Time to post a diary entry. It's been quite a while. Truth to tell, I don't consider myself to be an interesting person.

Anyways, I'm working on something. It's not software. Maybe I'll post an article here. Haven't decided yet though, it's pretty larval right now.

I haven't been in the best of moods lately. There just isn't enough time, and the same old demons haunt me. While on the surface everything is ok, sometimes I wish I could go back ten years and just make things RIGHT this time. Or maybe twenty. Or just be born a different person altogether. While submerging myself in computers and DND helps somewhat, I don't feel like I am fully using my potential. I tend to just act on impulse, and that is usually wrong. When I cannot change myself, how can I expect to change the world around me?

Anyway, Happy New Year I suppose. I'll be 25 in 3 days. Maybe this time, the world doesn't end.

Wow, it's been a while.

The versatel thing has been wrapped up by now. Bas hasn't been involved. Right now the ball is in their court, they decide wether they want to go ahead with it or not. The ballpark estimate did seem to scare them somewhat though.

In other news, I compiled mindterm (http://www.appgate.org/products/mindterm/) and packaged it for epoc32 - the platform for amongst others, the Nokia 9210 cell phone. So now you can (in theory) get SSH on your phone. There are some caveats though: read more here.

There is more news but I don't feel a lot like writing right now.

Work:

It seems the versatel job is serious. Bas and I have been invited for a little chat in their office. Of course, the fact that their HQ is LOOONG distance doesn't help a whole lot. Still, it's a development gig and seemingly an urgent one so maybe it's possible to do some of it from the home - especially since I'm moving into the same home Bas and his wife are in on friday. (They have a spare room, and are quite addicted to tabletop roleplaying: example. )

Home:

Renting a van, arranging people to help and getting boxes to put stuff in. Soon I'll be packing.
Next weekend will be busy. Moving is fine, but two birthdays on one day complicate matters. Luckily I can do one in the morning and one late in the evening, but it's sure as hell going to be a whole lot of driving.

Random stuff:

Update: PHP3 sucks. It's roots as a simple interpreted language are clear enough, but it doesn't really get as obvious as when you're dealing with multiple include paths that could be invoked in any order and find that attempting to solve the problem (having multiple includes of the same functions causing symbol clashes) triggers subtle bugs in the include code path with the net result of stuff not getting included even when I explicitly tell it to include it. Argh.

Another week bites the dust.

Work

Much hackin on a new DB abstraction layer. Too much, unfortunately since this assignment ends next week but the code is so incredibly annoying I had to do something about it.
Luckily I tend to document things pretty well :)
It seems Versatel is in urgent need of my / anyone's services for some reason or other .. oh well, we'll see what that is all about.

Home

Moving day is approaching fast. Next week, to be exact. Due to that the week hasn't been slow - painting, attacking doorframes, killing power outlets andsoforth took up most of the weekend.

People

Dionys is silly. He seems to have started two brand new advogato projects .. well, take a look and you'll see what I mean. "Reconfiguring the Network" of course could be anyone's network on any scale..

Random stuff

Is God dead? His awe-inspiring majesty seems to no longer update his diary. Did He give up? Did we *finally* manage to burn Him out? Does this explain why George W. Bush got elected president?
Another mystery to be solved I suppose..
Anyway, the upside seems to be that this evil-doer no longer is updating his diary as well. Maybe somebody finally brought him back into the Light? Maybe the stock market crash drained his financial resources?
Or is it all Badvogato's fault..?

A whole lot of thinking again. Most of it not very useful. Some about the code I've been writing for work, and how it *should* be done .. somehow I can't seem to avoid building an abstraction layer between server & database. The naming has something to do with that, of course. The primary table has 115 records, all of them with nice 'comprehensive' names like 'f0' through 'f114', and most of those not used. Unfortunately, I can't throw any of the empty fields away because the code is depending on the order in which they are returned from a 'SELECT * from ..' query. And that, I might add, across multiple tables.
There are more big mistakes in that code of course, but this one is the biggest pain in the rear of all of them. Still, since this software is on the roll to be axed I am reluctant to 'do the Right Thing (tm)' simply because that might take more time than the remaining lifespan of the project.

Yesterday was nice. I spend my evening watching the last six episodes of Angel season one. Yes I'm a fan. Unfortunately, I might add - Angel was supposed to be a badly done ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - but it's not. Not by a long shot. I never have been that addicted to a television show in my life, let alone two. Both of them have this 'let's plain ignore the beaten path every now and then and do something truly original' quality that's hard to find anywhere else. Having watched this part of Angel for the first time, I am still amazed at how well it was done. It might just be me but I have this feeling that Angel might turn out to be better than Buffy in the long run. With Angel I have this 'the possibilities are infinite' feeling..
Yes I'm addicted. Hopefully it will subside a bit in the next few days or I'm not getting any work done..