Happy Birthday To Me, Happy Birthday To Me,
I’m Forty-One To-da-ay,
Happy Birthday To Me.

It’s been a very long day: I woke up at 17:30 on Thursday, switched all of the computers off when there was a storm, switched them all on again, went up the hill to Tesco – and was almost electrocuted on the way back – and I did more ancient Nascom-1 emulation stuff and tried to get some sleep, but couldn’t because the man downstairs has his toilet right below the room where I sleep, and when he uses it, it wakes me up. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that he seems to eat a lot of spicy food.  Sometimes I love this place: the views are great, the air is clean – but sometimes I don’t: when the traffic is loud, there are a bunch of kids spraying graffiti on a wall over the road and one’s downstairs neighbour spends all day coughing, farting and shouting at his dog, while the woman in Flat 2 yells constantly at her child.  It’s not a positive atmosphere and Sue (my neighbour) says that the house is ’soulless’.  Whinge whinge!  What a great way to end my birthday!

It’s been good, really: lunch was great and the Nascom-1 emulation stuff was fun.  Ah, watching those little monochrome Space Invaders shuffling across the screen brought some memories back.  It was exactly as I remembered, but without the hassle of having to stop and start a cassette recorder when I wanted to save a program.  I’m not sure if it was a Nascom-1 that I used before, or a Research Machines 380Z – I’ve used so many computers.

It’s been so long since I wrote anything in this blog, and I wasn’t even sure whether it was still going. I currently have quite a few projects going on and I randomly jump from one to the other, depending on what interests me. Most of the time though, I have a lot of trouble concentrating and I have begun to drink vast amounts of tea and coffee to try to stay on-the-ball. Can’t, though – when the daylight disappears, I wander the flat in a semi-trance and this is when I am likely to abandon current projects and start new ones. Last night, for instance, I spent a few hours looking for an acoustic coupler for my Tandy 102. I didn’t find it and instead, found an old computer (Toshiba T1910CS) that I have decided to throw away because it is incredibly old, broken and definitely past its expiry date.
My days and nights are so routine now: they consist of trips to Tesco, walks around Hillsborough or the seafront and sitting at a monitor, typing. I listen to Five Live a lot and am on Facebook. I have recently started using Skype again – look for ‘lexthehex’ if you want to contact me. I hardly make a regular PSTN phone call any more – it’s all ‘net.
I’m going to the rubbish dump to throw away this computer; it will be missed – it’s been around for a long time.

I wanted to let my many fans know that I am still here.  It’s been an alternately cold and hot summer and I have been extremely lazy, not particularly wanting to communicate with the outside world, apart from the occasional trip to Tesco.  I am now 40 years old, Christmas is about 4 months away and everyone’s preparing for it to be 08-Aug-08, when I suppose something amazingly weird will happen at precisely 08:08:08.  How far do you want to take the precision, anyway?  Is 08:08:08 and 0 milliseconds the time, or 08:08:08 and 8 milliseconds, or 8.08, or .8080808.. see?  What about .8888… with a recurring ‘8′?  When is it midnight and when has midnight passed?  Fish.  See you after 08-Aug-08, assuming that something doesn’t happen.

Looking through a bunch of very old documentation that I keep in a carrier bag, I found the following snippets, which may be of interest to anyone who was around in the mid-to-late 80s and has an interest in computing and telecoms.

My MUD signup letter:

A long time ago, I signed up to the original MUD.  This is my account confirmation letter (edited slightly, although there was no point in my doing that as the account doesn’t exist any more).

December 1989: having been awake for a very long time, I got the bus into Barnstaple and bought an Amiga 500.  I was 21 years old and rather mad.  This is the receipt from that purchase.

That was quite a week.  By Friday, I’d been awake for 5 days and was hallucinating and talking to myself constantly.  I was going off the rails but at least I was having fun, or I thought I was.

It’s suddenly become very hot and as a result, I’ve had my head shaved (number 3 on the settings).  I booked another appointment for a month from now.

My dad and his significant other – Tricia – are in the area, and staying at a caravan park.  Yesterday we went on a very long walk, at the edge of Somerset – Porlock, I think it was.  I started off the walk by walking quite fast and I overtook everyone and walked at the front of the pack.  The only tiny flaw in this strategy is that by lunchtime, I was rather exhausted, when the other walkers still had plenty of reserves left.  I was completely ‘done in’ and because I’d been carrying a rucksack around my neck, my neck was sore – I was hurting.

Peter Allen reports that the UK is to become ‘the most crowded country in Europe’.  Aye.. people everywhere – you can’t breathe for the buggers, and their dogs, their cars, their children, their computers.. no, that’s just me.

After the walk, we went to have a cup of tea with a rather religious woman and her husband.  Both had been on several trips to far away places.  The tea was very good, though Trish made me take my shoes off before I went into the house, and the tea was drunk in a summer house which was positioned at the end of a path covered with sharp bits of stone.  After walking over those little jagged bits of rock, my feet hurt a lot.  Another walker had been persuaded to come back to the couple’s house: he stood by a picture at the bottom of the stairs.  When I enquired as to where everyone had gone, he said “They’re looking around,” and said that was “A woman thing”.  If this was a ‘woman thing’, why had my dad gone along with them?  I could hear their voices echoing down the stairs as they were shown a painting or a carpet.  I began to wonder if the house was actually a shop, because they had some environmentally-friendly cloth bags for sale.  I couldn’t afford them and to be honest, I thought they were a bit small.

On the way back, I made the mistake of talking about my finances with my dad.  A day later, he gave me the option of having him handle the accounts, or he said it might be better if he let me sort it out.  I opted for the latter.  Hint: never ever let a member of your family handle your finances – unless you want to get into a horrible row with them and eventually disown them.  Unless it’s your gran – grans are good with finances and they don’t get all frustrated with it, as my dad does.  I think I’ve said enough (getting myself into hot water!).  In Slough, a man is ‘wandering the streets, threatening people with a handgun’.  Crazy bugger.

I’ve gone completely mad about an old Amiga game called ‘F/A-18 Interceptor’.  In my projects dir you can find a code calculator to replace the ‘flight computer’.  The code is a bash script and is slow and buggy because I wrote it as I went along.  My next project is to disassemble the game and rewrite a multiplayer version, though I will need to study the code for a long time before I work it out.  I like 68000 assembler a lot, and 6502 assembler is okay too (I have a BBC Micro) – I have yet to get into ARM assembler.  I have typed the Interceptor manual into OpenOffice and have to put graphics in it.  When I’ve done so, I’ll bung that in my projects dir as well – unless Electronic Arts tell me not to (would they really care about a 21-year-old computer game?).

I awoke to the sound of scaffolding being moved: the house is surrounded by builders.  I kept the curtains and blinds shut and at lunchtime, I peeked out.  There were a pair of sandaled feet and hairy legs parading around out the back.  I closed the gap in the blind, had a mug of tea and looked out again: the hairy legs had been joined by a red-and-blue tee-shirt and some more hairy legs, which were wearing trainers.  I saw the humans to which the legs and shirt were attached: white, early thirties, not much hair – basic builder.

(The ‘tweeting noise’ were the upper harmonics of a presenter’s voice on a nearly-muted, slowed-down playback of the Five Live election coverage, from last Thursday.)

On Wednesday and Thursday, we visited Barnstaple.  The sun was battering down as we stomped around the shops and visited the cafe known as “Zena’s” for lunch.  Thanks to Dad and Tricia for all that – it was very welcome, as was the fish ‘n’ chips at Squire’s Fish Restaurant in Braunton, later.  I ate rather a lot.  On Thursday Dad met me at the flat at 09:00, and we went into Barnstaple to buy shoes.  We met Mandy at the cafe at Marks & Spencer, and Dad said “Who was that?” “That was Mandy – wife of Rich,” I said.  “Ah,” said Dad.

I’ve been reading my Sun Cobalt RaQ 550 manual. Some of the warnings at the start are very strange. Take, for instance, this one:

Warning: The power switch of this product functions as a standby type device only. The power cord serves as the primary disconnect device for the system. Be sure to plug the power cord into a grounded power outlet that is nearby the system and is readily accessible. Do not connect the power cord when the power supply has been removed from the system chassis.

My interpretation of this:

When you switch the computer off, it’s not totally off. When you unplug the power cord, it is. Make sure you plug it in, and use a power outlet that is nearby (i.e. don’t plug an extension cord [see the warning about household extension cords] into your neighbour’s garage outlet and stick it through the door, through your window and into the room with the computer).

That final sentence really confuses me: ‘do not connect the power cord when the power supply has been removed from the system chassis’. Does this mean “do not plug the device in when it’s not plugged in”? No, I think it means “do not plug the power cord in when there isn’t any power”. Why? What harm does that do?

Here’s another:

Safety precaution: Never push objects of any kind through openings in the equipment.
Dangerous voltages may be present. Conductive foreign objects could produce a short circuit that could cause fire, electric shock or damage to your equipment.

Translation: as tempting as it might be, don’t stick a screwdriver into the computer. Don’t try to poke your chubby little fingers through the holes in the case. Do not attempt to stop the PSU fan by inserting pens into it. If you do, something bad might happen.

This one is also quite perplexing:

Top cover. You must remove the cover of your Sun Cobalt server appliance to add cards, memory or internal storage devices. Be sure to replace the top cover before powering on your server appliance.

Translation: you’ve gone out and bought a brand-spanking new expansion card and you’re knackered out from the trip back from the shop. I know, it’s a really long way to the next room to get your toolbox, and what you really want to do is just jam that expansion card into the Sun Cobalt server by chopping it up into very small bits and feeding it through the cooling vent. Please don’t do that – it is generally only possible to install something by opening the cover.

To be fair, there is a useful warning about browser bugs:

Both Netscape NavigatorTM and Microsoft Internet Explorer have bugs that can cause intermittent, unexplained failures.

Remember, this manual was written in the days before Firefox. Mac OS’s Safari browser is not mentioned, though Internet Explorer on Macintosh is. There is no way I would want to inflict IE on my Mac.

I left the house this morning, having not been out for 5 days (since last Thursday). I was ill with a cold/’flu thing – not sure what it was really – it just left me completely tired and lacking in energy, and I didn’t want to do anything except sleep a lot and eat Ravioli on toast. I sure did eat a lot of toast!

Today I upgraded my server (Desree – named after a cat, who was named after a singer) and things may be a bit flaky until I (yawn) edit the (yawn).. oh, this is terrible – I need sleep. I’ve been awake since 21:50 yesterday (Monday) and I am nodding off.

Things to do: buy William Gibson’s new book, ‘Spook Country’. Order a Crowded House DVD. Transfer more cassette tapes over to disk. Transfer more old video tapes to disk. Try not to crash anything. Peter Allen is talking about varieties of potato – somehow I don’t think that this will help me (yawn) stay awake – but I have to, as I ordered some shopping from Tesco and they’ll be here in about 3 hours and if I doze off, I’ll surely miss them.

This month I have been mostly: listening to Crowded House, thinking about the time that I spent at Easterground Cottage, thinking some more about Australia and a gentleman I used to know, called Coby.. and yesterday I thought a lot about 1985, when I was at North Devon Microcentre. This was an ‘ITeC’ – one of Maggie Thatcher’s brilliant (NOT) ideas to bring Britain into the modern age with lots of sparkling Information Technology. The other young people on the course seemed to do well, but I just messed around a lot and had a huge crush on a young woman who attended the course. She married a gentleman called Kevin and they moved to Germany. Hi, Sam, if you’re out there. Sorry I was such an idiot at the disco and thanks for being so patient with me when I acted like an idiot. Hello also to Jason Gordon – wherever he is – and .. who was that bloke I used to hang around with – John, was it? Decent guy. Hi, John, if that’s your name. I can’t remember nuffin’ – it’s all a blur. I remember when we got very drunk and shouted a lot, at the old bus station in the Strand. I really was very, very drunk. Jason and I walked back to Ilfracombe and Jason picked up a flashing roadworks beacon and threw it over a hedge.

Hey, it’s almost April – time passes so fast.

Elly, Nigel and Kate visited Devon – it was great to see them. Kate is so much more grown-up now, and as Elly says, she’s not a toddler any more! She seemed very much more confident than last time. We went to an Indian restaurant, and walked around Ilfracombe, drove to a few places and.. you know what, I can’t remember where – how annoying! Perhaps I should complete this entry when I’m sober? (I’ve been drinking lager again)

I’ve been compiling firmware for the Linksys WVC54G camera and I’ve written summat about it.

On a rainy Wednesday evening, I decided to install a new broadband router and simultaneously ditch my old blog and install a new one. Thanks to Ubuntu, that’s just a matter of typing ‘apt-get install wordpress’ and then reading the documentation to see how to set up Wordpress. They now supply a setup script to make this easier.

So, out goes GreyMatter – bye! It’s served me well, has ol’ GM, and you can still find the content here, although I am no longer updating it and it is in a ‘frozen’ state. WordPress should make it a lot easier for me to write blog entries and do the things that I had a lot of trouble with when using GM, such as…

Inserting pictures…

Whew.. what was that?!

Doing various text styles without resorting to HTML tags..

Adding links to files.

Sites that you will probably find useful when starting a WordPress blog are, naturally, wordpress.org – and particularly the themes site, where I got the current theme (Traffic).