After yesterday's abortive attempts at a wireless hotspot installation at one of our public venues, I took a small step back today just to chill out and get the perspective all back in shape. I cant actually recall one thing that went right yesterday.

So yeah... to give myself a little boost, I painted my blog. It's been a long while coming, I think, having had the same decorations for over a year.

Feel the strawberry goodness.

I know that 404 errors have to be among the most irritating things in the world... but... this one made me giggle for quite a while...

...But the gay Spiderman doesn't care!

Rob's Amazing Poem Generator

From the creator of Slashdot comes the amazing AutoPoetry generator!! Simply enter your URL and let the sticky syntax drip from your fingers!!

This page generated this little gem:

Not Sleeping, Dreaming about a journal.
Email Spying Fiction Geeking.
"Good luck, eh!”
So, many memories... Click to stay
at least until Uni starts, anyway.
virtually one of trepidation.
I get a click away. ***
I felt really sure
if trying to be
had disappeared and
my memory...

I'm attempting to add a photo gallery to SquashedFrog, however, the progress is going slow. I have it all uploaded and working, the only problem is presentation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it looks like shit in its default state. Besides. See what I mean? The 'photoblog' link has been broken for 6mths, so what's another few weeks between friends??

I've uploaded a few images, like this one, just to get me started. Lovely Harrow-on-the-Hill. My home town!!!

Doyle.

How to avoid doing work, Lesson #1.

1. Investigate all software currently installed on system.
2. Notice a nifty image editing package
3. Use package to browse image files on computer
4. Get inspired to create LJ usericons.
5. Giggle like a fucktard when discover nifty image manipulation filters
6. Make too many icons.
7. Have fun trying to select the best 3 to upload to LJ.

Here's the final selection:

Ok... Now I really have to do some work. 1000 words by bedtime.
Doyle.

guess which popular Tolkien website is now back up and running? Ringbearer v4.0.

Just took us 3 months longer than we anticipated. No biggie. *sarcastic*

At least its a starting point. I'm not totally satisfied with the job that the developers have done, however, the other three non-programmers are happy. Could it be that I'm being overcritical? Is it the obsessive geek inside me that is demanding perfection?

Dont know. All I know is that I keep wishing that this had all happened at a different time. What with the thesis, I had very little chance of being an effective webcoder. Damnit.

Oh well. Time will tell. We'll see what next year brings.

Doyle.

My Programming-Geek-Muse has struck again. What with the developments over at Fanfiction.Net, everybody is madly scurring around to move all their fiction to higher ground.

I have noticed a significant dearth of quality fiction sites that incorporate all the goochie things that I could provide. Forums. Chat. Author Profiles. Polls. Hell... I'd even go so far as to provide separate community pages for various genre's.

I'm itching to do this. I'm aching to get out my codebook and start hacking away at all the various scripts and software modules I've developed in order to create something enjoyable.

This is when the horried Thesis Monster comes crashing into the room, weilding a big fuck off shiney batton and beats me within an inch of my life.

NO CODING FOR YOU.

Whats even scarier, I had to UNINSTALL my code development programs so that I wouldn't accidently find myself looking at an empty ASP page....

I can ~see~ the code. I can feel the database forming in my head. Its so painful to have to supress this kind of inspiration, when my natural motivation levels are bouncing along close to extinction.

Fuckit.

After Oct 31st, I'll be free. (softof) So, if anybody wants to make a slashfiction.net website, I'll be more than happy to be the slave codemonkey.

Doyle

Do not adjust your monitors.

"Not Sleeping, Dreaming" has moved right here to this lovely new address. Hope you'll all appreciate the new place, as the old one was giving me the shits. Blogger refuses to work, so, I've resorted to Movable Type: the latest shithot thing to arrive on the Blogging World.

So yeah.
Still debugging, so if you find anything thats really off... please... let me know about it so I dont start crying.

Hello Dominic.

As you may have noticed, the old blog config was worse than useless so has now been replaced by something that I'm willing to look at every day of my life. With any luck, this will be the last upgrade in a while... although... ah fuckit. I wish I'd configured MT properly the first time.

Doyle

Well, I've just looked at the main page looking through Mozilla... and shit. When did everything get so ugly? My table borders are all over the place, and it looks like I"m going to have to go home and do some hardcore catchup to improve this POS before I can release it instead of dj.asp....

That and the fact that I'm stuck in a web publishing tute with, what seems, the most painful class in history. I've been here for an age. I've seen bad. This... well... I dont think i was EVER like this.

Jac.

Oh for fucks sake.
I cant even procrastinate properly!!

My main goal for my spare time (ha!) this semester is to get Carmody Online finally all hunky dorey and up to scratch. At the moment, its going really well. I have everything bar polls/top10s/quotes all finished off.

But, now that I'm determined to finish it, I keep getting distracted with fanfic. I'm procrastinating from my procrastinations. How fucking pathetic.

Oh well. I've read some damn good fic, and now I'm keen to restart the whole Coffee affair off again. Which is yet another thing that I'm determined to finish.

So, thats how many things on the To Do list?
Project
Uni
Coffee
Carmody
Relocate NSD.
Misc Fic...

Geeesh. I should hire help. I need somebody else to come and help me finish off all my procrastination ideas. AND! To top everything off completely... I have this nagging idea in the back of my head to create a FanFic.Net clone thats actually decent. And slash centered....

Good Idea? Bad Idea?
Doyle

Liking the looks of the Movable Type formatting for Blogging. May have to completely change the way things work around here.

Am currently working on the situation.
If anybody has any experience with MT and would love to give me a helping hand... my contact details are on the page you're currently staring at.

I have set up the system using a free host (Netfirms) however, I have never really liked dealing with that company since they buggerised my website about 3 years ago. My current host is NT based, and I really couldn't be fucked sorting through all the MT scripts in order to reverse all the slashes...

So... I'm looking for a really cheap (CHEAP!) host that I can use that doesn't have any banners, that I can use to host my new blog. Gunna even get a fancy shmancy domain for it as well!!!

Thinking of something like blogslaves so that I can get some subdomains to set up my friends blogs within the same domain.

Please drop me a line if you have any good advice! (not necessarily relating to Blog/MT/hosting)

Jac.

In tech support, no one can hear you scream
Written by Simon Peppercorn.

The phone rings as I unsheathe my lightsaber. Bugger. But I'm in a good mood, and not really enjoying JKII anyway? so I answer it.

'Hey hey!'
'Simon, I'm sitting in front of my computer and I want to overclock it. I want you to talk me through it.'
I cringe, knowing that this guy has the technical aptitude of a frog. So instead, I suggest it would be easier if he dropped his case over to me and I will have a look at it for him.
'I thought you would know how to do it,' he said, almost condescendingly.
The desire to cause pain was creeping in. I explained that it isn't necessarily a five-minute over-the-phone job, and would require a number of restarts and tests for stability.
'Surely we can give it a go...' he persisted
'OK...' I resigned, '...fine. What CPU do you have?'
'Huh?'
Audible groan... 'Do you have an AMD or Intel system?' I asked impatiently.
'Oh... ummmm... it says "Packard Bell".'
Urge to scream? 'OK...so what CPU?'
'Packard Bell!' he repeated.

And this is where it became a 'Choose your own adventure'-type situation. My choices were:
o politely and patiently take the person step by step through his overclocking adventure;
o give him a mouthful and tell him to go buy Atomic;
o look for a blunt object and suggest he drops by.

It's a strange thing. Having a reasonable technical knowledge or skill in personal computers creates an impression among those not so blessed that you are an expert in the entire IT industry. You seem to give off a signal that you are available as a personal technical support response unit, 24 hours a day.

To be fair, it isn't only geeks like us that are subject to this phenomenon. People such as mechanics, doctors, lawyers, interior decorators, and many other skilled people are surrounded by those who believe these people are willing and available to provide free support to others. I am guilty myself of harassing a particular nurse about matters I am sure he would prefer to forget about, when not at work? for which I owe eternal thanks.

But when it comes to computers, it's those of us in the know who are constantly expected to find solutions for the most inane problems, 90% of which are traced back to user error, ignorance or plain stupidity.

Typical problems:

o 'My monitor won't come on?what happened?'
o 'Why can't I print? I just put a new cartridge in, but the pages came out blank. My printer must be broken.'
o 'My PC won't start? how come?'
o 'Manuals?'
o 'I want to overclock my computer.'
o 'I wanted things nice and neat, so I moved all the .dll files into one folder, all the .inf files into another folder, all the .ini files into another folder?'
And so on? and so on...

And like superman with a propeller cap, you are expected to drop your JKII game, run to their assistance and save the world.

So being the superhero you are, you leap to the rescue, expecting to be able to display your technical prowess and fix some incredibly difficult system problem, impressing yourself and others... however, the more likely user feedback is:

o 'Of course the monitor is plugged in? oh? so it isn't? silly me!'
o 'Remove what tape from the cartridge? Oh? that tape? hey? it prints now!'
o 'Oh? I didn't read any of those messages? I just kept clicking "next" or "continue".'
o 'I don't need no steenking manuals!'
o 'But if I overclock my Pentium 100, then I can play Doom III when it comes out? right?'
o 'Stop hitting me!'

So you retire, deflated and angry, swearing to never look at another person's problems ever again. But weren't you a newbie once? Haven't you ever asked a question which made someone else think 'Tosser?'?

My Grandfather likes to tell me that 'Computers is the ruination of society', and reminisces about the days gone by, before computers, where unemployment was unheard of. He would talk of the day when a whole floor of office staff was given marching orders and replaced with a single computer. As much as we might roll our eyes at the ramblings of old folk, he does have a point: to a large extent, computers have replaced jobs traditionally performed by people. Technology has indeed been the cause of great industrial and social change -- not always for the better.

But the more advanced we become, scientifically and technically, the greater the gap between those who are ignorant of technology and are slow to respond, those who resist the changes and fail to accept that life could be a whole lot easier if they learnt to use an ATM, and those like us who embrace technology it, learn from it, drive it forward and help those who are falling behind.

But this is the trade off, isn't it? Those of you in the last group: you have been given a special power. And with that power comes two responsibilities. The first is to spread the word. Share your knowledge and encourage the growth of technology. Your other responsibility is far simpler, but less easy to accomplish. That is, to make sure people who shouldn't mess with computers DON'T mess with computers: keep them away from a keyboard using any method permissible by law -- heed my warning or you and I will be targeted for the rest of our days by shit like this:

Tech Support: 'What does the screen say now?'

User: 'It says, "Hit ENTER when ready".'

Tech Support: 'Well?'

User: 'How do I know when it's ready?'

Tech Support: 'When I stop swearing at you.'

Big fucking Happy Dance

This is the type of happy dance that comes with the high kick. Parading around the house like an oversized leprachaun who just fell over a pot of gold. Got the maniacle grin, and the leaping spazmodic shouts of glee. If I wasn't so godamned unco, i'd look like a Riverdance-refugee.

Wa-heeee!

I finally, after a considerable amount of time, managed to get two threads (spearate programs) to speak to each other via the serial port on the same computer. This small task has taken me about a week to polish off.

Wa-hooooo!

Now, however, I'm isolated off the network as the serial port is the very same port that I'm using for my modem. So, I'm offline for the next few hours. This is cause for unrest, as Carmody Online has had a few tweeny-bopper (tweeny as opposed to teeny, which are actually teenagers rather than glorified pre-schoolers.) invaders lately that need more attention than I can really spare.

Booted two of them off today, hoping they dont come back and take over while I'm gone. Iv had enuf ov netspeek 2 last me a lifetime or 4. Are schools even teaching English anymore?

May have to look into spreading the Mod's influence over to the Earth Temple, where most of the action is. Gah. If I had've known that CO would attract so many fuckwits I never would have built it. Perhaps with the new fandangled image, they might retreat a little. It is very upper-class for a dinky little website.

Oh well.
Back to work. I'll let you know when the next happydance occurs.
Doyle.

Getting the shits with Blogger at the moment.
This is a test post to see if ANYTHING is working.

Jac.

Happy New Theme!

Haven't yet decided if I like it or not, but its the result of complete and total neglect of my blogging that caused me to go ahead and do it. It only took me about 4 hours to get everything fine tuned. 4 hours that I didn't spend on my project.

Damn, why doesn't somebody just kill me now. Save the hassles.

Anyhow, I have a meeting today with Mr Head about the project, and my lack of decent progress. Summary is: Its all going very slowly. Somehow my threads are conflicting causing ~something~ to bail out. That bailing out then terminates the whole program and I'm left scratching my head wondering who I should swear at.

Perhaps I should start writing up some reporting parts, so that I'm not hit with the whole damn dissertation (20,000 words) to write up in one weekend. *meeep*

Ok, well, tell me if you think the new theme sucks ass.
Doyle.

Snazzy

Happy New Theme everybody. I designed it myself! I'm not sure how suited it is, but I do think its much easier to look at, and perhaps just a little quicker to load, as well. That cant hurt.

So... today wasn't very productive, as far as Uni goes. I really should have finished my project appreciation by now. Not to mension my Prolog Assignment. Alas, today was just one of those days where my brain refused to focus on something that wasn't related to graphical design. I seem to be having quite a few of these days and I hope that its not a growing trend.

My creativity has been stifled for too long, so at the moment, its taking all my willpower not to crack out the dictionary and begin yet another fictional master-piece. Or look into doing a photography class, or picking up my calligraphy once again...Alas, time is not my friend these days. Perhaps one day, I'll be able to blog about something a little more interesting than Artificial Intellegence, and OpenGL.

Somebody remind me why I'm doing this course again?

I upgraded my blogging software last night, and got rid of that banner that I kept despairing over. Yay. Commercialism-Free Blogging. Go me.

With any luck, this will be a little more stable as well, so you all should be able to access my thoughts without having to rely on the dodgy DeadJournal servers being awake. It was a constant nightmare to keep up, and the formatting was just hideous. At least, with this new funky lovely thingy, I'll be able to update all the side columns with ease.

===

In other news....

Almost had a massive fight with somebody last night. It was 2 am, I was stressed, he was stressed, and telling me how University was a waste of his time, etc, etc. Now, I dont know if he actually ~thought~ before he said any of this, but I've invested 4.5 years of my life into getting the piece of paper and didn't really take kindly to his inferences. I dont think I am wasting my time, and I really cant wait to graduate!

Then... *haha* then he told me he wanted to transfer from IT into Electrical Engineering, as it'd be more "real world". Ok, so, electron's are so friendly, and great to invite home to the parents. WTF? I'll be the first to admit that there's a whole heap of shit to wade through in the IT degree, but thats the same as everything. To run, you must first walk, grasshopper.

So, I got blunt, and straight to the point. Put up, or shut up.

He shut up.

And the world rejoiced.

And now for something completely different
I'm sorry DJ, but...I'm just not happy with our relationship the way it is. I feel like I've out grown you. Its not you, its me.
I just dont think I could be happy with a single online blog, that doens't let me do my rambling offline... I mean, I like you, and I really think you're a great Blog... its just that... well... you see... I've met somebody else...

Got an idea to build my own Windows API blogging client.
Will look into it a little more, and see where it gets me... dont really think I'm that good though, and will probably settle for one that already exists... Possibly going through my old Blogger, and resurecting the tired old formatting, and doing something different.

Decided that I'm a webaholic, and going to remain that way for at least another 9 months. I need to graduate. Then... once I've got a job, and working with real computers, for real money, I can afford professional help.

Until then.... www.spack-is-a-geek.com

Happy New Colour Scheme!
Hope you enjoy it all, netizens!

The text finally works, and the colours are now static!! With any luck, this may be the last overhaul for a little while...
I'm thinking of signing off with DeadJournal, and using "Moveable Type" which offers superior editing options, and a more powerful archiving system as well... However, that all depends on my server having Perl4.02.
As my current server does not, I'll have to wait until I can find a nice cheap host that can help me out... Knowing me, it'll get 'feature creep' and I'll be making a huge domain of other similar web logs using the same system... alas... I'm useless when it comes to setting myself boundaries.

Oh well... me signing off so I can go and do some work on my tutorials.
Jack.

Having a moment, right here.

Doing some web programming, and fixing stupid mistakes that I've made in the past. I'm really starting to get an attitude toward myself, and keep calling myself names.

Its not really very helpful, and I'm beginning to think that I'm a total bitch. Besides, Dreamweaver is shitting me, as the arsehole crashed on me, right when I was about to save my work. Fucking typical. And like, who was it, that installed it in the first place?