Day 904

To T's via Debden about 6.30, drank, talked, listened to Madness and watched telly till 3.30am.

Day 903

Found a chapter in that unlikable John Simpson book which was about S. Africa, read it with interest.

Day 902

Cashed my Giro. Ironic for 6 years to the day and day of the week after the start of uni.

Letter from T, listing her fantasy league team (she's 3rd out of 47).

Programmed. EMACS looks very good but is very hard to get to grips with. Updated my distance map.

Day 901

The weekday congruence brings us to the end of the sixth year since the start of uni. There was an item about a bloke starting there on Look East.

Went round to my parents', spent most of the day helping dad with scaffolding for trimming the fir trees. Started re-doing an old Sunday Times personality test mum found - it had answers on it I did in 1987. Full results tomorrow.

Gave The Fast Show a chance ite, some good jokes but too much white space. Pris later.

Day 900

Dark damp morning. Went to the library, then to sign on: the queue was enormous, I was 20 or 30 numbers behind. One of the top women came out and made a speech of apology. Everyone listened sullenly.

About 2.30pm M rang up, temporarily back, and invited me round. This echo of past days was contrasted by the revelation, that she's engaged! To A! With engagement presents and everything! And they're getting a house together! And they'll probably get married next year! She is the first of my friends to. What surer sign can there be that after three years of the Univ. of Life there are fundamental changes in our world?

She was very impressed by my INT 10 EGA Mono TSR. Later she came round here and took away a copy of the DOS Scan stuff, strictly for testing purposes, to see if it crashed her computer and (identical) scanner. And if Logitech do me for unauthorised distribution I'll have them for Trades Descriptions for the misleading scanner box. So there.

In the evening watched Harry Hill's latest short; live-action Punch & Judy and very funny. (Chucks away baby, cut to rabbi and nun sadly leaving infertility clinic. Baby drops into her arms).

Enjoyed reading On The Road again: the grand landscapes and the correspondingly futile lives of most of the people, failed assignations, failed marriages, aimless wandering, smoking butts from the ashtrays in grey dawns. A warning. There's got to be something more.

Day 899

Finished sorting out the Pascal disc.

It took me so long to read the paper this week that I had to have a bath and do it in two goes. Perhaps I should start reading the news bit earlier in the day.

I wish I could suss out the reason for the sub-dizziness I've been getting ever since June 14th, during the ABC days.

Day 898

Got the text menus working. Finding there were 130 files in the Pascal utilities directory, spent all day cataloguing them with a view to getting rid of some..

Cooked tea, watched Alan Partridge again.

Day 897

Went into town. Borrowed the concise ephemeris from the library, I want to sort out the outer planet transits once and for all.

Started that, did more Latin, worked very hard on a text menuing system to imitate the Psion's on a PC. Making progress. Watched Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge.

Day 896

C brought round a copy of the Red Dwarf quiz book from work (it came with a press release) - scanned a picture of Holly to display on my own computer.

Listened to depressing but authentic R4 play The Peer Gynt of Victoria in the evening about homeless alkies, mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.

Day 895

Did some more Latin, started transferring my personal vocabulary to a Psion database.

T rang up; when I told her about the strike she said she'd come to Epping station and meet me.

Day 894

Still felt a bit paranoid, but not so depressed. Remembered the thing in the Life of Johnson: the court physician said, if a man says he sees a ruffian attacking him with a sword, and tries to point him out to me, I pronounce him to be mad; but if he says he thinks he sees a ruffian, and yet knows that he does not, I pronounce him to have a disordered imagination. Certainly I've always had a powerful imagination, I suppose with so little reality to work against it's racing away in overdrive.

Finished Herodotus, all 600+ pages of it. (The Greeks win).

Realised there will be a Tube strike on the 30th so I can't go to T's: tried to ring to put off to Oct. 13th, but no-one there (she was supposed to ring me yesterday).

Day 893

Very depressed and paranoid today. Watched Harry Hill's Fruit Fancies, quirky silent comedy thing.

When I started this diary volume a year ago today I was facing an isolated autumn: I hate to say it but I've quickly got used to having hardly any social contact. This last 12 months feels like it's been going on for years, and the ABC debâcle did a double disservice by raising my hopes and then dashing them again.

I hope this depression lifts soon (could it be all the rain?) as I'm finding it hard to look forward to anything.

Day 892

Saw that Colin Stagg, that bloke they tried to trick into confessing to killing Rachel Nickell, has passed a lie-detector test.

Day 891

Improved the DIR search prog from the Advanced Turbo Pascal book to do only files after a given date.

Went with C to car lots as he's thinking of buying a car. in the afternoon he decided on a yellow A-reg Metro for £995.

Watched Gladiators, sad to say. Then the repeat of Alan Partridge, it was so good yesterday.

Day 890

They have got a shareware bank down at the library, £2 per disc with all the stuff in the shareware catalogue. Might well give it a try, to encourage them to keep up the service.

Read Herodotus most of the day, got the impression of a totally new room simply by sitting at the other end of the bed. in the evening watched Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge, the latter transferred quite well to telly with just a few slack moments.

Day 889

Another dark and rainy morning. Very cold - had to put a jumper on for the first time this season.

In the afternoon did a load of scanning, Catchword very effective once you get it to accept a scan - I was doing the Page scan where you stitch two vertical strips together - did it by scanning them with SCAN and loading them in. Also two very good 4"x4" 100dpi scans of a photo.

Carried on with Herodotus, very good to read it end to end instead of anecdotally. Liked the Cleomenes/'Scythian fashion' unmixed wine story.

I'm a bit worried about getting replies to the letters I sent on Monday, usually I'm too embarrassed to read them for days.

Day 888

It was a dark rainy morning, so I skipped going to town and just walked as far as the post office to cash my Giro.

Worked out that the maximum 400dpi scan length is 19mm before the signal corrupts, it scans a full 4" width though. Can't work out why. Maybe the 8 MHz processor speed is too slow.

Absolutely triffic Star Trek TNG today: 'Devil's Due', woman impersonates historical supernatural being to take over planet. As good as the Mintaka one in 1991.

Day 887

Tested concurrent procedures in Modula-2; took a bit of adapting to the version of the compiler that I've got, but worked.

In the evening watched The Real McCoy - very good first 20 minutes, then a bit boring.

Day 886

Prepared for the 'restart'. My deliberate new policy of being relaxed worked a treat. I got a poacher-turned-gamekeeper ex-fellow-jobless-graduate, we even had a few laughs. While he was fetching a form I sneaked a look at my records upside down across the desk (again). 'Client very negative' it said, about my last visit. But I had laughed while looking at the job boards, '£4000 per anum' read one of them, loosely translatable as '£4000 up the arse'. So I was in such a good mood I made vague promises to go to a voluntary 'job review workshop' on Oct 6th.

In the library spotted a cluster of girls from my old school; they seemed so small! And fashions have changed. Times have moved on.

Day 885

Last night I dreamt I went back to ABC again, and found out that it was the bloke Julian that betrayed me. I woke up at 7.20am with a deep feeling of peace. Don't know why. Perhaps a travail is never really over till you've dreamt about it, especially something like this that I suppressed so much information to myself about. I was still walking home when I started forcing myself to forget. And the first dream was only on Friday

Nice peaceful Sunday. Took 70 minutes to read the paper, it's getting ridiculous. Finalised the anti-'restart' armoury against tomorrow, apart from if there are any good ads in the Guardian tomorrow.

Watched J. Beadle, they should dump him and just show the videos and save a lot of cash. Tidied up the clip art discs.

Day 884

Didn't wake up till 10.30am, set to work writing 'restart' letters. Read the paper, and Herodotus. Listened to solar-powered radio all afternoon. Managed to make the first calculator I ever had run off the solar panel.

Day 883

Dreamt last night that I went back to ABC and confronted them. Quite frantic today: determining to make some applications against the Scum 'restart', rang Steve Layer at the Busywork Trust to see if he'd give me a reference. He couldn't get rid of me fast enough, and said I should ask ABC to find out why it ended. Accordingly I rang the woman who sent me the form letter, the tone of which contrasted so much with the way they followed me out of the building. She denied that any allegations of misconduct were in the air and after some hassle gave me this bloke to write to, whereupon our tone grew somewhat more conciliatory.

I was relieved to get all that resentment off my chest and sort of saw that the end of ABC was not so very terrible, I suppose I was annoyed at myself and at the Arrogant Bastard. Got to sort out this references thing I suppose.

After all this did more peaceful things, managed to run the radio indoors by putting the solar panel close to a light bulb. Did a spot more computer experimentation.

Day 882

Solar panel came: very effective in proper sunlight, 65mA through glass at 3V, 110mA outside. Quite inspiring to listen to R5 and think that no resources are being used, so no cost.
Couldn't find any jobs to apply for in the freesheets, this could be a bit of a problem with the scum tomorrow. I'd better do something, even speculative letters perhaps (dread the prospect).

Couldn't iron out the bugs in the C version of the .EPS shower, but had more luck with a replacement for INT 10 that only allows graphics mode changes to modes 7 (text) and 0F (EGA Mono). So any prog that goes into Mode 10h (EGA colour, but same resolution) using INT 10/00 will go into Mono mode instead, enabling me to use it. Didn't work with GWS (but hang on, that's set up for Hercules) but did with GWS's self-displaying .EXE files which take a mode switch. It does take up rather a lot of space though and would benefit from being rewritten in assembly language. (Don't hear 'machine code' much in PC contexts). Felt quite proud of it.

Day 881

Poxy 'restart' letter this morning. On Monday too - not much warning. Better make some no-hope applications on Friday to keep 'em onside. Went into town, came back, read Herodotus.

Discovering Graphics Workshop prints .EPS PostScript files, wrote a file viewer in QBASIC for them. I've found out that the ASCII bitmap in these files is actually a .TIF file - should try applying it to a real live .TIF file tomorrow.

In the evening watched Star Trek TNG, all nice sets and 'I sense anger' and no substance but still with a certain charm.

Day 880

Wrote a minimal screen-by-screen TYPE in 180 bytes. Installed the free game from PCW onto the 486 - very good, road-race in space. Discovered it was from Estonia, so ran MS Anti-Virus afterwards.

Read a lot of Herodotus - very interesting. Did some more Latin.

In the evening watched Hi-de-Hi (!), had forgotten how funny it could be. JDC rang up, sounding more like Kenneth Williams than ever. Had a short but amicable talk.

Day 879

Made some calculations, paid £20 into the bank and ordered a solar panel from Maplins. It leaves £8.50 to keep the catalogue people at bay. Got a good assembler book from the library with a clever stack-based binary -> ASCII decimal conversion routine.

Day 878

More assembly. Went round to C's, he told a horrible tale about what him and his mate got up to last night - hope the bloke doesn't come looking for him.

Listened to Jane Eyre on R4, did more Latin.

Day 877

Continued my recent successful run of assembly programs with a DIR in 330 bytes. Partly because so much can be done with INT 21 they're very small, .COM files. Also modified yesterday's FCOPY to use a 16K buffer rather than 512 bytes, making it demonstrably faster than COPY on a 400K file

Taped East of Ipswich (by M. Palin, seen it before, very funny) in the evening.

Day 876

Beautiful September weather. And once again the vestigial September urge to go off and away has come on me.

At least rode into town. In Smiths spotted Maplin catalogues in profusion. For £10 they've got a solar panel which can power things like personal stereos and recharge AA NiCd batteries. What a gadget! Can afford one, because every 1 unit of drink less a day is £4.04 a week in my pocket.

Wrote my own COPY in assembler, it worked faultlessly even on EXCEL.EXE (4 megabytes). Talk abt Rhino Tested! I could give it a variable size buffer to cope with big/small files most efficiently. Also did a BASIC prog to sample values from a file and give a 'signature'..

In the evening watched Red Dwarf V.

Day 875

First day of Autumn; very damp with lots of rain. Everything looking very green. To Sainsbury's in the morning for wine, water and PCW. Did a lot of scanning.

It'll be "Restart" hassle time in one month. Will I survive this one? And to think at the time I thought ABC meant my luck had changed. Not that I've been unlucky since, with the Psion, and the visit to D's went off well.