28/11/2004 10:56 PM
I mentioned a while ago that I had been contacted by a friend of mine from secondary school via Friends Reunited. At the time I didn't respond because with the whole "no work" thing I wasn't really in the frame of mind to talk to anyone. What would there have been to say? "So what are you up to now?". "Me? Fuck all". So I didn't respond. Then when I started working, it was awkward because it had been so long since her email. And of course the more time that went by without a reply, the more awkward it became. Luckily for me, she actually sent me another email last week, telling me about what various people have been up to. This was just the kick up the backside I needed to get me to reply. Admittedly, it took me a week to do it, but I did reply. Now the ball is in her court.
Speaking of people from the past, Tristan showed up on IM a few days ago.
It was funny that he showed up on that day seeing as I had been talking about
the Hellhole to Andrew on the previous day. I have only ever seen Tristan
online once before. That was the day after he gave me his address and I added
him to my list. He showed up and before I could even write out a hello
message, he was gone. That was about a year ago. Either he hasn't been online
all that time, or he's doing some sort of stealth thing. I sent him a fairly
long email after his birthday, in September, but he didn't respond which
irked me slightly. After talking to him though it turns out that he never
received it! I guess I shouldn't have assumed he was just ignoring me. While
I was chatting to him, I sent him the email again and confirmed that he had
received it. Hopefully he'll respond this time. Or else I'll hound him 
.
My sister has been doing a fair amount of work on the computer recently, some of which she has taken in to work with her. Things such as presentations and so on. She's been using floppy disks and not having much luck or fun with them. That doesn't really surprise me. They're such an antiquated piece of legacy technology. I don't see why machines are still equipped with them. I decided to buy her a USB key instead. I decided to get her a 128MB one as I don't really think that she'll be using any more than that in the near future. It might seem that I'm not future proofing by getting a larger one but I just don't see the point. By the time she needs any more than that (a long way off) the price of something significantly bigger will be pocket money. So I think I've gone for the right price/storage point. I did however decide to get myself a 512MB one as well. Now I don't really have an immediate need for one, but I decided to get one anyway, and I'm sure I'll be using up the space. Once I had ordered them, I actually regretted not getting the 1GB one as that's enough to fit a CD image on, which would have been useful. Maybe next time.
A few days after I ordered it, she took some work in to school on a floppy and the bloody disk wouldn't work. She had to recreate everything from scratch during a free period, before presenting it to the class. That cemented both of our desires to get the flash drive for her. They arrived a few days ago and they are quite nifty little devices. I bought generic ones and unfortunately they feel a bit cheap and tacky but hey, it's the insides that count and for the price, you can't complain. They were instantly recognised by Windows and usable immediately. Linux recognised them instantly but took a little longer for use, but that was because of an oversight on my part. I was a bit concerned that they might not work on my desktop because a cousin of mine came to our house a few weeks ago and had problems with it. When he plugged his key into my USB hub, he was told that it didn't have enough power and so it had to go into the port at the back of the machine. Luckily both of these ones worked perfectly fine via the hub, so I guess there was just something strange with his key. Now I just have to think of a purpose for my one ...
In another piece of good news, I got a tax rebate in the post! Yay! It's
quite an amount (at least as far as I am concerned) and I was therefore a bit
confused. There was no way that I earned enough last year to warrant that
level of rebate. When I checked the date it turns out it was from the time
that I was working at the Hellhole. In which case the value is a small
fraction of my earnings but it's a nice amount for me now. It's nice to
receive some "free" money (the quotes because technically it was
mine in the first place). I'm not sure why I'm getting this back now. I don't
really know what kind of time scales these things work on. Maybe I shouldn't
think about it too much and just accept it. Once it goes into the bank, I
think I'll finally get myself a digital camera .
Well just as I was about to submit this, I realised that it was a year and two days ago that I made the first entry. Wow. I can't believe I've lasted that long. Looking at some of the early months I was writing something almost every day. There is even one day with two entries. Yet now it's been three weeks since the last entry. I wonder if I will make it to year two.
07/11/2004 10:33 PM
So the project I'm doing with Andrew is going fairly well. I think we're on track. As with all project plans, the reality of the situation is quite different from the plan. Some tasks have merged in with others so it's hard to say just how far along we are, with relation to the original plan. I'm fairly certain though that we're on target.
One thing that I don't like though is that the workload is not properly balanced. In the past when I have said/thought this it has usually been me who is doing a disproportionately large part of the work, and hence the complaint. In this case however it is Andrew that is (in my opinion) doing the bulk of the work. He's been very focused and into his work, so I don't know whether he has noticed. Nothing seems to be going into my head and I seem to be asking for things to be explained to me constantly. I can imagine that it might have something to do with the fact that it's really his project. He was working on it for a week or two before I got involved, so he knows a lot more about it. There's also the fact that I've been getting less than four hours of sleep a night for a few weeks now which has dulled my ability to absorb information. Whether or not they are valid reasons/excuses, I still feel guilty. Hopefully this week I will start to be able to pull my weight.
In other news, my sister has been in a placement school for a week or two now, and she's going to be teaching her first lesson tomorrow. Yikes! Exciting stuff!
01/11/2004 5:14 AM
So, new month, new page, new look. Yes, I finally got around to making the changes that I talked about oh
so many weeks ago. Unfortunately I had to make some compromises. I wanted to do the whole thing using pure
CSS without a table in sight but the difference in CSS support in the browsers I was testing with was just
ridiculous. It was nigh on impossible to get things to lay out it a particular way and have them stay that
way in other browsers. I'm sure I made those complaints last time so I won't waste energy repeating them. So
my compromise was to use a few tables to contain the main components and then CSS-ified everything else. It's
more evolution than revolution unfortunately but it's better than nothing I guess. It's still following the
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle but now it's a lot less ugly . Theoretically it means that updates
at a later stage will go a lot more smoothly. Time will tell. Hopefully now that I've done this bit it will
have spurred me on enough to migrate the other sections as well.
