May 2002

May 29th, 2002. And the clocks were striking thirteen

I was walking up The Vennel today, in heavy drizzle, when I saw a piece of paper pinned to a wall. On it, it said "What would make Edinburgh better? Have your say!" The top entry was "SUNSHINE" in big letters, and with a smiley-faced sun. I couldn't help but agree.

Mind you, lower down it said "more sweaty moshing", which isn't really the sort of thing I'd encourage, at least not right next to me.

I'm a bit worried that I've been watching every episode of Big Brother so far; well, at least the ones on Normal Telly. I hope this doesn't mean I'm getting addicted. The other series, I didn't really get interested in until the last few weeks because at the start there were just too many people for me to get a handle on them all. Maybe this just means my face-memory is getting better. Or my eyes squarer. Or someting.

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May 28th, 2002. Geek news, not Greek news

I seem to have got the stupid thing working sort-of reliably now, by unplugging the old Windows hard disk compltetely. Well, I hardly ever used it. It's not crashed at all since I did that.

Saturday night: I wasn't impressed by the Eurovision result, but I wasn't impressed by the songs generally. Ah, well. It's always a big disappointment, I think: the song you want to win never does. Slovenia were working on the right lines by going for a complete camp-overload -- isn't that the whole point of the thing? Jessica Garlick would have done better if she'd worn shoes that matched her outfit, I think. And why did Malta do so well, anyway, when it sounded just like the music from Wish You Were Here I kept having visions of Judith Chalmers.

Dimitra said she wants to forget all about this year's song content as forget the Greek entry ever existed. It was definitely going into "so bad it's good" territory --- I couldn't keep a straight face through it.

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May 21st, 2002. Fingers crossed...

Well, it's still broken. Sort of. I managed to get it running again most of the time -- I'm not sure really how -- but every so often the disk drive starts making nasty clonking noises and the whole thing just freezes. Actually, it did The Noises just then, but for some reason kept on working.

Because I've not been writing things down, I don't seem to have anything interesting to write down. I quickly got bored of going back and forth to EasyEverything every two or three days to read all my email (I know, too many mailing lists). I was planning to take up lots of exciting new activities -- and especially, get some more things ready to type and put up on the words page. But, um, I haven't. I wrote a letter to a friend in the US, ans wrote two poems to post to one of the many, many mailing lists, and that was about it. Oh, and I managed to get two friends' computers online. No self-interest there, of coure. One of them paid me in cake, which has to be a good thing.

If you go to Not You, The Other One, you can read all about what students at my university were like. Not me though, of course. Everyone else seemed to be Dead Posh. When I worked in the library, behind the counter, we could see what the students' names were when their matric cards got scanned. There was a frightening number of people with names like "The Honourable James Twistleton Ponsonby-Smythe". I had friends whose flatmates thought a nice weekend off was a quick flight to Switzerland, for the skiing.

Oh, of course, I have to remind you that it's the Eurovision on Saturday. My friend William (the actor, see below) would be terribly disappointed if I didn't point it out.

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May 6th, 2002. AAARGH

So, the computer has broken. The bastard. I won't be writing much until I manage to get it fixed, which will probably take a couple of weeks at least. I managed this by persuading a friend to let me use his machine.

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May 1st, 2002. Keyboard Harmony

Went out today and bought the new single by Dot Allison (that's the link on the CD cover, but it doesn't seem to work). To be honest it's not that good, but it's OK. Unusually, the B-side remix (which Brian at joannou.net was waving around on his site the other week) is better-structured harmonically than the A-side version.

Last night's dream: I was supposed to be travelling to Mull, which had managed to move itself to the other side of the country and was now somewhere in the Tay. Then, I saw sat around in my old school, fixing clocks. Or something like that. Later on, I was attending a conference (which seemed to be something to do with town planning) in a labyrinthine hotel, adn it all got very scary. I discovered that we were some kind of guinea-pigs for the *real* conference-goers, we tried to escape but couldn't and all that sort of thing. The best bit was when I found that if I took my phone and flipped over the SIM, I could then use it to reprogram reality -- although this gave us a better chance of escaping, it meant we could be tracked down a lot quicker, too.

I really should have less cheese with my evening meals, I think.

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