Tired.

Bloody Knackered

Last night I sat up waiting to see the lunar eclipse. I've never seen one in all my years on this planet, so I decided it was about time to finally see one. At about 1am I drove out towards Capel Dewi where there is less light pollution to ensure a good viewing. There was the odd patch of cloud, but it wasn't a problem because the moon was visible on and off. I just wanted to see something of it.

Anyway, me and Saad who came along for the ride sat and waited. At 1:25 when it was due to start what happened? I'm sure you can guess. Cloud. Big thick dense cloud with no breaks in it. CUNTS! The one time I am actually in a position to see the eclipse this has to go and happen.

Anyway when I got back one of my flatmates had a drunk girl in the flat. He kept making crude suggestions to her ("you're only hear for a bit of cock", for example) while I was in the room which made me uncomfortable so god knows how she felt. It was pretty obvious what those two were going to be getting up to during the night, and as he is my direct next-door neighbour I said, as I went to bed, "Don't keep me up all night".

Like they paid any attention. It was already late by the time I got to bed, and it was even later by the time I was able to get any sleep thanks to the amount of noise those two made. No I couldn't hear them shagging, if that's what you are thinking. I was spared that. They talked all fucking night, laughed, she screamed at one point (not a proper scream, more of a squeal), they were in and out of the room repeatedly letting the door slam... Fucksakes.

This morning I had to be up early for a lecture. Unfortunately I got the times wrong and so ended up getting up an hour early. D'oh. So I finally got to sleep around 3 or 4 this morning, and then got up about 9, and so I am now shattered.

Just got back from the pub. Went to see Tom. He seems to be a bit happier than the last time I saw him. Played a few games of pool, we were both utterly crap. Typical.

Anyway, I'm going to get a drink and go to bed as I am utterly shattered and I have to drive to Newbury around this time tomorrow, so I can't afford to be tired then.

"Today...

...I are been mostly learnin' not to go shopping when I is starvin'"

Went to Lidl earlier. The plan was to get some basics, like chopped tomatoes, frozen and fresh veg, cheese, bread, etc. Problem was, I'd not eaten properly for a long while and I was dying of thirst too. Went a bit mental when I got in there, thus proving that we all succumb to our instincts when we have to. I ended up buying £25 worth of food. And I mean food. There was no alcoholic bevearages in my trolley. No personal hygiene products, no cleaning products or whatever. Just food. £25 worth of food from Lidl is a lot of food. It came to over half-way up the trolley, even at the deepest end of the trolley. It filled the boot of my car. I couldn't find space for it all...

A lesson well learnt.

Hypo-Allergenic Cats

Wow, scientists are developing cats that don't cause problems in those who are allergic to them. Like me, for example. What I want to know is how many cats they will have to treat like shit and simply get rid of once they have served their purpose, all just so that people who get itchy-eyes and a runny nose can own cats without fear of their allergy.

Personally I'd rather put up with the allergy than sentence kittens to death.

Florida Voting

A look at how the new fool-proof elecotions might work in Florida:

Quicktime

Windows Media Player

Absoloutely splendid!

COMPOOTA GWAFIKS

We've got a new lecturer for Computer Graphics. I'm in the lecture now. I haven't the slightest idea what he's saying. He's scary. I keep half expecting a scene from a samurai movie when someone answers his questions wrong.

Advice

I'm sick of giving advice to people who ask for it. Fair enough if they want my advice and are prepared to act upon it or at least consider acting on it, but I'm sick of being repeatedly asked for the same advice over and over again only to have it ignored over and over again. I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall.

Shit

I'm having another dizzy spell :( The diziness had settled down recently and I was rather enjoying not feeling like the world is spinning. Mind you, I've not been taking the Ginkgo Biloba...

irc2msn Rewrite

I'm in the midst of rewriting irc2msn. The old version died when MSN changed their protocols and the jmml libraries couldn't handle the changes. I tried to get the new version of jmml working but it wasn't to be. I found some different libraries, the MSNj libraries but they won't even connect to the network. Eventually I stumbled across the TjMSNLib libraries and they're much better, except that many important methods were spelt wrong (e.g. acceptInboud and setTransferedAmount) so I've changed all those to keep myself sane.

Now I've got to rewrite all the underlying code as I've decided on some changes that'll make the program that little bit more useful, and because the libraries interface in a completely different way. So far so good anyway, I've managed to connect to MSN, appear in my contact list (I have a testing account on MSN), and send and receive messages. Exciting stuff.

Hacking UNIX

While doing some research for my major project I stumbled across a hacking document from 1990. It is, without a doubt, the oldest hacking doc I've ever seen. It's so old it refers to The Internet as "InterNet": Notice the lack of "The", and the capitalization of the N. The author describes InterNet as "a WAN (Wide-Area-Network)". 1990, back when The Internet was still small enough to be classed as nothing more than a network. Of course, there's no mention of the web in that document, or hacking HTTP servers... It wasn't until 1991 that the first web server went live. There's no mention of Linux, either. It didn't really appear until September '91, and that was only version 0.01 which was more a proof of concept than anything.

Anyway, the doc is worth a look at if you're remotely interested in UNIX and computing history. Note that the author was an early script kiddy. He wrote commands to display "You suck" on other people's TTYs etc. Maybe he was one of the first? ;)