Niall’s virtual diary archives – February 2002

Sunday 24th February 2002: 2.50pm. God damn this is a small screen. It's like 800x600 and I'm typing into an area around half that size cos the rest is full of the usual FrontPage toolbars and crap. It's almost comical that I am using a dual Athlon 1700 with 1Gb of RAM with a monitor so ancient its max resolution is 800x600. Well, it would be if it didn't flicker so much and furthermore, it squashes said 800x600 into about 10" diagonally instead of the 13" it should. Oh those lovely black borders ...

Well if you hadn't guessed, yes I am back in Bordon again. Around a week after the last entry I headed to Hull which was good although too short. It's annoying when free time is always a few days grabbed here and then there. I was thinking a few days ago in fact that I must have taken at least fifteen days off in the last year and a bit and I think I'm entitled to twenty-two. Roll on unemployment!

And another thing you might have guessed is that I finally got the computer working again (in fact it's DivXing Lord of the Rings right now for the umpteenth time). I'll just say now that Win2k's dynamic disk support is bug-ridden and crappy and will quite happily delete your hard drive. Furthermore, a few days ago I was copying files from one place to another when I deleted a partition - something which should be safe as windows is always reading and writing data - but no! - it happily wiped the entire partition table of the hard drive instead. Two days of painstaking sector analysis later, I reconstructed the partition tables using a linux on a floppy and thus saved my data. Sometime today I'm planning to get to work on my first multi-platform project for a few years - I'm going to write a little game for XFree86 and Win32.

I also finally got my books, which was nice. The Quantum Computing one is particularly maths-ridden so I decided to start with Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. Some interesting points, although I remain unconvinced subatomic particle physics is as similar to eastern mysticism as he claims. I'll see what I think when I've finished it and the others he's written - whatever else may be, I certainly will know a lot more about eastern religious thought.

Just was thinking of what else I'd like to write. Fraid nothing much is coming to mind. Probably time for spliffage, then some breakfast and then try to produce a project which makes sense to windows and linux. Hmm. I guess that will be life again for the next three months.

Oh, speaking of which, soundings have been made about paying me a few thousand more euro to work until compatibility test (supposedly end of May). I'm sooooo divided on that one. While a few thousand euro is lovely for a month, I can see the bastard bench failing its test and me getting lumbered with months of more work. This job is so boring now, there is absolutely nothing new in it and for the last three months all the problems have not been of my doing. Also, to be honest, even a week here even with my computer in this house is already beginning to grate me. I can see in twelve weeks more that I'll be close to snapping point. I'll take a trip up to London next weekend to see some friends, and try to negotiate a weekend back in Madrid for the following weekend.

Ok, cool, I'm done for now. Not sure when nor if will be the next entry, mainly because nothing ever happens here so there's not a lot to precipitate one. But who knows, maybe my reading list may provide? Right, until next, be happy ...