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Year View| Summary| Highlights| January 2004 (Month View)
Sep ‘03 | Oct ‘03 | Nov ‘03 | Dec ‘03 | Jan ‘04 Feb ‘04 | Mar ‘04 | Apr ‘04 | May ‘04 |
01.01.2004 – Thursday 1 January – New Year’s Day
- Midday
- • I guess it’s the two thousand and fourth day of our Lord, or thereabouts, and the world still hasn’t ended – perhaps next year, perhaps tonight, who knows. So far, it has been a hot, moist, humid and damp but not raining year, and I’ve been able to do things for the first time “all year”, all day – but that got sort of clichéd a few years back now.
- IRC
- • I felt all righteously indignant at the stupidity exhibited by the majority of humankind, but in particular the admin of Bohica, so thought I’d satiate my indignation with a pointless email.
Hello,
It has recently come to my attention that DCC (filesend) is blocked on at least Bohica. It appeared to work on the other servers I tried. I believe, as is rather obvious, that DCC is an integral part of IRC, and that blocking it is a stupid step towards a molly-coddled network that does not put its users first.
I’m not sure what the logic behind this is, perhaps an attempt to protect users from the transferral of viruses? Regardless, I’d like to officially complain and request that either DCC be re-enabled on Bohica or the server be removed from Austnet. DCC is direct client to client, it does not affect server bandwidth and is not the server’s responsibility to attempt to control or limit.
I, for one, do not wish to have my IRC limited on the off chance that someone may send something undesirable. It is a case of ruining it for everyone for the sakes of a few.
Please de-link or re-enable DCC on Bohica. - 3:30am
- • I’ve been for a walk out to the halfway spot, then up to Dad’s, then back in the dark barefoot on the very sharp cracked gravel – so my feet hurt. Dad wasn’t there but I met him just after I’d left, driving back, so spent a while there talking before heading back here, eating some two minute noodles, and watching “The Majestic”, which was better than I was expecting. I’m now tired and needing sleep, and a bit fed up with people who seem unable to fathom anything logically, and end up distorting the truth so badly that nothing is even distinguishable anymore – and they don’t even seem to know they’ve done it.
- • “I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
02.01.2004 – Friday 2 January – Mum’s Birthday
- Morning
- • I woke up a bit earlier than usual, excited to give Mum her present, but just missed her as she went to town. I then became tired and lay down again.
- Afternoon
- • I set up Mum’s new stereo and Mum enjoyed playing her music. It seems to be all good, which I guess it would be, being brand new.
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking, I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC; I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. To my astonishment and distress, he threw it into my microwave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said “Do not worry, it is unharmed.” After a few minutes, he took the CD out, gave it to me and said, “Take a close look at it.” To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first, I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole, I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F
2066696E64207468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20
616C6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D
“I cannot read the fiery letters,” I said. “No,” he said, “but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:”
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. - Evening
- • Jade drove over and I took my camera, with the wedding photos I’d taken at Shan’s wedding, back over to Joneses and picked up some photos Shan had sent Jade from Thailand, and then drove up to Shan’s place where, with much trouble and waiting, I managed to burn three copies of my and their photos onto CD’s.
- Night
- • Mum and I listened to some of the music I’ve got on this PC on her new stereo, and then watched “Black Robe”, which is almost too realistic to be enjoyable, but impressed with its realism, realism of a level not often seen nowadays with all the politically correct garbage surrounding indigenous peoples and their histories.
- 2:06am
- • Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mystic’s Dream”, from her “The Mask and Mirror” album is astounding, and reminds me of “The Lord of the Rings”, in which I believe it is featured. I can’t even begin to describe it – it’s like perfect music, and on that note (no pun intended), I shall retire for the night.
- Comment by kathryn – Monday 25 October 2004, 10:00 AM
- Loreena McKennitt's heaps cool. I was going to sing Come by the hills for the HSC music but then i bailed.
- Comment by Ned – Tuesday 26 October 2004, 1:07 AM
- I agree. Some of my favourite music at the moment is hers.
- Comment by kathryn – Saturday 6 November 2004, 7:30 PM
- he he he you wrote back. It's funny cause i expected to comment and then for it to get lost in cyber space. I only have one of her CD's at the moment from my old music teacher so by the sounds of things i should get a wriggle on and get her most recent stuff. I'll tell you who is really groovy Karl Jenkins Adiemus- the eternal knot.
kat
ps i sent u an e-mail so check it O.K - Comment by Ned – Tuesday 9 November 2004, 7:16 AM
- I’m afraid I never got an email?
03.01.2004 – Saturday 3 January – Ghosts, Creed and the Astral
- Day
- • I chatted. It was hot. It seems to have cleared up now, there’s not even that many clouds left.
- Evening
- • I went for a walk out to the halfway spot and swam in its icy cold spa – it was a bit late for swimming really, but I’m so tough that I did anyway.
- Night
- • Mum and I watched “Shanghai Knights”, which is actually quite witty at times, and an enjoyable, fun movie. I then spent some time chatting online, listening to some music, and reading various forums before heading to bed. Some of Creed’s songs are quite good – but not quite right, there’s always something that lets them down. I have so much music, and so much of it is bad – lacking skill or sounding awful.
- 3:53am
- • This monitor looks like it has a bruise – the top left corner is gradually going a bluey-green. It needs degaussing, and I need sleep.
04.01.2004 – Sunday 4 January – Nude in the Flow
- Midday
- • I awoke, and spent the evening online, chatting, procrastinating, emailing, “surfing the net”, and so on and so forth.
- Evening
- • I walked out to the halfway spot, which was cold as it was a bit late, but I forced myself into the water, he-man style. I’d been relaxing and thinking about ice bergs for a while, so decided I aught to get out before I froze to death, so stood up, turned around, and saw two people sitting on some rocks – not facing my way, fortunately. Had I known who they were, I’d simply have got out, dressed, and left, but I had no idea who they were and didn’t want to embarrass them – or me, so I lay in the water, closed my eyes, and pretended it wasn’t cold. After a while, I got used to it and it seemed warmer. There’s that many bubbles in the water it’s pretty much air, and as I just lay there, plummeted by the water falling and rushing around me – I realised I could no longer tell what was air or water, whether my arm or leg was under water or not. It’s very peaceful in a funny sort of way, and I quite enjoyed it for a bit, until I began to get sore from the water pounding against me, which is quite strong, but gladly, just before it became uncomfortable, they left and I was able to get out and walk home.
- Night
- • I’d thought on my walk, how I should add the capability to my online journal, of representing linefeeds (or carriage returns). It sounded like a simple idea, but like many simple ideas, wasn’t as easy in practice as it sounded. After a few failed ideas, and a search through Google, I ended up having to use a recursive XSL parser, just to replace carriage returns with line breaks. That’s the problem with XSL, it’s so hard to do deceptively simple things – it took me ages to work out how to count words and truncate a paragraph, for example, and Meunchian grouping still boggles my mind, it’s like recursion without the recurs.
Oh, and now that I have a fancy journal that supports linefeeds, I shall use them!
He he. - Comment by keight – Monday 5 January 2004, 10:52 PM
- you forgot to mention your awesome chat in hashmaths
- Comment by Ned – Tuesday 6 January 2004, 1:36 PM
- Oh yes, I went to #maths, a channel on Austnet, and left in disgust after being informed that engineers are scientists, as part of an argument on why the Information Technology degree is somehow worse than any engineering degrees.
- Comment by DM – Thursday 8 January 2004, 1:34 AM
- Ah, I guess this linefeed stuff would explain that exclamation of yours I somehow recall seeing in #bits.
I wonder if comments like them, too.
05.01.2004 – Monday 5 January – Second-hand Fire
- Morning
- • Mum and I drove to town, where we picked up Sarah, and did some shopping. The second hand shop burnt down last night. It was the first thing we noticed upon arriving in town – it is totally burnt down, just a blackened pile of tin and old chairs. Two fire engines and a pile of fire fighters, including Matthew, were sitting outside along with some police. It’s all taped off with police tape and looks a bit sad. Apparently, the butcher next door has suffered some damage too, and people were complaining that it took half an hour for any fire engines to arrive. I’m surprised Cooktown has two fire engines, unless one was sent up from somewhere else, which seems doubtful, the nearest place being four hours or so away.
- Evening
- • I walked up to Shan’s, where Jade and Ella were copying some CD’s, and talked for a while, before heading down to Nui and Koi’s to have a look at their computer, or computers, as it turned out. After a quick trip back here to get a dialup phone number to authenticate their satellite, I installed their various bits of software they wanted installed, and set up the satellite stuff. There’s only a very small window of time to get a transmitter lock, before the auto-phase protection stuff shuts you down, and we couldn’t get a lock on any valid transmitter rate. Because they’re so paranoid about VSAT’s (you need to be a registered transmitter site to actually use one, which are they’re location-sensitive, and they’ve got to have safeguards built in so you can’t do anything bad, fry people, or interfere with anyone else’s services), any transmit error shuts down the entire system – so shut down it is. Telstra is going to send someone around to have a look tomorrow morning apparently.
- Night
- • I had planned to chat online, as per usual, however I kept getting disconnected, which was rather annoying – not to mention expensive. After being disconnected for the umpteenth time, I decided I’d have an early night instead, and went to bed.
06.01.2004 – Tuesday 6 January – Till Human Voices Wake Us
- Morning
- • I went and looked at the phone line, to see why it was being so bad yesterday. The reason why was obviously apparent – it was snapped, totally snapped, not connected in any way whatsoever. This begs the question – how then did it work at all last night? I swapped to another two different wires, and it seems to be working again.
- Evening
- • I walked out to the halfway spot, dipped my toes in the water, decided it was too cold for humans, and walked home again. I had planned to bring Shan’s wheelie bin down to be emptied tomorrow, but their drive sort of opens onto the telephone and it looked too open and public, so I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the poor wheelie bin there by herself. I’ll have to go bring her down early in the morning instead.
- Night
- • Mum and I watched “Till Human Voices Wake Us”, a somewhat disturbing, but brilliant, Australian movie. In fact, it has really impressed me – just brilliant, the sort I’ll think about all night, rather like “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, but not grim. That was terrible the night I watched that... watching it at 2 AM in the morning and then staying up all night while remarkably stressed probably wasn’t such a good idea either. At least this movie, while suspenseful when watching it, is over now and I’m not bothered by it.
- New Year’s Resolution
- • I thought of a New Year’s Resolution I could make, but didn’t, and probably shan’t. I could resolve to write not only a journal, but also a diary – to include how I feel about things, not just the things. The problem with that is... I don’t know how. Like today and tonight – how do I feel now? Well, I’m not sure. I feel normal, perhaps a little saddened by the speed with which time passes, and the changes that brings – things that were, that never will be again, things that weren’t, and now never can be, things that should have been, had I only known, and things that aught never have been. Or something like that.
07.01.2004 – Wednesday 7 January – Enrolling Woes
- Morning
- • I walked down to Shan’s and put his wheelie bin out for the rubbish collectors. I then went online, of course, and that was that.
- Evening
- • I walked down to the pump, taking Karl’s wheelie bin back down on the way, covered it up, and then walked up to Shan’s and took his wheelie bin back inside. I stayed up there for a while messing around on his computer until a big storm began to brew outside – very dark and foreboding, with deep, scary, rumbling thunder.
- Night
- • I tried to enrol in next semester’s subjects, but had difficulty figuring out what to enrol in, and then, just as I began to figure it out, SINET, UQ’s online student information portal thing that is usually overloaded and failing, went down for its scheduled nightly downtime. I reckon they’ve stolen its server for the holidays, and are away playing network games on it, while it’s left running from an iMac.
- Lightning
- • The lightning and thunder, which seemed to pop up randomly and ferociously throughout today and tonight, made me remember when I was in Cairns last, walking down the esplanade. Sarah and I were walking along when Sarah noticed that my hair was standing on end – literally. As was hers. I’d not seen such a strong attraction before – any loose bits of hair were raised straight up towards the sky, trying to get the lightning to hit them... it was a bit scary and we left pretty quickly.
- Comment by DM – Thursday 8 January 2004, 1:39 AM
- Funny. I was just musing today about what subjects I'd be doing next semester, too. Haven't come up with a good way to balance the engineering and the arts subjects, though, so I've decided to find out how to talk to an academic advisor. After all, it's their job to know this sort of stuff.
- Comment by keight – Thursday 8 January 2004, 3:15 AM
- Oh, and Ned forgot to mention that he enrolled in SPAN1010 -- Introductory Spanish A.
:)
08.01.2004 – Thursday 8 January – Big Shed Website
- Morning
- • Dad, Mum, and Ned drove into town. They dropped Ned off at the supermarket, where he bought a milkshake for breakfast, and then walked up to the Big Shed Hardware. Once there, he quickly disabled the guards and made off with the loot. No wait, he actually spent an hour or so discussing things, before beginning to design a website, eventually finished several hours later. It was very hot outside and nice and air-conditioned inside, so this was good. Ned charged them $130 for his services, which he thought was reasonable considering the site, borrowed several CD’s, and walked back down to the supermarket where he met Rick, of Rick and Kerry fame. Rick drove down to the wharf and had a look at a sunken and now beached boat, which was too far gone for anything more than a bonfire, and then out to the Maxwell’s Transport depot where he picked up eight chairs and a table. He then drove back to the supermarket, picked up Jolene, and drove Ned back out to Rossville.
- Night
- • Later, just after dark, Ned walked up to Shan’s – he is still overseas on his honeymoon. Ned then used Shan’s CD’s and his computer to copy the discs he’d borrowed – all fourteen of them, which took ages. He was very glad to be finished, as it was hot, stormy, and towards the end, swarming with mosquitoes.
09.01.2004 – Friday 9 January – Cooktown the mighty, the brave
- Morning
- • Ned was woken up by someone arriving – in this case Jean. Fortunately for him, she only wanted to see his mother, so he was able to go back to sleep, only to be awoken shortly after by Ella. Mandi had driven up to get the key, as they needed to access Shan’s computer for some tax records or something exciting like that. Seeing as the key was in Ned’s caravan, along with the sleepy occupant, she had to come and get it. Luckily Ned has known Ella forever, because he doesn’t sleep fully dressed.
- Afternoon
- • Ned had to drive into town to drop off the CD’s he had borrowed yesterday. He noticed a few some fires on the way in. Once in town, he checked his mail, posted a letter, dropped the CD’s back, bought a thickshake, a punnet of salad and a few bottles of soft drink, and then drove home again.
- Evening
- • By the time Ned got home, it had clouded over, and was threatening to storm. Thunder was rolling in the distance, and it didn’t look like very good weather for walking. Undeterred nonetheless, he decided to not only walk out to the halfway spot, but to also lie in the rock pool spa watching the lightning overhead – hoping none struck him or the water nearby. My, what a daring lad he is.
Just as he decided the water was very cold and got out, it began to rain. By the time he was home, having walked through a true tropical downpour, he was as wet as it is possible to get without actually being underwater. He’s quite glad it’s not cold up here, or it wouldn’t have been much fun. - Night
- • Only a few minutes after he had arrived home, it began to thunder and lightning. Ned made his way out to his caravan, where he started up his computer, just before an immense thunderclap, so he quickly unstarted up his computer, and cowered on his bed waiting for a tree to javelin through the roof. One lightning bolt sounded as though it hit a tree in the bush just beside his caravan – making such a loud and thunderous noise that his ears rang for quite some time after.
After sleeping for a few hours until the thunder had gone Ned again started up his computer and spent the night online, doing things, as he is wont to do. - Comment by keight – Saturday 10 January 2004, 4:44 AM
- Did your money order arrive yet?
- Comment by Ned – Saturday 10 January 2004, 9:41 AM
- No, it hasn’t. I don’t know what’s up with it? :-(
- Comment by keight – Sunday 11 January 2004, 10:58 PM
- Well, it is in the hands of Australia Post. God know.
If it dosent arrive soon, I'll see if I cant cancel it.
10.01.2004 – Saturday 10 January – To Cairns we go
- 3pm
- • Jade and Ella came around and we left for Cairns. The drive was rather uneventful – the road is bad though. We hit some pretty big and nasty potholes, which probably isn’t too good for Jade’s small Asian car, but it’s even worse trying to go slowly.
We drove straight to Jade and Ella’s grandparent’s place, where we picked up a gate key, and drove into Cairns, parking at the new car park beside the new lagoon on the esplanade. Jade and Ella went swimming, while I checked into the “Bellview Guest House”, at $18 a night for a bed in a six bed dormitory, although I was the only person there.
Half of Rossville and Mungumby were also enjoying the new lagoon, apparently also down there for Jenna’s going away party tomorrow.
We had dinner at McDonalds, or at least I did. I bought one of their new “Salads Plus” veggie burgers, which aren’t too bad really and actually contain some real, live salad, while Jade and Ella had some disgusting thick shake and apple pie monstrosity. - 9:30pm
- • We went and saw a romantic comedy, “Love Actually”, at the City Cinemas. While definitely not my style of movie, it was enjoyable nonetheless – and I think the girls both liked it. It was going on midnight by the time it finished, so the girls drove back to their grandparents and I went to the Bellview and slept. It was quite hot too, and I was too stupid to close the window and turn the air-conditioning on, so I sweated all night instead.
11.01.2004 – Sunday 11 January – Raymond and the Rings
- Morning
- • I woke late, showered, found an internet café, checked my emails, chatted, found Raymond online, and arranged to phone him back and meet him in a while. I then went to the night markets and bought some pasta for lunch.
- 12:30pm
- • I phoned Raymond, who happened to be nearby, and then found and met him. We went and saw “The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King” at Central Cinemas, and it was good, although I can see that as a standalone movie it doesn’t really make much sense. After that, we spent the evening wandering around the pier, until I got a message from Joneses that I was to meet them at 7 PM.
- 7pm
- • Jade and Ella turned up, and we drove and bought an Eagle Boy’s pizza, which we ate on the esplanade, and then went to an internet café for Jade to find out something about guitars, which took ages and I wanted to go see a movie.
- 9:20pm
- • We went and saw “Cold Mountain”, a somewhat depressing romance set during the American Civil War. It was a good movie, but the tinging of sadness at the end wasn’t exactly what I needed before bed.
12.01.2004 – Monday 12 January – Lingerie, Guitars and Falafel
- 10:10am
- • I was supposed to meet Joneses at the Bellview at 10 o’clock, but due to my watch being three or four hours wrong, I hadn’t even got up or got ready when the Bellview man came in and told me Ella was downstairs waiting – and checkout time is 10 AM.
After a mad panic rush to get ready, I went and met Jade and Ella, and we went shopping. I bought the shoes Mum had requested from Woolworth’s, dropped Ella’s photos off for printing, and went to a guitar shop. Jade spent quite some time playing various electric guitars, before finally choosing one for Craig – and then we went and spent quite some more time at an op-shop, where I amused myself by trying to get Ella to buy sexy things, looking at belts and ties, playing with kitchen utensils, and various other exciting things.
We went and picked up Ella’s photos, which weren’t at all suitable for framing in her frame, so we had to leave them there for another hour and have them enlarged. - 1:20pm
- • I bought a nice, large, falafel roll, which I then ate half of and got full. Jade and Ella shared a small bucket of horrible potato chips and some silly fruit juice, and then tried to finish off my falafel roll but also got full. Jade drove off to a flute lesson, and Ella and I went and watched “Honey” at Cairns Central. Ella really enjoyed it, and I didn’t mind it either – although mainly because she enjoyed it so much.
- Evening
- • After the movie, Ella and I walked down, picked up her photos, and waited for Jade to return – which she did. After checking the photos against the frame we found there wasn’t any way they could fit, so amidst Ella’s instant plunge into the realms of depression, we took her photos to another photo shop, along with the frame, and had a chat to the woman there who says she can print them to fit, but it will take an hour.
To fill in the hour, we drove to Earlville and went to Stocklands, bought some chocolate wafer things for Craig and some women’s panties (oh, what exciting shopping), and then drove back to the photo place. This time they pictures did fit, and Ella was happy, so we all lived happily ever after.
Actually, we drove back out to the girls’ grandparent’s place and dropped Ella and her pictures, happily in their frame, off at Jenna’s place, and then me back at the Bellview, where I checked in again, this time for $20. - 7:30pm
- • I phoned Sarah, having phoned Kelly an hour ago and found she was at training, but she was too tired to do anything. She had worked ten hours today, and had to be up at some horribly early time tomorrow, so I went and bought myself a mini pizza from a shop on the Esplanade, ate that, and then went to an internet café to await “Welcome to the Jungle”.
- 9:30pm
- • I watched “Welcome to the Jungle” at Cairns Central, and really enjoyed it – it being a fairly mindless but amusing sort of Hollywood action movie. After the movie, I planned to go straight to bed, as I have a wakeup call scheduled for 7:30 AM tomorrow morning, but it was not to be.
When I got back to my room, after a quick (and free) drop in at an internet café to check for last minute email from Shan, I found one Swiss girl, one German man and three Swiss men. They were hiding from the fearful prowler, that mighty guarder and noise-killer, the night watchman of the smoking-not-allowed-inside. Women aren’t allowed inside either, for that matter – how potentially immoral! - 3:30am
- • My throat got sore, having been talking non-stop for the past few hours, so I went to find a shop selling drinks. Amusingly, some of the Swiss were there buying drinks too, on their way home from the Woolshed. They’d gone out a few hours ago, after a bit of a chat, and I’d been chatting to the others ever since. It was quite interesting – they were very inquisitive, and intelligent, as was I (especially the intelligent part!), and we discussed a wide range of things from our different perspectives, from world politics through to the important matter of the relative size and weight of our respective coinage and the fancy see-through window in our notes, compared to the silly all-one-sized American notes, and wondering how blind people deal with that. We all need to get up around seven...
13.01.2004 – Tuesday 13 January – And home again
- 7:30am
- • I am awoken by whomever it is that wakes people up at the Bellview.
- 8am
- • Jade and Ella picked me up, and we drove, stopping only for petrol, back home. The road was as rough as the way down, and it rained on and off. The drive was enjoyable, and seemed to go faster for some reason – probably because Ella and I are so simple-minded and easy to amuse, and both tired.
- Midday
- • I arrived home, and promptly retired to recover in front of my radiation-emitting cathode ray.
- 2:45am
- • Here I am, still awake, and stupid. I’ve spent most of the evening online messing around reading things, chatting, doing a few things on my website, configuring the new version of Dreamweaver – nothing too exciting. Now I’m hugely sleepy and off to bed.
14.01.2004 – Wednesday 14 January – Mowing
- Morning
- • I was woken by Jade and Ella banging on my door. This was the start of a rather unpleasant day. After quickly gulping down a glass of soymilk, we drove up to Shan’s place, unloaded two mowers and a whipper-snipper, and began the ordeal.
The grass is hugely long, three or four feet high in spots, and very thick everywhere else. The mower I’m using can’t handle it. I have to mow backwards, at an incredibly slow speed, lifting the mower – basically carrying the mower into the grass. Anything else and it stalls. Four hours later, and we’ve succeeded in mowing an area that would take not more than half an hour normally. I’m dripping in sweat, my head pounds, I feel sick – what is it about mowing that makes it so much hotter than any other sort of task? The on and off rain didn’t help the humidity any either.
Just before collapsing entirely, we stopped and went for a swim down at the Home Rule Bridge. - Evening
- • I spent the evening recovering from the morning, quietly online.
15.01.2004 – Thursday 15 January – Ranting and Raging
- • I have had a quiet day so far, nothing much has happened. I walked down to the hall, and saw what I believed was Shan getting home, and then confirmed on MSN with his sisters that he is indeed back. That’s about all that has happened so far. I ate a chilli in my soup for lunch and it was hot. I changed the location of the files used for various hit counters across my site, so they’re all in a central location. Silas’s payment for hosting was denied due to possible fraud. Oh, and I’ve probably almost got indigestion – apparently eating chillies and ice cream and nothing much else isn’t that good.
- UQUnion
- • From the scum who steal our money while lying about representing us, comes this:
“The University of Queensland Union will actively fight to remove the Liberal Party from Government at the next Federal election. UQU will further move to exclude through democratic means, from within the organisation members of the Liberal Party.”
I might not mind so much if I weren’t legally obliged to belong to, support, and pay these vile creatures. So much for that farce known as democracy – the sad and scary thing is that so many believe it. - IRC
- • I have regularly been disgusted with the management, or mismanagement I should say, of the IRC network I frequent ever since I had a series of disagreements with some of them ages ago, but today a series of wallops went too far, and I had to complain. After receiving these wallops, which potentially anyone on the network can receive:
15•09 ••• !Kwahraw! I AM A STUD, THE REST OF YOU ARE NOT!!!!
13•08 ••• !Kwahraw! I am a f*ckin moron, just thought I'd let the world know.
15•16 ••• !Zardoz! [16:14] <reverend> someoen needs to tell that kwharawh to stay the f*ck off wallops [16:14] <reverend> he is always telling me about his friend's birthdays and sh*t <–– everyone take note please
15•16 ••• !Kwahraw! I don't have friends, and if I did, they wouldn't have birthdays.
15•18 ••• !Kwahraw! since the ONLY thing on wallops is oper comments, if you don't like it, you can -w
15•18 ••• !Kwahraw! thats done by /mode YOURNICK -w
15•25 ••• !Kwahraw! noteeth says he is lonely, and wants to be messages. He especially liks poofts. /msg noteeth
15•26 ••• !Warder! poofts? sounds like a cereal
15•27 ••• !Kwahraw! i think its like queers/fags/butt pirates/anal spelunkers
15•27 ••• !Warder! oh poofs
15•28 ••• !Kwahraw! yeah, thats what noteeth likes
15•28 ••• !Zardoz! Are you drunk?
15•29 ••• !Kwahraw! no, just.... out of my mind. I agreed to have dinner tomorrow night at my ex-gfs place-– the one that I've been spending the last month trying to get over.
15•29 ••• !Warder! haha ive just had 10 or so ppl ask me that as well
15•29 ••• !Kwahraw! alcohol doesn't drive me this insane.
15•31 ••• !Akron! Kwah dude hasent anyone ever told you never to go back? bad bad idea!
15•31 ••• !Warder! unless u r desperate and have low self-esteem
15•32 ••• !Akron! rofl so true.
15•32 ••• !Kwahraw! what if I'm in love with her?
15•32 ••• !Akron! same thing?
15•32 ••• !Warder! then may god have mercy on your soul. never love them, only use them
15•33 ••• !Kwahraw! or if I just miss the sex?
15•33 ••• !Akron! isnt that expensive down the street....
I felt required to send this email:
Hello,
I would like to officially complain regarding the use of various global services, in particular wallops, in a manner that is both reprehensible and not suitable for the general public, or Austnet's image.
I understand that IRC is an unmoderated medium, and as thus, users are held responsible for whatever they may see or do while on IRC, however I feel that certain aspects should be suited to any audience. These would include the official channels such as global messages, wallops and so on.
I do not think it is right that one should be required to shield their children or themselves from wallops (or any other official Austnet service) in order to avoid their exposure to coarse language, racist, sexual, or other slurs that I feel are totally inappropriate for any staff member acting in an official capacity.
I would hope that those involved are reprimanded and that this does not occur again.
In addition, I question the legality of using offensive and mature orientated language, as shown by various people when involved in their official Austnet duties, in a medium that has global exposure across a network supposedly suited for all ages.
-thei
Printed on 100% recycled electrons.
http://nedmartin.org - Browsers
- • Without wanting to get into the issues of rendering, standards support, vulnerabilities and other such exciting things – I thought I’d mention that I have found MyIE2 to be markedly faster (in all ways) and less resource-intensive than Mozilla, Firebird or standalone IE, and I have used it on several computers ranging from old, slow, memory lacking machines up. Also, MyIE2’s user interface, with its excellent tabbed support, mouse gestures, shortcuts and so on is rivalled only by Opera – none of the Mozilla family can match it.
In my opinion, Mozilla and the various other Gecko based browsers are the most up-to-date insofar as rendering and such – although this is seriously offset by the fact that most sites are designed for and tested with IE. Their actual interfaces and the application itself I find to be clunky, slow, buggy and basically not as good as either Opera or IE. They have the best rendering engine... but that’s it.
Opera has the nicest interface and “user experience”, but isn’t free and has a few “interesting” features/bugs. It’s nice and fast, and all current browsers could take a few hints from some of the non-traditional functionality they’ve added, especially their accessibility support. Their tabbed interface is the best, no questions asked.
IE is... well everyone knows what IE is – basic, functional, most widely supported and used but rapidly becoming outdated.
My personal preference is MyIE2, a wrapper for IE. It adds the best functionality from Opera (which Mozilla/Firebird etc cannot yet match) and combines it with the integration and compatibility you get from IE. The main downside is IE’s age – it simply doesn’t support the latest “cutting edge” stuff. Avantbrowser is similar to MyIE2, but not as good, I find.
Of course, this only applies to Windows. - Comment by Raina – Friday 16 January 2004, 10:21 AM
- Ok, where do I get MyIE2 ? And what functionality does it add apart from 'tabbed support' and mouse gestures? (I like the idea of tabs)
- Comment by Ned – Friday 16 January 2004, 2:06 PM
- Their site at www.myie2.com sums it up nicely: “MyIE2 is the most powerful and fully customized browser on earth”. I agree, and I have used the majority of browsers currently available under Windows. It took me a while to get used to using it, now I couldn’t do without it – I have my own customised keyboard shortcuts, am used to using the tabs and drag and drop to open new windows, save pages, organise things. Oh and mouse gestures are excellent once you get used to them, I can’t do without them now... never again click a back button :-)
- Comment by Ned – Friday 16 January 2004, 2:11 PM
- Oh, one other thing... don’t necessarily install all the crud that comes with it. It comes with all these bundled roboform auto password filler-outters and stuff. They’re probably really good for all I know, but if you don’t want that stuff – ensure you don’t select it when installing, not that it’s hard to uninstall again.
16.01.2004 – Friday 16 January – Cooktown, Shan and Kylie
- thei.com
- • I wouldn’t mind purchasing thei.com, and they had an advertisement on their site that it was for sale so I sent them an email and got this reply:
“Dear sirs:
Thanks for your interest in Thei.com.
I would like to quote you the price range from 2,500 to 3,000 USD for the domain name.
Then, I will be pleased to release it to your company.”
Now, they’ve updated their site with details of an auction for the domain name, which I quote:
“Sorry to announce that this website was closed due to our financial problems.
Therefore, we wait for a new owner or investor of this website. If you are interested in purchasing this website or domain name, please make your best bid via e-mail.
Anybody can bid from US $3,500 up to US $5,500 for this domain, the highest bidder will get this domain.
The auction will be done by email. The starting price is US $3,500 and if anybody reaches to US $5,500, this auction will be automatically closed. This auction period is 45 days from the first bid.”
It’s annoying. I have checked thei.com often – it has never been used, it’s always some stupid holding page type thing mentioning that it’s for sale.
Is “thei” the most wanted name in Asian business or something... or are they just insane? - Morning
- • Mum and I drove to town, where we did shopping. How exciting. We also got a few DVD’s: “Mean Machine”, “Hidden Agenda”, “The Cat’s Meow”, “Liberty Stands Still” and “Hamlet”.
- Evening
- • I went for a walk around the school loop and then out past the Home Rule Bridges, missing Shan and Kylie in the process. They dropped by here, and went looking for me but Mum told them I’d gone the other way, so they missed me.
- Night
- • Mum and I watched “Mean Machine”, or we were watching it, right up until Shan and Kylie arrived. We didn’t hear their car over the movie, so it was a bit of a shock. Mum went inside, and Shan and I played some computer games he’d bought over in Thailand until Kylie got very sleepy, and they drove home. Mum and I resumed watching the movie, which ended up being good. Not much really happened, and that which did was quite predictable, but it managed to predictably not really happen in an interesting and involving sort of way, and I enjoyed it. British films are just somehow different to American ones.
17.01.2004 – Saturday 17 January – Black Image
- Afternoon
- • I walked up to Shan’s. It began to rain just as I left, of course, and I got wet – my umbrella leaks. Why they don’t make things like umbrellas out of something waterproof has me stumped. Shan and Kylie were halfway through watching “Hidden Agenda”, so I got to see the end half of that, which, not surprisingly, made no sense. Jade and Ella arrived not long after I did, and we spent most of the evening playing computer games, talking, and laughing at Shan and Kylie wrestling. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and I guess wrestling is about as intimate as you can get without it being erotic.
- Evening
- • Jade dropped me home, but just as I got out of the car, Shan pulled up behind and asked if I wanted to go out to Home Rule, which I did. We spent an hour or so out there, looked at Shan and Kylie’s honeymoon pictures, and generally messed around before they drove me back up here.
- Night
- • Mum and I walked down to the hall, to see how “Black Image”, who were playing there, were going. Ninety-nine percent of the people there were murris, and eighty percent of them were standing around outside the hall listening and wouldn’t have had to pay, so I’m not sure how their cover charge was going to cover anything. It definitely wasn’t my crowd, so we left.
- 10:24pm
- • Shan and Kylie walked up. I got a bit of a shock when they silently arrived at the door whilst I was chatting online. Apparently they were having trouble sleeping, and probably bored too I guess, so had walked up to see if it was any more interesting up here. We looked at pictures and talked until midnight, and then walked back down to the hall to see how that was going. It was pretty much the same as last time so we didn’t stay. We’d discussed dark evil presences and all those other sort of scary things that lurk in the dark on the walk, which made me a little freaked on the walk back by myself, especially after seeing a star with an interesting sort of mist effect – I hope no one reads this.
I then chatted and read online until the wee hours of the morning.
18.01.2004 – Sunday 18 January – Pumping Up
- • I have had a lovely quiet day, disturbed only by Mum ordering me to pump up. This involves a dangerous and very hot trek through the jungle, during which I have to carefully jump across mud-filled ravines, navigate slippery mountainsides, treacherous riverbanks, and dangerous suburban areas – twice, once to start the pump, and once to shut it off. This is all assuming it starts of course, which it did. And that’s assuming it runs after I’ve started it too, which it didn’t, so I had to start it three times – stupid small motors. Jean came around at some stage too, to get me to have a look at her computer, which I’ll try to do on Tuesday.
- 10:51pm
- • I got disconnected, and when trying to reconnect, received an “Error 691 – Access was denied because the username and/or password was invalid on the domain”. After several attempts, I decided either Dodo is having problems, or my account has been disabled. Hopefully not the latter, and hopefully they’re transient problems and I’ll be able to connect again soon. If not, I guess I’ll have to phone them tomorrow. Perhaps I should go watch “S.W.A.T.”, which I have here on DVD. It’s still showing in the cinemas so I’m guessing it’s probably reasonably illegal to have a DVD. Perhaps I should point out that I do not own the DVD, and, technically, do not know from whence it came.
- 11:29pm
- • Yay, online again! It must have been a transient fault. What a relief! How traumatic that was. Now I’m all stressed that I’ll get disconnected again and have to go to bed or something terrible like that.
19.01.2004 – Monday 19 January – Symlinks at last
- 5:34am
- • After a hard night’s chatting, I finally went to bed.
- 1:10pm
- • I woke up, and, of course, went online.
- 5:39pm
- • Shan and Kylie came around, and proceeded to make Ella very angry by threatening her, via MSN, that they’d come around and borrow her satellite decoder and she’d not be able to talk to all her lovers – she’s such an angry girl. They also borrowed a few DVD’s.
- 7:34pm
- • After an abortive attempt some time ago to figure out a way to mirror my content in two locations (on the same server), I again and successfully tried using symlinks. I can now serve my journal, for example, from nedmartin.org/journal and journal.the-i.org without affecting its existing structure – something I have wanted to do for some time.
- 9:27pm
- • Mum and I began to watch “The Cat’s Meow”, but it was terrible so we stopped. Plus, it had awful audio and we could hardly hear it over the rain, so we watched “S.W.A.T.” instead, which was much better and we both enjoyed it – although it’s very predictable and typical and not that good.
- 4:21am
- • I went to bed, late – yet again.
20.01.2004 – Tuesday 20 January – Jean’s WordPad
- 12:20pm
- • I wake up. I thought Mum was going to town, but she decided not to, so I spent most of the day online chatting instead.
- 3:48pm
- • Jean’s computer has some problem apparently, so I walk down to see what it is. I meet Jean just before I get to her place, and get a lift the rest of the way. It ends up, she’s printing a document she typed, and there are a few errors and inexplicable formatting problems in it, but each time she prints it, it comes out just the same regardless of what she does. She even went so far as to retype a page. She’s using WordPad, which I’d never really bothered to look at before – but it’s remarkably poxy. It doesn’t even support pages – instead everything is one long line, and you can wrap it at a specified ruler width if you want. Her print queue had about 20 documents in it, all in various states of failure, so that probably has something to do with her problems. Over two hours later, which involved such enjoyable tasks as feeding paper into a printer, one page at a time, removing large chunks of jammed paper, waiting considerable amounts of time for printer to return to life and rebooting an old Pentium 2 with 64 megs of RAM.
- 6:09pm
- • I got back from fixing Jean’s computer.
- 8:34pm
- • Shan turned up, dropping off the DVD’s he’d borrowed. He only stayed a few minutes – he and Kylie both looked very sleepy.
- 4:04am
- • After messing around with my site all night, updating and changing things, I finally went to bed.
21.01.2004 – Wednesday 21 January – Liberty Stands Still
- 5:36pm
- • I phoned Dodo technical support, because I got another of those “Error 691 – Access was denied because the username and/or password was invalid on the domain” errors. They said they’d phone me back, which isn’t much use as either I’m not here, or I’m connected to the internet, tying up the one phone line.
- Evening
- • Seeing as I can’t go online, and because I usually go for a walk anyway – I went for a walk. It’s nice walking in the rainforest once the heat of the day has passed. Everything is so green and lush, there’s so many different types of plants, trees, vines, grasses, ferns, berries, birds, bugs, insects – even just the noises. The place is teeming with life – little life, the sort you miss if you’re in a car. I enjoy the peacefulness and find I can think really well when I walk up here.
- Night
- • Mum and I watched “Liberty Stands Still”, which was actually thought provoking, so not too bad really. Not the most exciting movie around though. I then stayed up way too late online trying to get rid of a crappy problem with my website – I ended up having to copy another several hundred line file, checking through it line by line, before it would work.
22.01.2004 – Thursday 22 January – Dean’s Commendation
- 8:30am
- • We all did go to town, at which we set upon the post office to discharge its mail, being as it was ours. I was pleased to obtain, in a large manila envelope, a Dean’s Commendation for Excellence. Dad and Mum were well pleased.
A milkshake, a talk to Bob and Peter, and some shopping later, and we drove home. We met the Jamaican and another bloke broken down near Ron’s, had a quick look, and then helped them phone the RACQ. I then collapsed in front of the fan and went online. - Evening
- • Mum went to get a can of three-bean mix out of the cupboard, but got a black snake instead. For some reason, she didn’t like this, and screamed and threw the can on the floor and made quite a fuss. The poor snake was very alarmed and angry. Mum wanted it to go away, but it decided not to, so it’s still there now. It seems to be a bit happier now, all curled up behind some jars.
- 1:13am
- • It’s raining nicely. I’m slowly getting sleepy, but don’t think I’ll go to bed for a while yet.
- Comment by DK – Saturday 31 January 2004, 9:04 AM
- Well done re: Commendation ;)
- Comment by Ned – Monday 2 February 2004, 1:20 AM
- Thanks :-)
23.01.2004 – Friday 23 January – Cooktown, Pizza and Chips
- 2:04am
- • I sleep.
- 2:49am
- • I enter a deeper state of sleep.
- 6:35am
- • I enter a semi-awake state of sleep, during which I dream a lot, but I forget this by the time I wake.
- 10:58am
- • Wake.
- 5:30pm
- • Walk. The spa is intense. Rain has swelled the waters. I am pummelled.
- 11:23pm
- • I arrive back from town. Shan turned up a few hours ago, with Kylie, Jade and Ella – on their way to town, a spur of the moment anti-boredom measure I think. We had a good time – bought chips, milkshakes and pizza from Joe’s, which we ate down at the wharf, and some drinks from the servo, before driving home again. I really quite enjoyed it – it’s nice to be able to do these sort of things with Joneses (and now Kylie), as I’ve never been able to before, as they were too young.
- 3:14am
- • Sleep.
24.01.2004 – Saturday 24 January – Reign of Darkness
- 12:15pm
- • I woke up, to hear Mum screaming and carrying on. She’d put her hand in the cupboard to get a plate, and got a snake instead. I suppose I can understand that making her scared, but I can’t understand her stupid insistence that I not go near the snake. It’s the same snake from the other day – about five feet long, quite black, with a pink tinged greyish underbelly. Mum seems to think that it can magically morph its way through jars of food, leap through the air, and bite me – all in the twinkling of an eye. This necessitated Dad and Ron arriving, complete with a broom and a rake, and poking the poor snake until it fell out, ran under a cupboard (from whence emerged a rat – very amusing) and then outside.
- 5:24pm
- • I decided to go for my normal evening walk out to the halfway spot. I was about halfway back from the halfway spot when I met Shan and Kylie, driving out to Home Rule, about halfway to the halfway spot. I got a lift out to Home Rule with them, where they planned to use Ella’s satellite dish and phone line to authenticate Shan’s satellite decoder. Unfortunately, they’re experiencing power problems – apparently there’s air in the pipe, so we didn’t have any power for a few hours so stayed for dinner.
By the time we got the satellite stuff done and left, it was bucketing down rain, and going on midnight. Jade and Ella came along, and we all drove up to Shan’s and watched “Reign of Darkness” – a very B-Grade horror movie, but I didn’t mind it too much. - 1:45am
- • It was funny – they all fell asleep watching the movie, even Shan. I hoped I didn’t offend any of them, but I snuck out and walked home, rather than wake anyone up.
- 1:53am
- • Sometime around here, my site would have been moved across to its new server, although DNS will take much longer to propagate so I don’t expect anything to actually change for a while.
- 4:13am
- • After messing around with the new server for a while, and chatting online, I went to sleep.
25.01.2004 – Sunday 25 January – Server Move
- 9:54am
- • I wake. I have a bit of a sleep around midday because I feel terrible.
- 1:52pm
- • I shower because I still feel terrible.
- 5:29pm
- • I go walking, to try to come alive. I then spend the night chatting and waiting for DNS to resolve and messing around with my sites, which were moved to a new server not long after midnight last night, trying to fix them.
- 3:27am
- • I finally go to bed.
26.01.2004 – Monday 26 January – Australia Day, Bruised and Battered
- • I am so tired and worn out, aching and sore. I’ve been swimming for hours, being bashed, battered, bruised and gashed against rocks – and to top it all off, scratched, bleeding and lacerated from an ongoing altercation with some violent femmes.
- 10:19am
- • I woke up, which isn’t that hard to imagine. I then did the obvious – and went on line. I was trying to fix up my website so it will work, as well as possible, without XSLT, but every time I tried to something went wrong. FTP died, DNS resolved at random, randomly – the power even failed for ten minutes and kept playing up after that.
- 11:46am
- • In fact, that was a little scary. The power cut out for about ten minutes, just as I was finally about to upload a fixed page for my journal – having already tried several times before and been unsuccessful due to stupid text encoding problems. I leapt up and pulled the plug on the PC in case the power came back on suddenly and blew it up, and then wandered around aimlessly inside, getting some ice cream. After the power came back on, and seemed to be staying on, I rushed out here and started up the PC – and it made about 30 little beeps, but then booted normally.
- 1:01pm
- • Not long after the power failure, Shan messaged me on MSN and asked if I wanted to go out to Home Rule for a swim, which I did. We drove out there and walked up to the Blue Marker, and swam. That is somewhat of an understatement. We actually fought the current, and each other, getting smashed against rocks, scratched, gouged, and generally exhausted and bruised in the process. Kylie managed to take skin off fingers on both all of my hands – which hurts now that I’m typing, and my sore ankle was the only one anyone ever grabbed.
After our exhausting ordeal, we spent some time at Joneses, before driving up to Shan’s and walking down to his pump. Small motors, and pumps in particular, are horrible sadistic things. After we’d got the water out of the exhaust, we spent quarter of an hour pulling its stupid little starter, before I cunningly tricked it into starting. Small motors are bad, there’s no two ways about it. It sure didn’t do my already very exhausted right arm any good either. - Night
- • Shan and I spent a while looking at the new GameDude site, and picking mulberries, before I walked home. I then had dinner, which was nice but made me feel so exhausted and sick. I think I’ve overdone the exertion today.
27.01.2004 – Tuesday 27 January – Town and CD’s
- Morning
- • Mum and I drove into town, I’m not quite sure why. We didn’t really do anything. Sarah is back, having left her wallet on the bonnet, driving off and losing it with her licence and Vince’s credit cards in it. To top it off, their phone died while they were away and they’ve lost a job.
- Evening
- • I walked up to Shan’s, talked about blank CD’s, and then out to the halfway spot. I ordered 50 “Laser” brand 48× 700MB blank CD’s for $25 from GameDude, having priced them in town where they cost over twice this. I chatted to Silas, who is trying to figure out which MP3 player to buy.
- 2:45am
- • I’m listening to Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mystic’s Dream” from her “The Mask and Mirror” album before going to bed. It’s such a good song.
28.01.2004 – Wednesday 28 January – The Man in the Iron Mask
- • I slept in late, being woken by someone looking for Sarah, and spent most of today online chatting and messing around updating bits of my website.
- Evening
- • I went for my normal unexciting walk out to the halfway spot and back again.
- Night
- • Mum and I watched “The Man in the Iron Mask”, which I quite enjoyed despite its somewhat predictable plot, horrible accents and Leonardo DiCaprio.
- 3:43am
- • I can’t believe it’s so late and I need to get up reasonably early to go to town. Argh!
29.01.2004 – Thursday 29 January – Cooktown
- • Mum and I drove into town and did shopping. I had my traditional milkshake followed by a punnet of pasta salad and felt traditionally sick afterwards. We also got another five DVD’s, “Born Romantic”, “Rush Hour 2”, “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?”, “Blade” and its sequel, “Blade Ⅱ”.
- Evening
- • I arrived home to find Jade and Ella on MSN telling me Kylie wanted to talk to me, and a frantic email from Shan and Kylie asking if I’d drop a DVD back for them as they were going away over the weekend, down to Kylie’s Mum’s place. The fuss seemed a little excessive for a simple DVD return, so I talked to Kylie about it. It seems they had gotten a porno movie – probably the first either of them had seen, and weren’t very keen for anyone to know – especially not Jade or Ella. It seemed somewhat funny at the time.
30.01.2004 – Friday 30 January – Site Moved
- • What an ordeal that was. I woke up to find that Robert had moved my site over to another server, as promised, because with the crazy random problems they are having on the new SolidInternet server, he wasn’t willing to mess around trying to get Expat, mod_ssl, Zend and Sablotron to co-exist peacefully.
I updated my site to use all its XSLT features again, but my syndication feeds update script gave a “404 File Not Found” error. This seemed odd because the file definitely existed. After some messing around, I realised it was actually giving a “500 Internal Server Error”, but due to the way I’ve handled unfound pages, that gives a “404 File Not Found” error.
Once I’d figured that out, I thought it would be easy to fix, but no. First, I discovered that every time I attempted to execute the file, it caused a 10 MB core dump in its directory. This was exciting but unhelpful. I rewrote the script – several times. I then tried copying other existing scripts I had that did almost exactly the thing, and modifying them to work – but they didn’t. I figured it must be some sort of file permission problem, probably caused when my files were copied from the other server, so I chmodded them to every known permission, changed the directory they were in, changed their name and type, overwrote existing files, used rename() to copy them to other files, and anything else I could think of, before deciding it must be something else.
I then attacked the XSLT file that performed the transformations, thinking that perhaps this server had a different version of Sablotron installed, which was having problems with something – but it’s such a simple transformation that I couldn’t really see any problem with it, there’s just nothing that I could change.
Fortunately for my sanity, I had the rather obvious brainwave to change the input data file to a last year’s journal – and it worked. This narrowed down the possible problems to this year’s journal data file, which seemed very odd and hence why I hadn’t considered it could be a problem. Once I’d worked this out, it was easy. I truncate the output to 30 words, by trimming on word borders, and if I’ve an element in the input that is the first content element for a specific day, and has only one word, it tries has a heart attack and dies. My shoddy coding I guess, although I’m not quite sure how to fix it yet.
I skilfully changed the one word element “Sleep” into the two-word element “I Sleep”, by the dexterous placing of a single “I”, and all my troubles went away. Or rather, they should have... I tested it and it worked, so I fixed up the original files, copied over the working code from the files I’d been testing it in, and uploaded everything. Clunk. It all died. Totally. Everything stopped working. FTP didn’t work, XSLT died totally – it was a shambles.
I was just about to give up and go back to using HyperCard on a Macintosh, when I remembered the 10 MB core dumps. Now that I’ve deleted them, and freed up some space, everything works again. - Night
- • After a walk out to the halfway spot while it was drizzling and a nice warm shower when I got home, Mum and I watched “Born Romantic”, which Mum quite enjoyed. I liked it too, but it’s not really my style of movie. British comedy is usually good though – leaves for dead that incredibly obvious rubbish the Americans call comedy.
31.01.2004 – Saturday 31 January – Dad’s
- • I had planned to go over to Home Rule and try to install some stuff for Ric, but was advised by Ella not to – so that sort of messed up my day and I spent the rest of the day doing not much and wishing it wasn’t so hot.
- Evening
- • I went for a walk up to Dad’s and had dinner there.
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