Sulk, moan, whimper

The superduper fantabulous present that I received as congratulations for making it through eighteen years of life (the occasion was marked last Saturday) was an iPod. You'll understand if I mention such words as "yay!" and "whoohoo!" here, and forgive me for being quite so exuberant.

The iPod is a thing of beauty, wonder and excitement (much excitement - Kevin's already heard me squeaking with excitement over it), and thus far I love it to bits. You may be wondering where this entry is heading, having taken note of the title. Read on.

Due to the fact that the iPod was intended to be a 15GB model, and was apparently (I say apparently - of course, I knew nothing of this, with it being an official Birthday Surprise) ordered just before Apple changed their range from 10GB, 15GB, 30GB to 10GB, 20GB, 40GB, the order was delayed so that they could upgrade my model at no extra cost to the 20GB version. The scum. This naturally meant that it wouldn't be delivered until this week, and in fact it arrived yesterday and was the cause of much joy and squeaking. However, due to my arriving home late from work, I didn't have time to do more than turn it on, fiddle with the settings (most of which I couldn't check because there was no sample music on it), play with the games and install the enclosed software. Oh well, I thought. That's enough for today - I'll move everything onto it tomorrow.

Tomorrow being today (today being yesterday), I got home early, plugged in my iPod - and I still have to get used to saying "my iPod" - to the USB2 port on the computer and waited confidently for MusicMatch to pop up, as my User's Guide says it should. Ah, see the trust I have in my iPod, the faith I've placed in it.

Wrongfully so, as it turns out, since nothing much happened apart from the computer detecting a new unknown hardware device. Hmm, I thought. I went back through the setup now that the iPod was actually connected and got to the part where it says, "Your iPod needs to be configured. Press OK to configure your iPod now, or Cancel to skip the configuration step."

OK.

"Please plug in your iPod to the USB2 or Firewire port, and press OK."

Um. OK.

"Please plug in your iPod to the USB2 or Firewire port, and press OK."

Ooh, that's bad. OK? Pretty please?

"Please plug in your iPod to the USB2 or Firewire port, and press OK."

This is the stage I'm at so far. The computer knows about the iPod, and recognises it as an extra hard drive, but doesn't seem to recognise that it's an iPod - MusicMatch thinks that there aren't any portable devices connected either. The Apple support phone line was surprisingly helpful in the twelve minutes before they closed for the night, and they now have all my details. Not the details of what's happening with the iPod, you understand, just my details. It seems they need a name, email address, postal address and telephone number, but feel no need to ask for the particulars of my problem before passing the matter on to an actual support person. However, I now have a Case Number (which puts me in mind somewhat of clichéd noirish Private Investigators) which simply means that won't take quite as long to reach a support person when I phone tomorrow morning (I didn't quite get that far tonight).

So for now I have a superduper fantabulous iPod, which can still send me into exclamations of delight just from using the touch wheel. But still. That doesn't stop me from being downcast with techie blues at the prospect of technology that doesn't work as it should. Gah.

Sulk, moan, whimper.

Then there was music (and wonderful roses)

The iPod situation is fixed, and I'm plugged in this very moment listening to my music collection on random play.

This came about after spending over an hour and a half on hold to Apple's technical support at national rate while Enya was played at me. I'm pretty sure they make an attempt to select calm and soothing music to subdue you, and avoid the prospect of you exploding once you actually manage to talk to someone. The main effect it had on me, however, was a soporific one, and after an hour I was finding it increasingly difficult to remember why I was phoning them.

The good news was that my problem was solved within ten seconds of talking to someone: iPods can't be used with USB2.0 ports if you have Windows Me. The bad news, and the annoying thing (other than the actual content of the bad news), was that this isn't mentioned anywhere on Apple's website, on the iPod box, literature, or in any of the information that came with the iPod dock connector to USB2.0 cable that we had to buy especially for this purpose since we didn't have a FireWire card in our computer. We've asked for a refund; whether we'll get one or not remains to be seen.

Anyway, the problem was solved by my dad popping out to buy a FireWire card which was duly installed, hence all the music currently on the iPod. The only irritation is that, due to the snazziness of the Browse and the Shuffle functions (you can set it to shuffle albums rather than songs), I now have to go back through all of my files to add in the album field in the ID3 tag - in the past I have stripped out all fields other than title and artist. Gah. Still, there's only 1000 or so files; shouldn't take too long.

Linkfest

As you may have noticed, I have far too much Real Life going on at the moment. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable unless I quit my job. (Not likely to happen.) I hate having no free time but there's not much I can do about it. I'm still trying to keep up with blogging, but I'm not having the greatest success in that area.

Anyway, mini-linkfest (because I haven't done one for ages):

• A 1997 reference to - well, article on - mouse potatoes (courtesy of Fionnaigh)
• Ever wondered what happened Gordon the Gopher after he left his glamorous career co-presenting CBBC? Wonder no more.
• Fascinating 1997 article by David Siegel on the separation of structure from presentation with regards to web authoring - "The Web Is Ruined And I Ruined It"
• The visible Mars bar project
• An appraisal of the utility of a chocolate teapot

Wonderful weekend (beware the brackets)

So, a belated look at my weekend (forgive the tardiness; I've been trying to catch up with my life in the meantime. I've since given up). Saturday saw me travelling into deepest Essex (well... further than I've been before, anyway) to see Kevin, a journey that would have gone more smoothly had I not been misdirected to the wrong tube station at one point and consequently ended up having to double back on myself. That aside, the rest of the day went really well. The weather helped in that aspect - it was amazing. No, really, it was absolutely stunning for mid-October - clear blue skies, warm breezes, bright sunshine, and fantastic autumnal colours on all the trees, with reds, oranges and yellows mixing in amongst the more everyday greens. I couldn't help sighing with pleasure at the beauty of it all whenever I looked around.

After lunch (note to self: toasted sandwich makers are gooood, particularly for use in conjunction with cheese-containing sandwiches) we went to the seafront of Southend-on-Sea (should that be Southend-on-Thames-Estuary?) and strolled up and down. We played "Adventure Golf", which is uncannily similar to crazy golf (but more adventurous, you understand), and I've now been to the end of the longest pier in the world, which is, um, something, I suppose :-) We took the little electric train out to the end and walked back, catching an almost-sunset on the way. It was an amazingly clear day - you could see for miles, and the sea sorry, Thames was so blue, and the sunlight dappled gold over the surface of the water... excuse me, I'm getting carried away again by the colours. This is what really beautiful autumn days will do to me (and it's been much the same today as well - it's almost good thing we don't have a window in our office, else I would have spent today staring out of it in rapture. Not wishing to go overboard here - well, I think I probably already have, but never mind - but I walked around outside today at lunchtime, and my heart was singing due to the sunshine, blue skies, and the shock of colours from the trees all around.

Okaaay, I think that really is going overboard (splash). Move on, Cathy.

Against expectations, we made it to the cinema in plenty of time for Finding Nemo, which was very enjoyable, and the first Disney film I've seen in the cinema in eight years or so. There's not much at all that I could criticise the film for - a slight lack of plot development, true, but you really can't hold that against it. I'd recommend it to a friend (you lot, consider yourselves duly recommended-to). One of the highlights was the CGI short animation shown just before the film, a short that Pixar made in 1989, and which was rather good. As the credits came up ("Filmed entirely on location") Kevin pointed at the screen and exclaimed, "Steve Jobs!" A blank face on my behalf revealed that this would have been far more impressive had I actually known who Steve Jobs was prior to this. Another little piece of ignorance has now been eradicated :-)

During the day I was exposed to Essex driving for the first time. At least, to Essex driving in Essex for the first time. It's so funny when you're sat behind a couple of adjacent cars (two lanes) at a set of traffic lights and you just know that as soon as the lights turn green they'll be off in a desperate, unthinking attempt to stay in front of the other one. Every time :-)

And now it's only Tuesday, and I don't get another weekend for almost four whole days...

Show us yer props!

On Saturday Kevin and I eventually met up in London following a spectactuarly unsuccessful attempt which saw us wandering round on both sides of the Thames, mobile phones glued to ears and trying vainly to spy one another since we both thought we were standing in the same place. My telling Kevin that I was standing in front of the Royal Festival Hall would have been more helpful if:

• I'd been slightly more specific than this
• Kevin had known where the Royal Festival Hall was
• the sign that Kevin found saying, amongst other things, "Royal Festival Hall" hadn't at some point previously been swivelled round 180°, meaning that he strode off in the opposite direction.

We ended up having to navigate by landmarks as varied as the Wheel and "a man dressed all in gold" (a mime), and eventually found each other. Sheesh. I never knew it could be so hard to locate someone when you've pre-arranged a meeting place and a meeting time, and you both have mobile phones. Je suis inutile.

Another good point to note for future reference is that "I'm on the Millennium Wheel side of the bridge" means that someone's on the Millennium Wheel side of the bridge, not necessarily the Millennium Wheel end of the bridge. Gah. We've never been good at directions.

We wandered around London until the evening, when we went to the Lord Of the Rings exhibition at the Science Museum, which was drool-worthy. Particularly noteworthy were the extremely life-like Boromir lying in his boat (I half expected him to suddenly sit up until Kevin said something very similar, at which point I four-fifths expected him to suddenly sit up), and one display showing various props and costumes at different scales - there was an example of the material used for Frodo's jacket, and they even had the weave of the cloth made to different scales.

One thing that did surprise me was how enthralled I was by the artwork that was on display - I've never been much of one for art, but it was really beautiful. The exhibit that I found slightly disturbing, on the other hand, was the display of prosthetics - what you can see is a glass wall of a cabinet absolutely crammed full of them. On first hurried glance out of the corner of my eye, all I saw was a large display full of feet, and isolated ears, which almost made me jump.

We had a leisurely scout around the Science Museum shop, which features a huge range of fun gadgets, toys, and suchlike. There was the screwdriver with a spirit level in the shaft... the periodic table ties (always a classic)... the globes with raised surfaces for mountains... the egg-timers containing bubbles instead of sand ("Bubbles which defy gravity and float upwards!")... the build-your-own suspension rollercoaster... the t-shirt with hazard symbol declaring "IRRITANT"... Best of all was - actually, I'll let Kevin tell that one :-)

Bleh

I'm sure I've used that title before, but I ain't checking. Besides, it's a rather accurate representation of how I feel right now.

Yesterday morning's sore throat transformed into an extremely sore throat and swollen glands this morning, as a result of which I am off work today, and not entirely sure whether I'll make it in tomorrow. After getting up at 6:30am and deciding within ten minutes that I'd be staying at home, I forgot to have breakfast and just floated around until I realised that, it being so early in the day, I had full access to our DVD player. So I settled down to watch some of Buffy S3, since I bought it two months ago and until today have found time to watch exactly three episodes. That figure is now slightly-more-than-ten.

I decided to get dressed first since I'd be warmer, then found myself to be too cold in the big thick jumper I had on and so added a big thick outdoorsy fleece over it. But my legs were still cold (even with tights under my trousers), so I fetched a big thick blanket to snuggle up in.

A couple of hours later, after some sneezing, I decided that I needed a hot water bottle under all that as well.

So today has been woolly thinking, sore throat, sneezing, shivering, and slight dizzy spells. Although to be fair I think those last are more from tiredness than from illness - surprisingly, I haven't been back to bed at all (although I did fall asleep briefly just before lunch). I had hoped that I could do something vaguely productive today, such as actually starting on the workbooks I've been sent as part of my remote learning maths course. It's organised by Year In Industry and is aimed at students who are taking a gap year before going onto a science Uni degree. It's basically to refresh your memory, and introduce a few new topics so that you're not thoroughly bored.

Strangely, and especially after looking through their programme, I'm realising that I actually miss maths. Trigonometry... matrices... vectors... now, vectors were fun. Complex numbers! De Moivre's theorem!

And, oh. This is getting scary. I'm starting to miss P5 integration! It was the bane of my life, and I absolutely hated it because, of the three pure maths modules in the Further maths A-level (P4, P5, P6), P4 and P6 mainly consisted of Learn Method, Apply. In P5 it was more Learn Techniques, Apply The Right One. Correctly. (Yes, I resented having to actually think.) That was the one exam that I truly dreaded, and miraculously it went swimmingly. We all came out smiling, which was inconceivable beforehand.

I'm suddenly very aware that I'm rambling. However, I have a double excuse - I get to blame it-

Oh no, wait, a triple excuse. (That wasn't planned, and nor do I expect the next few paragraphs to further resemble the Spanish Inquisition sketch.) I get to blame it on (a) illness, (b) tiredness, and (c) Shelley Powers' stunningly beautiful photographs, which I saw about fifteen minutes ago and which reduced me to a state of wibbling near-incoherence. Not that I was exactly lucid beforehand, but it's always nice to have more excuses.

Loose scatterage, with smatterings of sense

Okay, a rare update... and in the spirit of live television, I'm going for absolute stream-of-consciousness writing, which means the Backspace key is only allowed for typing errors. Prepare yourself for dribble (and, most likely, plenty of brackets... sorry, this is how I think on paper keyboards), while I explain why I'm doing this.

It may not have escaped your attention, unless you're deeply uninterested in bent back tulips (in which case... oh, never mind), that my blogging frequency has plummeted in the last eight weeks. This is because - and I'll stop whingeing about this at some point - I have no time. My weekday life is: Get up, go to work, work (no internetting available), come home, spend an hour reading emails and blogs, and desperately trying to catch up with the couple of hundred daily messages on alt.fan.pratchett, have dinner, chat on IRC, go to bed. And yes, the "chat on IRC" is quite essential to my day and I'm not giving it up to make time for other things :-) Weekends, especially Saturdays, are generally quite busy and Sunday seems to be (sad as it is) my day for trying to shoot off some emails, and for catching up with the week's television. Which I'll never be able to do if BBC2 keeps showing Buffy Series 7 three times a week. Won't. Cope.

I used to find it awkward to write informal things - even formal informal things (but on the other hand, writing informal formal things was always fine. As was writing formal things. Keep up) - and this showed when I started blogging. After a few months however, my writing style had loosened up a lot and it was no hassle to dash off a number of paragraphs and still have it be a perfectly legible and relatively well-written article. My ease of writing improved even more when I started writing a personal diary journal (it's not a diary. I don't have a diary. I'm not someone who keeps a diary. It's a journal, okay?) just because of the sheer quantity of writing I was doing. Lately this quantity has dropped off to almost zero, and it's for this reason as well as the lack of time that my blogging's been suffering.

I have been doing things... writing bits and pieces (although mostly bits), dabbling in bent back tulips redesigns (crossbrowser CSS authoring is a nightmare, browser hacks are horrible, and I hate browsers). Mostly, though, things remain unfinished and linger, which is what tends to happen with my 'projects'. I have a dozen unwritten and partially written draft posts which I've tried to write, but I get stuck with. The ideas are there, but the expression's gone. I've always been a perfectionist, and if any of my writing isn't up to my standards, most of the time I'd rather not release it than publish something which I'll cringe at in a few days' or weeks' time. This is why I start forming paragraphs, then get discouraged, think "No, this sucks", and hastily cast it aside again.

Not this post, however. However dull the content, however ghastly the sentence structure, however much the entire thing resembles unfinished and incomplete thought, I'm damn well posting this today, and not having it hang around and eventually deleted. And hopefully you'll be slightly entertained by it before you finish reading it.

Too much waffle, too much waffle, cut back... another reason why my stream-of-consciousness writing isn't well-structured. And why this is looking like an increasingly bad idea. I have been known to carry on entire conversations with myself for half an hour or more. I've been known to sit down and just write in rambling yet coherent fashion for a couple of hours or more. Every day for a couple of weeks.

So, conclusion: there's usually a lot of writing going on behind the scenes, most of which you won't want to read but which exercises my writing habits so that when I come to actually writing properly (ie. for bbt), I can. However, my definition of "usually" is now not valid, and won't be so until August or September next year (when my contract ends). At the moment, bbt is about the only writing I have time for (and there's little enough of that) and so consequently quality and therefore frequency of writing is dropping on the whole. The sad state of affairs is that I'm now aiming for ten posts a month. This is, emphatically, Not Good. Still, I'm going to try to maintain what semblance of a blog I now have, and hopefully you won't lose patience with me. (Yes, yes I know; it's my own damn blog and I'm not under obligation to anyone; I don't have to write anything; I'll write what I like, when I like and you lot can take what you're given. I know. In theory this is true, but really, it's the readers and commenters who are important and who motivate the author. Else this wouldn't be sitting on a world-wide publically accessible internet server, would it?)

Okay. And that was just the intro ;-) More tomorrow, hopefully.

She's done it again

Remember yesterday when I said "More tomorrow, hopefully"?

Well, it turns out that Cathy was very silly and, although she managed to compose half a blog entry at work (yes, after she'd finished doing all her actual work), she forgot to email it home. Or rather, she sent the email but never attached the attachment. Gah. Still, you should get it on Monday when I actually have access to my computer again.

In the meantime, I shall direct you towards an account of my Wednesday because I'm too lazy to say more than: I took a day off work and, amongst other things, got some more books signed by Terry Pratchett. On the plus side, we were in and out in record time, even for me (I'm always near the front of the queue at Pratchett signings; once I was even the third person there). On the downside, however, I managed to say barely a word, other than trying to convince him that yes, it was the 29th today and not the 28th (me: "It is the 29th today, honestly - I've had this date in my calendar for weeks." Kevin, elbowing me: "Shh, he'll think he's important!"). This always happens - I'm never quite sure of what to say, and so I end up saying nothing. Except for last year, when I did have something to say, but was instead stunned into silence by Terry saying, "I've signed books for you before, haven't I?"

Result: mouth opening and closing. Think goldfish.