Argh I feel terrible. Seem to have caught Grete’s cold, not getting enough sleep, getting stressed at all the wrong things 🙁

Probably working too much out of hours, and not enough during hours as well.

One day I’ll get it all sorted.

Anyone like to buy a house in Stockton on Tees? mail me if you do!

Morning folks. Well, recovering from another evening in the Sheriffs Lodge in Nottingham, free ale and good food. An excellent evening, even if I did get a headache before hand. Grete’s costume looked excellent, still waiting for photos from the actual night, but here’s one of her in the back garden before we went.

Thanks to Christine for organising the evening 🙂

We’re heading into town at some point to get photo’s developed – two of the flims we’re not sure what’s on them all, and one of them I probably ruined last night by opening the back before it had rewound 🙁

We do have some digital photos from Center Parcs, but not many (having real problems using the digital camera in low light conditions!). Anyway, here’s one of me preparing to fight off some ducks.

After that, if we’re up to it we might go out for some food with Andy and his mate, but it depends on headaches and stomachs.

The entire darkstorm.org site (including this bit if you’re viewing it at darkstorm.org and not tagman.demon.co.uk) was moved to another server over the last couple of days, by Xeran [the hosting company I use]. Went virtually without a hitch, so thanks to them for that. It now means I get to use PHP3 and mySQL if I can think of anything to use them for!

I might use PHP3 to allow me to make these diary entries without changing the page source, which should make things quicker and easier generally, but we’ll see how things progress.

Only 9 days to pay day.

I know, I know, nearly two months since the last update. Sometimes it’s easy to find the time and the emotional energy to update the diary, and other times it’s very hard. Also, at times, the stuff I
want to write in here really isn’t wise, and so I leave it alone for a while until I’m more me.

The Gemmell Mania website has suffered from a lack of updates as well, although I’ve just gone through it tonight and added all the reviews and recommendations that have been sent to me in the time between changes.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on NewsMangler, and it’s pretty good now, even if I do say so myself. Still needs work on the exception handling side of things.

Grete went through a pretty bad patch recently, one of the reasons for a lack of updates. However, she’s come through it with what seems to be a renewed lease of life, and is once again working at
Oxfam. Which is nice[tm].

We’ve been away for a few days at Center Parcs – Eleveden Forest, which was nice, although I’ve bruised my coccyx cycling, which hurts and is a bad thing[tm].

Work is better, generally not too bad to be honest, and I’m much busier now than I have been for a long time.

We’ve got another cat – Bubbles – to go with Squeak. No photo’s on Grete’s site at the moment, but I’m sure there will be soon.

I still officially hate cars – our car is now due MOT, Tax and Insurance once again. However, it does give us the freedom to get around, without which we’d be in real trouble.

The Omega event was excellent – without doubt the best LRP event I’ve been to, to-date. I think I set out to do nothing, and did far more than normal. Weather was ok, company was excellent, and the four days were generally brilliant. It’s not long now until the next event, and I’m really looking forward to it.

We’re off to our second Medieval Banquet at the Sheriff’s Lodge in Nottingham this coming weekend, which should be excellent.

[Although Grete still has to sort costume out – and only three days to go!]

Anyway, long update, and I promise I’ll try and make updates more frequently (for some reason, people seem to read this now and then!)

I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed,

I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how to have fun again, I will be more relaxed, I will learn how
to have fun again.

Well, work isn’t getting much better.

There’s just no room in my life for Intolerance.

Preparation is underway for our first LRP even of the year with the Omega crew [we are the Lorgaire De Eolas in case you forgot ;)]. Costume development rules the lounge, Grete is once again creating amazing costume out of cheap on-sale material!

[14th February 2000 – 20:23]
Well, even more shelves have gone up. The two connected units in the back bedroom are now fully populated with paperbacks. The 50cm unit in the front room has the two PC’s and various other bits of
hardware on it. The 30cm unit in the front room has all the CD’s and some of bits of stuff on it. Another 30cm unit on the other side of the front room has all the RPG stuff on it, and all our photographs. We bought another one of the £16 boxes from B&Q and have put all our LRP kit into it (and one other we already had). Although the LRP kit is building up elsewhere!

We seem to be finally getting the rooms sorted – only 9months after moving in.

Another weekend, another geeking session. This time I spent it building a very basic news server on the linux machine. The main aim was to ensure that myself and Grete could read news regardless of
which ISP we were connected to. So, it connects news every hour from a list of ISP’s (and if we’re not online, it doesn’t do anything), and then we use it to read our news using Agent.

Seems to work ok, although I’m not sure how much disk space it’s going to need …

Used a linux product called Leafnode .. doesn’t scale but works well with a small number of users.

Well, I’m knackered. Another visit to Ikea, more shelves, more building, more moving, more carrying, and the result is that we’ve now got two shelving units in the bedroom (with another 3 to build),
one 30cm deep, one 50cm deep.

Here they are, 50cm bottom, 50cm middle, 50cm top, 30cm bottom, 30cm top.

As you can see, Moria and Mordor have finally got somewhere ‘proper’ to live. The end result is a much tidier room (well, one end of it), and a much more knackered Tony.

Well, I’m rather peeved. I installed the GoLive patch, and GoLive no longer ran (problems with a DLL). So, I de-installed, re-installed, ignored the patch, and started work on the page again.
Filled in some of this diary, explaining about the patch, deleted some text and GoLive crashed again, dropping all the changes. So, considering the learning curve, the fact that GoLive has some serious problems, and the fact that I only started using GoLive because the auto-upload feature in PageMill appears to be broken, I’ve removed it. I can’t be bothered. [And the fact that it buggers around with loads of file associations really annoyed me].

So, here we are back in PageMill, and now I need to find a proper FTP based web-page updated which works, is quick, and runs on Win9x.

Anyway, spent today buying shelves from Ikea and they’ve made this room much easier to live in. [Oops, did I say live in? It’s only the bedroom!] Anyway, for those who like this sort of thing, here
are some shots of the first shelving unit, complete with contents. Shot1, Shot2.

Hmm, Adobe GoLive has some annoying habbits. Seems to screw up the auto-launch settings for text files each time it starts up, the global search can crash it, and it never re-sizes windows to anything sensible.

However, it does so proper uploads and doesn’t mess about with javascript URL’s as much as PageMill, so I’ll keep trying to get on with it for a bit. Aha, just found a patch on the Adobe website, hopefully that will fix some of my concerns.

Generally it feels like a nicer editor, but it is still niggly in places.

Life goes on still – stuff happening. I’m building our fourth PC at the moment (I felt obliged) so now I need to find something for it to do. It’s only a P166MMX built using our old kit, but it must be able to do something.

Well, we made it into the year 2000 without any serious problems [the guestbook at this site turned out to be non-Y2K compliant, but it’s since been fixed]. The flu’ is almost gone, although I’ve still got something of a cough, and now my stomach/chest muscles hurt from the constant coughing, but these things happen. Grete is feeling much better and almost fully recovered.

Now all we have to do is try and fit our celebration in before we run out of time – since our actual attempts were stopped by illness and work.