners loaned us cars
We raced up and down the sidewalk twenty thousand million times

Why did they send her over anyone else?
How should I react? These things happen to other people
They don’t happen at all, in fact

When you’re following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they’re meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things
I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can’t hear, there’s no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I’m already there

Gonna ask for my admission
Gonna speak to the man in charge
The secretary says he’s on another line,
Can I hold for a long, long time?
I found out she’s an angel
I don’t think she knows I know
I’m worried that something might happen to me
If anyone ever finds out

Why, why did they send her over anyone else?
How should I react? These things happen to other people
They don’t happen at all

When you’re following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they’re meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things
I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can’t hear, there’s no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I’m already there

When you’re following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they’re meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things

(© They Might Be Giants)

Proper update now, then 🙂

I’ve spent the last few days learning CVS, which is fun. The whole of the K3 engine (Klind/Klide/Kewl) is now CVS based, which should make life easier. I’ve also started a new project, Nomical to make a PHP-based system for playing Nomic.

This is distraction therory, obviously. I went to Bath last weekend, which was – as always – wonderful, we did stuff, saw Harry Potter with more members of AFP (It is, as Moth says, mostly excellent) and then I came home again with a new Hub and NIC (And mad-props go to Pol for being so great as to give me both of those plus the lift down there).

The Lack of NSD is my fault. I haven’t yet gotten around to giving Lonecat FTP access to the Pareidol system that runs it, so I have to do all the uploading, and my Hard-Drive is not working properly, which is, to coin a phrase, a major bugger.

More new projects ahoy, I’m writing a system to create a new interface to the IMDB (Pol, you are evil for telling me that the datafiles were availible free), working on Klind 1.5, Afphrid 2, Pareidol 1.5, and the Vulpordb, since my ability to do anything non-coding is being hampered by my complete lack of a working windows drive.

No games, No graphics, no Word and ergo no CV, so no progress. This, I realise, is distraction therory, but I’m on the verge of losing 20gig of data here, and I’d really prefer not.

My HDD is dying. If you launch it into windows, the activity blinkenlighten stops blinkening and just becomes lighten, with no audiable disk churning. I can get at all the required data from Linux, but windows takes over 70 minutes to boot up even if it doesn’t crash. If I leave the ‘pooter off for a few hours, it will work for about a half-hour (Not long enough to do anything with the HDD) and then crash. In windows. Under Linux everything is fine, except, obviously, the fact I can’t run any of the games or stuff I use. So I’ve had to order a new HDD. And Civilization III.

The obviousness of the second part of that sentance may not be /quite/ so obvious to those who are not me, or in fact those who *are* me yet are not currently sharing this meatspace. I will own CivIII. It was only a matter of time before my willpower failed to stop me buying. In this case my willpower crumbled under the twin attacks of:

1. Spending
   

Take the Affliction Test Today!

In a few minutes time I have to leave for the office, so I can fix the email system, so I can (I hope) get paid, so I can spend some money when I go to Bath, which I do in just under three and a half hours time, and I haven’t written in a while, so I suppose I’d better…

I’ve failed to get anything done, really. I could make the excuse that all this scripting and playing is increasing my value as an employee, but I’d be lying. I need to get something actually *happening*.

Of course, something *is* happening. I’m going to Bath, to see Lonecat, and the Harry Potter Movie (Tickets booked, yay) which is a good thing…

…Okay, I have a duty to this diary to put interesting things in it, and I’ve failed to do so for a while. It will get better, promise, but first I have to get my life moving again….

This wasn’t the idea.

Friday, I go to a funeral. I get a whole load of first-hand experience of how frajile life is, and how it’s important to make do with what you have, ‘specially if the array of What You Have includes the string “Wonderful SO”. But that, of course, I don’t realise until the point where I’ve already left a /query with enough abruptness for it to seem like I’m annoyed.

JFTR, I wasn’t. I meant what I said about not being able to deal with People right now. That was the wrong thing to say.

So I’ve spent a while reading Cryptonomicon (Hence the previous entry) and failing to phone people incase they are working.

That’s my personal rational for not actually phoning anyone, like, ever unless I know – to a few decimal places – what they are doing or where they are. I’m terrified I’m going to be the person who phones in the middle of a lecture, or cinema, or while they are at the pub, or some other situation where talking to someone by phone is impreferable to silence. So I phone nobody.

And I sit and listen to CD’s, Play computer games, read books, and wonder if phoning was The Right Thing

Reading: Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson), Listening To: Five Guys Named Moe, Playing: Hostile Waters

Aquarion == Lawrance Prichard Waterhouse

Fun.

Yes.

Today has not been, in any way, shape, form nor method, fun.

I began today by dreaming of how today could go, of ways things /could/ be worse.

I woke up this morning, and went to a funeral. I learnt more about my great uncle’s life in death than I ever knew of him in life.

The day was freezing. The kind of perfectly crisp, totally clear, and absolutly cold day where the wind goes right though you that English Winters throw upon us from time to time. The perfect day for a funeral, in fact. It wouldn’t seem right to do it in blazing sunshine.

Fighting off depression is a fun experience at the best of times, and a funeral is good for it. Seriously. Nothing convinces you that you really should make the most of what you’ve got like sitting in a cold church singing hymns.

I still felt like an outsider. As I listened to the minister quoting passages and giving us the potted biography, I realised that most of the people there with me belived everything she said, and how much of a comfort those words were to those who were grieving. And so was I. Another member of my family I will never know.

We went home. I hacked around a bit at my audiogalaxy monitoring system, and waited while my main box defragmented.

I fielded a call from my little brother’s school, he wasn’t in lessons. I passed it on. After school was over, he came home, I fielded another phone call, and asked what happened.

Mucked around in class, was told off, worked hard for the rest of the lesson, was hit by small girl. For this he got a tick on the blackboard. Asked why he had the tick, and got second tick. Instant Detention, just add water. Didn’t go to detention, last lesson was to be the same teacher as the one who had given him detention, so he didn’t turn up.

Easy.

Fun day.

A freezing cold day,
A man stands dressed in black in a carpark,
A life lived for others is celebrated.
Today I went to my great uncle’s funeral.