Rmdir afp

I've done something that I really should have done a long time ago, which is to take down my afp guide. It wasn't originally written for the general public and I never rewrote it adequately for this.

I wrote it a year ago for a friend and, to be honest, I linked to it in the bent back tulips sidebar last December simply because I wanted things to fill up the navigation. Forgive me, I was naïve.

To be more brutally honest, it's actually the guide that I'd have wanted when I started to read afp almost two years ago. But that's more to do with my slightly obsessive nature, and wanting to know as much 'background' as I could before I joined in. The guide's not actually that appropriate for other afp-newbies because (having looked over it recently for the first time in months, and wincing) I've seen that it's potentially off-putting for newbies with its implicit mandate that These are the Things that you Should Know before you so much as start reading it.

That's not what I wanted, and the bad thing is that bent back tulips is rather Google-friendly, and so I'm getting very high rankings for even generic usenet guide search terms - "usenet guide top posting moron" (drops down to #2 if you exclude "moron"), "killfile filter plonk" - and this despite the fact that no one has ever linked to the guide.

So it's gone now. With the right HTTP Error, no less.

Life and stuff

I've basically had a week that had me running around a lot and felt like it was packed full and hectic, but looking back on it, it seems like I've achieved nothing. And I'm mystified as to how all this nothing happened.

A bit of the mystery disappears when I explain that, amongst other things, I've been playing Discworld Noir - I finally got around to installing it after having bought it about two months ago. I bought it in my capacity as a Discworld fan rather than as a gamer - I am not a gamer. Apart from this and one other DW PC game, the last one I can remember playing seriously was EcoQuest: The Search For Cetus when I was about seven. Ooh, memories! That was fun. Anyway, I don't get a huge sense of achievement at solving all the puzzles, or working out how to progress in the game. It's a point-and-click, so essentially what I've been doing is wandering around, talking to everyone about everything, and when I get stuck I just pull up a walkthrough and move on. In my view this gets me maximum entertainment because nearly all the dialogue's brilliant, and also I don't end up banging my head against the monitor in frustration.

The other thing that took up a lot of my time last week was watching all of Angel Season 4 - the first half via a borrowed boxset and then via downloaded .avi files for the last eleven episodes. Having only ever seen Buffy or Angel in boxset form I'm used to watching a season in about three weeks, and so it was very traumatic when I ran out of videos and the season just stopped halfway through. Really :) I don't know how everyone else manages to watch them week-by-week; I'd find that absolutely excrutiating. I found it was bad enough only downloading two or three per day (~80MB each at a rate of 5-10KB/sec).

Now the odd thing is that I've finally caught up with the rest of the world on the Angel front. I'll be able to have conversations about it with people and not feel left-behind or continually having to avoid spoilers. This is weird. But I still haven't seen any of Buffy S7, so there's still that left.

On a related note, in a few days I should be the proud owner of Buffy S3 on DVD - less than half the RRP from the "as new" used items from Amazon. Yay :) I'm still annoyed for not buying up Angel S1 on DVD a few months ago when someone offered it for £20.

I did drive to Farnborough after all on Saturday and it was an unexpectedly enjoyable experience because of the lovely, lovely air-conditioning in our car. On the way back I had to turn the fan down because it was getting a bit chilly (the heat hit us in the face and engulfed us the second we stepped out of the car). It was lots of motorway navigation, which I haven't had to do before and so it involved lots of panicking about which lane I was supposed to be in, and so on.

Actually, yesterday was even hotter than Saturday and so I said to my parents (with a straight face) that I should probably try driving there and back on my own seeing as the route was fresh in my mind. Just to reinforce the route, you understand. Not just because I want to spend another two hours of the sweltering afternoon in the nice chilly air-con, oh no. I managed to get there all right, with the exception of the minor incident when I evidently forgot which lane of the M25 I had been in on Saturday and thus ended up in the lane for the M3 going to Sunbury rather than the M3 going to Southampton. Oops. Not that I minded having to go the extra five miles to Sunbury, get off, round the roundabout and back on the M3 heading in the right direction this time - another 5-10 minutes of driving time was well appreciated :)

As a consequence of all the above and the sluggish heat, and a few other things, I've read practically nothing in the last week, which I find annoying because it makes me feel really lazy and dissatisfied. I think it's Summer Holidays Syndrome kicking in - nothing to do and no real structure to your week. I'm not very self-disciplined, and so I end up not doing much. I'm almost looking forward to having a fulltime nine-to-five job (should the official contract ever actually arrive) starting in September.

That's almost - not that I'm not looking forward to it in the abstract sense, but I suspect that getting up at 06:15am every day will be a real shock to my system. Not to mention actually working all day and with only a few days' leave per year. Quite apart from the huge long school holidays, for my two years of Sixth Form I had an incredible amount of free time - last year I had the greatest number of study periods of anyone in the year - and now I've just had four months of study leave, exams and holiday.

Once I start my job, feel free to laugh at my despair, and say things like, "Welcome to the real world!"