Fixed

Sometimes I wonder about myself. I've looked at my blog script countless times and never noticed this (rather odd) glaring error:

God knows how that happened, and god knows why I'd not noticed sooner. Edit: Liz just pointed out that I've spelt "February" wrong too. Arse! That makes no less than 25 extra blog entries wrong! Anyway, it's fixed - I'll correct all the wrongly dated entries some other time, right now my bed is calling me.

Dates

How odd. Excuse the weird dates, I will look into it some time tomorrow. The server is reporting the correct date, so I'm unsure why the blog script is getting it wrong. It's just using the Perl standard date command, so it should be the same as that reported by the date command. Ah well, I'll look at it tomorrow.

Treat

Decided to treat myself this evening by buying some chocolate from the CO-OP. Normally I wouldn't allow myself such frivolous luxuries, but I need something comforting to take my mind off this bloody cold for a while. So I bought a full-sized bar of Green and Black's Organic chocloate which is fairtrade, organic and even suitable for vegans.

Mmmmmmmmm. This is the first chocolate I have had since- I can't remember when I last ate chocolate, actually. My god it's been months. I've not had chocolate since I became a full-time student again. Fucking hell.

Getting Better?

I might be counting my chickens before they hatch, but I think I might be getting better. Maybe. I felt utterly crap for parts of today, but my throat is settling down a little. That said I felt like I had a tennis ball stuck in my throat when I woke up this morning. I've been taking lots of paracetamol and I've been eating loads of Vitamin C as well as taking the multi-vitamin supplements to keep my body tanked up on everything it needs. Oh and drinking loads of water. And I'm wearing two jumpers to keep warm. At the moment I just can't afford the time off, so I have to do everything I can to avoid this dragging on.

Last night I slept like a baby. It was the first decent sleep I've had in ages. It took me ages to fall asleep, again, but I woke up feeling like I had actually slept so it's a vast improvement on the norm.

Now I guess I should start work on the new website.

Ahhh Got Me A Job

The discussion about the website went very well. Luckily my cold didn't get in the way for the hour or so I was there. He gave me a few sketches of the sort of thing he wants, and a few links to websites that he likes the style of or how they've tackled various problems. Most of the website will be just a plain-simple website, but part of it will need a dynamic solution which will be interesting to implement. How I go about that will depend on exactly what he wants, he's going to draw up some ideas for that section and get back to me. All in all it's going to look utterly splendid on my CV. When the ugly matter of money was brought up I laid my cards on the table and blustered words to the tune of "I don't know, how much do you want to pay?" Let's just say the figures he suggested will do quite nicely.

Afterwards I wandered over to the OLU to say hello to everyone. The plan had been to pop in for 10-15 minutes but I ended up staying there about an hour talking to everyone. Turns out that Julie has been spying on me. Yes you, Julie! While I was talking to Susan my cold started playing up, it felt like someone invisible was trying to crush my head. Not pleasant. It was cool, once again, to see everyone. I miss the place. I even logged onto my old computer, which was a bit weird.

Now it seems the paracetamol is wearing off and my throat is beginning to hurt rather a lot once again, so I'm going to dose up and then sort some stuff out.

Saving Bandwidth

I took a look at the logs for the blog earlier and was surprised to find it gets rather a lot of hits these days. I then worked out how large the homepage is and ran the figures through a calculator. I suddenly realised my humble little blog must actually be eating a fair bit of bandwidth from nic-nac-project, the free shell provider on which the blog is living.

Because the project is currently looking to move to a new home they are addressing the issues of bandwidth and space usage. I don't use much space (about 2 MB) but I think I may have been eating at a fair old slice of the bandwidth. I've changed all that by making the default page show ONLY the latest blog. If you want to see more than just the default then you will need to use the archives.

Incidentally, when I get the time, I shall be compressing the archives into a .tgz file and making the blog decompress them on the fly. This will save a bit of space on the server (I've written in excess of 1.6 MB in under a year!) without too much compromise to the running of the blog.

Of course, nic-nac-project is just a temporary home. As much as I love it I'd like a more stable home, so when I get out of Uni I will strive to get some actual webhosting and a (memorable) domain name.

Impeccable Timing

As always my body has chosen the most unhelpful time to lower its defences and let a cold take hold of me. I awoke this morning with a throat that felt like it had been cheese-grated, and a bunged-up nose. My ears keep giving me the odd twinge of pain and I feel dizzy. Great. And I have to go and see the head of Leisure and Tourism at 2pm and try and sound enthusiastic about his website while I feel like I'm dying.

I hate getting ill. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does I tend to really get ill. Maybe this time will be an exception? You never know.

Shattered

All I want to do is sleep but every time I go to bed at the moment I end up just lying there for hours on end feeling completely awake. No amount of trying to relax or clearing my mind works. If I get up I feel tired. If I go back to bed I feel awake again.

Apparently it's abnormal for it to take more than half an hour to fall asleep. As long as I can remember it has always taken more than half an hour to fall asleep.

Apparently it's abnormal to lash out with any limb s during the night. For as long as I can remember I've been kicking walls, punching things off bedside tables and elbowing things during sleep. Sometimes it wakes me up, sometimes it wakes people in the next room up.

Apparently it's abnormal to wake up with a dry mouth. Most mornings I can hardly breathe my mouth and throat are so dry.

...in fact, most of this list of sleep disorders applies to me. Screw it. I find it hard to believe that I suffer from apnea, insomnia, narcolepsy and periodic limb movement disorder. Stupid bloody online quizes. I'm surprised it didn't also come with a cute little logo with the HTML to add to my website so that others can see which sleep disorder I "am".

Well I guess I'd better give it another go. No sense in sitting here doing nothing.

Oh, and in other news, I think I've caught Liz's cold :(

It Works

The code now works. I got my regexps sorted out. I even tested it on the BBC News website and it works on there, where as it just hung trying to save that webpage before. While I was there I saw an article on the Bhopal disaster. I've never heard of this before, what with being all of 1 years old at the time. I had a quick scan through and heard of all the horrible things that happened to some of the residents of Bhopal because Union Carbide had disabled 4, yes 4 essential safety devices and did not have an evacuation plan. But the thing that made me sick was the closing comment:

£300?! The chemical that leaked causes blindness, infertility, damaged lungs, vomiting, burns, respiratory difficulty... This is one of the most lethal toxic substances known. The company officially killed 3000 people. Other estimates put the figure between 5000 and 10,000 people. A further 50,000 people suffered permanent disabilities, and more people died later on as a direct result of the chemical.

And they only gave an average of £300 compensation?!

Perl Regular Expressions

You gotta love it. Just when you think you know everything you really need to know about Regular Expressions, something goes tits-up and you spend a day trying to work out why. Then when you do you learn something new. Then something else goes tits-up and you realise your regular expression is running extremely inefficiently. So you go to fix it, and realise you need to learn something new. So you learn it and then realise that you will, in fact, need to learn something ELSE new. So you start trying to learn it and realise it is, in fact, completely mental. I am referring to inserting Perl statements into Regular Expressions.

So what you end up with is some Perl, then a block of Regular Epression, with some Perl in the middle of it, a bit more Regular Expression and then Perl. This might sound easy at first, but then one realises that one has to build the regexp in a certain way to force the Perl in the middle of it to be executed. And then one realises that the Perl behaves arbitrarily different depending on what the regular expression does, what the perl does, what context the perl is in, and where the moon lies in relation to the earth and the sun.

Wish me luck, I'm going in.