Friday 29 September 2006
Ponderings
Without music again
Splitting up
Staring at the wires
Another day, Another notepad
Thursday 28 September 2006
Third time lucky
Try again
Keeping the train on the rails
Wednesday 27 September 2006
Next Stop Oblivion
Thoughts racing.
Lets get some of them down on paper.
Too slow, thinking faster that I can write. How am I? Am I making a mistake? I've convinced myself that I'm bipolar but don't yet have a confirmed medical opinion on that. Doctor is referring me to see a psychiatrist attached to the community mental health team. Don't know how long that will take. GP didn't really say much, am I reading too much into what he didn't say?
He didn't prescribe me with more SSRI, is that because he agrees with my self diagnosis and doesn't want to risk mania, or is it just because I didn't seem down at the appointment?
Thursday 21 September 2006
Am I Bipolar?
I watched an interesting documentary on BBC Two about Bipolar Disorder presented by Stephen Fry (who has himself been diagnosed with cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder).
Spent almost the whole thing thinking "Oh my god, that's me!". It left a lot of open questions. I've known that my depression is a problem for a long time. When I stopped cutting and shortly afterward met Charlotte and got married I had a couple of normal years; making me think it was all behind me.
Then came redundancy from Energis and everything crashed again. Or did it? Before crashing I had a period of uncontrolled spending and overconfidence. This included getting a job at safeway stacking shelves, which got rid of any insurance benefits I had without any hope of paying enough money to pay the bills. At the time I didn't really feel in control of my actions and maybe now I have a reason why…
Wednesday 6 September 2006
How do I hate thee Microsoft, let me count the ways
Who made the arbitrary decision that new motherboard=new pc? It's not even as if its consistent, I've changed mbs in the past and its just installed the new drivers and away. But not last night.
After the swap over the pc wouldn't boot, would reset before any screen output. Refresh install time thinks I. In goes the original media. Type in my original product key. All seems ok: great I think; job done. And then I log in to check for updates… Wtf? I'm not activated?
So now I find myself with another reinstall in the works. I do have another key I can use for this pc, but its for a different install cd and won't work with the oem cd I used to repair last night.
I guess thats my point. I did a repair last night, not a full install on a new pc. It kept all my other settings, why not my activation?
I'm glad I only run one windows box on the network at home. don't have any of these issues with the OSX, Debian or Ubuntu boxes.
Microsoft, I know you are not listening, but here's a suggestion. The main reason you have such a stranglehold on the os market is because your OS has the apps support, and your own apps are a large part of that. Make windows free. You'd kill Linux as a desktop contender just like making IE free killed Netscape as the dominant browser.
Of course, as a longterm Microsoft hater I don't want this to happen; I love that modern linux distros such as Ubuntu or SuSE make an open source desktop viable for non unix geeks; however in my mind it seems like a plausible option for them to take and a surefire way of killing the opposition. Sure they'd lose the revenue from new pc installs, they'd still have their apps though, they could still get revenue from the specialised variants (embedded, server, 3+ Cpu) and most of all they would get rid of the headaches of having to figure out new ways to stop OS piracy without generating extra support overhead when it breaks existing customer installs. It'd get rid of almost all of the bad press about MS too; very little of the bad press is about their office productivity apps. A lot of it is about oppressive os licensing. They'd still catch flack for their DRM stance and the crappy standards compliance in Internet Explorer (I gave up trying to make my sites display properly in IE ages ago; why should I work harder because MS don't read the standards properly before writing their code?). IE7 is supposedly more standards compliant. I don't want to get started on that though, I'll just say this: Why does fixing a bug require a major upgrade? Would it really be that hard to backport the fixed standards compliance as a critical update for 6 so webmasters don't have to wait years for everyone to update?
I was going to do some reading on the train this morning after a quick post. I seem to have got carried away...
Tuesday 5 September 2006
He took his ball and he went home
Monday 4 September 2006
What God invented sailors for
Nothing ever changes but the shoes
Up the Ziggurat, Lickety Split
Relaxation. Fleeting… rare… Drug of the Internet generation.
A week in Wales, far from the wired (although not that far; Grandad is as big a gadget freak as I am and has a larger disposable income so the temptation was there to "Just check my email…". I resisted though.)
Battery is crap in the palmtop so I'm back to pen and paper this morning