Skip to site navigation

Andrew's diary

bleb.org > Writings > Diary
<<< 03/2002 January Feburary March April May June July August September October November December 05/2002 >>>

Tuesday, 30 April 2002

Ill.

ITV-Digital finally gave up the ghost and, from 7am tomorrow morning, won't broadcast any pay-channels. Lots of reports say "the FTA channels will continue in the short-term", but muxes 1, 2 and 'A' are not run by ITVD and will continue as long as the licence holders want. In fact, E4 is broadcast on MUX 2 and the encryption codes for the next month have already been broadcast. Perhaps E4 will continue for another month? Apparently it can't go FTA as the contracts for some of their shows don't cover rights for FTA-broadcast. If after a month E4 want to continue, Channel 4 will set up their own key-management system for FilmFour and E4, with E4 being available for £30 a year (pulling figures out of a conjectural hat).


Monday, 29 April 2002

The Young Visions celebratory meal at La Cantina in Southampton. I'm glad I didn't pay as it wasn't great (it was good, but not great).

Mel got an A on her second piece of coursework too :-)


Saturday, 27 April 2002

Met up with Mum, Dad and Robert in Reading after lunch before going to look at the pictures. It was unbelievably packed in Reading, but we eventually managed to park and, after a bit of shopping, headed on to Venture Portraits. Mel and I decided to use our voucher to get a small one free (of the two of us, ahhh) and spend money(!) to buy one of the group.

We got the PowerPoint presentation on CD and so I'll put them online after a bit of tidying up.


Friday, 26 April 2002

Today was the day we were supposed to own our house. Unfortunately, there's still no idea of any particular dates except one: we're moving out of flat for definitely certain on 4th June.

The ploy of writing a diary to encourage folks back to the website actually works as I've heard of at least one person know who reads it who isn't a direct friend. Woohoo! ...now if only I could find a way to actually make money, I'd be rich!


Thursday, 25 April 2002

Convinced Dad to buy a Psion Wavefinder for the bargain price of 40 quid. Buffy was good: well-written with a (possibly obvious) twist at the end, but lots of meta-Buffy in-jokes.

Still no word on the house. Except the insurance company have (fairly reasonably) said the policy can't be put in place until we've got a definite date for exchange.


Monday, 22 April 2002

Hmm, both Mel and I felt "off" today. Hope we're not coming down with something. ITV-Digital also got put up for sale: if they scrap the PPV and porn channels there'll be loads of room for some decent, high-quality channels, so this could be the best thing for DTT.

Sunday, 21 April 2002

A family came to look at our flat: I think they'll take it which means we won't get another extension if the house-buying gets delayed again.

Watched 7-9am on 24 - it's funny how your brain gets used to having many days compressed into 45mins, so when it's real time you think it's dragging (even when it's interesting and not dragging).


Saturday, 20 April 2002

Met up with my family and Mel's mum & dad in Reading for a nice pub lunch (The Fox and Hounds, Theale) before heading off to our contemporary (free) portrait session. It was a little daunting at first, but the photographer was a nice young girl, complemented me on my choice of CD and the soundtrack soon got everyone having fun.

What's really interesting is the technology side of it: she used a really nice digital camera and got through two 340MB Microdrives of photos (over 200). The prints are produced digitally and you get a CD of screen-viewable resolution JPEGs of the rest. Instead of film being expensive and so only taking two or three formal pictures, each of which has to be perfect, she just took a constant stream of photos and we'll pick which ones we like. Very cool.


Wednesday, 17 April 2002

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhh!

Bloody fscking sod's law: got a phone call today from the estate agents: the guy at the top of the chain (of three) is an elderly gent who's buying an empty bungalow. But the empty bungalow he was buying is no longer on the market. So he's found another one, but that means everything gets pushed back another month. This does not make me a happy bunny.

Our solicitor's crap too: why didn't he tell us about this and he doesn't seem eager to help resolve the situation :-(


Tuesday, 16 April 2002

Found a phone number for NTL (which, sod's law says they've now plastered on the front of their site) and, after being passed from one call centre to another managed to find someone who could answer my questions and order it for me. £25 install and £34.98 a month (including phone line) for broadband. I'm happy :-)

Sunday, 14 April 2002

A lazy weekend. Yesterday's headache continued into today, but we went into Southampton and ordered our sofa. We were quoted 9 weeks delivery, which puts it around mid-June - place your bets.

Friday, 12 April 2002

Good grief: more people in positions of power at work who don't understand the web, which means I have to spend the day re-explaining everything and why <foo> is a Good Thing.

But there was some good news: we've got dates for exchange and completion now (touch wood). Should be exchanging next Friday and completing the Friday after.

Watched Andrew in The Real Inspector Hound in the evening: very funny - especially the bit where he fell off the stage ;-)


Wednesday, 10 April 2002

Check the access logs and am getting over 1000 hits a day on the TV pages. Coo.

Monday, 08 April 2002

IBM delivered a profit warning for 1Q 2002: down from $21bn to around $18.5bn. Am I surprised? No. But that could have been cos I read an interesting article on OS/2 and many of the mistakes IBM made back then are being repeated now, both with Lotus and Linux.

Got home relatively early as Mel's Java class restarted this evening (she got an 'A' for her first piece of coursework) and found my new IBX-260 had been delivered (full size keyboard but no remote control). Also listened to beautifulgarbage, which'll probably grow on me the same way Version 2.0 did.

At 6.30 a couple came to look around the flat, followed by the letting agent ten minutes later. Given the letting agent is going to be responsible for returning our deposit, she seemed very positive about the state of the place and said the carpets didn't need cleaning :-)


Sunday, 07 April 2002

Started work on the MP3 jukebox for the house, as mserv doesn't do what I want, and neither do any of the (many) listed on freshmeat. The requirements are simple: be lightweight (will be running on a 486); HTML interface which works on a Bush Internet Surf Set; don't rely on ID3 tags (I use filenames and hard links to organise my MP3s); be easy to use (so no need to log on etc.). The system will be in two parts: mp3d has now been written which controls mpg123 and manages the playlist etc. The next part is a set of three CGI scripts which will be the user interface within a frameset. One to do file navigation, one to display the playlist and one to display information on the current track.

Saturday, 06 April 2002

Four years ago today Mel and I started going out. How sweet :-)

As a celebration we went out for dinner and then rented A.I.: you can tell Stanley Kubrick was an inspiration as the cinematography reminded me of 2001. The teddy was cool, too.


Thursday, 04 April 2002

Received another email from an old school friend and spent most of the day listening to 6music whilst working. Speaking of which, I've got a growing feeling that everything's going to go horribly wrong at some point in the future - whether or not that's due to staffing; communication or something else...

Also pushed our solicitor to push everyone along and took the brave (or stupid, we'll know in a month) step of handing in the month's notice on our flat. Let's just hope that everything else goes according to plan and we're moved before the end of the month.

ITV Digital also gave us FilmFour for a month as a gesture of goodwill given the technical problems we've been having. So I added it to the TV pages and accidentally stumbled on a way of getting the longer format listings back. Woohoo!


Wednesday, 03 April 2002

Got invited to a wedding by an old school friend. What with Graham's kid and Mel's younger cousin's wedding next month, I agree with Phil - I'm feeling old.

Tuesday, 02 April 2002

Received another email from the listings editor at Granada Sky Broadcasting. He seems pleased that I'm now listings Granada Plus and Men & Motors.

Monday, 01 April 2002

How about a nice game of chess?
- Joshua, WarGames

A night of TV watching: Stargate, I Love Muppets, Enterprise, Dark Angel but back to work tomorrow :-(


<<< 03/2002 January Feburary March April May June July August September October November December 05/2002 >>>