radiac.net

Happy new year everybody!

I've tried sending some texts, but as usual the mobile network is ridiculously busy. Still on GPRS, but this time from Cornwall - when time and connection permits, I'll come back and do another entry with the usual. But for now, may the new year hold much joy and happiness for you all, and may all your dreams come true. Unless your dreams contain themes of paedophilia or bestiality.

Happy new year!

I am now back on broadband, and as promised I will now provide you with my start-of-the-year entry, even if it is two days late.

The past few years, I have predicted things, but since my predictions are always bang on it's getting a bit boring, so this year I thought I'd share with you my new years resolutions.

1. Be altruistic at least once

   If everyone on earth helped everyone else just once this year, the world would be a better place. Possibly even a hippy paradise planet, attracting visitors from across the galaxy who come in search of fine ganja, or an easy planet to subjugate.

2. Work more

   Last year, I fitted my work in around the rest of my life, with amusing and predictable results. This year I will have to work more. I am determined to free myself of the ongoing CMS joke, and at some point I'll need to earn some money. And if I get everything done that I want to, hopefully I'll have something more interesting to show for my year than some closed-source commercial Flash animations.

3. Push the boundaries

   Evolution has brought us so far, and I must be pretty close to perfection, but during 2005 I didn't grow wings or laser-beam eyes. Technology will have to pick up where evolution left off, so this year I'll be reading Wikipedia to learn everything I need to know about genetic engineering.

4. Play more

   Last year I worked and dealt with life's little problems, but often that didn't leave me with any time for Counter-Strike:Source or San Andreas. This is clearly a terrible injustice, and must change.

5. Stay awesome

   It's a well known fact amongst the social elite of this fair country that I am awesome. This year I aim to secure that status by maintaining my amazing physique and awe-inspiring intellect, and I will open offices abroad to spread the message.

6. Keep in touch

   Although 2005 did see me start a talker, and as a result re-unite with some online friends, I have been very bad at keeping in touch with my offline friends, often forgetting birthdays and failing to reply to text messages. And rarely initiating conversations. 2006 will see me change all this when I send snail mail letters to everyone in my offline address book, telling them to come talk to me on my talker.

7. Restore radiac.net to it's former glory

   I miss the radicam and the animated sliding menu, and this year, lets be honest, most of my diary has sucked. Possibly because I haven't done anything exciting to write about, but that's a poor excuse - I never had anything exciting to write about before either. So, that'll be new back-end, new design and new content then. Sure.

8. Build an army of robot minions

   I have been working on blueprints for a robotic kitten. Once it is complete and has proved itself on the battlefield, I will train it to build copies of itself. They will, in turn, build copies of themselves, and soon I will have a massive army to carry me to power and destroy the speed cameras of the world. All I will have to do is place orders on dabs and maplin, and wait three days for the economy postage.

9. Think of another new years resolution

   All the good lists have 10 points, and I refuse to be bested by the FBI's most wanted or that Nielsen chap.

May 2006 be good for you all.

Well, that was the most expensive £30 I've ever spent.

Accidentally put the wrong card into a cash machine last month, and took out £30 on my credit card instead of my debit card. At least I won't have to pay much interest on that, I thought to myself. I was wrong - it ended up costing £4.

Nearly 14% interest on cash that they were only missing for 10 days? 50% interest if I had left it unpaid for a year? Anyone want to set up a credit card company with me?

In other news, I have finally got around to setting up the backup drive in my server. The only thing that can stop me now is armageddon! I love that show.

I'm up to my eyes in actionscript at the moment, and its not pretty. I'm in the middle of writing a function called 'binTwosFractionParserFromBoxes', and as it implies, I'm not exactly having the time of my life. But hey, it's work, so I can't complain.

As far as targets go, I'm waay behind. This is the project that started 6 months late. It's a set of 21 activities, and I figure I should be able to get through one a day now, but I've been at the same one for the past 4 days. At this rate I still won't have the first version finished in February, which isn't good.

And in the back of my mind I'm still thinking about my cms framework, plotting and schemeing. The more I think about it, the more I realise just how big a job it's going to be, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. I hope so. It would suck if I spend 6 months on it and nobody uses it. I know some people think I'm wasting my time and should just use/extend drupal or django or whatever, but that wouldn't be the system I've planned. I still need a decent name for it though.

In other news, I can't sleep. I've got a problem with my nose - I've had it for years, but it's been getting a lot worse recently. It gets blocked in a matter of minutes, and at night that disrupts my sleep. Sucks. And because I'm tired, I keep getting headaches that make me feel so bad I have to go to bed for the rest of the day. Which isn't helping with the work. Yesterday I had a headache and went to bed very tired, but today I woke up at about 3am and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'm a little grouchy. I've been to the doctor three times, and they've now referred me to an ENT specialist, so I've just got to wait it out now.

Still, it's not all bad - it's time for weetabix!

It is only now I realise that I haven't told you all about Leela's car.

Monday morning started normally enough - got up, had breakfast, Leela left, I started work. Ok, I started reading the morning webcomics, but I was going to start work right after, honest. Only Leela came back in while I was in the middle of User Friendly.

She knew when she set off that something wasn't right with her car, and gave up at the end of the road. We could see the problem - there was a very big screw in the top of a tyre, which had made it very very flat.

We decided that the best course of action was for me to pop her to work in my car, and I'd then replace her flat with the spare tyre, and for she could take it to a garage at the weekend to have the flat replaced and put back on properly.

Now there was one little details I forgot to mention when we agreed this plan - I've never actually changed a tyre. There was that one time when I came close, but this was to be my first solo operation. And so, being the good little geek I am, my first stop was Google. 'Sounds easy enough, dunno what all the fuss is about' I thought to myself, so went outside with my screwdriver.

For once, I was right - it was easy, and everything went smoothly. Oh, apart from how the moment I popped off the hubcap it started to rain, just like it does in the movies, only without the thunder. So for those of you who get a flat tyre on the road, don't panic, it's easy - just get out your car manual and follow the instructions.

And now, for our home and studio audience, but not for our panel, here's the before and after shots:

Flat as a pancake

Shiny new spare!

In that last picture, note how the rain is running down the back of the car. Just wouldn't have been the same if it had been dry.

There were going to be some action shots, but I forgot. However, this isn't the end of The Great Tyre Adventure of 2006 - oh no! Next we have to see what happens when it needs to turn... *snigger*

No entries for the past few days, have been working hard trying to keep up with the stuff coming in, so that I don't slip further behind with the long ongoing flash project, which I am determined to finish this month. Enough is enough, I've been doing pretty much nothing but actionscript for 5 months straight now.

Also noticed I didn't have any countdowns going over on the left, so have added one to remind me how hard I need to work, and another about my tax return. These tax things are fun, eh? I've finished the income section and now they owe me money.

I'm expecting to get through one flash activity a day now, but this one took me about two weeks. It's a fixed point binary converter - seriously, what's the big deal. It's not rocket science.

Still, I have finished it now, and with just 2303 lines of actionscript code. The USML library was only 1384 lines, and that runs 5 websites - this just converts from binary to decimal. Ridiculous.

Anyway, now to start the floating point binary converter *sob*

This morning a letter arrived from the Cornwall NHS trust, containing details of my upcoming appointment to sort out my nose. It is on the 1st of February, which is nice. But it's in Redruth.

Why has this happened? I live 5 minutes away from the main hospital in Cornwall, the doctor who referred me lives just around the corner, so why have I been sent to a hospital on the other side of Cornwall? It's going to take me an hour to drive there and back! What the hell?!

Dear Person Who Has Bought Something From Spam,

I'm writing to you today because I have a question. What were you thinking when you filled out that spammer's form for a homeowner loan?

No, seriously. Were you thinking about your debt? Well nice work Einstein, now you owe Hong Kong $769M.

They say technology is a great leveller, and it's certainly helped you out. But in 1859, they figured out why people like you have such bad luck, and they called it evolution. Survival of the fittest. The reason you can't get a girlfriend is not only because you're ugly, it's also because you're stupid. I don't want people who buy "v13gr 4" clouding up my gene pool, so would you kindly get the hell out. Perhaps there's a reason you need to increase your "size and stamina" - nature didn't mean for you to use it in the first place. Ever think of that?

I, and the billions of other people who don't buy from spam, all want to know - what made you think those stocks were a good investment? Was it the spelling of '1nv 3$t0r z' that got you thinking "hey, here's someone who knows what they're talking about"?

And on a personal note, can I just ask why you followed the link in that e-mail from Paypal? Was it the way it was addressed from 'Acounts'? Did you think "hey, that sounds like someone I can trust"? Didn't you think it was a bit strange that you didn't even have a Paypal account?

You have wasted hours of my life, and I want them back.

Ok, so I'd only waste them anyway, as Hans would say. But that's not the point. You are the reason I need a dedicated mail server to deal with the 20,000+ spams I recieve each and every day. You are the reason my ISP wastes over 30 GB of bandwidth a year on my unsolicited commercial e-mails alone. I'm even going to blame you for my hard drives packing up so quickly - after reading and writing 7.3 million spams every year, you've got to accept you're at least partially responsible.

Please do us all a favour and take your PC to someone who knows something about computers. Maybe they'll be able to scrape the hard drive clean of all the spyware and install some anti-spam software. Maybe they'll just see the harm you're doing and just 'format C:'. I don't care, just get the hell off my interweb.

Yours sincerely,

%RND_NAME

It's that time of the year again - today is Leela's birthday! We have just had pain au chocolates, followed by thorntons and tropicana - every breakfast should be that good. She has also unwrapped her cards and first wave of presents - the ones from me, and she appears pleased, always good.

She has taken the day off today (a good move), as have I (although it's easy for me) and we'll be going out for lunch. Mmm. Then she will be shopping for the rest of the afternoon, and we'll be going out for tea with her mum in the evening. A fun-packed day of fun!

As you can see, I have changed the display of the diary - something I've been meaning to do for a while, so decided to do it today. But the rest of the design still needs its makeover, and now I remember - that was why I had been putting it off. Oh well, baby steps... I'll get there eventually!

I have also added a very simple CAPTCHA to the diary comment system to help fight the spam - you will now be prompted to enter a word to prove you are human. But I'm pretty lazy, so I put a link on there to fill the form out for you. By adding the test, it also allows me to open up all my old entries to comments again, so yay for that.

With my human check, I'm betting that (a) radiac.net is such a small site that no spammer is going to bother customising their spider to work with my system, and that (b) the spammers don't run all the javascript on the page before submitting the form. While I'm sure I'm right on the first count, I might be wrong on part (b), so we'll see how it goes. If you have any views or comments on it, please do let me know.

Oh and shame on you all for not wishing Leela a happy birthday! Or is it just that nobody reads my site any more? :)

Time to watch the last LoTR!

Well, that sucked. Two spams within 18 hours.

I'm going to go ahead and assume it's the javascript link, so that's gone. I refuse to believe spammers can afford to have warehouses full of minimum wagers who go through my old diary entries posting links to casinos. If they can, I'm ditching the Flash and becoming a blog spammer.

No spam in 28 hours and counting. Either the spammers took today off, or their spiders run Javascript and I have defeated them once and for all! I'll keep an eye on it. I was aware that Javascript-enabled spiders were out in the wild, but I wanted to test it for myself, and if I don't get any more spam, I guess that's proof.

Work is going slowly, but well. Advancing towards target of the end of the weekend for finishing the Flash work - it'll be tight, very tight, but should be possible. I'll just have to stay up for the next 5 days. I miss Tristan's cinnamon caffeine tablets... wow, that's something I never thought I'd hear myself saying, although I always thought the chocolate ones were pretty damned good.

I have an appointment at the hospital tomorrow morning. Should be fun.