Finally I am awake at a sensible time, but I still feel very tired. I wouldn't be surprised if I grabbed another hour of sleep after I have finished here. The main priority for today is to spend as much time in my workshop as the heat permits. The temperature today is expected to peak at 30° C, maybe even a degree higher, and a few degrees higher than yesterday.

 Tonight should find me in The Ram for a pint or two (and back to another late night).

 Another very late night last night, and hence another late morning. Also another brief entry for today as I really ought to crack on and do some stuff. Today, after going out to buy some catfood, I expect to spend a lot of time in my workshop.

 Another late start to the day after a very late night, and getting up in the middle of the night to check on the computer. However I am up, washed and dressed. Also I may have fixed a minor leak on the toilet cistern, and done a little computer work.

 Today could be the first day in several where I can sit back and relax a little. I still have some neglected stuff in my workshop to do, but it is going to be a hot day, and I do feel tired and exhausted after two nights of disrupted sleep.

  Today is the day of reckoning ! My dole was paid in today so I dared to look at my bank account. It was pleased that I was very slightly better off than I thought. Only slightly though, so I still cannot afford to be complacement.

 A lot of today has already passed, and I am still writing. So far I have written a couple of long e-mails, read a load of e-mails, paid two bills, and got stuck on the phone for over 30 minutes.

 My next move is probably to have some breakfast, and then I want to get into my studio. Finally, after all that, I want to get into my workshop for an hour or two.

 During the course of the day I spent far longer in my studio than I thought I would have to. I still managed to spend at least an hour in my workshop. It was while I was relaxing with some food in the evening that Kevin called with the surprise suggestion that we go for a drink that night after having missed Wednesday night. We both tried to see if Iain could make it, but he seemed doubtful. In the end he didn't make it, but Kevin seemed happy enough to buy me some beers in return for a few DVD's. We met a little later than usual at 21.00 so only got through 3 pints. I intended to offer some money towards of the rounds, but I never got a chance. The surprise within the surprise was that not only did I get beer, but I got a packet of fags as well. It was such luxury this morning not to have to fumble around with cigarette papers, and half fill my bed with tobacco, as I had my first fag of the day !

My intended schedule for today is to spend the morning in my workshop, and then the afternoon in my studio. It may not end up like that, but it is a start.

 It's a bright sunny start to the day, but a change is on it's way. The forecast is for more rain and strong winds. I think my body can detect the change in pressure already. I have a sort of headachey feeling.

 Today I need to spend even more time in my workshop. I am on the home straight at last, and I can't wait to finish what I am doing so I can move on to something else. This project has taken more time than I thought it would.

 Tonight, all being well, will be boozing night at The Ram. I haven't heard from Kevin yet, but Iain has confirmed he will be there.

  After a grey rainy day yesterday the weather is forecast to be bright and warm today. Maybe this will inspire me to get on with more worthwhile things. I need to pop out and get some Tesco Diet Cola, and maybe a few other odds and sods (garlic maybe ?), then after that I really ought to do what I didn't do yesterday - get into my workshop.

  Today I really ought to be spending some time in my workshop, but there are some other distractions that will need a bit of attention. One distraction is trying to copy an 832MB file from an external USB hard disk onto my video editing PC. Something funny is going on as it keeps crashing for some unknown reason. Perhaps it is because it was formatted on a Linux PC and Windows XP has gone all huffy !

 With most of my chores out of the way, except for laundry, I can pick and choose what I do today. I think I will probably spend a couple of hours in my workshop, but aside from that I may just spend a lazy day drifting between anything that takes my fancy.

  Today I will be concentrating less on my workshop, and more on all the other things I need to do. There is the usual Saturday morning laundry to take care of, and some shopping to get that I should have got yesterday. Then I really must spend some time in my studio. I have been attempting this for a few days now, but today I will do it !

 Rain was forecast to start at 22.00 yesterday, but this morning it is still dry. It can't be far away though. There are loud rumbles of thunder coming from some distance away, but getting closer. And just as I write this, the first drops of rain are falling.

 As the mist slowly lifts it looks as if today is going to be another fine hot day. Maybe too hot. My day today will probably be similar to yesterday. I want to spend even more time in my workshop. Before that I have a couple of e-mails to write in response to e-mails from Bear and Patricia. If I can find the time to relax, and get into the right frame of mind, I want to take the first tentative steps in learning how to program Microchip "PIC" chips. I know a lot of the theory already, but I have never worked in assembly language before. So it will be a bit of a steep learning curve at first. One other thing I ought to do today is to spend a couple of hours in my studio.

 Yesterday started very cool, but soon warmed up. By the end of the day it was very hot. This did slow me down a bit, but I did manage another hour or so in my workshop, but I got distracted by a desire to draft out some modifications to the schematic on the computer.

 I find it hard to account for all the time yesterday. Maybe some of the things I did took longer than I imagined. Apart from the unknown time in my workshop, and the unknown time drawing diagrams, I did spent another unknown amount of time editing, and restoring some audio. That leaves an unknown amount of time that I cannot account for. I can account for another hour when I watched The Bill, and I did go to bed early. It is strange that I should feel so vague about how I spent the time yesterday. However it is obvious that I had sufficient to do that I cannot remember feeling bored at any time.

 It is unusually quiet at the moment. For the last 5 or 10 minutes there have been no cars, trains, or planes.  All that can be heard is the birds singing. It's nice. It is also nice and cool. Later on it will end up hotter than yesterday

 Today I want to spend even more time in my workshop. There is a little less urgency in what I am doing as there is a holdup with some of the parts I need, but I want to get as ahead as much as I can. I'll also spend a little time in my studio where I have an audio file to reprocess.

 I must spend some more time in my workshop today. At some point in the day, possibly this morning, I will pop out and finally try and remember to buy some shower gel. Any other happenings today will be truly spontaneous.

 This morning, and as for as much of the afternoon I can stand it, I should be in my workshop. There will be a few interuptions. I have a letter to write to the Job Centre, and I'll also have to go out and post it. I may take a break, or two, to burn a couple of CD's or a DVD.

 Today, being a day of rest, will possibly be the day I finally pull my finger out and do something worthwhile. I have, or appear to have, had a good lay in this morning. That is not actually an accurate assesment. I woke up at 03.15 (approx) after having some sort of bad dream. I have no idea what the dream was about, but after going out for a pee, I tried to get back to sleep and failed. My brain suddenly woke up and started thinking about things. It got stuck in a loop while I was mentally composing a reply a Job Centre query. They have written to ask why I did not apply for a job I enquired about, and threatening that I may be in breach of my Job Seekers Agreement by not doing so. The basic answer is that the job turned out to be beyond my capabilities when I looked into it further. I think I have worked out a way of replying that will show my contempt for such a stupid question, but without it being obviously disrespectful. Maybe they won't realise my subtleties, but it will give me some joy when I have finally written out the reply and sent it off.

 I got back to sleep around 04.00 and slept right through to 09.00. Since then I have washed and dressed, as well as found a couple of blank mini disks to record a short wave radio station on. Unfortunately all my computers tend to cause serious interference when directly connected to a radio. So it's back to analogue recording - well almost. Mini Disk is digital, but the little MD Walkman feels like a little cassette recorder. The station in question is Alices Restaurant. It was once a land based pirate radio station, but just for today is broadcasting legally through a high power Rumainian transmitter that they have hired. It is on 9290KHz until 16.00 (or maybe 18.00) tonight. Between 12.00 and 14.00 one of my old friends, Nigel, is the DJ.

 I really should be spending all day in my workshop. However I have laundry and a bit of shopping to do (the shopping I didn't do yesterday). How the day actually turns out is anyones guess.

 I was not very happy yesterday. In the morning I received a letter from my bank. I have been charged £34 for a bounced direct debit. So my financial position is far worse than I thought. Even Friday's dole money will not get me in the black, but it will get close. Fortunately most of the monthly bills are paid, and next fortnights dole will go in before the beginning of September when the next round of bills starts. With the little bit of money I am expecting to get from Lee I could have a fairly comfortable September, but I will still have to be very careful, and for the next fortnight I am back to being totally grounded with only about £35 on my Tesco Club Card to sustain me. Most of that £35 will go on catfood and tobacco, so it's back to a very bland, high carbohydrate diet for me.

 On top of the worry about my bank account, but really part of it, was another "threatening" letter from the electricity board saying they wanted more money. Some time ago I tried to change my standing order from £42 to the requested £65 a month. For some reason I could not change it via online banking so I let it stand. Last month I paid up the difference as a one off payment, but yesterday I phoned them up to say it was their fault as I was waiting to hear ow much I should be paying now I am on their dual fuel tarrif (gas and electricity). They accepted this and reviewed my past electricity consumption. For electriccity they said that about £50 a month was all that was required, and not the £65 they had been asking for. So I have arranged that I will be setting up a new standing order, if the bank can't change the existing one, of £60 a month to start being paid later this month. Now we are both more or less happy. They are happy that they will (ought) to be getting the money they want. While I am sort of happy that they will stop nagging me. I will be paying £8 more a month, but will not have to keep topping up the underpayments (£27 last month).

 This story is actually being told out of order, but in order of importance. All the negotiations with the electricity board, and closing the account with British Gas took place late in the afternoon. For much of the morning, and into the early part of the afternoon I just moped around unispired to do anything. Soon after 15.00 I went out to the Job Centre to sign on at 15.30. Once there I was asked how my job searching was going. This is pretty much part of the standard interrogation, and in theory, unless you can satisfy them that you are actively seeking work your benefits can be stopped. I told her about the job I had applied for online, and showed them a printout from a page of their own website with a job I was interested in. It is rare for jobs found there to have any contact details, or the name of the firm, and the details have to be found from the Job Centre itself or via their phone line. She looked up the job and told me it had been suspended. At that point I was able to say that my job searching was going very badly as the job had appeared to be available when I had checked a few hours earlier. So I asked if she could at least reveal the name of the company so I could approach them with a spec letter. That was not allowed so I said that my job seeking had almost ground to a halt, and that it was their fault. This was almost humourously accepted (as intended) and the interogation came to a halt. The good news is that because of the upcoming bank holiday, and a staff and office reorganisation, I do not have to sign on again until 20th September.

 It was straight after coming home from the Job Centre that I tackled the Gas and Electricity boards. After that was done I felt totally exhausted, and could do no more than lie down and do some quiet reading. An hour or so later I made some food and watched the 18.00 news on TV while eating it. The options on TV after that were not very inspiring so I went back to reading. By 21.00 I was actually in bed, but I continued to read until sometime after 22.00, perhaps nearer 23.00, when I turned out the light and quickly fell asleep. I'm sure I had some peculiar dreams about LAN cables, but the memories are now too hazy to be recalled.

 This morning I think I have more energy, and with my finances now stable, although still balanced on a knife edge, I may be able to concentrate on doing something useful.

 I have applied for a job this morning. I am pretty certain I won't hear another thing about it. The job is an I.T. job as a 1st Line desktop support engineer at a "busy and trendy" media agency. Trendy is almost certainly a code word meaning they are after a very much younger man. Still, you never know....................

 I spent many hours rebuilding my PC that is called Greysky yesterday. This is my favourite spare PC that uses a Pentium III 450MHz processor. Originally it had a removable hard disk carrier with a choice of two hard disks. One was Wndows ME on a 4GB drive, and the other was Xandros on a 6.4GB drive. The rebuild was to take out the hard disk carrier and install two permanent 10GB drives. One now has Windows ME on it, and the other Xandros in a dual boot arrangement. Nothing else has changed, but this time Xandros has not picked up the PCI SCSI card with a SCSI CD writer attached to it. One possible reason is that Windows has set the SCSI card to share resources with another card, maybe the sound card. Another day I will see if I can persuade Windows to use some other i/o, irq, etc for the SCSI card and then see if Xandros can find it. Although it is a little annoying that Xandros has failed me in this respect, it is of little consequence. The free, "Open Circulation", version of Xandros limits CD burning speed to x2. So it would probably be quicker to copy the files I want to burn to the Windows partition and burn them using the Windows application Nero.

 Besides the advantages of dual booting, without having to swap hard drives over, the object of the exercise was to liberate the smaller hard disks to use on the Pentium Pro PC which cannot reliably detect disks bigger than about 8GB. Some other day I will retry Vector Linux on one of these smaller disks and see if it can get the boot sector correct. I may also try an old version of SuSe Linux (6.3 ?)  that I have on an old magazine cover disk somewhere.  I have read suggestions that SuSe is able to cope quite well with low memory provided I select a low end window manager instead of going for the heavyweight options of KDE of Gnome.

 I didn't seem to get up to much else yesterday - apart from a few little odd jobs. I did get into my workshop, but all I did was to replace the broken plug on a keyboard. I did a little shopping for vegetable (and some junk food). I also bought some cheap sliced pepperoni thinking it might go well in a rice dish. Although not unpleasant it turned out to be very unexciting.

 Dreaming about being on a treadmill suggests monotony and boredom. That may be true for a normal vertical treadmill like the wheel in a hamster cage, but what does it mean when you dream that you want to get on a horizontal treadmill and run around fast enough to defy gravity ?  The memories of my dreams are fading fast now, but I do remember some scenario like that. There was a tie in with a Sci-Fi book I was reading before going to sleep. I had two human assistants/trainers from the planet Pyrrus (surface gravity twice Earth), and whose names were rather bizarely Mandrake and Redhat (Linux distros !!). They were trying to teach me the technique of running fast enough around what was more or less a circular room, and to end up running on the wall. I can't remember if I ever achieved it, but I think it seemed fun at the time.

 Yesterday went by quite pleasantly. I spent a little time in the morning exploring some Linux options. Initially I wanted to try and install the fwm95 window manager in the experimental installation of Redmond Linux. I found some "howtos" on how to do it, but fell at the first hurdle - "fwm95 requires libraries so and so", in turn those libraries probably require something else as well. So I did some research for lightweight Linux distributions. The particular requirement was to work with only 48M pf ram with a full graphical interface. Two possibilities arose (there are probably others). These were Puppy Linux and Vector Linux. So I download both of them and had a play. Puppy Linux was quite good, but is a live CD distribution that does not install to a blank disk. It makes its home on part of another operating systems file system. Running just from the CD was slow and unresponsive, but I did like the way it worked. It had one major flaw though - it did not find my ISA sound card.

 So next was Vector Linux. I quite liked that. The installation went smoothly, and it did find all the bits in the computer correctly, even the sound card was correctly identified and configured (probably). Funny thing was I never heard it make any sound !  At times it did feel a bit lumpy, and even froze solid once or twice. The major problem was related to lilo, the boot manager. It was probably because the BIOS could not see the full size of the disk. It was a 10GB disk, but the BIOS reported it as an 8GB disk. On booting up all I could get was the first "l" of lilo followed by half a screenful of "40"'s repeated over and over again. As a temporary solution I was able to boot from the installation CD, and then transfer to the hard disk from there. I am now in a bit of a quandry with several options available to me. The simple solution is to use the installation of Windows 98 that is still safely on its own hard disk. It makes everything in that PC work correctly, or I could perevere in getting Linux working correctly on it.  A smaller hard disk would almost certainly solve the lilo problem, but I am tempted to put the Pentium II mother board back in the case and try Vector Linux again. Of course all this is a load of fuss for a PC that is near the bottom of the pecking order of my PC's and is unlikely to be used for anything serious.

 Later in the afternoon/evening I was tempted back into my studio. Using modern digital processes I have an amazing selection of audio tools that I could only have dreamed of 10 years ago. Despite that whole arsenal of tools I have yet to find anything that will remove an offensive Village People song from within the middle of someone elses music mix !

 Yesterday was quite a successful day. I did all that I predicted. I did my laundry, emptied Nelly's litter tray, and went shopping, and later on spent a lot of the rest of the day up in my studio.

 Shopping was a joy with my Club Card Plus having credit on it. I bought 3 types of staples. These were bread, potatoes and rice. The rice was a sudden inspiration as I was walking around the store. There are tasty things that can be done with rice and some curry powder. I also bought a few little luxury items like a 50p bar of chocolate, some "value" crisps, and some pre-cooked spicy chicken slices that were very nice when cooked as part of a spicy rice dish last night. As well as a few other bits and pieces like vegetable I also bought a 6 pack of "Athurs" cat food. It is cheap variety that the cats later told me was not totally to their taste. Maybe the economics of it were not a good idea after all.

 Once I had satiated myself with some of the food I bought, I  went up to the studio, initially, to do some experimentation. I tried to burn the same audio to four different makes of blank CD. Although the four types were of different manufacture, only one actually had a brand name on it, and that was something unheard of. The four types all played back perfectly in both CD players. However one did seem to take a little longer when seeking between tracks. I tried burning another set of audio tracks on another of those disks, but that time I did the burning at half speed. That one seemed perfect. In the light of this I will definitely avoid using "5 Star" disks for audio in the future, although maybe if I burnt them at 1/4 speed they might be OK.

 I stayed in the studio until roughly 20.00, although I did take a few short breaks. Thanks to the wonder of modern digital editing I managed to pull success from what was a disastrous recording session. The ability to edit down to the nearest millisecond, and retry it if it was not right, is a fantastic luxury for anyone who remembers using splicing tape and a razor blade on 1/4 magnetic tape.

 I came down feeling hungry after that session and so set about cooking my spicy chicken and peas pilau rice.  It is ages since I last cooked any rice, but I have not totally lost my touch.  I say not totally because if I had a chance to cook that dish all over again I would have added about another tablespoon of water. The rice was perfectly cooked, but just a tiny bit dry. Other than that it was delicious. The dryness may have been because it was a fat and oil free recipe. It is possible that I may do a rice dish for tonight, but sadly I have no more chicken to put in it, and sadly I don't think bacon would quite work - but I may try it anyway !

 I didn't really like yesterday at all. I can't really concentrate on anything during the day when I am waiting for a specific time to arrive. In this case it was the hospital appointment at 15.28. So until it was time to leave here I just pottered around flitting from one thing to another and feeling sort of bored. At the hospital my eyes checked out OK, which is what I was expecting, and I will be recalled again in a years time for another check.

 It was on the way home from the hospital that things went from bad to worse. I called in on the Aldi supermarket on my way home and attempted to buy £15 worth of stuff on my debit card. The transaction was refused, presumably for lack of funds, and I had to abandon my shopping and come home empty handed. This was a bit of a shock as I thought I had a little spare cash in my account. So instead of having something very tasty for supper I had to resort to curried potatoes with green beans. It has left me feeling a little pissed off.

 Today, or tomorrow, there should be £70 available on my Tesco Club Card Plus. Unless that transaction, on the 1st of the month, failed through lack of funds. To avoid further embarrasment I shall go to Tesco today and attempt to buy about £2 worth of catfood on my Club Card Plus. If that fails today I can afford to pay cash for it. If it goes through OK I may return later in the day to buy a few staples for myself, but I think it will have to be more boring stuff like more potatoes and frozen peas. I may be relying on a lot of that £70 for tobacco  for the next week or two so I'll have to keep the cost of groceries to the barest minimum.

 I am not sure what I am doing up at this time of the morning. Last night I was in the pub, and after a decent drink came home to watch the late night showing of The Bill on ITV 3. Somewhere within earshot of my bed I had an alarm call at 06.00. Just for a change this was a quartz one instead of a fur and whiskers one. I think my watch, which was in my trouser pocket, was set to sound at 06.00 - a legacy of days when I had to get up to go to work. So basically, this morning, I have the sort of hangover that is not painful, but feels like every effort is like wading through treacle, and I could have done with more sleep.

 I think that yesterday was a good day, although I did read some worrying news. I didn't do much in the morning, but I spent an enjoyable afternoon in my studio.

 It was shortly before going out to the pub that I had a quick flick through BBC teletext to see what was going on in the world. I am very concerned by one news item. Apparently someone associated with the London bombers has been charged with withholding information that could lead to the arrest of one of the actual bombers. He may be a despicable bastard, but leaving that aside, since when was it a criminal offence not to grass up your mates, family members etc ? Is this another indicator that we are on the slippery slope to the Orwellian nightmare ?  What today may be special circumstances becomes common place tomorrow. How long will it be before it is a criminal offence not to turn in your mates for any offence they may have committed ? I doubt I know anyone who has not pulled some stroke at one time or another, even if that was just as trivial as driving at 35mph in a 30mph limit. With the miracles of modern leechs I could be alive on this planet for another 50 years (if I ever do sign up to a doctor again), and suddenly the future does not look too rosy. Perhaps not signing up to the proper care and maintenence of the human body is not such a bad idea after all.

 I almost achieved all that I intended to do yesterday, but I could have done more. I did a lot of workshop type stuff, but did it while watching TV. As I learnt new and exciting things (or maybe not) from repeats on the Discovery channel, I was busy winding coils. What I should have done then is to get into my workshop and solder those coils into place. My excuse for not doing so was that my fingers were aching, and I had a phone call from Jodie to say she wanted to come over and use the studio. So I decided to break for lunch before setting things up in the studio for her.

 From then on time seemed to fly, and I did remarkably little to fill in that time. Later in the evening I spent some time in the studio myself. Breaking only to watch "Yes Minister" on BBC 4. By about 22.00 I went to bed with a book intending to read until 23.00 at the latest. Unfortunately I got carried away and did not turn out the light until midnight when my eyes were going blurry, and my eyelids drooping. I was asleep very soon after, but mysteriously woke up at around 04.00. I think it may have been a fox in the garden that woke me up. Last night was the first time in a week, or more, that I have slept with the bedroom window open. So any sound from outside would appear louder than it has done lately. It is only 6 or 7 weeks after midsummers day and it is remarkable how much daylight we are losing. Just a few weeks back it would have been light, or almost light at 04.00, but this morning it was very dark.

 I didn't achieve much of anything particular yesterday. It was a Sunday, and like God, I chose to mainly rest. Unlike God I could not rest all the time. He didn't have hungry cats to shop for ! So soon after Tesco's opened I was in there buying catfood, and a certain amount of human food too. The one thing I should have bought was toilet paper. Unfortunately I didn't realise I was running out. I am down to my last roll, but that should be good for a week unless I am lucky enough to eat something like a Vindaloo !

 Later in the day I spent several hours in my studio recording some stuff, and processing some other stuff. While some of the processing was going on, or more precisely, waiting for the computer to finish the pocessing, I started searching for a specific old magazine cover disk.  I knew that somewhere I had a copy of a "forbidden" (in an Orwellian way) Linux distribution. This was Caldera Linux which was released by SCO. There is a whole pile of lawsuits going on between SCO and various companies over alleged copyright infringements. These all relate to whether SCO owns part of the Linux Kernel. As such, SCO are hated by most of the Linux community. This site is as good as any at explaining what is going on. Eventually I found the disk I was after. It was actually a DVD rom disk which I think is bootable, although I have not tried it as yet. I have no real reason for wanting to try it except that it is there (and the fact that it is "forbidden").

 One other thing that happened yesterday was that I had the potential for a house fire.  While tapping away at this PC in the morning, I could smell a fishy sort of smell. Initially I thought it was some old catfood going off, but I had not put out any fish based catfood for sometime. The other thing that smells like that is an overheating 13A mains plug. After a little investigation I found that the plug for the Washing machine was too hot to touch. Unfortunately the water pressure round here is low because of a few minor leaks in the surrounding roads. This reduces the temperature of the water from the multi-point boiler here. Because of that the washing machine is having to use it's own heater, and this draws a heavy current. I quickly turned off the socket and withdrew the plug (not easy with a very hot plug in a confined space). Investigation showed that a screw that connects the fuse holder prongs to the connection block was loose. I tightened it up, but I was still concerned that the metalwork would be corroded and still not make a good connection. So one of my other purchases from Tesco was a brand new plug. Perhaps today I will open up the old plug, clean it up, and keep it for something that consumes far less power.