Day 965

Still no weather change but still cold. Went to town in the morning, looked at postgraduate courses in the library, some ideas.

Successfully scanned 7 small pictures for mum's work. Did more cleaning and tidying in the room, dark corners I haven't seen for years.

So what must I do to break away. Choose a job-likely course, write a letter, apply, possibly get interviewed, get money, find somewhere to live/means of travel, move. 6 or 7 stages of varying difficulty but not at all insurmountable to anyone with a sense of purpose. Perhaps I can acquire one. I do feel that I'm moving into a window of opportunity to end the Interregnum, as T sensed too.

Day 964

I'm getting on for 25 now - no age to still be hanging around at home.

Budget today (stupid day/time of year for it eh?) Nothing on drink but 10p on fags, probly 40p on rolling baccy so leaving me 80p down per fortnight. No point giving benefit bonuses for getting work - what about a 10p yearly tax on all employers of over 20 people for each unemployed person in the constituency? That'd be £500 per employer per year in Mugsborough and would encourage them to take more people on.

But I forget. The Tories who rebelled on the Europe bill have had the whip withdrawn. Technically the government is in a minority of 2 or 3. The first time they've been a minority government since 1979. I know it's only technical but it's a sign. Dare we say El Alamein?

Day 963

Yet again no weather change, though the sun broke through in the afternoon. Read in the paper that after 3 years' unemployment the chance of getting a job is virtually nil. I must go on a course to qualify me for something. This has gone on long enough. I may have so resolved before, but this one was made in November - in plenty of time. This one will go if I push it.

Day 962

Went for a walk in the afternoon, felt rather bored. Abolished the Pris extra drink allowance to help pay for Christmas.

Day 961

No change in the weather - more anticyclonic gloom. Went for a quick 15-minute walk in the afternoon.

Day 960

Got up early and went to the library.

Started writing to T.

Day 959

Got a good working version of a Psion .PCX file viewer going. A letter from T in the morning; the usual catalogue of hedonism

Major threatening a general election if he loses this vote on Monday - if only, eh.

Day 958

Went to town for Giro-related stuff.

Day 957

Quite a good day really, though damp and foggy. Watched the very first Young Ones vid, Demolition - interestingly different. Finished off the Modula-2 notes. Substituted a 1½ mile bike ride for the 1 mile afternoon walk, expended a lot of energy. Hopefully I can lose a bit more weight, with the help of the new sensible diet. I've substituted displacement eating with displacement nutrition calculations.

Late Pris but I think I can squeeze it in.

Day 956

Some low moments in the morning when I went to sign on, but things improved during the day with Young Ones videos. Made notes on Modula-2 prior to taking the book back on Wednesday.

Day 955

Not such a bad day for a Sunday. Watched Quantum Leap (a good one in a 50's radio station). Made another Christmas cake in the afternoon, luckily this one didn't get burnt.

Got to sign on tomorrow - how depressing. There's been a worrying speed-up in time recently, also a worrying run of each week and day being like the last. Still, who knows, they might offer me a job and change everything. As always, 'Never despair'.

Day 954

Listened to the R4 play in the afternoon, quite good, about a sort of Venetian Thlela; earlier went for a walk and posted T's letter.

Went round to my parents'; C brought copies of all 12 Young Ones eps he got off his mate - triffic! The early 'unpolished' eps in series one are interesting to see how it developed.

Day 953

Very warm for November. Went into town in the morning to the library; found a book with undocumented DOS stuff and also (by instinct?) one with the PCX file format! At last! Got the new Dragon too, quite a good one with plenty of dungeon stuff. Spent all morning getting the PCX stuff working. Very good, quite fast even in Pascal.

Listening to the R5 phone-in a call came through from someone who turned out to be the bloke who had the bookstall in the square at uni. He was talking about the need for alcohol education. I must mention it in the letter to T. Oh, what a great life she has... romantic interest, a job, partying every night and 14 grand a year to piss away.

But I suppose (so long as you've got a few basic wants fulfilled - shelter, heat, food, wine, baccy) being poor is good for the soul. Like a material diet. I wouldn't want to be genuinely poor though. Luckily I've got a few things left from more prosperous times.

Day 952

Continued the letter to T, went for a walk in the afternoon, had a bath. I've lost 2lb since I started paying attention to diet.

Day 951

Rode to Sainsburys in the morning for wine and more Christmas cake ingredients. A letter came from T, enclosing the postage money.

Got a much more acceptable file transfer format for the D&D rules.

It occurs to me that there's a Restart Bastards encounter due on Dec 5/12 or thereabouts. With ABC writing me mad wild killer references I don't know what they expect me to do. Bastards. T wrote reams of good advice jobs-wise, I hope some of it proves practicable.

Day 950

Did more D&D typing in Write on my own computer - went round to my parents' and had a hell of a job converting it in Word on the laptop, learnt some stuff though.

At dad's suggestion took the car down to Lakeside and browsed in PC World. Canon colour ink-jets only £360, colour cartridges £7 though and I suspect you need four - cyan, magenta, yellow, black I reckon. Looked at a sample - quality stuff.

Looked at modems too, though frankly a lot of the Internet stuff is anorak city with a few useful nuggets.

Day 949

Impressively grey and windy weather; went to the library and Sainsburys. Mugs queueing for the Desperation Tax (so-called National Lottery) in evidence at the latter. They say the jackpot odds are 14 million-1 against.

Had another look at the careers book - the suggested ones are rather unrealistic training-wise but sound interesting.

Day 948

Quite a good day for a Sunday. Mixed the Christmas cake in the afternoon - unfortunately the oven malfunctioned and reduced it practically to ashes. Never mind. I'll make another one next week when the oven's repaired. I can exclude animal fat next time too.

Rang the operator and found there's a fault (a 'ring-trip') on T's line, which explains why I haven't been able to contact her. It won't be repaired till Friday. It doesn't explain why she hasn't refunded the postage for her book. I get £1770 a year, she gets £15,000, so 88p to me is £7 to her. Neither a lender or a borrower be.

Watched the usual telly; sorted out the problem on the 486 where Windows reports all numbers bigger than 1,000 as a thousandth of the value. I'd deleted the thousands separator in Control Panel because I don't like computers to give me numbers with commas in - bit of a bug for it to cause this behaviour. Remedied it.

Day 947

Rotten grey wet November weather. In the afternoon listened to good R4 comedy play about King Arthur. Great stuff the whole thing. I didn't listen to it last time because of the stupid title. Run of good 90-minuters on R4 at the moment - a lot of 'occasional gems' all together.

Still could not get T. on the phone. Couldn't even hear it ringing again. Hope she's OK.

Day 946

Slightly less paranoid today. With enormous hard work got a working C version of the .BMP file viewer. A massive achievement considering that I didn't even know the file structure when I started and had to work it out by deduction. Very fast too.

This took up most of the day. Unpleasant news Bosnia-wise w the Americans letting through weapons to the Muslims, the enthusiastic slaughterers of the Serbs when the former were the Nazis' allies. Lucky there's Fritz Leiber to take me away from all the sordid rightwingery, 'arming for peace' etc.

Day 945

Felt rather strange again. It's the way every day is starting to seem like the last - I've been here way longer than I was at uni and I must make some sort of change. 'We have got to make a vigorous move.'

Worked very hard on the .BMP viewer - a couple of successes. Considering I'm starting from absolute ignorance I'm doing well.

Day 944

Shocking weather - heavy rain. Ventured out in the morning to cash my Giro - avoided going to town because of the rain, read more old White Dwarfs. Rather paranoid again.

Watched Star Trek TNG, rather strained constitutional stuff, nowhere near as good as last week's triffic Robin Hood fantasy. Why do Americans call him Róbin Hood? Have they got no ear for names?

Worked on a .BMP file viewer; after initial trouble (the boolean expression-evaluation priorities catch again) got it to do perfect renditions - except that they're upside-down mirror images. What a stupid way to encode a file, beginning at bottom right and working upwards. Still, I'm quite proud of my achievement, done by dumping the first 128 bytes of eight .BMP files, getting their details from Graphics Workshop, and looking for significant variations. Half-an-hour's work located ID bytes, file size, bits per pixel and x,y dimensions. I love this sort of computer detective work. Wish I could find out exactly where header ends and data begins, though.

Day 943

Intensive Combat Administrator work today - got character generation done very well now. Read more old White Dwarfs - last of the decent ones, the early 70's issue numbers.

The Atlantic oil thing yesterday reminded me of what mum says people thought in the early seventies - it would make them all rich (N. Sea oil). Now where is it? Pissed away on dole. Apparently Th***r said in '79, 'who would you trust with the oil money?' Tony Blair should say it in '96. (October, they say...)

Day 942

Went to sign on, endured a frustrating wait with the new disorganised system. Sent off T's book: only 88p first class for 400g.

Read old White Dwarfs when I got back - couldn't carry on with the D&D prog because I left the disc in Mum's laptop. In the evening started adding character generation, made good progress: the class-selection algorithm is surprisingly simple. I've assumed rather standard characters for now, still it's all (foresightedly) in the initial data setup section.

Day 941

Did a lot of computing - Mum brought her laptop round because it was malfunctioning. I discovered Page Plus 3 had been installed on Friday leaving just 160K free out of 123M. Amateurish attempts had been made by mum's techno-illiterate colleagues to save space by erasing Write and Paintbrush: compressed the hard disc and restored them, getting a theoretical 66M free (but you know compression progs).

Improved the Combat Administrator. Made several attempts to ring T about the book she left behind, couldn't even get the ringing tone.

Day 940

Woke up at 9.30 to a damp grey morning. Drove T back to London. Rotten but pleasant dark rainy misty winter weather coming back on the M11 and A414. Very atmospheric.

Day 939

Walked down to the station at 5.30, met T, went to the Black Horse and the Rose Garden. Came back here, watched telly and videos till 3.30am. Interesting sketch in the largely unoriginal Harry Enfield, viz 'Benny Elton' with the man himself in Saturday Live shiny suit running about in fast motion covering up scantily-clad women, wiping off their make-up and giving them books called Dull Feminist Theory by An American Woman.

Day 938

By swapping HHSCAND.OLD for the newer device driver I managed two 7" 300dpi scans. Excellent! Must try and see if the 19mm (no-crash but corruption) 400dpi limit is challengeable.

Heard on the radio that the Post Office is safe, perhaps at least until the next election and hopefully forever. Is this the turn of the tide?

Day 937

Went into town, got a thick Modula-2 book from the library. Came back; did a lot of text scanning on the Warhammer and D&D rules. Very good at 300dpi. Bit of a dilemma; it takes at least as long to scan the text as to type it, plus correction and editing. I shall conduct a serious trial tomorrow.

T rang up saying she'd get the 5.30 train on Friday and be here at 6pm. I hope she doesn't bring any blow. She always offers but I always decline - because it does nothing for me.

Day 936

Worked very hard all day on the combat prog, added more monsters and experience points. Watched the last Fast Show in the evening.