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09-Mar-2008: "Last chance..."

Howdy.

Some news:

Regarding brooknet.no-ip.com's availability, the router's got an annoying 'undocumented misfeature' where it will sometimes stop forwarding traffic from the Net: all incoming connections time out. Outgoing connections are not affected, which is why I don't notice when this occurs. All I can say is *sorry*! I'll replace the router soon, when I can untangle the load of cables under the table and when it's not so cold in there.

I'm not sure if the 'Music' line appears with this GM theme - if not, the subject won't make much sense, but does it ever anyway? The concluding line is '...on the stairway' - I'm listening to this song at the moment. It's an old Duran Duran song from an album called 'Rio'. That was back in the days when they used to make these spinny things out of vinyl and people would put them in machines that poked them (the records, not the people) and sound would come out.

I've been thinking about lots of things lately. Here are some of my dumb thoughts, not in any particular order, but with timestamps so you can see how my train of thought goes off-the-tracks as the day goes on.

[10-Mar-08: Having sobered up, I've made a few edits to protect my privacy, and those of others. If you caught the blog before the edits, lucky you!]

SATURDAY

01:02 <@lex> "Europe is about to launch the biggest and most sophisticated spacecraft in history.."

02:16 <@lex> Remember that EMP (egg mixture protein) stuff that I got for the pigeons? I've just tipped the whole lot out onto the window sill, old bedroom. Tomorrow morning there'll probably be a massive flock of pigeons out there. Let's hope it doesn't rain.

08:33 <@lex> I've been on SL so many times tonight.. a doing a lot of building, my first bit of texture design and more building.

08:45 <@lex> I've found another bit of cantaloupe - I think it's okay. I'm eating it.

10:12 <@lex> What if people in Hillsborough Terrace are on SL - I'd never know, would I? Maybe I should put a notice downstairs, asking anyone if they are on it.

12:36 <@lex> It's amazing how much [my SL persona] looks like Ben - I never noticed before. It's the glasses.

13:13 <@lex> Chocolate: Dream, Milky Way, Kit Kat Chunk. The girl at the counter smiled at me and asked me if I'd like a bag. I couldn't remember. I said, "Er.. yes.. er.. I mean no.. sorry, I'm so tired, I don't know whether I've got a bag or not." [I was carrying it]
13:14 <@lex> There's £11 on the electricity.

20:53 <@lex> I'm awake again. I woke up some time around 20:30, I think, though I didn't find out what the time is until 20:45. The sound of people outside woke me - teenagers shouting (the usual
thing)./

23:05 <@lex> Dad should have got his flying monkey by now. I seem to be getting into the habit of buying Dad very silly birthday presents.

SUNDAY

00:00 <@lex> It's Sunday.
9th March. Sunday. 2008.
It's night-time - dark. Temperature in the kitchen is 17C.
Spatula's system temperature is 29C.
Spatula's CPU temperature is 56C.
CPU Core Voltage is 1.59V.
DDR Voltage is 2.69V.
DDR VTT Voltage is 1.63V.
ATX +12V is 11.72V.
AUXC Voltage is 2.73V.
My throat feels croaky and I think I'll have a mug of coffee.
End of report.

Dotun is talking about fish and chips. This is all making me quite hungry - don't worry, it'll be lunchtime soon. I expect that Mr. Nolan is on his way back to his hotel now, where he'll stuff his face.

To do: create mushy peas in SL.

01:30: They've.. what? Hired dogs to suck the bloodsuckers out of.. what?
Hotels. In hotels, they've hired dogs to find the bedbugs, and then they get an exterminator to get rid of them. Americans. No, not to get rid of the Americans, although that sounds like it might work too.
If they're going to all of the expense of getting trained dogs to find bedbugs and then getting exterminators to kill the bugs, why don't they just shut the whole hotel down? They'd save money. I mean otherwise, they'd have to go back for something else - cholera or something.

01:36 * lex laughs.
They're talking about conkers again. Americans don't know what it is.
Memo: create a conker in SL.
Conkers, mushy peas, what's left? Lots.

01:43 <@lex> Don't they have Fish 'n' Chips in the US?
Bizarre! No tea, no conkers, no mushy peas - I'd never make it there.

02:20 <@lex> What's that guy's name? Enzo Macaronelli? The announcer bloke had some trouble with that one. It's the boxing. Lunch is a PB & Banana sandwich. I've cut a milk carton in half and am going to use it to put tea bags in, so I can avoid that annoying 'splashing teabag' problem where, because I carry a teabag across the kitchen, tea ends up dripping on things (the fridge, mostly).

02:30 <@lex> I wrote 'USED TEA BAGS HERE PLEASE' on the side of the carton, and 'TEA BAGS - USED - HERE PLEASE', and 'TEA BAGS - USED PLEASE HERE' and stuff.

06:07 <@lex> I'm transferring data off the Nokia 6230i (Llamatron) and I'm writing it to a CD-RW, on Circadian's Windows XP system. That system is being very uncooperative and I conclude that it is buggy.

Everything is. That's what Thom [Yorke] should have shouted, in 'Planet Telex'.
EVERYTHING IS.. BUG-GY

09:37 <@lex> I am following my train of thought to try to work out why I am perusing the kernel source (2.0!) on kernel.org. It was something to do with dmix - if only I could remember what.. oh yeah, I was looking at top and trying to see the dmix process, and I couldn't so I figured it was part of the overall 'system' load. Then I did more 'top' stuff, thought about SMP, about the SPARCserver, and.. er.. can't remember what I was thinking after that.

09:42 <@lex> I need one of those portable media players.. oh, wait, I've got about a million of them. I just need to work out which one to use for all of my audio and get a big enough storage card for it.

10:31 <@lex> 'Exit Music' still makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up.

10:42 <@lex> 'Strange News From Another Star' makes me feel strange [sigh..] - groggy, drunk, heavy, lethargic. No change from the usual then.

10:50 <@lex> I love the start of 'Last Chance On The Stairway' - the sound of a cigarette lighter, I think (not very politically correct these days, but who gives a [four asterisks, disguising a word starting with 'S' and ending with 'T']?).

Things that I want (slightly - it's a long list):
1. X Files Season 9, although it's crap
2. Old Duran Duran albums
3. Knight Rider DVDs, other than the one I have already
4. A Knight Rider RC card.. car, I mean
I'm getting towards 40 so I am getting quite retro.
Why does that happen? Why, as I get older, am I losing the memories and the feel of those old times, and yet I want to relive them? [Maybe that's why..]

11:02 <@lex> I still think that 'The Chauffeur' is a truly excellent song.
"Who's that up front?" - maybe he says that now..
"There's more to his kind of camouflage - more than just colour and shape."
"Who's calling now? From the toy box in the attic.."
"Someone."
That last word is so quiet as to be almost inaudible. It might be 'somewhere', but I think it's 'someone'.

[I never noticed those words when I first heard that song, way back in 1982.]

13:27 <@lex> WARNING: /iommu@f,e0000000/sbus@f,e0001000/dma@f,81000/esp@f,80000/
sd@0,0 (sd0): Error for command 'read' Error Level: Fatal Requested Block
67936, Error Block: 67936 Sense Key: Not Ready Vendor 'CONNER': ASC = 0x4 (LUN not ready), ASCQ = 0x0, FRU = 0x15
13:28 <@lex> Disk error... bad..

13:33 <@lex> If I can stand that stink [the odd smell emanating from the SPARCserver], I'll go back in there. After a few more glasses of wine, I probably won't care.
* lex laughs.
I feel as if I have most spectacularly failed to do anything that I wanted to do, today. As usual, I got diverted from my objectives.
"You've wandered so far from the person you are," sing Keane.
I wander into the other room, disconnect the Sony CDROM drive, wander back into the kitchen.

14:06 <@lex> I declare that the Papermate ComfortMate is my favourite biro at the moment. It's good - it writes well, it feels good in the hand. You can tell that I'm drunk, can't you?

14:16 <@lex> "Female red squirrel, blond hair. Amy the Squirrel is intelligent, independent, and very protective of her loved ones, like her son Timothy. She too has been approached by Sabrina's employer to appear in her films. Her job is unknown, but a video by Eric implied she worked at a hospital as a nurse."
A nurse? I fancy her even more, then..

.. and I hate Thomas Woolfe, who is her husband. Bast.

[Oh no, sounds as if my Amy The Squirrel fixation is returning from my Amiga days.]

14:52 <@lex> I definitely had AF issue 110. 111 had 'Quake' on the front of it, and a Quake-like 'Q'. I may have had this - not sure..
Release date was Fri 15th May 1998. Issue 112 had a pink logo and a bloke who looks like Harry Enfield on it. I definitely didn't get this one. Why did I stop getting Amiga Format, then? I think it's the usual thing: the shop missed a couple of issues and I thought that AF had packed up. Mainly though, I was skint...

15:18 <@lex> I love Harriet Wheeler's voice. She's got such a brilliant, clear voice. I still love this album (R, W and A) although I've heard it lots of times.

15:23 <@lex> [Looking at the SPARCserver's files scrolling past]
Huh? /var/local/info/woman? What kind of file would that be? Next to 'widget' and 'viper'.

15:28 <@lex> It always gets me that when I listen to this stuff (Duran Duran again, currently) that the singer is frozen in time, always the same age, always in that moment, but I am accelerating away from them on the timeline, getting older all the time and seeing things differently. That spooks me.

16:03 (the present): It's moving so fast, it's standing still. That's not my quote - that's William Gibson's. I don't have a single original quote to my name, except maybe...

'Er.. dunno, stuff.'

Vague things like that, I say a lot: mostly to myself, in the dark, before I walk into a box of junk and fall over.

I'll go now.

[It's gone already: the present becomes the past and vanishes down an infinitely-receding timeline, where it will be endlessly re-iterated and changed by events in the present, until it bears little resemblance to what it was when it existed. The future awaits: a looming chasm of noise and randomness, generally buggering around with the present and turning it into another one. This makes life seem like a very long and nauseating fairground ride - The Waltzer, maybe, and the idiot who spins the cars around is the poking finger of fate, squashing order and sense into a meaningless mess.. and I need another drink.]

[Instead, I had a mug of tea and went to bed, waking up about 6 hours later. I'm sorry that this blog page couldn't be more interesting - it's never a good idea to paste bits of my diary into it, as it's unstructured, rambling, and usually contains something embarrassing. I've removed a lot of it since I originally wrote it, and there's not much left. I should have planned what I was going to write before I started typing.]