Well, that's another week nearly out of the way ! No great tales of high adventure still, although I am heading off to Germany (Frankfurt, to be specific) this weekend to catch up with Paul (a former colleague from Suspect) and his lovely girlfriend Sharon. I don't speak any useful German, so I guess I'll see how I go !! (I don't imagine there's a social subset in existence that would regard “Wo ist das froschwerfen wettebewerb, bitte ?” as *useful* German)

The saga of the paycheque continues – I guess this is one of the “joys” of being a contractor… after 2 weeks of chasing around and me nearly turning into a stress case, it seems that my pay for September's work is supposed to arrive in my account on about Tuesday or so. So hopefully, after repaying all the people who I've had to borrow money from in order to survive, I should be able to get back to a more normal cashflow situation. Tell ya what, it's really no fun in this country when you're broke.

At the moment, every seems like “1 step forward, 12 steps back”. I guess the good thing is that I've definitely had what I consider to be a BIG step forward this week – I got my laptop back from the manufacturer, and after about 4 hours of tooling about with it, reinstalling drivers and subsytem modules, and generally touching it in shameful ways, I GOT IT WORKING AGAIN !!!!!! It's a tremendous relief, because it means I haven't lost all the programming work, photos, mp3's, passwords and just other generally relevant data enshrined on that hard drive. I think doing a backup is in order (funny, people are always mad keen about backups AFTER they think they've lost everything ?).

It occurs to me that I'm dropping behind a bit with my birthday greetings – I missed Annie and Nat for last weekend, Fi's on Wednesday, Kristen's today, and Mum's next Wednesday. So, Happy Birthday to all you ladies ! Wow, it's starting to feel like magic mirror time on Romper Room in here now… I think mine's broken – it's only picking up Lineke ?

(There's nothing quite like posting an in-joke on a public forum, is there ?)

Well anyway now that I've got my laptop back, I can continue with the programming work I started on it a month and a half ago, which includes a couple of new features for me little website ! How exciting !

Should dash now… meant to be working, and all that.

2004-10-15 : Poets day
🌳 Buy me a Tree