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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Monday 14 July 2003 (Day View)

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14.07.2003 – Monday 14 July

Morning

• I phoned Qantas to get them to re-send my confirmation email, which, like the first one, I did not receive so I posted a query on my web host’s forum and found out that Qantas sends malformed emails for their confirmations and my mail server rejects them – so handy. I also phoned Joe around eleven to let him know what time I’d be arriving, and then spent the rest of the morning online multitasking.

Evening

• It cleared up and I went for a walk out the Home Rule road to the halfway spot and sat by the creek for a while, then it clouded over again and I came home. It’s nice to be walking around in the pure air, knowing I won’t meet anyone. It really is quite beautiful up here; I have yet to see anywhere nicer. This is definitely the best time of year too – a nice temperature, not too wet and not too dry.

Night

• I drove out to Shan’s and picked up the DVD’s he had, to take them back to the video store tomorrow. I’ve now remembered in graphic detail some of the reasons why I bought a new computer. After rebooting to get my DVD drive back out of PIO and into UDMA mode, I rebooted as the computer froze up, and then again as it froze up again – both times due to DVD reading problems. I then downloaded an ASPI driver from Adaptec, which didn’t work, so I went and got the Nero one, which did work, and rebooted again because the computer froze up again. After this, I finally managed to get a DVD reading correctly and made an image of it, with only two read errors, and was delighted to find that it played with some choppy sound and no video, and of course froze the DVD playing program every time. So I deleted that image and rebooted again, twice as I had to set the DVD drive back to UDMA again and the only way I know how is to uninstall the hard drive adaptor, reinstall it and reboot. All this so that Mum and I could watch “Romeo Must Die”, which we eventually did. Mum enjoyed it and I understood it better the second time around. Oh, and I should add – while Mum and I did manage to watch the movie, it froze up twice on scratches and I cannot parse either the UDF or ISO9660 file systems on the disc properly, but it works quite normally over at Shan’s in his computer.

3:20am

• I’ve spent hours and hours and hours preparing my “the-i.org” site for its transition from a flat-file to a template-based system, and it is still not at all ready, because I’ve been doing it all wrong. The more I do, the more I think of better ways to do it. It seems this is how I work. I think about something, figure out a way to do it, and then begin to implement that. Halfway through I’ll think of a better way to do it and change things accordingly, and then towards the end I’ll realise that I’ve been going about it all wrong and I need I’m too sleepy to continue, so I’ll sleep on it and think about it while I’m sleeping and then in the morning I’ll awaken knowing what to do next. If only I could sleep on something and do it right the first time, but it seems the effort is what triggers my thinking processes, or perhaps I’m just too lazy. At least I’ve all but worked out how to convert my site; in fact, it’s running through a PHP template at the moment, although it appears almost exactly the same and still uses the old “.html” style links. It’s quite hard coding on this small seventeen inch monitor after being used to a nineteen inch dual monitor system. I have to do everything one at a time, switching from window to window.

3:58am

• I think I should go to sleep, especially as I’ve got to wake up sometime tomorrow morning and go to town. I don’t like going to bed with an unfinished task in front of me but I know it will take hours and hours to complete and the nitty gritty of how to do it hasn’t fully gelled in my mind yet, although I can feel it starting to congeal.