Day 1421

Felt great despite getting up at 6am. Lovely clear morning.

There are 10 weeks to do the last two C++ assignments, which'll remove the end-of-term pressure.

Had a long group project meeting lasting 100 minutes, finished the functional breakdown. Transferred the Xview demo I wrote yesterday to the Suns, with success.

Relaxed on the train home. Finished the crossword - unusual for a Thursday.

Read the Xview book I got from the libe last weekend, this time made sense of the key attribute stuff. I'll try it on campus tomorrow.

Pretty tired now after all that effort - I plan to get a good 9 hours in bed before the weekend starts tomorrow.

Day 1420

Implemented most of the science assignment. Revamped my studies web pages. Spent a lot of time working on Xview, eventually got a workable solution at home in the evening.

Had something of a realisation at Ferry Farthingale station: what I'm doing when I say I'm anxious is actually being distressed by the memory of having been anxious before in similar situations. I have to replace those memories with instances of being relaxed in the same situations. The genuine anxiety about a year ago was accompanied by hyperventilation etc, everything since has just been memories. The 'anxiety' thing has assumed the form of a conundrum to which I must find the answer. And this memory theory might be it.

Came home quite pleased with this, watched ST:TNG ('Every box has a way out, every puzzle has a key'). Watched a good Labour broadcast with an extended football metaphor.

Early start tomorrow. Only four more of them on the course though (a mixed blessing because it brings the exams closer!).

Day 1419

My supervisor got the time of our meeting wrong and then postponed it. It didn't matter because I'm managing OK by myself at the moment, and he did give me a directory-full of Xview source.

The studies lecturer gave us the location of a link page for all our web pages. Got mine on - he said a file: path wouldn't work but it did. Wonder what the others will think, assuming they read it?

Back 1600/1616 - might start getting the 1700/1716 since I don't do much between getting home and having tea, and if I was at home at 6.12 via the 1700/1716 I could eat straight away and have an extra hour in the lab.

Worked out how to do the science assignment, watched The X-Files - Anasazi, very good and a cliffhanger.

Day 1418

Group project meeting slow but constructive - I can get on with that C. now but that M. is a bit of a nuisance, constantly bringing up stuff we decided weeks ago.

Made a start on the science assignment, had an e-mail from an equally hard-working T. E-mailed the studies bloke to ask whether he was still going to make our web pages mutually accessible. He replied saying he was going to announce something tomorrow. Well timed.

Exercised, watched Our Friends In The North which got me pretty exercised as well. I am officially withdrawing my support for the police in the miners' strike, I now realise both sides used violence. But I still think there should've been a ballot.

Beautiful weather all day. We seem to get these days at the end of Feb.

Day 1417

Did some more Xview, watched Tomorrow Is Yesterday. Read the Doctor Who books E lent me. Spent the afternoon doing notes for the group project tomorrow.

Read the e-mail T sent me on Friday.

Things are going pretty well at the moment but I must keep on top of the work. Science assignment to tackle this week I think, with Xview for light relief. Socially things haven't been better for years, since July 1993. As the Jazz Club bloke on The Fast Show would say, 'Great.'

Day 1416

Got the bus into town, fortuitously found an XView book in the libe. Came back, spent all day getting XView to work, and also the obscurer .h files like dirent.h - I hadn't installed part 2 of the kernel source which has vital include files.

Went to the Crown with M and E, talked about the wedding (poss. September). Told E he resembled Nicky in Our Friends In The North.

Day 1415

Woke up at 7.55 refreshed by a proper night's sleep. At Effolk carried on with Xview, greatly hampered by the lack of a way to force window repaints. In the science lecture sorted the Fafhrd & Mouser stories into four enjoyability ranks.

Got an e-mail from M to say she was skiving off work and I could come round for tea if I wanted. We went into town, looked for a phone as the one I went with her to buy in summer 1992 has packed up, went to pick up E from work.

Home at about 7.15. Watched The Bill, Paul Merton in The Missing Page (creaky updates), The Fast Show, Red Dwarf VI (Legion again) and Fist of Fun in a 2½ hour telly blow-out. .

It's the weekend! Yes!

Day 1414

Up at six, in by 8.35 by old slam-door train. Bus not so crowded as usual but I wish they'd put a double-decker on the route. Did xview experiments (largely profitable but couldn't find out how to force a canvas repaint), made parallel processing notes in the libe. Good group project meeting, N commented on how we'd got on with the minimum of argument so far.

Handed in my science assignment, came home and took a night off work. Made up my mind to cancel CompuServe in favour of AOL at the end of the month. Played Sim City.

M rang up to say she wanted a copy of Prospects Today, as she was sick of her job. Agreed to get it for her.

Day 1413

Got to campus after ten, a signal at Ferry Farthingale was causing delays. Lucky I went early. Saw my adviser, then stopped to tell the C++ lecturer that friend functions aren't covered in the C++ textbook. He asked me to assess his next lecture for clarity! Actually I cleared up a couple of points I was worried about in the ½ hour it took, so we both benefited.

Spent all afternoon making X notes in the lab and parallel processing notes in the libe. I'm getting on quite well with Xview.

Came home (no delays), watched a dull ST: TNG with Lwaxana Troi in it, made software engineering notes for the group project tomorrow. Printed out the minutes and the science assignments - had to write a C formatter to do the latter. Blimey I'm tired!

Day 1412

Got another lift, due to the snow this time. Had to turn back because of a snowdrift, but got to campus about 10.30. The studies lecture didn't happen so I sat in the lecture theatre and made parallel processing notes for my project. Someone left their trousers behind (!) so I posted a note via e-mail, later getting a thank-you.

Had an e-mail from the 'Lankhmar' web page bloke. Got a lot of notes done on Xview.

Unusually heartening Bill ep. Typed up the group project minutes, watched The X-Files.

Got a rescheduled meeting with my adviser at eleven tomorrow so better get up at 7.19 for the 0849, just in case.

Day 1411

Got a lift to Dulchester because of a bomb hoax at Stratford. It had snowed overnight but the day was sunny. Went to the science, had another question rubbished by the lecturer. ('In Enlad we have a story about a boy whose schoolmaster was a stone. Aye? what did he learn? Not to ask questions.') Managed to get my assignment rewritten after realising that cons(x,NULL) returns a list with just x in it, so the lecture was some use.

Waiting for the bus home everything was sunny, then the North wind strengthened, the clouds darkened and the buildings were dimmed by snow. Then a driving blizzard came upon us, I was glad when the bus came.

Walking back from Mugsborough station, the sky darkened once more and another blizzard struck. Glad I was only 400 yards from home. The snow piled up quickly, at least 2" by now.

Did some computing, watched Our Friends In The North. If Mary had waited for Nicky to come round on the night of the 1964 election, they'd've saved a lot of trouble.

Day 1410

Spent almost all day on the computer, doing various things. Can't get that assignment rewritten - bothersome. Read the parallel processing stuff for my own project, made a small dent in it.

M and E came round in the evening for a cup of tea and to pick up her Linux book. Noticed E looking assessingly round.

Back to routine tomorrow - I must try and get more reading done rather than spend all day in the lab.

Day 1409

Went out and withdrew £60 from the building society to tide me over till the end of the month - I'll make it up again in March when there's no season ticket to buy. Also got a PCW with a free AOL trial - used it in the afternoon after going round to M's for an hour or so to borrow her Linux book. Her and E had been to a wedding exhibition, would you believe it.

AOL was very good and I got a reply to my what-have-you-got email within two hours, on a Saturday afternoon too. Not bad eh? There are 110,000 files in their library and searches for 'Prolog' and 'LISP' revealed coverage as good as Compuserve's. And their Web page thing is up and running already. I'm going to test the reliability of their connection over the remaining 29 days of the trial and if it's OK I'm going to change from CompuServe, because their connections are frankly rubbish at the moment. Also AOL is £5.95 pcm rather than £6.50.

Day 1408

Had a rather troublesome first part of the day: got laughed at in the science for asking how to derive log₂ from log₁₀ ( log₂(n) = log₁₀(n) / log₁₀(2), I worked out later) 'for one's own amusement'.

My supervisor came up behind me in the lab when I was e-mailing T about the Scott report and said he'd rather've found me working on his cons() function. Actually, from this point things began to improve because he explained it very carefully.

This was so distracting that I utterly forgot to go to the C++ lecture. Went to see the lecturer to ask if he'd made any announcements. He'd noticed I wasn't there, which I suppose is gratifying, and kindly went through the substance of the lecture on his board, unprompted.

Ended the day on a wordprocessing machine, in sunny white space. Went for the bus and found everything blue and yellow instead of red - spring is on the way. Strong south wind.

Came home in the sunset, and, following a tip M'd sent me from work, registered an alphanumeric id at CompuServe.

In the evening settled down for a comedy fest of (new) Fast Show, Red Dwarf VI (I imagine VII would've been on but it was delayed because Craig Charles was in prison) and (new) Fist of Fun. Had a Scotch at ten, relaxed and enjoyed the weekend ambience.

Day 1407

Had my own project meeting with my supervisor. 3pm on Thursday's not the ideal time as I've been up since 6am and by then am knackered from all the lectures. Wonder if he'd change the time?

My new bus-catching algorithm worked perfectly, home by 6.22pm. Printed out the group project outline requirements document and some D&D monster list stuff, experimented with my Linux X-Windows.

Day 1406

No cards again. Perfected my UNIX recursive directory lister. Went in the library and drew diagrams for the group project and made notes for my own project.

Came back, installed X Windows onto my Linux system - Xcellent stuff. M rang up and we had a good talk till E started moaning in the background because of their phone bill.

Found a great Fritz Leiber site on the WWW, with even a map of Nehwon. The author of the PC upgrade book e-mailed me to thank me for my appreciative comments, too.

Day 1405

Up early for the 10am group project meeting - put makeup on first thing for the first time since October 1991.

Devoted the afternoon to general UNIX fiddling and a recursive directory listing prog.

In the evening found a good small programming editor, jed, in LINUX. Watched The X-Files, then Pris.

Day 1404

Went to the lecture, did science exercises. Extended the gap between fags to 65 minutes. Worked very hard, and coming back at 4pm the western horizon was a thin bright line. It widened, and on the train back everything was bathed in golden mellow light.

Installed Linux in 284M on drive D:, leaving 240M on D: for DOS (plus 1,079M on C: of course). Did the first two pages of my C++ assignment again, think I'll get it off my hands tomorrow.

Watched Our Friends In The North - cracking. Group project meeting at ten tomorrow so bed soon.

Day 1403

Didn't wake up till 11.20. Watched Star Trek - The Squire of Gothos - excellent stuff. Somehow I knew that was the name of the ep as soon as the planet appeared on the pre-credit sequence, despite never having seen it before.

Got back to work on the computer; went out in the afternoon to PC World and got Upgrading and Repairing PCs. It cost £46, so I was pretty wary, but it is the best value manual I've ever bought. It clarified the hard disc prob (essentially that I had one drive upside-down!) and by 5pm I had the new 1,079M drive working. Copied the entire contents of the old 560M across to it. Got everything working and the box closed by 8pm - about 25 hours for the job.

Then I chanced on the 'Hard disc troubleshooting' section. It said a common fault with hard drives was the heads sticking, and that a cure was to jerk the drive (the whole thing) so as to unstick it. I applied this to my own 32M hard card - success! I was really pleased. My own computer is now up and working again. UaRPC has paid for itself already.

All this left me in a very positive mood and ready for next week.

Day 1402

Made notes on the lambda calculus for my project. Spent a lot of time in the evening trying to fit the new hard disc. Made some progress but felt it was a bad time for M to be away.

Watched the last Alan Partridge, not so funny this time round, I thought.

Day 1401

Benefited greatly from the extra sleep. Went to the lectures, toyed with xview, got a project book out of the library. Weather changed: cold, wet and windy.

At home had a frustrating time trying to install the new Linux, ended up rendering the new hard disc unbootable. Bah!

Apparently the IRA let off a big bomb at Canary Wharf this evening, which means the ceasefire lasted about 17½ months - not so bad.

Day 1400

Up at six, in by 8.30. Not much of a turnout for the 9am studies, perhaps not surprisingly. Lab was chocker at noon, so went over to the word processing machines and telnet'd (as I discovered was possible earlier this week) to the Sun server, managing to change and recompile my C++ assignment, all through telnet. Worth remembering.

The group project thing went OK; then had a massive 80-minute dissertation session with supervisor. Learnt a lot about the combinators I've been studying since last week.

Got the 5pm bus, home at 6.12 for fish'n'chips.Watched Game On.

That's the hardest part of the week over. Now for a nice 9 hours' sleep.

Day 1399

Got in about 11.30. Carried on with my HTML adventure. Went to a lecture about Xview on my adviser's recommendation. Quite good, and quite similar to the Windows API (pre-C++).

Came back and printed out the group project minutes and the outline document, and the C++ assignment. Then removed some dead wood from my course file, which is getting pretty hard to carry around.

Realised something on the train in the morning - suppose I've been anxious twice a day for a year, that's 730 times, none of which have led to me flipping out - 0/730.

I've got to get up at 6.08 tomorrow, so I'll go to bed about eleven I think, and carry on with: The Swords of Lankhmar. I was reminded in the toilets today of the Mouser hiding in the jakes in Lankhmar Below.

Day 1398

Put in a lot of work on the assignments. Everyone else is worrying about the C++ but my prog works.

Had success last night with allowing myself 8½ hours' sleep instead of 8 - perhaps I do need more than eight hours.

Day 1397

The group project meeting went well, I felt quite confident. Worked on a science tutorial in the lab. Luckily it was the abstraction-through-includes stuff I studied in Barclay last summer.

Icily cold wind in the afternoon, got the 4.16 train. I might start staying till five every day, then again the 5.12-6pm period at home is quite relaxing. I could start going in for ten instead of eleven, I suppose.

Typed up the 'minutes' for the project and the draft outline requirements document we discussed.

Rang T as she hadn't got my e-mail saying not to worry about putting off our meeting (again) till March. Last year perhaps I'd've been more bothered but so far this year I've had an unbroken string of Saturday nights out.

Day 1396

Worked on the engineering assignment, did the design waffle but couldn't print the code as the disc had been corrupted (again).

Read stuff for my own project, e-mailed T, downloaded a LISP interpreter and experimented with it. Played Sim City.

Thought about buying a bigger hard disc, investigated inside the machine for connections etc, rang M for advice.

Day 1395

Caught the bus into town (£1.55 return to Tesco's), got the latest LINUX from the bookshop. Worked on installing it in the afternoon. I got X-Windows working - an achievement. Not much memory to spare though.

Day 1394

Got £20 out of the building society, caught the 0949. It was delayed so I missed the bus at Ferry Farthingale and had a tedious wait. Watched a ship being unloaded on the Dulne. Consequently was late for the science.

The software engineering was cancelled so worked in the lab on an optional Towers of Hanoi exercise. The man himself came in and looked at my answers, he seemed quite satisfied and we had a long talk about abstract types in C.

The 4pm bus missed the window of opportunity for the train, so went back to the lab. In the absence of CGI for local binaries, implemented a programmed adventure (like Warlock of Firetop Mountain et al) using HTML links.

Finally got home on the 5pm/1716, got a lift back from the station from mum who happened to be dropping C off there. Played Sim City.

As I said in an e-mail to T today I think I've turned a corner recently, since about Jan. 22nd when the day had unaccountable promise. Is it the temperance or the hard work or both? Who cares so long as it works.

Day 1393

Where did January go?

Went to the software engineering. The group project meeting went OK - I'm in the chair on Tuesday.

I've started feeling very thirsty every day about 2.30pm - wonder why? It takes at least a pint of water to assuage it. Probably the cheese, marmite and coffee I expect.

Came home, prepared the engineering assignment, made notes for the group project. Tried the new surcharge-free local Mercury connection to Compuserve, but it dropped out. Played Sim City.