Sunday 31st October 2004
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07.00 GMT
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It's good to be back to GMT. It feels so right.
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Weather - overcast but dry
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Another
month comes to an end. On balance it has been one of the better months
of this year. Next month sees a slight change of plan. Tomorrow I start
a 13 week course called "Intensive Activity Programme". It is designed
to help me find, and get back, to work. We'll see............ Beyond
its intended plan it does bring with it a few other implications. Of
particular significance to this diary is that I will not be able to sit
here all morning reading and writing on the internet. It is quite
probable that my main updates will be done in the evening. Next up is
that I won't be able to nip out and do my shopping during the day, and
lunchtime drinking will also have to stop. Lastly, but probably more
irritating, is that I doubt I will have time for any morning visits to
Patricia. Depending on how late this course finishes I may end up
rushing back, all hot and sweaty, to visit Patricia before she finishes
work. There is a plus side to the course though. It will mean a walk
through the park twice a day, and being away from the temptations of
food during the day. At the end of it I may end up fitter and healthier
than I would otherwise be. I had a taste of that during the 2 week
course I was on during the summer. Even though it was just a mere 2
weeks I think I lost a few pounds and felt better for it.
I am
wracking my brain trying to think what I migh have done yesterday that
is worth mentioning this morning. It was another day that flew by, and
yet there is little to show for it. I did compose another couple of
experimental web pages, but they are not for viewing here. I suppose
one thing I did that took up a fair amount of time, and needed lots of
input from me, was not design and print three slightly different CD
jewel case inserts. It was all because Taz does not have a PC or any
way to play mp3 files on CD. She wanted to hear all three series of The
Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. Everybody else (Kevin, Howard and
Iain) who wanted to hear the last series again, or had missed an
episode of it, got a CD with all the series on it in mp3 format. I even
did some fancy artwork for that, but Taz needed the every episode in
audio CD format. So using Cool Edit to slightly speed up each episode
(it's only just noticable if you are aware of what I have done), I was
able to fit three episodes to each disk. That will be six disks in all,
or three double CD's, one double CD per series. In a fit of stupidity I
decided to design new artwork for each double CD case, although each
case carries a common theme. I started this paragraph trying to think
what I did yesterday and suddenly it all came flooding back to me. The
CD jewel cases took up a lot of time. The web pages experiments took a
lot of time, and on top of all that I did some laudry and shopping.
It's no wonder that it felt like I had been busy yesterday.
It seems odd
that tomorrow I start this new course. I want to get off to an early
start for it. It will mean sorting out the paperwork for it, and yet
tonight I am out drinking until late. There are two things I ought to
do then. One is to sort out all the paperwork (etc.) this afternoon.
The other is to try and avoid getting too drunk and ending up with a
hangover. Ideally I would like to get away from the drinking early, but
I will be tied to the time set by the driver. I suspect I will not be
home much before midnight. The only saving grace is that with the
switch to GMT it will feel as if I have had an extra hour in bed when I
attempt to get up at 06.00. The downside it that midnight is going to
feel like 01.00. (cue very large yawn !)
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Saturday 30th October 2004
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07.40 BST
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Weather - dry and cold
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This
time tomorrow it will only be 06.40 instead of 07.40 and everyone will
be able to have an extra hour in bed. Everybody except me. I will be
attempting to get back to my once regular time of 06.00 for waking up.
At the momemt I am having to rely on my furry alarm clock, Nelly, to
wake me up. She seems to have quite an accurate clock that goes off at
07.30 each day. It does make me wonder what she uses to synchronise her
internal clock to the outside world. With the curtains closed she has
no real clue about daylight outside. Perhaps she hears someones else's
alrm clock going off somewhere.
Yesterday was
probably even better than the days recently where I have said it was a
good day. The very best part was when I got a phone call from Patricia
early in the evening to say that she had been to the dentist and was
finally out of pain. That was really good news. The poor woman has been
in so much pain during the last week that it has been most distressing
to see her suffering so. I just hope that there was no pain after the
aneasthetic wore off and she has finally managed to get a good nights
sleep.
I made some more
progress with the rips of LP's that Iain gave me. It is proving to be
very slow work, and now I have hit a problem that is proving difficult
to resolve. One side of the Chicago album that I am working on has 5 or
6 tracks that run into each other and it is most difficult to decide
where each one starts and finishes. Iain has given me a list of the
track names so I know how many divisions there should be in the one
long recording, but I cannot see more than 3 places were it is obvious
that one track splits from the next unless some of the tracks are only
20 - 30 seconds in length. Perhaps a bit of searching on the internet
would reveal the durations of each track. Once I know that it will be
childs play to split the recording into individual tracks.
At a guess, I
would say that a lot of today is going to be taken up with more audio
editing/restoration. There are other things I will have to do like
laundry and shopping, and they will have to take priority, but after
those it looks as if I will be working at the PC for many hours again
today.
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Friday 29th October 2004
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07.00 BST
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Weather - cold and slightly damp
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This
is one of those mornings when it feels as if there is not much to say.
Yesterday seemed to fly by. It can be summed up very simply by listing
: Washed and dressed. Went out and bought New Scientist. Read most of
New Scientist. Made a start on cleaning/editing Iain's ripped LP's.
Visited Patricia. Watched TV. Surfed the net. Went to bed (late). It
doesn't sound much, but it filled the whole day. Ideally I could have
done with a few more hours in the day.
Which brings me
on to today. My first task......., no not task, but pleasure, is to
visit Patricia again to see how her toothache is going, and to drop off
a book for her. After that the rest of my schedule is blank. I
had considered popping over to The Herne this afternoon, but I don't
think that will happen. In all probability I will spent a considerable
amout of time today working on Iain's LP rips. So far I have only
tackled one side of one LP and there are over a dozen to do. Some
tracks will need much more treatment than others. The first LP I am
tackling is Chicago by Chicago. It has some pleasant tracks on it, but
one, 25 or 6 to 4, is such a
great track that it needs extra special work done on it. I will go
through that one millisecond by millisecond cutting out every hint of
pops or clicks. In all I think Iain has provided enough material to
keep me busy for today and the whole weekend. Even then I may not
finish it all. A lot depends on how bad the original LP's sounded. Some
of them are at least 30 years old and may need a lot of treatment to
restore them. Some may end up as almost as good as a CD, but others we
will have to accept are just going to be as good as they can get.
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Thursday 28th October 2004
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07.45 BST
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Weather - grey and drizzly
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After
all the possibilities for drinking yesterday, only the evening drink
with Kevin and Iain actually happened. I never heard from Taz, although
I did hear about her. She has the lurgi and after a brief visit to
Catford hurried home to bed again. Patricia has been suffering from bad
toothache and was feeling too knackered after sleepless nights to go
for a drink. That just left the usual suspects for the usual Wednesday
night drink. Even then we did not have a full compliment with Howard
being back up at Suffolk for a few weeks.
I did feel very
sorry for Patricia. She was obviously in a lot of pain last night. On
Monday night a small tot of whisky helped to deaden the pain, but
apparently it did not work on Tuesday night. I am relieved to hear that
she has, or was about to, make an appointment with her dentist.
Toothache is one of the worst pains ever. There have been a few
occasions in the past when I have been in screaming agony with
toothache so I know what the poor woman is going through. I will call
in on her late this afternoon and see how she is doing.
Yesterday I
managed to finish reading Dan Brown's "The Digital Fortress". It was a
jolly good read like his previous book "The Da Vinci Code", but was
slightly let down by certain likely inaccuracies in his descriptions of
computers. For an example I will describe one scene in the book, but
try not to give too much of the plot away. There is this huge gigantic
computer that stores most of the American governments secrets and it
has a virus that is progresively destroying all the firewalls that keep
unauthorsised people from accessing its secrets. They are waiting for a
way to kill the virus as the clocks ticks slowly away towards all this
information being freely accessible on the internet. If they don't
unlock the the way to stop the virus they conclude they will have to
shut the computer down. This will cause untold damge to the data inside
it, and even worse the computer is fed from multiple redundant power
supplies that have to be shut down in the correct order, and it will
take 45 minutes to do it. Virtual panic sets in as the zero hour
approaches (well they are Americans - very prone to panic ) and they
watch the firewalls crumbling away on a visual representation. Now I do
not know enough about huge computer installations, but I have worked in
some pretty big telephone exchanges, and all I would have done is
simply disconnect the computer from the communication links to the
outside world. If it were a telephone exchange it would be just a
simple matter of pulling out links. Communication links are designed to
be easily broken to allow for testing. It may have taken a little time,
but I doubt it would take 45 minutes. It would be non-destuctive and
given them all the time in the world to defeat the virus, but I suppose
it would not make for such an exciting read. Therin lies the problem.
Dan Brown seems to have sacrificed accuracy for drama. It makes me
wonder if all the "true facts" in his book "The Da Vinci Code" were as
accurate as they were supposed to be.
Today : Well
it's a Thursday so I will be off in search of this weeks New Scientist
magazine. I have a job to apply for. Iain has given me a CDR of tracks
ripped off of old LP records to be cleaned up and titled. I ought to
get into my workshop. I have to get washed and dressed. I will be
popping in to see Patricia (and possibly going for a quick drink with
her). During the course of the day I will be doing some, or all, of
those things.
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Wednesday 27th October 2004
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07.25 BST
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Weather - dry and cold
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Words from last nights dream : Calvados.
That is all. I woke up with that word on the tip of my tongue, but I
cannot recall any details from a dream that contained it. Calvados is
an apple liqueur. So presumably I was dreaming about drinking. I just
hope that I was having fun in that dream !
Yesterday was
pretty good. I was creative and I saw Patricia. What more could I want
? The creativity part was mostly confined to doing a lot of printing. I
printed out some photos of two paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci for
Patricia. They were of the two alternative versions of Virgin Of The Rocks. Now you may feel this is slightly odd behaviour, but if you were to read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code"
you would understand the significance of these two paintings. They,
along with several other works of art, are involved with the plot of
that book. Most of the other printing I did concerned some CD artwork
for the collected radio episodes of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Series three of THHGTTG finished on Radio 4 last night and it was time
to archive it onto CDR. For a series of such importance I thought a
bright and colourful jewel case insert was needed instead of the more
usual scrawl with a magic marker. I am quite pleased with my final
design. Most bits of it were nicked from the internet, but it is mostly
my composition. The major failing in it was leaving out an exclamation
mark after Don't Panic . I have only just noticed that as I write this. There is no way I am going to scrap all that I have printed now so it stays.
Today brings up
three opportunities of going for a drink. The first, with Taz, is a
possibility. The second, with Patricia, is likely, and the third, with
Kevin, Iain, and Howard, is almost certain. I say almost certain to
leave a small amount of doubt. Anything could happen between now and
tonight and it is important to remember that the world could be eaten
by a mutant star goat before the pubs even open, or the world could be
destroyed by a fleet of Vogons. I'll admit it is not likely, but in an
infinite universe anything is possible. I might even consider going to
see Think Floyd again when they play the Fairfield Halls in Croydon on
the 18th Of November.
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Tuesday 26th October 2004
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07.05 BST
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Weather - dry and cool
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Yesterday
was a good day. It started with getting up nice and early, and finished
a little late at midnight. It should have finished an hour earlier, but
midnight was not a bad compromise. Actually I would have preferred to
have been asleep at 22.00 so I could have woken at 06.00 this morning
with a full 8 hours sleep under my belt.
Once I was up,
washed, and dressed the first task was to get to a post box to post off
a couple of disks to Steve (who is probably reading this and eagerly
anticipating receiving a copy of the Skyline DVD plus a few other bits
and pieces). My next stop was Patricia who pleasantly surprised me by
suggesting we go for a drink after work that same night. Next it was
shopping in Tesco's. I found they were selling Dan Brown's book "The
Digital Fortress" so I had to buy it. That book was purely the cause of
me not getting to sleep at 22.00 last night. Like the previous book,
"The DaVinci Code", it is difficult to put down once you start reading
it.
After I got home
again I had some breakfast and then decided to tackle my PC upstairs.
Twice, the day before, it had crashed on me. From all the interference
it was causing to medium wave reception I knew it had to be the power
supply failing. Sure enough, onceI had opened up the power supply there
was another capacitor with its top split open just like last time about
12 months ago. While I had the PC opened up I decided to clean up the
processor fan and heatsink. I gave it a good clean and put fresh
heatsink compound on it. It now runs about 10° C cooler. I also
installed a new case fan, and probably more critically, one that blows
instead of suck. The whole PC is now running much smoother.
With
that PC now running extra smoothly I thought it time to give Kevin's
DVD player one more go. After him changing the optical block to cure
faulty DVD playback it plays DVDs perfectly, but now will not play CDs.
After performing every test known to manking (and several unknown) I
can only conclude that the new optical block is faulty. After the
success with the PC it was a bit of a come down to find there was
nothing I could do to fix that player.
The rest of the
morning, and much of the afternoon, I spent reading or listening to the
radio. BBC 7 broadcast an exceptionally funny episode of The Goon Show.
I must make a CD of it to give to Taz. I just know she will love it. At
17.15 it was time to go out to meet Patricia. We went to the
Weatherspoons pub in Lewisham. It was a pub she had seen while on the
bus going home and liked the look of it. Personally I found just a
little too crowded for so early in the evening, but Patricia thought it
was very nice. Apart from the crowds, and in particular the problem
finding an empty table, it was not that bad in there. Patricia was
suffering from toothache so I bought a single measure of whisky. The
idea was that she would just take a couple of sips and hold the whisky
on the tooth to help quieten the nerve down. Sometimes it works for me,
but sometimes not. I was most suprised when Patricia said she liked it
and prcoceeded to drink the whole glass. For an infrequent drinker I
would have thought neat whisky would have been most unpleasant. I think
it had the desired affect and she reported her tooth did feel more
comfortable. After about an hour we left the pub and I saw her onto her
bus and I headed off to home.
The rest of the
evening was spent eating, watching TV and reading. Somewhere during the
course of the day I heard several midi tunes that Howard had sent to me
for use as ring tones on my new phone. There is a certain little jingle
that I want my phone to play when it rings. I lack two things to make
it myself. One I am almost tone deaf and couldn't compose/play a
musical instrument to save my life. Secondly I lack the tools to do the
job properly. So I got Howard interested in the idea. So far he has
done well, but not hit perfection yet. I chose to burden Howard
with this task because if my memory serves me well ( which I have
serious doubts about) he originally composed the tune on a Yamaha DX7
which he bought, or borrowed, some 20 years ago. I hope you
are enjoying this as a challenge and not a chore, Howard. It's worth a
pint when you come up with the perfect midi file !
I'm not sure
what I am doing today. I could so easily end up reading all day, but I
would like to be a little more productive than that. I still have many
Gigabytes of mp3 files to sort and catalogue, and so I could get on
with that. There are also a few things I ought to do in my workshop. It
is possible that I may be meeting Taz for lunch. Basically, anything
could happen today.
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Monday 25th October 2004
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06.15 BST
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Weather - wet and windy
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I
managed to get to sleep early last night. Perhaps not as early as I
wanted, but very soon after 22.00. So, apart from a false alarm when I
woke up at 04.00, I have had close to a full 8 hours sleep. With
another hour, or so, until it starts to get light, it still feels very
early, but I must resist the temptation to go back to bed. For the
first few hours of this morning I have a lot to do. Roughly speaking, I
have to wash and dress, post a smal package, visit Patricia, and get
some shopping from Tesco's. Once that is over I can relax a bit, but
not much. My PC upstairs is playing up again. Twice yesterday it
crashed with the infamous Blue Screen Of Death. Once again I think it
is the power supply starting to fail. I noticed that it is starting to
produce a lot of interference on a medium wave radio again. It always
has been a bit noisy in that respect, but last night I had to turn the
mains off to it so that I could listen to my radio while in bed. All it
should need is more capacitors being changed, but with a need to record
a radio show at 12.30 (either an episode of The Goon Show, or Round The
Horne) I do not have that much time to affect a repair on it. I just
hope I can identify the parts, and find replacements in time.
Even with a full
nights sleep I still feel rather groggy this morning. I don't think I
actually slept that well. I woke up with a headache and a neck ache
too. Sometime in the last few days I think I pulled a muscle in my
neck. Since then it has given me various amounts of pain. There was one
morning recently when my neck felt very stiff, and painful to move, for
several hours. Last night, as I was trying to get to sleep, I kept
finding a position where I could feel the knotted muscle in my neck
stretching in a painful way. This morning it still feels sore. When I
think about it I have a theory that it is probably all the result of
some intense reading sessions both in bed, and lying on the settee.
Yesterday I
compiled a collection of my better photographs of my cats, past and
present, and made a copy for Albert to take home to show his wife. It
seems she has a particular soft spot for cats. I think that provided
the inspiration for a dream I had last night. I was in a bedroom that
had two beds in it. It was my bedroom, but not where I sleep now. It
was almost, but not quite, the room I used to sleep in when I was a
kid. With me in the room where my four cats. There was a tabby, a black
and white cat, a kitten, and a tiger. Yes, a tiger ! I had no fear of
the tiger except that I was worried it might eat the kitten. I decided
that we ought to play a game together and noticed a toy white mouse on
the other bed. When I went to pick it up it ran away because it was
actually a live mouse. It was the tiger who noticed it first and made a
lunge at it as it scuttled behind a small chest of drawers. This drew
the other cats attention and they all clustered around the chest of
drawers together to try and catch the mouse. The next bit is very hazy
and I can only describe what I think happened. In fact it may have been
two seperate dreams that seem to follow on from each other. As the cats
lay in wait for the mouse to reappear I laid down on my bed and stared
at the ceiling for a few moments. When I looked round again the cats
had disappeared. The door to the room seemed firmly shut so I started
looking around the room for somewhere they may have been hiding. I
checked under the beds, and other places, even though I knew that a
full grown tiger could not even get under any of the beds. After a
while I heard some noises from under the other bed and eventually the
kitten appeared. There was no sign of the other cats. As the dream
seemed to fade away the last thing I noticed was that the kittens tail
did not seem as long as it should, and yet there was no sign of any
fresh injury to it (where perhaps the tiger had bitten the end off).
My clock say it
is now 07.05 and there is a hint of light in the eastern sky. It might
be an optical illusion, but there is the faintest hint of red showing
on some of the clouds (as in - red sky in the morning, shepherds
warning). It looks as if today is going to be another wet and windy
day. Yesterday evening is when the rain seemed at its heaviest. There
were even a few claps of thunder. They were not from that close, but
not too far away either. I will be quite happy when these autumn storms
subside and we get more stable weather. As November is only a week away
it should not be long before we start getting nice crisp and foggy
mornings.
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Sunday 24th October 2004
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10.30 BST
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Weather - slightly grey, but dry
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It
seems I have had another late night. This time it was 03.00 !!!! I
finished reading Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code", and very enjoyable it
was too. It was also quite intriguing as it was a work of fiction set
around real places and people. Now that I have finished reading it I
hope to be able to go to sleep at a more useful time tonight as I hope
to be up early on Monday morning.
Yesterday
restarted with the postman waking me up and forcing a hasty exit from
bed (I had gone back to bed for a lie in). He delivered the packet with
not one, but two PCMCIA LAN adapters (Thanks Steve). It took a little
time to track down the drivers for the one card that I have tried, but
once installed, and having gone through all the rigmarole of having to
restart Windows 95 many times, I was finally rewarded access to my
network, and to the internet, on my laptop. It is now very easy to
transfer files from the PC's to the laptop. Previously it was a slow
tedious process. One thing that surprised me, although intellectually I
knew it should be so, was how little difference there was in the speed
of browsing the internet on the laptops 120MHz processor compared to a
2GHz Athlon processor. Of course there is the slight matter of my
connection speed to the internet being only what is available on a dial
up connection, but it sort of proves the point that for basic web
surfing, and general office tasks, an old, slowish, PC is more than
adequate.
I don't know how
much time I spent playing with the laptop, but I doubt it was more than
a few hours. It makes me wonder where the rest of the day went. I did
watch some TV, and read a little from magazines, but the next thing of
significance was when Albert dropped his PC off for another repair. His
back-up battery had gone flat and corrupted the BIOS to the extent that
it appeared not to be able to do its own self check. I had talked
Albert through how to reset the BIOS over the phone, but for some
reason it did not appear to work. When I tried it I had better luck.
The BIOS is now set up correctly and the internal clock appears to be
keeping good time now. One thing that desperately needed doing was a
disk defragment. I suspect it was the dodgy Blue Yonder internet
software that kept trying to access the disk and prevented the
defragmenter from running correctly, but I finally booted into safe
mode and disk defragging is now proceeding even as I am typing. (Note to self : On Windows ME hold down the F5 key during boot to get into safe mode NOT F8)
I am not sure
how I will pass the time today. I still have a load of mp3 files to
sort and catalogue, and I guess that will take up a lot of time if I
want it to. Also I have hundreds of Megabytes of BBC Radio 7 programmes
not even listened to let alone edited for archive. It seems I may be
sitting behind one PC screen, or another, for a lot of today. On the
other hand something else might come along and distract me. We will see.
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Saturday 23rd October 2004
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08.00 BST
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Weather - cold and drizzling
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Another
morning where I still feel tired. I was reading until 02.00 again last
night, or should I say, this morning. I have to say the Dan Brown's
"The DaVinci Code" has turned out to be a fascinating book. It is not
my normally preferred genre, Sci Fi, but is a thriller based around a
network of real facts and places, plus many presumed facts that are the
basis for many conspiracy theories. Many of these conspiracies have
been aired in such magazines as Fortean Times. I have read about them
in a semi disinterested way before, but I may pay more attention the
next time they are mentioned.
I think
yesterday was fairly productive. I spent many hours renaming, and
resorting mp3 files on my PC upstairs. It seems to be a task that will
never be finished. At various times I have ripped bits of my CD
collection using various different ripping programs. It was my own
fault for not setting them up correctly, but one did not include the
artists name in the file name, and another session produced all the
tracks from a four disk box set as just track01, track02, etc.
Fortunately the ID3 tags contain the correct information so I can read
them and rename the file to reflect its contents. It is a very slow
process, but I am at last making some sort of headway. One sad aspect
of all this labour is that one of the principle uses of these mp3 files
is to make compilation CD's that will play on my DVD player in the
living room, and that cannot display the file names, or ID3 tag names.
One day I may get an mp3 player that is capable of displaying track
names so it will all be worthwhile in the end.
I am not sure
what I will be doing today. I suspect it will be more of what I was
doing yesterday except for one minor variation. Albert's PC has blown
up again and he is probably dropping it round when he finishes work
this evening. It looks as if a failing BIOS battery has corrupted the
BIOS so badly that it does not seem to respond to simple methods to
restore it. I may scrap that PC and transfer his hard disk to another
of my spare PC's. I have a spare Pentium II (or maybe III) PC that
really only needs a decent hard drive to be a usefully working machine.
I also ought to take a look at Kevin's DVD player. Since he fitted a
new optical block to cure no DVD playback it plays DVD's perfectly, but
now will not play CD's. I have inspected it and can see that he has
fitted the new optical block correctly, but so far I have not turned it
on and conducted any tests myself. I think the first thing I will do is
to put the old optical block back in to check that it can play CD's. If
it does it will leave little doubt that the new opical block is, in
fact, faulty.
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Friday 22nd October 2004
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07.00 BST
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Weather - clear skies, cold and dewey
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It
was surprising how much yesterdays sunshine warmed the house up. I
didn't need any heating on all day even though I had long periods of
fairly sedentary behavior. i.e. reading. This morning it feels very
cold. With a clear sky overnight, there could almost have been a frost
this morning. As November approaches the probability of frost gets ever
higher. Yet yesterday afternoon I went out to buy a few things without
even needing a coat on.
Yesterday seemed
to be a pleasant sort of day. I am not sure why I should think that as
it was not a very productive day. After my long lazy lay in my first
task was to have a go at cleaning up the audio on a CDR that Iain had
given me. It was his first go at transferring an old LP onto the PC (or
MAC in his case). The transfer went well, and all the recording levels
were spot on. Iain had been worried that it did not sound right, but I
thought it sounded OK. It was from an album whose name I am not sure
of. I think it was called Simon And Garfunkel - The Collection. A "best
off" album with all their most famous songs on it. Listening to it I
have to concur that the vocals on the first track did sound odd, but I
am sure, 100% positive, that the fault lay on the original recording
and not the disk to computer transfer. It sounded as if the original
microphone channel had been recorded too high leaving the vocals
sounding strangely clipped. The rest of the album sounded fine apart
from some surface noise and the odd click and scratch on the record
surface. It took nearly two hours to do some mild noise reduction, and
then to remove the clicks and pops. Many of the clicks and pops I was
able to remove using automatic tools, but in several places I had to
resort to cutting them out manually. That is easy to do on the PC. I
can cut as little as one millisecond of sound at a time, but
doing that many times takes a lot of my time. It accounted for much of
the two hours I spent "remastering" the recording. I should add that
this was actually only the first side of the LP. Iain wanted to make
sure that I approved of the method of transfer before wasting time on
the other side. It is a sad fact that, unlike CD's, LP's can only be
copied in real time. I can see this collaboration going on for ages
with Iain doing the transfers with his better equipment, and me doing
the audio processing with my better experience of audio editing.
Once I was happy
with my audio editing/processing I decided to go out to buy New
Scientist and a new paperback to read. I spent the rest of the
afternoon reading New Scientist. I only stopped a few times, to watch
TV programmes, before going to bed. I was determined to try and get an
early night last night. Lately my time has been slipping and I have
been getting up later and later yesterday being the worst of all. I
took the new Paperback to bed and thought I would read for a few tens
of minutes before trying for sleep. It didn't work out like that. The
book, The DaVinci Code, although not my usual type of book, turned out
to be very interesting. By midnight I had read the first ten chapters.
I could have gone on. In fact I was very tempted as the next chapter
looked as if it might start answering some questions, but I decided to
stop there and get to sleep. I fell asleep surprisingly quickly, and
for the most part, had a good nights sleep. I could be tempted for more
sleep now, but I will stay up as I want to call in on Patricia this
morning and find out if we are still OK for a quick after work drink
tonight.
|
Thursday 21st October 2004
|
|
11.45 BST
|
|
Weather - bright and sunny, breezy
|
|
It
was very windy last night in two ways. When I came out of the pub the
wind did not seem to bad, but it was pelting with rain. I think Kevin,
Howard, and Iain all noticed that I was slightly "windy" as well. I
came home and watched The Bill that I had recorded while in the pub.
While watching that I was feeling slightly uncomfortable. When it had
finished I went to bed but found great difficulty getting to sleep.
Outside the wind was really howling. It was making quite a racket
stripping leaves of the trees (I am quite surprised that the trees have
any leaves left this morning). meanwhile it was getting very windy
under my duvet. To be brief I had to rush out to the toilet about 5
times before I was finally feeling almost comfortable. Most of it was
wind, but not all ! I ended up reading until almost 02.00 before I
finally went to sleep. It was an interesting read all about the boot
process of PC's, with particular reference to the GRUB bootloader. I am
not sure how much I can remember this morning, but it seemed pretty
fascinating at the time.
So here I am now after an extended lay in. I did get up at 07.30
to feed Nelly, but decided not to even turn on the PC. Now I am washed,
dressed and ready to go. I have even had time to prepare the following
photograph.........
It is of myself, Kevin and Iain
in the pub last night. We had a pretty good drink with loads of
different thing being discussed.
Today I have
several asks to do. It is New Scientist day so I ought to pop out to
Smiths, or Tescos, to get that. Then I have a load of DVD-R disks to
take a look at to index and copy their contents. I think all that
should keep me going until the end of the day.
|
Wednesday 20th October 2004
|
|
07.45 BST
|
|
Weather - dull and drizzling
|
|
Last
night I made the same stupid mistake I have been making rather a lot
lately. I have been reading in bed and not keeping an eye on the time.
When I finally decided that I was so tired that the pages were
beginning to blur it was coming up to 01.00. Even though my eyes were
closing I still could not switch my brain off and it seemed like ages
before I went to sleep. I would hazard a guess that in reality it
really only took 5 or 10 minutes, but it seemed as if it would go on
forever. Having finally got to sleep I was woken up by something at
around 03.00. This has happened for the last few nights. I have no idea
what it is that wakes me up, but I suspect it is something on the
railway. Perhaps it is a track maintenance train passing by. Whatever
it may be it has come and gone by the time I have fully reached
conciousness. Fortunately getting to sleep again seems fairly quick
after these 3am episodes.
So once again I
feel that I have not had enough sleep. The last stages of sleep
consisted of loads of dreamy images. I can't remember more than one bit
of dream clearly, although I do retain some jumbled, almost
nonsensical, images of other dreams. The part I remember clearly
followed on from vague images of a cricket ground. This was probably
inspired by The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy and the robots of
Krikket. Following on from a wide, almost panaoramic, view across the
cricket ground I found myself walking down a narrow cobbled lane. On my
right were large industrial type buildings, and on my left small old
terraced houses. After a very small walk I came to a gap in the houses.
In their place was what I though of as a sight screen for the cricket
ground. It was huge. It stood at least as high as the houses and was
the width of two of them. The emarkable thing about it was it appeared
to be water cooled. There were pipes carrying water to heat exchangers
mounted at the rear of this huge thing. I was conemplating if it really
was a sight screen, or whether it was actually a scoreboard using huge
hot lamps when the dream faded away. I think I also dreamt about one,
or more, preserved railways, being in a some sort of bar or pub, and
another involving a sports field using giant laptops as score boards. I
seem to recall the giant lapops had a monochrome screen with the light
parts being a pale dirty yellow colour, and the dark parts being a sort
of muddy grey.
So the plans for
today are fairly simple. Keep myself available to possibly meet Taz for
a lunchtime pint, and then to keep myself ready to go to the pub
tonight with Kevin, Iain and Howard. By "keeping myself ready, or
available" I mean not having any sudden huge meals before it is time
for drinking. I just can't drink on a full stomach.
|
Tuesday 19th October 2004
|
|
21.30 BST
|
|
Weather - cool and dry
|
|
It
has been a mostly satisfactory day. A few experiments on the PC did not
go as expected, but all provided valuable learning experiences. The day
started with a rush to get out at 09.00 to visit Patricia and sign on.
Today was the last time I sign on until next January. From the 1st of
November I am being sent on the Intensive Activity course. Apparently
this will help me get a job, but if there are no jobs out there then it
will be useless. Nevertheless I get an extra bonus payment for going on
it, and that can't be bad.
While out
visiting Patricia I couldn't help getting my new phone out and taking a
snap with its camera. It was not the greatest of poses. At the time she
was cleaning a teaspoon while making a cup of coffee. I hear that they
are all living on hot coffee in the classroom as the heating had failed
some time back (last week or even earlier) and no one will fix it. With
the temperature dropping all the time they are all freezing there. It
makes me glad that I am not doing a course there at the moment.
I am not really
sure what else I have managed to achieve today. It has been a sort of
lazy day doing some reading, some listening to radio programmes (past
and present), playing with the PC(s), and throwing out a little more
junk from my workshop.
|
07.45 BST
|
|
Weather - dry and cold
|
|
Yesterday
was a good day. It had some negative points, but overall it was good. I
decided that I would definitely go to Maplins to buy my IRDA adapter.
Before I set out I gave Ivor a ring to see if he had any interest in
going to Maplins, and more interestingly, whether he he would be
popping into The Railway Telegraph which is opposite Maplins. Luckily
he said he was. So I set out with a spring in my step and started
walking towards Forest Hill and Maplins. It was a glorious day. The sun
was shining, and yet it was not too hot. In fact it was not hot at all,
but by the time I got there all that walking, plus the sun beating down
on my black leather jacket, had warmed me up to the point where I was
sweating.
I met up with
Ivor, and Iain, in Maplins. Ivor bought a printer and I bought my IRDA
adapter. We then crossed the road into the pub for a few well earned
pints.
 I
was able to show off my new Nokia 6610i phone with built in camera. The
pictures it takes are not brilliant, but seem adequate for web pages.
The whole point of all the rushing around, walking to Maplins was to
enable me to download the pictures from the camera, via infrared link,
onto the PC.
After the
first pint we were joined by Paul. This had the effect of lengthening
Ivors lunch break and I ended up having three and a half pints before
going home. Once again I decided to walk home. This was probably a bad
mistake as either my sock, or the lining in my shoe, rucked up and made
walking painful. I have the blisters to prove it !
I walked
home via Tesco's where I bought some food, and more importantly, some
toilet paper (I was down to my last roll). Before I did anything else I
had some breakfast. I had not eaten in the morning, and after all that
walking I was feeling a little peckish. I think I probably had slighty
less than Ivor had.
Once I had eaten
I attempted to set up the infrared link to get the pictures out of the
phone. My initial attempts ended in disaster. I tried it out on three
different PC's. Two running Windows XP, and the other Windows 2000. All
three refused to co-operate. It was only on the last attempt that I
realised I was being stupid and installing the wrong drivers. I had
been attempting to use generic infrared drivers not realing that my
adapter needed specific drivers. The generic drivers did attempt to
work, and they would recognise the phone, but it was like the sensor
was only being polled for something like one second in every five. The
PC could recognise the phone in the brief space of time, but the Nokia
software wanted nothing to do with it. Finally I installed the correct
drivers and it all sprang into life. So now I can become the menace I
always intended to be and go around with a camera permanantly ready,
and able to stiore the pictures on the PC.
So just one more
picture before I rush off to wash and dress before going out to sign
on, and pop in to see Patricia. If you are looking at a screen that
reflects the same page layout as I can see here (probably needs a
resolution of 800x600), on the left is a picture of Paul in The Railway
Telegraph. Of the four picures I took there (one was very boring, and
not shown here) this one has probably come out best. The colours look a
little murky on these pictures and in later attempts I may try and tart
them up a little.
|
Monday 18th October 2004
|
|
10.15 BST
|
|
Weather - bright and sunny. Still cold.
|
|
The
past three hours has not been spent sleeping. In fact I doubt I managed
to get more than 30 minutes extra sleep. Admittedly I did spend another
two hours in bed, but I could not get to sleep. I suppose I probably
didn't need it after all, but it did feel like I did. Since then I have
washed my body, washed my hair, and I had a wet shave ! Fortunately I
didn't lose too much blood from using a fiercesome razor blade. I
thought my electric razor was not doing a good enough job, and besides
which it will not trim my sideburns. My face feels slightly smoother
now, but I think it will need another wet shave in the morning to do
the job perfectly.
I
had a pleasant surprise when I checked my email first thing this
morning. I have been offered a swap for a PCMCIA network card. I don't
know where, when, or how the swap will take place, but it will be damn
useful to get that card. Perhaps I should list more of my wants, or
desires, here and see if any other kind offers materialise. Apart from
the obvious, wine, women and money, I would say the next thing I desire
, or at least would be useful, is another ethernet hub. My four port
10Mbps hub serves me well most of the time, but one with , say, six
ports, and perhaps a 100 Mbps throughput, would be very useful on some
occasions. As to why I have this insane desire to network loads of PCs
together is anyones guess.
I had a strange
experience on Saturday that I keep forgetting to mention. I was
reminded of it when sorting out my socks this morning. As usual I did
my laundry on Saturday. What was slightly unusual was that I did not
get the stuff out of the washing machine until the evening. I must have
been in and out of the kitchen a dozen times during the day, but it was
not until I came to unload the washing machine that I noticed I had
dropped one sock on the floor while loading it up in the morning. It
has often been said that socks have strange properties when confronted
with washing machines. This one obviously tried to escape, but where
did it hide during the day ? I am sure I should have noticed it if it
was sitting where I found it when I came to unload the washing machine.
It was sitting right in front of it in plain sight. I can't even blame
it on Nelly. She appears to have no interest in my socks at all.
Perhaps I should submit this story to Fortean Times.
It has turned
out a nice day, or at least at the moment the sun is shining and all
seems well. It could be an ideal opportunity to take a walk to Maplins
to buy the IRDA adapter I want. I might, or I might not, and if I do I
may not walk but take a bus. I'll decide on that later.
|
07.25 BST
|
|
Weather - cold
|
|
This
is going to be the briefest of notes. I was reading until the early
hours, and now Nelly has woken me up demanding her breakfast. She has
now been fed so I am going back to bed !
|
Sunday 17th October 2004
|
|
12.45 BST
|
|
Weather - dry, but very gloomy
|
|
I
think I have left it too late for a computer fair today, although it
would still be just about possible. I have spent quite a lot of time
counting up all my small change. The idea was that there is a machine
in the Sainsbury's Savacentre, which is sort of on the way to a
computer fair, that takes all your loose change and converts it into
bigger currency. It does charge 7.5p per pound to do it, but a few
£5 notes are easier to carry to a computer fair than £15.86
in 1p and 2p pieces - and a lot easier to spend as well. I haven't
checked, but I suspect there is enough loose cahnge in my back pocket
to raise that £15.86 up to the point where I could get exactly
£15 back in notes.
Just a few
minutes after saying it was very gloomy and the sun has now put in a
brief appearance. If I was certain it would stay out I might even
reconsider the idea of getting to a computer fair late, but I have just
put my lunch in the oven to cook so I think I know what I will be doing
next for definite - eating. After that it will be time to put my feet up and do some reading.
|
07.45 BST
|
|
Weather - damp after light overnight rain
|
|
It
is another gloomy morning. I thought that a weather forecast I saw a
few days ago suggested that today may have been brighter, and warmer,
than we have had of late. Maybe once the sun has climbed a little
higher in the sky it will improve things, but for now I can only
describe it as horrible.
Yesterday turned
out reasonably well. I sat down to do a load of reading but Taz phoned
me up and asked if I fancied meeting up for a quick pint in The London
And Rye (local Weatherspoons pub). It seemed like a good idea too me so
I met her there at 13.00. I was not aware that they had started their
"Oktoberfest" beer festival and had lots of guest beers in. It turned
out that not that many were actually ready for use, but there were
several that were, and were worth trying. It was only a quick drink so
I had just two pints. One was GB Mild - a rather pleasant mild from a
brewery whose name escapes me, but ideal for lunchtime drinking. The
other pint was from, I believe, a Welsh brewery, and called something
like Fallen Oak. That was a little stronger, but once again very
pleasant. The best thing about both pints were that the both cost a
mere £1.49 a pint.
After those two
pints I accompanied Taz to a shop across the main road called Savers.
It is primarily a cheap place for cosmetics and the like, but does have
a few other odd things in as well. In particular they had a basket of
glowsticks for just 20p each. I have a feeling that the normal price
would be closer to £1 each. In case you are not aware of what a
glowstick is they are essentially tubes of two different chemicals, one
inside a thin glass tube that when broken mixes with the other (both
are in a tough plastic outer tube) and gives of light. They are eerily
fascinating things and I only bought two of them. I should have bought
more as I think they are fun things to have. Strangely enough this was
only the second time I have ever seen them for sale. The first time was
probably 10 years ago at an amateur radio rally. The three I
bought then were real industrial versions meant for emergency
illumination, and probably used by cavers etc. The ones I bought
yesterday were toy versions, but still just as interesting. I did try
one out yesterday. It was half of a pair designed in such a way that
the pair could be joined together to make a kids necklace. Unlike the
industrial ones that were optimised for maximum light output and time,
this one gave out an eerie green light which only lasted less
than an hour before the light started to fade. The industrial ones gave
out a yellowy green light and still provided enough light to read by
after several hours. It would be nice if the three remaining glowsticks
I have had a variety of colours.
Once back home I
spent the rest of the day either reading (books/magazines) or trying to
extract some data from a CDR. This particular CDR was made by Traxdata
and gives every appearance of being a good quality product. Except that
after a couple of years it is almost unreadable. I spent, or rather one
of my PC's spent, nearly two hours attempting to copy all the files on
it. I have managed to get some files from it so far and will be trying
again today. I think I will see what the drives on my machine upstairs
can make of it. This PC cannot read a single file on the disk. The
other PC down here can, at least, read some of the files, although
curiously it is the DVD reader driver that seems to make a better job
of it. I have often found that on a reluctant disk it is a CD burner
drive that has the best chance of reading it.
Today I think I
want to go to a computer fair. There are definitely some bits I need to
buy, but I am not sure if I should spend my money on them. Principly I
want a PCMCIA network card so that I can get my laptop on my network.
That would save so much bother when it comes to copying stuff to it.
Then I want an IRDA adapter so that I can transfer data to, and from,
my new mobile phone. From Maplin these would cost £20 and
£15 respectively. I doubt I would be able to save that much
on the IRDA adapter, but I might be able to pick up a secondhand
network adapter, or maybe an older and slower one, for perhaps half
that price. It is tempting, but I will not make a final decision until
I am up, dressed and washed.
|
Saturday 16th October 2004
|
|
07.20 BST
|
|
Weather - damp but no rain
|
|
I
feel a lazy sort of day coming on, although lazy may not be quite the
right word. A day of media frenzy may be a better description. I have
magazines and books to read, DVD's to watch, and radio programmes to
listen to. There are a few other things I must do. The weekly washing
is one, but I can't think what else just yet. No doubt something will
arise that I have not thought about.
|
Friday 15th October 2004
|
|
21.15 BST
|
|
Weather - intermittent rain
|
|
Today
has been quite good with a few high points. First of all I am happy to
say that I am rich, or will be, but only in a very minor way. The Job
Centre are sending me on an intensive activity course. It sounds
dreadful, and probably is, but I do get an extra £15 a week for
my troubles. I am not sure what will happen there, and I am not sure
where it will be held. I do know the address, and I know it is in the
vicinity of Ladywell Station, but I can't place exactly where it is. It
all starts on November 1st.
The other good
thing is that I spent all afternoon (and a bit more) fixing Alberts
computer. It is now running as sweet as a nut. I think the principle
problem was that a (presumably) faulty on board sound card had been
turned on by a glitch in the BIOS. It was probably causing all sorts of
conflicts. Beyond that there was also the problem that Albert had
almost filled his hard disk. He had obtained a new one and my original
job was to fit it for him. Sorting out the viruses, spyware, and other
nasties only added a bit more relish to the job. He wanted one other
thing fitted - a USB hub. I had a spare that fitted into a 3.5 Inch
drive bay. I am not sure how much it was worth, but I knew when I
originally bought it, it cost around £25. So I offered it to him
for £15. He pulled out a £20 note and said keep the change.
So I am a little better off than before. Now if only I could work out a
way of doing that again twice, I would have enough pocket money to go
to the computer fair at Ashburton School on Sunday morning - I might go
anyway !
|
07.00 BST
|
|
Weather - damp after more overnight rain
|
|
The
story so far......I successfully got infrared working on the laptop. It
can detect the phone, and even tell me it is a Nokia 6110i.
Unfortunately the Nokia software that could be installed under Windows
95, Nokia Phone Suite 4, does not recognise the phone. It knows
something is there, but it does not support that model. I am now left
with the impossible situation that anything I have got that will run
the correct software has no Infrared transceiver, and the laptop that
has, will not run the software. I think it will be a little difficult,
although just possible, to upgrade the laptop to Windows 98. It seems a
bit of a drastic resort to try and install Windows 98 on such a small
hard disk just to communicate with a mobile phone. There is also the
problem that I cannot read CD's directly on the laptop. That would make
the task of installing Windows 98 really tedious ! I think I'll
investigate the possibilities of trying to make an infrared transceiver
for the big PC.
There are two
definite things happening today, and I hope they don't clash. I have to
see my New Deal adviser at 11.15, and Albert is popping in this morning
for me to fit an extra hard drive in his PC. The trouble is I have no
idea what time he will be coming. He may drop the PC in on his way to
work - so it could be early - but I suspect it will be shortly before
midday. In other words the most awkward time possible. If it is to be a
lot earlier then I ought to wash and get dressed fairly quickly.
Ideally I wanted to go back to bed for another hours sleep. I was
playing with all that infrared software until very late, and when I did
get into bed I had to read for a little to wind down. I have no real
idea when I turned the light out, but it may well have been approaching
02.00. If that is so then I have only had some 5 hours sleep and
deserve to feel a little tired.
Just to make
life a little more interesting, or confusing, I've just remembered that
I think Taz mentioned meeting for a quick drink around lunchtime. If I
have remembered that correctly, and I am not getting confused with last
week, then I have probably got one more conflict in allocating my time.
Oh well, I'm sure it will all work out OK in the end.
|
Thursday 14th October 2004
|
|
22.30 BST
|
|
Weather - dry
|
|
After
this mornings yucky rain the sun came out. By midday it was not looking
too bad. It also seems to have warmed up just a little.
My new phone
turned up soon after midday. It is a Nokia 6110i. It's not bad, but it
does not appear to have bluetooth as originally suggested. This is both
good as well as bad. It is good because I do not have a bluetooth
adapter for it to talk to - yet. What it does have is infrared
communication that I may be able to get working with my old IBM laptop.
That is causing a little problem so far. I am attempting to set up the
infrared port even as I type this. Unfortunately the copy of Windows 95
that I have on floppy does not seem to match up with the version that
is installed on the laptop. I thinkthat has been set up via the CD
version so all the cab files are numbered differently. There may be a
way around this, but it could mean laboriously copying all the cab
files, one by one, from the desktop PC via hyperlink. It's slow, but it
will get there in the end. Once that is finally set up I am hoping that
some older Nokia software will work with the phone. The correct
software will only work with versions of Windows higher than 95. Having
wasted loads of time downloading that wrong software (all 27 MBytes),
and then wasted loads of time time transferring it to the laptop, I am
getting a little pissed off with it. I then downloaded an earlier
version, and wasted hours downloading that and transferring it. That
seemed to have a corrupt archive in it so I am even more pissed off
with it. I am now downloading it all over again ! meanwhile it seems
that the software I need for infrared communications is not on the
Windows 95 floppy disks so I will have to reboot into windows and copy
the cab files from the CD to the laptop via hyperterminal. This is
getting tedious, but without it I have no (easy and cheap) way of
getting pictures from the phone onto a PC.
Assuming
everything works out fine, and I can eventually copy files from the
phone to a PC, then Iains first task when he reads this is to send me a
MMS with at least one interesting picture - one that he is very proud
of. This will test our capabilities of sending and receiving pictures
by phone.
|
07.10 BST
|
|
Weather - rain
|
|
It's
a horrible soggy morning. It rained for a lot of the night, some of it
quite heavy, and it is still pouring with rain right now. I don't think
I even want to open the curtains this morning.
I thought I had
an appointment with my New Deal adviser today, but I've just checked
and I see it is actually tomorrow. So today I will be staying in
waiting for my new mobile phone to be delivered. It could come today,
or it may come tomorrow. It would be handy if it came before this
afternoon so I could pop out to Tesco later in the day. Although I
would hope it comes today, I would not be surprised if it actually
turns up tomorrow. They quoted 2 to 3 days for delivery, but if it is
coming via Royal Mail I would not be surprised if it did not get here
until the middle of next week. I will just have to be patient, but it
is a good excuse not to have to go out in the rain.
|
Wednesday 13th October 2004
|
|
20.35 BST
|
|
Weather - damp and intermittent rain
|
|
Right
now I should be down the pub, but I have a splitting headache and I
don't think I can face a session in there. It would be slightly
unpleasant on a normal night, but very unpleasant if they have any
football showing in there. We can normally avoid most of the football
on the big screen, but for some games, presumably so called important
ones, it can get very noisy with occasional bursts of extra loud
earsplitting cheers (or boos). It is probably making my head hurt even
more just sitting behind the PC screen. So I'll try and keep this brief
and then quite probably go to bed.
I did go for a
drink with Ivor and Iain this lunchtime, but that is not the cause of
the headache, or at least I don't think it should be. I only had two
pints of beer and a couple of diet cokes. The drink was in Barming and
it was most pleasant when we got there. The sun was out and it was
feeling fairly mild. While in the pub the weather got steadily worse
and the journey home on the motorway was foul. I managed to get in with
just enough time to have a pee and brush my teeth before going out to
visit Patricia. As I expected she is very busy the whole week and there
was not enough time for an after work drink. We are going to try again
next week.
|
07.50 BST
|
|
Weather - dry and almost bright.
|
|
Yesterday
had only two brief bright points. I saw Patricia in the morning. That
was very pleasant, but I did learn some bad news. She may not be free
for an afterwork drink all week, although tomorrow, and Friday would be
the more likely days if there were any chance that she was. The second
bright point started off as being potentially negative, but should turn
out quite well. I phoned up O2 to query a payment for my mobile phone.
I had recieved a reminder letter about paying a bill that I thought had
already been paid. However it was my first ever payment made via
internet banking and I wondered if it had all gone wrong. It turned out
that all was well and they had recieved my payment possibly even before
they sent out the reminder (weird company !!). Upon concluding that bit
of business I was asked if they could do anything more for me. So I
asked about free upgrades for my phone. The battery life on my current
Nokia phone is now noticably less than when new. So a new phone seemed
like a good idea. It turns out that I was eligable for a new phone and
ended up being offered a bewildering choice of phones - all for free !
I did not recognise half the models being offered, and worse than that,
when I did occasionally sort of recognise a model number I really had
no idea anything about the phone. So I have opted for what I
think is a Nokia, but it is the phone with built in camera, a colour
screen, and Bluetooth. I am expecting delivery of whatever it is I have
ordered tomorrow or the day after.
The rest of
yesterday was boring, dull, and even slightly irritating. A lot
of little things combined have conspired to make me feel a little
depressed. It's hard to enumerate all these little things, but I
suppose there is the usual trinity of job, money and sex (or the lack
of them). Then there is the weather being gloomy. Missing out on the
council house regeneration scheme is another little disappointment.
Added to that I was feeling uncomfortable in the pub because of a
bloated feeling caused by overeating the previous two days. Finally,
and this one is not proved yet, I may be suffering the onset of a cold.
(This morning my throat felt slightly sore and my nose very stuffy -
symptoms that now seem to be going away since being awake for 30 - 45
minutes). All that meant that i was not the most entertaining person in
The Herne yesterday. I think I managed to piss off Max even though she
is notionally disinterested in anything I do.
The story would
be incomplete if I did not mention that there was one other bright spot
yesterday that I forgot to mention. That was the latest episode of The
Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy as broadcast on Radio 4 at 18.30
(although I was not in, in time, to hear it direct, but had recorded it.
Last night I
had a dream about a dream. In this dream I was trying to remember part
of another dream. It was all a little confused, and the little I
remember now makes it even more confusing. In the first dream, which
may have been real or a product of the second dream, there had been
some sort of accident. I don't think it was an accident of the calamity
kind, but perhaps more of the serendipidy kind. The outcome was that
self replicating "things" had been made, but whether by me, or someone
else, is a matter that will never be resolved. In the second
dream I was trying to remember all I could about the first dream. The
"things", whose exact appearance is now so hazy in my memory that
it is hard to describe them, had the property of shrinking whenever
they replicated. I think their appearance might have changed more than
once during the course of the dream, but my last vague memory was of
something very much like a postcard with some sort of slogan on it.
They would gradually shrink in size while multiplying in quantity such
that their volume remained the same. I cannot, now, see the use of of
them, but at some point in the dream it seemed like a good idea.
Today I have
been invited to go for a drink in Kent with Ivor and Iain. Ivor is not
going in to work today, but is meeting Iain half way to discuss his new
web site. They would like some input from me, but I am not sure what I
have to offer. They are meeting in a pub so I doubt much work will be
done. I am not sure if I want to go. It could be a good day out, but it
depends how I feel. Potentially I could go to three different pubs
today. There is this one in Kent with Ivor and Iain. Then there is a
very small chance that I could end up going out with Patricia, and
finally there is the regular Wednesday night drink in The Ram with
Kevin, Iain and Howard. It would take a lot of resources to do all
three. I think, on balance, that I may well attend this afternoons
drink, but I will not make my mind up until closer to the time.
|
Tuesday 12th October 2004
|
|
06.50 BST
|
|
Weather - cold and dry
|
|
Against
all odds it appears to be another dry morning, or at least it does not
appear to be raining now which is contrary to a recent weather
forecast. It is a little too gloomy, at this time of the morning, to
say how cloudy it is, but I would guess that it is cloudy. Otherwise I
think it would be a bit lighter outside. Yesterday was dry too,
although most of the day was very overcast. I think the sun did put in
a few brief appearances, but none were really significant to really
register on my brain.
Yesterday
morning I did a bit of this and a bit of that, but at some time after
11.00 Taz phoned to see if I wanted to pop over and have a chat with
her. So I went over in the early afternoon and we talked and talked. So
much in fact that I lost track of the time and did not get to see
Patricia as I meant to do. I could have made a last minute dash and
waited for her to leave work, but it would have been too late to get
into the building as the public entrance would have been shut.
So my mission
for this morning is to pop in on Patricia, early, before her pupils
start to arrive, and make a date for an afterwork drink with her. It
will probably be tomorrow evening, but she may suggest tonight,
Thursday or Friday. I may well go over to The Herne this afternoon so I
want to see Patricia before then in case she suggests tonight. If so
then I will abandon The Herne in favour of a drink with Patricia.
I still have
not had the letter from my building society authorising the work to be
done by the council as part of the town regeneration scheme. As the cut
off date was last Wednesday it now looks as if I have blown any chance
of my house front being refurbished. I cannot believe that The Woolwich
building society could possibly take so long just to get a form letter
printed and in the post. It says very little for their efficiency and
it will make me think twice about doing busines with them in the future.
|
Monday 11th October 2004
|
|
08.05 BST
|
|
Weather - dry and bright
|
|
I
feel a little rough this morning. I expect it is because I ate very
unhealthily yesterday. It is not so much a direct effect of the type of
food, but more to do with it giving me a poor nights sleep. I had no
trouble sleeping, or so I thought, but I was probably tossing and
turning all night. It certainly feels like it was hard work, and the
amount of dreams I think I can remember having suggest it was a very
active night, I had all sorts of dreams. Many seemed to have a very
rural, and often old fashioned, feel to them. One of them seemed to be
about a small village getting its first railway service. I think that
there were several variations of that one dream. Some of them seemed to
incorporate elements from the film "The Titfield Thunderbolt". In
another dream I was trying to find out what was so special about the
shoes that a small community wore. It was a closely guarded secret, and
it seemed to revolve around a special pattern on the sole of the shoe
that made it slip proof on muddy ground, but let no footprints. Then
there was a dream about a council meeting taking place in a small
village. An empty shop, possibly an ex-barbers shop (it still had hair
on the floor), that was used to serve posh meals to the councilors
while a woman (friend ?) was forced to run her sweetshop from a stall
outside. After much grumbling from several people I went inside to see
what was happening and found that anyone could buy one of the posh
meals, and that they were cheap to buy. What's more, the woman with the
sweets could move into the shop once the meeting was over. The last bit
of dream was of revisiting, on foot, a place I had passed on the train
from one of the earlier dreams. It was an urban road where all the
houses down one side of the street were shrouded in large tent like
sheeting. All the wooden furniture from these houses was stacked up
alongside the road, and I could see a few men working inside with
vacuum cleaners. I concluded that the houses were being decontaminated
after being infested with fleas. It certainly feels like I had a busy
night, and it is only now, after sitting down at the PC, that I am
beginning to feel rested.
I don't have
any particular plans for today. I think I will pop up and see Patricia
late this afternoon to find out when we she is available for our next
drink. Other than that I will just have to see how the day pans out.
Possible ideas include checking the internet for more job
possibilities, and maybe even playing with that ancient laptop I
mentioned yesterday.
|
Sunday 10th October 2004
|
|
21.00 BST
|
|
Weather - dry with sunny intervals
|
|
|
Were
it not for the fact that I have eaten too much today, it could have
been a rather good day. I started off aimlessly surfing the internet
when an idea came to me. I have a very old
laptop that uses a most primitive 8088 processor. Just to put that into
perspective here is a list of the development of processors for the
standard PC.
- 8086/8088
- 80286
- 80386
- 80486
- Pentium 1
- Pentium 2
- Pentium 3
- Pentium 4
(For clarity I have left out
the equivalent non Intel procesor names). As you can see the 8086/8088
family is where it all started some 20, or more, years ago. The
processor in this old laptop runs just under a 1000 times slower than a
modern hi-spec PC. On top of that it has a laughably low amount of
memory fitted - also about 1000th the size of a conemporary PC. It is
impossible to get any modern software to run on it, but I thought I
would try and track down some old stuff that might work on it. My first
success was a copy of that old arcade game Pac Man. It runs remarkably
well on it, and it was sort of fascinating to hear the sounds it played
on what is really no more than in inbuilt bleeper. I should add that
this laptop has no proper sound card, and also that it uses an odd
sized LCD screen in black and white and maybe just one or two shades of
grey. The next thing I tried installing was a copy of Windows 2.03.
This was just about the most primitive version of Windows that actually
worked, although it is nothing like we know Windows today. About all it
really can do is to act as an almost graphical file manager. It
displays a list of files and allows you to click on them to start the
application. There are two more programs that I might try to install,
bu I am not sure if they would actually need Windows 3 to work. They
are Netscape 0.9 and Mosaic. Both are web browsers, but I am not sure
of their capabilities. I think Mosaic can display text and graphics
provided they are in gif format. I have experimented with a version for
Apple Mac's, but only briefly. I assume the DOS (or Windows) version is
pretty similar. Version 0.9 of Netscape sounds equally as primitive. It
is just possible that I have seen, and even used it before. Memories
are coming back of a program called Wildcat Navigator that I once used
for bulletin boards. I am sure the core of that was Netscape, but with
a few bolt on goodies. I still have the installation disks for that (if
they are still readable). The last time I used it would have been on my
old Amstrad PC1640. The spec for that was not too disimilar to the
laptop so it ought to work OK.................Thinks....It may not have
been on the Amstrad. It just might have been on the 486 PC that came
after it. Well, there's one way to find out. I'll try it next time I am
feeling patient.
|
08.00 BST
|
|
Weather - dry, cold and slightly cloudy
|
|
Yesterday
was not as dreary as I thought it may have been. After writing
yesterdays brief words I went back to bed for a couple of hours and did
manage at least a whole 60 minutes of sleep. Once up, I did my washing
and listened to a radio recording. I then nipped out to the corner shop
and bought last Thursday's Micro Mart. I then sat down and did some
reading while listening to some of a huge mp3 compilation CD(R) that I
had burnt some time ago specially to use on my DVD player in the living
room.
In the
afternoon Kieth dropped by and we had a good chinwag that went on until
22.00. That was quite a long time. In fact about three times as long as
I had originally planned. The time passed really quickly. So quickly
that I almost forgot to get hungry. I didn't actually have my
lunch/dinner/supper until after he had gone. We passed some of the time
listening to clips from my old pirate radio audio archive. I have
recordings of all sorts of people, including myself and Keith, going
back to the early nineteen seventies - over thirty years old !!! Of
course many of these are highly embarrasing, and that most definitely
includes all my own early stuff ! I was quite amazed that Keith was
only a gnats whisker away from recognising the voice of Simon Barrett
on a recording made a good year, and maybe more, before he went to sea
to join Radio Caroline.
I went to bed at
around midnight, and fell asleep almost instantly. Shortly before
waking up again this morning I was having one of those dreams that seem
very long, and seem to be reality stretched to its furthest limits. I
was back in the house of my childhood, 19 Silvermere Road, except it
was far larger and with more rooms than it ever had in reality. The
layout was approximately the same, although upstairs and downstairs
were occasionally transposed. All sorts of people were staying there.
These included Kevin (who in reality used to live 2 doors away), some
other friends, at least one TV personality who I think was Cat from Red
Dwarf, and one person who I have never met, but have seen some of her
blogs on the friends list of another internet blogger who I have met
briefly. The dream was set at bedtime, and there were people moving
about trying to get to bed. It sounds as if it could have had sexual
overtones, but that never did seem to be the case. It was more like
everybody wanted to get to sleep, but whatever anyone did it would wake
someone else up. There was someone in the bedroom at the back of the
house talking loudly to the neighbour on the left through the wall. In
reality we never really talked to that neighbour. It was also odd in
that I thought it was Kevin who was in that room, but it was Keith's
voice I could hear through the door. I was trying to do some reading
before I went to sleep, but with all the disturbances I was kept awake
for longer than I wanted. Eventually I needed to go for a pee and
wandered off to a middle room that I knew had a toilet in it. For some
reason I decided not to use that one and laid down on a bed that was in
there. Looking to the far wall was a load of shelving that contained,
amongst everything else, loads and loads of CD's belonging to everyone
else except me. I stared at them for some time thinking how I was ever
going to be able to rip so many CD's to mp3s. After a while the need
for that pee arose again and I decided I would use the outside toilet.
As I left that room I noticed the huge amount of junction boxes on the
wall by the door. There were connections and splitters for telephone,
TV, data, as well as a lot of light switches. (strange I had never
noticed these before considering I was supposed to live there). To go
outside I didn't have to go downstairs as upstiars and downstairs had
mysteriously transposed themselves. I went out into the garden and it
was like a jungle, and I mean that literally, not figuratively. There
were all sorts of exotic trees and shrubs. Many had recognisable fruits
on them. There was someone there, who may have been my brother, and he
was asking what I thought of it all. As I turned round to take more of
it in I noticed that there were several people out there, some of whom
were women. One was a very good looking women, but not one I could put
a name to. It was looking like the start of a party and/or barbecue. As
I became more interested in the idea of a party I remembered that I
still needed a pee. That was the point when I woke up and found that a
stroll to the toilet would be a good idea.
Today starts off
in a similar way to yesterday. I really have no plans or predictions of
the days outcome. Yesterday I had been toying with the idea of asking
Iain if he fancied going to a computer fair this morning. I have now
decided against that as it could end up being rather an expensive
outing. There are a few things that I could profitably buy
from a computer fair, such as some more blank DVD disks, but I would be
too tempted to spend money on things that I want, like an 8 port
100Mbps ethernet hub, but are not actually essential. I do need some
new blank DVD-R disks, but I may opt to get them over the internet.
|
Saturday 9th October 2004
|
|
06.50 BST
|
|
Weather - dry and cold
|
|
So
far this morning there is nothing much to say. I have already said all
I needed to say about yesterday, and today is just a blank so far. I
have fed Nelly and now I think I will go back to bed for another hour.
|
Friday 8th October 2004
|
|
20.45 BST
|
|
Weather - still dry and getting colder
|
|
Today
has not been a wonderful day. It had its highlights, but somehow I did
not really enjoy it. I decided to go and have a drink with Iain and
Ivor. They suggested we meet up in Forest Hill as they had to go out to
the bank shortly before lunchtime. After eating a fair amount yesterday
I decided to walk to Forest Hill. It was slightly hard work, and I got
pretty hot by the time I was there. Some of the heat was just the
effort of walking, but there was a fair bit of sun on my black jacket
as well. Despite the effort required, and getting too hot, it was an
enjoyable walk. I did it on an empty stomach and that probably helped
as well. I decided that I definitely would not get drunk today so I
stuck to diet coke in the pub. With no food and no alcohol I was
feeling really rather chilly in the pub, and I still felt cold when I
got home. So I have had a rather large kebab for breakfast. That,
together with putting some heating on, has finally warmed me up.
|
06.45 BST
|
|
Weather - cold and dry
|
|
Nothing
much happened yesterday. I did a little shopping and bought New
Scientist. The rest of the day was spent reading New Scientist or
playing about with printing. I was sure I had some software that had
some sort of preset for printing out a small booklet. It seems I
haven't, or at least not in the way I thought I might have. It turns
out that Koffice (part of the KDE linux desktop system) comes closest
in so much that it does at least allow two columns of text to be
printed in landscape mode on an A4 sheet. What it will not do is to
re-arrange the page layout so that the text is input logically, page
after page, and then it is printed with all the pages in the correct
order to form a booklet. I am having to do that manually, and it is
making my head spin. Before anyone mentions it I do have Microsoft
Word, and that may do it, or I do have Microsoft Publisher which is
even more likely to do what I want, but I have been trying to do this
without rebooting into Windows. One program I had high hopes for was
Scribus. That is an open source, freeware, program written to be very
much like Quark Express. Unfortunately it has some strange issues with
the CUPS printer drivers and will really only work when printing with a
genuine postscript printer. Without that it seems impossible to print
in landscape mode. Despite these problems I have worked out a way to do
what I want. It is a little more fiddly, but I am making good progress.
The sky is
beginning to get bright now and I can see that it is mostly cloudless.
That explains why it is very cold outside this morning. Nelly was
considering going out, but decided to sit on the doorstep with her tail
still inside. This prevented me from closing the door on her. While it
was open there was a really wicked cold draft playing around my bare
feet. Fortunately she made her mind up after a minute or two and I was
able to shut the door. She decided that it was too cold to go out!
I never did get
over to The Herne to return Ruth's DVDs. Perhaps I might have another
go this afternoon. I also have a CDR for Iain now. Yesterday I was
thinking of getting there at around 17.00, but by the time I would have
to leave I was too settled in and could not face the bus journey
through the rush hour traffic nor travelling on a bus with a bunch of
screaming schoolkids coming home from school. If, and it's a big IF, I
try again today I might go for something like a 15.00 arrival. For
reasons that I cannot even begin to guess at, yet alone explain, I find
it very difficult to go out unless it is in the morning, say before
13.00. Any later than that and I just want to relax for the rest of the
day. Sometimes even going out in the evening is a bit of a chore, but
sometimes it has to be done. I guess I am just a morning sort of person.
Last night I had
some darkly disturbing dreams of a political nature. It is very hazy
now, but I think I had several dreams which were only subtle variations
of each other. In was arguing with somebody, or maybe some persons,
that the idea of "ethnic cleansing" as a way of restoring the British
way of life was a contradiction. The memories are even hazier as to how
that argument started, but I think it was after I became concerned that
several TV personalities had started to mysteriously disappear (who
????). Like all dreams, if you don't make a conscious effort to
remember the details directly after waking up the details quckly fade
followed by the broad details soon after. Like many mornings the first
priority it to get to the toilet. If I haven't fixed in my mind what a
dream was about before I get to the toilet it is pretty much lost
forever. You could say that the ability to remember dreams is inversly
proportional to the need to get to the toilet. If it is habit rather
than desperation then the chances of remembering something is good, but
when you're busting it is hopeless. This morning it was very desirable,
but not urgent. Hence I managed to retain some of the broader details
of the dream, but not the real pictures and words.
|
Thursday 7th October 2004
|
|
06.30 BST
|
|
Weather - cloudy but dry after earlier rain
|
|
This
feels like an odd sort of morning. It's probably that I am still rather
tired after a late night. I came in after a pleasant night in the pub
with Kevin, Iain, and Howard, and then sat down to watch a recording of
The Bill. I think it was only 00.30 when I got into bed, and I was
asleep soon after that. So I have had a full six hours sleep. That
ought to be enough, but I may try for a little more.
Yesterday was a
little disappointing. It was supposed to be the very final deadline to
get the documents in for the house regeneration scheme, but I am still
waiting for one more letter to come through from my building society.
At this point I don't know whether I have blown it or not. I hope there
is still some chance for flexibility.
One highlight of
yesterday was seeing Patricia. It was not as good as it could have been
as we never got to the pub. She had to take her son to The Dentist and
couldn't stay late. We are going to try again next week to have a drink
in the Lewisham pub that she had suggested. It now seems almost
definite that it is the Weatherspoons pub whose name I always get
wrong. I think it is called
The Watch House, or something like that. I did hear some bad news from
Patricia that leaves me feeling slightly sad. It was nothing I didn't
really know already, but it still came as a shock. It doesn't actually
change anything. In fact it leaves things very static.
I am not sure
what my plans are for today. I am considering going to The Herne for a
drink, but I can't afford, nor do I want, a full session. One answer is
to go over there very late, but by late afternoon I feel I have settled
in for the night and can't be bothered with mucking about on buses.
Another downside is that the pub starts to fill up during the early
evening and it all starts to feel very impersonal when all you want is
a quiet drink. At this point I am very undecided what to do. One
possible excuse to go is that I have a couple of DVD's to return to
Ruth.
|
Wednesday 6th October 2004
|
|
07.15 BST
|
|
Weather - bright and clear
|
|
It
makes so much difference to describing the weather when I get up late.
It's hard to make out what is going on when it is still dark, but right
now it is perfect daylight. The sky is nearly all blue and the sun is
shining, although it looks a bit weak so near to the horizon. Maybe we
are in for a perfect morning, and if the luck holds out a pleasant
afternoon as well. There was one weather related oddity last night. At
around 22.30 (plus or minus 30 minutes) it sounded as if the wind gave
one very long, and very powerful sigh. Before that it was realtively
peaceful, and seemed to be afterwards. It was if one area had been
deflated and all the air was rushing in to re-inflate it again. It is
possible the sound was something else. I was tucked up in bed quietly
reading when I heard it. Out of all the possible sounds I can hear when
I'm in bed, noises from the roads, railways, planes, and people, it was
only really like wind. So that is what I assume it to be. I have never
heard just a single isolated gust before and it was just a little
spooky.
Yesterday in
The Herne was not as good as I expected it to be. It turned into
something of a mothers meeting. For a part of the afternoon I was
heavily outnumbered 3 to 1 with a load of nattering old woman. There
was a rare visitor to The Herne ( at least rare for the times when I am
there), Michelle, and then there was Max and Ruth. Michelle had brought
her 2 - 3 year old kid with her and Max spent quite a lot of time
mothering him. Meanwhile much of their conversation was about clothes
buying or other stuff that I do not comprehend. I think it was
Ruth who eventually remarked that I had a glazed look on my face and
suggested I move to the other end of the table and talk to her.
That did not work out too well as I had taken advantage of the numbing
effects of alcohol and did not attempt to fight it until it was too
late. I was also a bit miffed after Max had snapped at me after
she mistook a remark I made as being based on condemnation rather then
envy. I was quite glad to go home again when the time came.
Iain managed to get me home in time
to listen to the next installment of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The
Galaxy. Unfortunately I fell sleep half way through it, but it should
be safely stored on my PC upstairs where I can listen to it again
today. I think I heard enough to work out where the series is coming
from and going to. The first series, from over 20 years ago,
followed the first two books in the five part trilogy (!) fairly well,
but the next series went off at a complete tangent. Now, after all
those years, it seems to be back on track with the third book in the
trilogy of five. According to the BBC website there are two more series
planned for production after this one finishes. If they mostly follow
the books it will be enough time to do everything up until the end of
book five.
The most
important thing about today is waiting to see if the building society
letter, approving the regeneration work on my house, gets delivered.
Today is the deadline to get that in for approval for the work to go
ahead. The deadline was officially two days ago, but presumably there
are others like me who could not get all the paperwork together in
time. Even if I miss this deadline it is still probable that I will get
the work approved as there seems to be a little more flexibility in the
system than they publicly admit.
The other most important thing for today (and there can be two most
important things because they are about different things - so there !)
is that I should be going for a little drink with Patricia very early
this evening. I hope that this one will be more like a date in so much
as it will not be just in a very local pub. Last week she suggested we
pop into Lewisham where she had seen an attractive looking pub. I
suspect she means the Weatherspoons pub in the high street, but I have
my doubts as to whether she has ever actually been in it. I have been
in there once or twice, but can remember little about it. I am hoping
it has those little semi-private booths that are a feature of many
Weatherspoons pubs.
There are a few
others thing that should be happening today. This morning I have to go
and draw out some cash to buy some fags, lots of fags ! Early this
afternoon I should hopefully be buying those fags. At some point Albert
might drop by with a few trinkets recovered from scrap trains. Then
late in the evening it will be drinking time once again with Kevin,
Iain and Howard. Meanwhile I have to try and recover from over
drinking, and overeating yesterday.
|
Tuesday 5th October 2004
|
|
06.30 BST
|
|
Weather - dry and very cold
|
|
Yesterday
afternoon remained warm and sunny. I was walking around Catford at
17.30 quite comfortably in just a t-shirt. With very little cloud cover
the temperature has plunged very low this morning. It is not light
enough yet to be sure, but it looks as if there is only some high misty
clouds at the moment. It would be glorious if today was as good as
yesterday afternoon.
The man from
the builders was about 30 minutes late compared to his estimated time.
That was not too bad as it gave me plenty of time to spare after he
left again. He has now done the survey and did not even blink at some
of the cracks in the mortar around the back windows. That is a relief.
Provided I can get all the paperwork rounded up by tomorrow afternoon,
principally that from my building society, the work should start next
February.
As I intended I
popped into see Patricia. She was happy after having sorted out some of
her troubles over the weekend. We didn't go for a beer this time, but
are going for one on Wednesday.
Today I have
only one thing on the agenda - a drink in The Herne. I hope I can
control myself and not get too drunk. Last Friday I did go over the top
a bit. It was OK at the time, and felt good while I was doing the
drinking, but it did make the following hours rather unpleasant.
Perhaps I ought to try and get a lift home with Ivor rather than hang
around with Iain. The problem with that is it that the best bits are
often happening just as Ivor is leaving.
|
Monday 4th October 2004
|
|
14.00 BST
|
|
Weather - fluffy clouds and sunshine
|
|
This
morning it was pouring with rain, and yet now the sun is out and most
of the thick clouds have disperesed leaving just odd patches of fluffy
ones behind. This seems slightly at odd with the weather forecast
yesterday, although it did say the worst of the weather would be to the
west of the country.
I went out, in
the rain, to go to the building society, and to Tesco's. Outside the
building society I bumbed into Debbie, the admistrator for the "Gateway
To Work" school. I asked after Patricia and apparently she was very
happy. She had some serious things to work out over the weekend, and it
appears to have worked out satifactorily. Providing the man from the
builders comes to see me at around the appointed time I should be able
to nip out and see Patricia before she goes home tonight.
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06.30 BST
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Weather - wet and windy
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It
is a classic sort of worst Monday ever sort of thing. It is raining
fairly hard, and has been all night. It is also fairly windy, and has
been all night. The wind has not been that strong, but a few gusts may
have been strong enough to knock a few trees on the railway lines, and
if not that, then the leaves will be all over the rails. I am glad I am
not a commuter this morning. It may be that all the trains are running
smoothly - I haven't checked, but it does feel like the sort of morning
where people will be delayed getting into work. And when they do arrive
they will be all wet and soggy and rather cross. Although I do not have
to go to work this morning I am not immune to the horrible weather. I
did want to go to the building society and to Tesco's this morning, and
possibly call in on Patricia as well. In an hour or so it will be light
and I will be able to assess the state of the weather with more
certainty and work out what I will be doing this morning.
There is one
more aspect of today that will need a little preparation. At around
14.30 the man from the firm doing the "regeneration" work will be
calling round to pick up the paperwork and maybe do an initial survey.
So I ought to do a little cleaning and tidying. It is not worth doing
too much as anything beyond a superficial clean and tidy up could takes
weeks, and not just the hour or two I have available.
Just one more
thing comes to me that I will record here this morning (unless anything
else comes to mnd before I finish this bit). It concerns a dream. It is
not the entire dream because that was too complicated to remember, let
alone describe. At some time in the night I dreamt that I had just come
out of the multi story carpark, where Tesco's and The Ram are located,
and it was either snowing, or about to. I looked up into the sky and
could see these really stark white clouds that looked like snow drifts
just hanging there in space. I ought to add that it was night time.
These clouds only obscured about a third of the sky and the stars were
really bright in the spaces. I could see the constellation Orion
shining really brightly, although it was in the northern part of the
sky instead of the southern. The thing that really sticks in my mind
was just how bright and sharply focussed the view was. Even the clouds
had sharply defined edges and some detail inside them. The sky was
really black as well. There was no light pollution and there were
hundreds, no, thousands of stars to be seen. It was, in fact, very
beautiful. For anyone living outside the city, and the associated light
pollution, it may not have been such an awesome sight, but compared to
the usual night sky in Catford it was magnificent.
There is just
one more thing that I remember to add here. It also is to do with a
dream. I can only remember one single freeze frame from that dream. I
was lying in bed next to someone whose face I cannot recall seeing. In
fact all I can recall seeing was one breast, in a bra, as seen from a
low perspective over its adjacent shoulder. Would the owner of that
breast please get in touch, we have things to talk about (and do !).
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Sunday 3rd October 2004
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06.30 BST
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Weather - cold and damp
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Last
night I went to sleep sometime between 22.00 and 23.00, but I am not
sure when exactly. I never really did go back to sleep after being up
in th early hours of yesterday morning. I suppose I may have
managed an odd 10 minutes here, and an odd ten minutes there, but by
08.00 I had had enough of trying to sleep so I got up. During the
afternoon I did have one, or maybe two very short naps, so it was sort
of surprising that I managed to keep awake until so late last
night. I still feel a little sleepy so I will almost certainly be
going back to bed once I have finished here on the computer. There is
one thing that could stand in the way of that - I feel very
hungry. I went to sleep feeling hungry, but I would have thought
that eating two tins of Heinz spaghetti with chicken meatballs would
have been enough to keep me going for the rest of the day.
Yesterday was a
strange day. The lack of sleep put me in an odd mood. I didn't want to
do much, and indeed I ended up doing very little. One task was to
do some clearing out of my workshop. There is so much accumulated junk
up there that it must weigh a ton. I strongly suspect it is the floor
being totally overloaded that is causing some of the damage to the
house. I have now filled the wheelie bin up to the maximum I dare
considering it will not be emptied until next Thursday. Once it is
emptied then I will have a similar load to fill it with. This could go
on for several weeks. In the mean time I will have to try and bring
some of the heavier items downstairs. There are two very heavy, and
basically redundant pieces of test equipment up there that I may have
to dump in the back garden. Both are pretty much obsolete, but I guess
I could auction them on e-bay or something if I were so inclined.
Unfortunately I am not as I could not be bothered to try and arrange
the shipping of an item the size of a 22 inch TV and weighing just as
much, and possibly more.
The sky is
beginning to light up now and is looking very red. I assume that we
will have another day similar to yesterday. The weather was very
variable yesterday. On average it was just gloomy, but occasionally
there would be a heavy shower of rain, and that always seemed to be
followed by a little bright sunshine.
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Saturday 2nd October 2004
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04.35 BST
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Weather - dry, slightly breezy
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I
have been awake for the last hour and there seems to be little prospect
of geting to sleep again. I am not exactly wide awake, but the
combination of lots of beer and a lot of pizza seems to have left me
feeling rather uncomfortable. I did get 3, or maybe even 4 hours of
sleep before I woke up. Since then my bed has felt too uncomfortable to
get back to sleep. Either it is too hot, or too cold. Every crease in
the bottom sheet feels like laying across a log, and my pillows feel
like they are stuffed with rocks. So rather than fight that lot I have
decided to come down and play with the computer. Perhaps an hour down
here and I will be knackered enough to go to sleep again.
I am quite
surprised how lucid all the rubbish I wrote last night was. It was hard
work concentrating on whet I was writing but it seems to have turned
out OK. It was a little more raunchy than my usual style, but I can't
deny that it is not all true. (I can't think how to reword that without
the unintentional double negative)
So that I don't
have to start the third paragraph with another "I", I have written this
redundant sentence. I have just realised that it the first saturday of
the month. That means I ought to be out drinking again today with my
old workmates in Elmers End. I didn't make last month as I was
partially financially embarressed, and partially on a mission of mercy.
I can't think of any reason I will not be going this month unless I
sleep throught it after a night wide awake.
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Friday 1st October 2004
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21.10 BST
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weather - drizzle
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It's
a Friday night. Is everyone out enjoying themselves ? Apparently so, or
so the broadcasters seem to think. I have recently come home from a
whole afternoons entertainment and now I want to sit back and be
entertained in my own living room. BBC TV 4 seem to be doing the best
job. They are broadcasting a PJ Harvey gig at the moment. Before
tonight I didn't even know that PJ Harvey was a women. She is quite
good looking, and seems to be making a semi pleasant racket. It is
almost, but not quite, to my taste at this particular time.
One of the
problems at the moment is that I am fairly intoxicated, but with some
effort I seem to be in charge of this keyboard without too many
problems. It is not so simple as that though, as it is taking quite a
lot of effort to get this reasonably readable.
One of the
drinkers at The Herne today (because that is where I have been all
afternoon) was Maxine. She was so convinced that I was totally pissed
that she was looking forward to see what rubbish I would write tonight.
Unfortunately it doesn't quite work like that. Only those who read this
page tonight can be sure that I have not corrected anything. At this
point in time it feels as if there is nothing to correct, but there is
nothing to prove that I have not done a cosmetic job on this tomorrow
morning. If anyone who knows Max is reading this prior to, say, 07.00
on the 2nd of October, can you cut-n-paste this into something like
Notepad, and print it out so that Max knows this is genuine.
It is not just
me who is paranoid about this. Max firmly thinks that I will say
something outrageous on here tonight. If she wants me to say that Ruth
was looking very sexy and I would have liked to take her to bed I will,
and now have. If Max wanted me to say that I thought she was looking
very sexy and that I would like to take her to bed then consider it
said. The truth is that I would love to take either of them to bed, and
given the opportunity I would, but I still would like to get to know
Patricia better, and to take her to bed as my first choice.
There you are
Max, I have said something outrageous after getting pissed ! It
is all true , but I think I would have prefered to be slightly
more discrete. With one touch of a button (figuratively speaking)
I will upload this, and once it has been uploaded, and effectively in
the public domain) I will not edit it or delete it. It is as it stands.
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07.00 BST
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Weather - cold and dry, 50% cloud
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At
the top of this new page I have boldly asserted that the clocks change
to GMT on the 25th of this month. I don't really know if this is true
or not. I think it is true, but it may just be me hallucinating.
Anyway, there's a few weeks to go before I have to worry about it. At
some point it may magically change to the correct date if I find it is
wrong.
The day is
getting lighter now and my estimate of 50% cloud may have been a bit
optimistic. It looks more like 75%, and the clouds are tinged with red.
This suggests that there is bad weather on its way. It is difficult to
know what the weather is doing lately. It is just so variable. The sun
we had yesterday, in the latter part of the afternoon, seemed to warm
things up a bit. I seemed too hot in bed last night, and woke up still
feeling rather warm, and yet downstairs it feels a bit chilly. I am
pretty certain I will be in The Herne this afternoon, but I doubt it
will be beer garden weather. It is more likely that it will be drizzly
by then.
I have come to the conclusion that I am waffling and that I
haven't got a lot to say this morning. Anything relevant to yesterday
is already written as the final part of Septembers page. So all this
drivel is just to try and get this months page off to a good start.
Perhaps I had better stop while I am ahead (or something).
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