I’ve been working a lot on Archive Fragments, completely rethinking it to explain some of the important characters better. Doing a mind map and some planning. Have gone as far as I can with the “just write something” mode of working. That’s how I work to get a feel for the shape of things. When I left my last job the guys kindly bought me a novel writing book that I’m really getting into, although a lot of what is says are things that you kind of know if you have done some writing and thought about it.

I strongly recommend Quicksilver by Neal Stevenson. It’s absolutely fascinating to read about how intellectual life started in the 17th Century and how England was by far the worst-off trading country in Europe but, interestingly, the development of natural philosophy started to make it dominant. Plus all of the court intrigues and the politics of keeping your court poor so they depend on you, which is why Louis XIV build Versailles outside of Paris to force his court to have 2 houses. Plus the flow of gold betwen warring parties – very interesting.

Very excited about AF, but can see it’s going to take a while before I have anything I can send to anyone. I suppose though that you can always send the submission pack and see if anyone bites. I’ve been using google documents to do the actual writing because I can work on it anywhere I have a web connection.

I’m missing working with the people at my old job, but not the work, not even slightly. I think I took the piss for most of the last 6 weeks, even though I did’t want to. I have no idea what would have happened if I had’t found another job, maybe I’d have gone postal – just as well I don’t own a gun!! They also gave me some Argos vouchers that I spent on some headphones, a Bluetooth dongle and a camera so the kids can wave at their mates when they’re on Messenger.

New job quite challenging. I’m helping the config manager do his job before his contract finishes at the end of the month (or thereabouts when he finds a new contract anyway). It’s all Unix scripts and Java stuff, I’m in my element. Have also helped the poor mug who’s had the Oracle database work dropped on him get some things going.

Commute is great. Takes about 50 minutes and practically no queues. We also work a 38 hour week which means we finish at 12:15 every other Friday. I’m adjusting to starting work at 8:15, but only leave about half an hour earlier than I used to leave to get to the old place for 9 ish so pretty good. Supposed to leave at 4:45 but guess what? I have’t done so yet.

People are really easy to get on with and we have a good laugh. I feel so much better being busy with interesting things to do, I can’t describe it.

Rescued results called milk relative beheaded.

No idea, but I quite like it.

Had a quiet Christmas. Mostly spent plastering, waiting for plaster to dry and then painting it. With a little bit of replacing skirting boards for variety. Roger did the plastering because he knows how to do it. I did a bit and learned a lot from him but am not sure when I’ll ever use the skill.

Kids had a good christmas. Generally quiet.

I have finally found another job, starting on 22nd Jan. Sad to leave old job in some ways, particularly if it had been the job it was supposed to be in the first place.

Trying very hard not to take the mickey, but very hard because I don’t want to do any of the tasks I have been given. None of it is what I was supposed to be doing. I feel I’ve wasted the last two and a half years, not being able to give what I know I can and being forced into a role on the back of some broken promises. We’ll see how the new role shapes up. I’ve never been in such a ridiculous situation ever in all my working life. The CEO appointed an old friend in a role senior to me who did’t have developer skills so I got pushed into a development role. Ridiculous. Incompetent. Some other words I can’t put here. I’ll be glad to see the back of it all.

I sent my novel Archive Fragments off to a publisher and got it back. Had a long discussion with one of the human beings at work, who also writes, and I’m thinking I will restart it and look at the narrative punch. Also, if I can make it new again I wo’t be totally bored with it!

I made a traumatic discovery after losing my temper with Jon when he turned his back on me and walked away. After 40 years I’m still carrying round all the grief from my father’s suicide. Rejection makes me really angry. I’m quite scared of the powder keg but now at least I know it’s there. Carrying all this rubbish around is really boring, remembering it all is really boring too – these stupid habitual mental loops that just make you feel bad. Habits can be broken.

Onward. 

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=5&subID=257

Don’t know how long it will be there. 

Ok,

No diary entry for a while. What have I been up to?

Birthday

47 at the beginning of October. Jings. Looking 50 down the barrel. 

Still looking for another job.

Think I may have found one but it involves a pay cut, at least in the short term. Given that my current pay review is 8 months late as it is and inflation has’t gone away not sure how much of an issue this is, these guys do at least pay their bonuses (as in there is a bonus to be had). Could mean serious tightening of belts though. Already 20% down on what Oracle used to pay me.

Sent my book off to a publisher

This was much harder than you’d think. However I got the author bio, synopsis etc. together and sent it off about 4 weeks ago. Will give it until after christmas and then send off to another.

Still running my own internet based business

This is making steady progress. Main problem is one of consistency: I keep doing some activity but not often enough. We had a huge conference in Belfast, which was brilliant and very uplifting, but now I’m short of energy again

Still fighting with health problems

Man, have I been down recently. Partly because of a sudden death and partly because I feel stuck on someone else’s wheel. This past week I’ve been floored by some viral thing that’s attacked the glands in my head. Very tired and listless and quite painful. Hey ho, keep taking the supplements and the antibiotics and it will pass like it always does.

Music software

I’ve been experimenting with Cubase and Studio to Go. I think I prefer studio to go (definitely for software synths and midi – it even understands VST DLL’s as well) but it’s audio recording screeches nastily whereas Cubase just takes the input from my USB audio capture thingy and works. Hmm.

The kids

Jon started senior school in September. He’s hockey captain and also has been praised by the school for modern languages (French to you and me). Wants a trials bike (which is a push bike these days). Deb is doing really well, winning all sorts of awards and going on visits and so on because she’s in the top set. Still crazy about guide, gonna go up to Senior Section in Jan when she’s 14.

We’re counting down to Xmas. I had a lot of leave left and said that I would take Thursdays and Fridays off in December, but this week was a dead loss because I was ill. 

NB – this works for IE only. See comments in the code. 

First create an html file called close_window.html and put it in your htdocs area:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//E” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”docs/iamsdev.css” />
<Title>Close parent window after waiting</Title>
</head>
<body>
<script language=”javascript”>
var doneTimer = 0 ;
function myMess( mesg )
{
  document.writeln(“<br />” + mesg ) ;
}
function close_window(){
  myMess(“Attempting to close”);
  doneTimer = 1 ;
  window.opener.opener=‘x’; // IE only FF/NS don’t like this, but it stops the prompt to close the window appearing

  window.opener.close();
  window.close();
}
function do_close_wait(){
  myMess(“calling timer”);
  setTimeout(“close_window()”, 5000);
}
do_close_wait();
</script>
Waiting to close window
</body>
</html>

Then, in the post-form trigger put this:

web.show_document(‘/close_window.html’,‘_new’);

This spawns a child window. The close window code will wait 5 seconds and close its parent window and then itself. If anyone has time to get this working with FF please tell me how you did it.

Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/dictionaries and download your dictionary – then it will start working.

See

What kind of bugs are these Oracle bugs?

If there’s ways of breaking into the database, then fine, but first the attacker has to have broken into the systems and got behind the firewalls. I work for an Oracle shop and some of our customers got very excited about the security bugs.

What they had’t grasped was that in order to exploit them their entire infrastructure had to have been compromised as well. If people can break the Application Server and/or the Portal and get information they should’t then this is a serious issue, but vulnerabilities that involve messing with, say, SQL*Net, can only be exploited if everything else has been compromised first and an attacker can log into a machine or start looking at network packets. If this is the case, you really have more to worry about than you database.

Ah, Ecademy

I was a member years ago when it was new – and it was’t worth bothering with.

Could never find others local to yourself because it was a free-text string. I live in Merseyside so, you had to look for

Liverpool/Wirral/Merseyside – or even an area like, say, Childwall

No idea how London-based people managed. It was was a useless unsearchable pile of free text that was only of use if you had the time to scroll through everything. I gave up.

Even then you might see a village or area name that you know is local to you if you could be bothered scrolling down the long list of people.

I unsubscribed three or four times and then was sent an email every couple of weeks until I was rude to the sysadmin in a reply and that sorted it.

I’m amazed people still use it, last time I looked it was still a free text heaven with poor searching.

I’m writing a document that has numbering.

Chapters have numbers and each section is numbered using Roman numerals.

I wanted to swap chapters 1 and 2.

In MSW you can put the document in outline mode (which does’t seem to exist in OO), change the number of displayed levels to 1, and move the sections.

All of the numbering stays together.

OO, on the other hand, does’t have this view. OK, says I, let’s just cut and paste the chapters. It’s a bit 1980’s but hey OO is free.

The section numbering goes west. The pasted in chapter is numbered 1, and the sub sections carry on from the earlier numbering.

Joy.

I tried loading it into AbiWord (not yet used in anger) but it was too confused. Left it for a day and had another go. Discovered that you can press return at the beginning of the line and it will do the numbering on the new line. Go back up, set the style to Normal and remove the line – then the numbering is correct. I have since loaded the filter add-ons for Abi and will maybe have a go just to see if it can do it.

This is a pain – most technical documents have numbered paras and OO just does’t seem to get it. MSW can do this without much of an issue. Maybe I missed something. I don’t have time to try and fix OO. maybe I’ll put a test case together and see if the developers can sort it out.

In my hunting on the net I discovered Lyx , which I am looking at at the moment. What You See Is What You Mean – uses Latex and then integrates lots of O/S tools to glue it all together. I’m thinking that this would be by far the better way of producing camera ready copy if I could only find the time to learn it. No issues with WYSIWYG numbering either – it just does it. I did once use these markup languages in another life (before decent word processors) and don’t mind them at all. Lyx just hides the complexity from you.

Also using Firefox 2.0 spell checker – useful.