Reggie Thomson’s Diary

I drew up a rough sketch for the shelf around the cistern and behind the toilet. Then, I calculated the wood I required, and cycled down to B&Q. Their chipboard was bent and larger than I needed. Homebase had the right size, though still slightly warped. It fitted on the back of my bike, and I carried the wooden battens while cycling slowly.

I drilled one piece of wood into the cement floor, but I wasn’t really in the mood for DIY.

Instead, I just played on my computer. I sorted out one or two more photos of Canada.

The Norton Anti-virus on my computer keeps giving a message - every incoming email gives a pop-up error message. I looked at the website for advice. I need to reinstall the product, they say. It seems to be a very poor quality product, incapable of protecting itself against the Klez worm, and liable to failures. I ran a scan of my disks, then set them to defragment overnight.

Phew. Reggie.net is has been transferred successfully. I received an email from register4less.com saying they would resubmit the request. Verisign are up to their usual tricks. They emailed me saying that if I signed up for 2 years they would continue the service at only $14.95 per annum. In the emails they bombarded me with and the letters through the post, the best they could offer was $19.95 for five years. It was a disgraceful ploy. I could have transferred to dotster.com for only $8.95 (I think). However, register4less handled the robbaker.org well, and have been responsive in the transfer of reggie.net. I may transfer other domains here when I have more money in the bank.

I cut the ugly piece of T-join out of the main water pipe, and put a stop valve on the toilet inlet. Turning on the water, though, I found I had a leak. I think the top part still had a drip of water preventing the solder from melting all the way round. Another blast from the welding torch sorted it out. The stop valve on the toilet is in the wrong way round - it refills very slowly. Also, I must have moved the toilet inlet pipe, as the cistern overflows. Life is full of challenges.

The more I looked at the area around the cistern, the more I disliked its ugliness. I decided that I should make another shelf to go round it. It’s back to the drawing board.

After a hot bath, I printed out some more of my namecards, and went down to the Barn. Ling, from Taiwan, was very interested in the photos. She went through them three times before choosing one. She wanted to know what I am, or what I do. I tell people that I do nothing. Of course, it’s not true. I do lots of things. But I don’t get paid for them.

People have a romantic notion about doing nothing. It is a permanent holiday. The life of dreams. The life of happiness. The truth is mostly the opposite. When everyone judges you by your job, not having one makes everyone else into instant advisors. Jonathan keeps telling me about the fiver-an-hour litter collecting job in Girton. Others tell me how well paid I could be if I taught English in A or B countries.

Ling then suggested that I am an artist. “I don’t know what I am,” I protested. “I am a nothing. A nobody.” This answer is highly unsatisfactory. Why do all humans have to be pigeonholed? Of what class, family, species, genus am I? The species of “Nothing” is an empty one, and must remain so. Nobody is a nothing. You have to belong.

The idea of becoming a hermit is growing on me. I’d be getting back to very early roots. All I need is a cave. Preferably one with an electricity socket and internet connection. And a nearby convenience store.

Downstairs on door duty, I chatted to David. He was under the mistaken impression that I am travelling. He has been reading my diaries on the web, and they still say I’m travelling, when I haven’t written the text for the day. It’s true. I’m still travelling. Only I’m not going anywhere. Time, I suppose. I’m travelling through time. The aim is to get to the end of life without dying. Good Grief! People actually read my diaries. I should go back to calling them “The Daily Drivel.”

If you’ve got this far, I should advise you to see your doctor. Or psychiatrist, if you live in America.

Work recommenced on the toilet. I drained the hot water pipes to replace the leaking kitchen tap washer, and sort the slow leak under the toilet sink. Unfortunately, I don’t have the correct washers in stock. I left the water off and cycled to B&Q to get the necessary parts.

By the time I returned, the empty ice-cream carton under the open drain cock was overflowing. When I sorted it out, I discovered that the hot water tap in the toilet is dripping slightly. Grr.

I continued with the framework for the shelf and cupboard around the sink. It’s a bit complicated, as I have to put in a door that will be covered in tiles - so I have to get the spacing correct. I even used Pythagoras to check the gap I needed on the door.

After a hot bath, I did some computer work, cancelling the extra spurious domains on Thinkhost.

I set up the computer with the hotmail account, and also set up their old shared account. I’m not sure I was able to obtain all the old emails from the Win98 Outlook Express.

Andrew gave me some money and I drove down to the Cantab Millennium computer store to pick up their cheapest sound card. However, back at the house, it wouldn’t install. I checked all the settings, but couldn’t get a peep out of it. The speakers work fine - I tried them in my computer.

I showed Andrew how to use the fax - sending with Microsoft Fax print, and receiving with eFax and the American fax number. Most of his faxes are junk, from the advert in the classic cars magazine.

Andrew and Sarah suggested I use Sarah’s car to run myself home - they would collect it tomorrow. That gave me an idea - I could drive over to Ampthill to visit Rob for his birthday meal. I telephoned them using my computer - and got through to Rob’s parents to leave a message.

Back home, I looked at one of the photos - the one that they put in the living room - and made some adjustments to it. I printed it out, and then packed a few things to take with me in case I stayed over.

I didn’t have a map, but reckoned I would remember the route via Biggleswade. It was fairly straightforward.

The children enjoyed pushing me over and making me disappear with their new magic wand, which flashes and plays a tune when waved. I guess adults usually tell them what to do, so it is unusual to meet someone who will happily do as commanded, however silly - especially silly things, such as rolling over and waving one’s feet in the air!

We walked round to a nearby Indian restaurant for a meal with about nine folks. I ordered something that sounded like “lush haggis” but now I can’t remember the real title! It had lamb and chick peas in it. A starter was out of my budget, so I had Nan bread instead. The popadoms caused a feeding frenzy!

It was very pleasant, though I’m not much of a conversationalist. I decided not to drive home at midnight in the frost in a car without a heater. I stayed over, in a sleeping bag on the sofabed.

I set the scandisk utility running on both drives. It didn’t detect any errors. While it was running, I scribbled some of my diaries.

Andrew and I drove down to the Cantab Millennium store in Mill Road. I wasn’t even aware of its existence before, and it is just opposite the Barn. The guy on the counter seemed more chatty than the folks in Cambridge Computer Supplies.

So, I installed windows XP in the afternoon. I was able to get most thing up and running. However, it wasn’t possible to get the sound output working. Maybe the software is incompatible. I checked on the web at www.driverguide.com and could only find a windows 95/98/Me version. The USB also required twiddling.

I restored his programs, got the camera USB working with all Andrew’s preferred settings, and set up an account for Sarah.

I also briefly looked at the old computer which has Windows 3.1 on it. However, it only has 96Mbyte of hard drive and I think 16 Mbyte of internal memory. It isn’t even worth suggesting that they upgrade it.

Late in the evening, I set up Messenger for them. To test if it was working, I logged on with my computer. I was surprised to see Jochen online. He has moved to China and is working there, although he still has the house in Miri with Rose and now two children. He still eat his cheese sandwiches, when he can find cheese!

I went through the drive on Andrew’s computer deleting all the files directory by directory. It occurred to me that I might speed things up using a program on my computer, so I drove home to fetch it. The program wasn’t on my Sony - it was on the IBM that Adrian has borrowed. Looking on the web, I found several DOS programs to kill directories and all subdirectories. That speeded things up a lot. However, several files would not delete. I began to suspect the hard drive.

I downloaded a partitioning program. However, it came up with a message just as I exited. I though I would need to format the newly created D: drive. When I did this, all the data on the C: drive disappeared. Grr. Worse, I wasn’t able to access the CDROM. I tried putting the old CD back in the drive. This didn’t work either. However, when I put the backup CDs into my computer, I was prompted to save as Read-Only. In this format the disks were readable on Andrew’s computer. At least, I won’t have to reload from floppy.

I took a break for tea. Later, I tried to reinstall windows from the backup CD. However, I kept getting missing file information - it seems I didn’t copy all the system files on the WIN98 directory. When I completed the windows setup, and restarted, windows promptly failed. Next time, I went through the setup and wrote down all the missing file names. Then, before the second boot, I decompressed all the Winzip files and put them manually into their respective folders. Windows was able to run, but I couldn’t run explorer or Internet Explorer. I guess I had updated the windows 98 so that the replaced files were for a newer version. Grr. I gave up.

My computer now gives an error on startup - Norton AntiVirus can’t load properly, and I will have to uninstall it an reinstall it to get it working again. I will switch to a different virus protection company when my update runs out at the end of this year.

It was another beautiful day. I started into the DIY, making the sides to the cupboard door frame. However, Andrew called round. He is fed up with the network router, because it doesn’t work. I was quite surprised, and almost offered to swap it for my one.

I went with him, to see if I could sort out the problems. The router was perfectly OK as expected. He had phoned up NTL about a problem with MSN hotmail and his freecom webmail. They blamed the router. He had already torn up the manual to remove the foreign language sections.

Logging onto hotmail gave me one clue - Javascript wasn’t enabled. However, it was enabled in the internet setup. It is possible that during the installation of the failed Norton, the scripting was disabled. I tried to reinstall windows 98 from the copy on disk. It didn’t make a difference. I guessed the registry had become corrupted.

I started a complete backup. This time, I compressed all the files and put them in Winzip format.