Well, I suppose I ought to write something . . .

What day is it now? Saturday? Yeah, I think Saturday. I was going to explain what happened last weekend, but never quite got around to it. Simon came over on the Friday night, but Simon was visiting M**** and I too had a visitor - Robert. We celebrated something . . . anything . . . no, I remember now . . . we celebrated the fact that my present university module is almost complete, and I look all set to get some kind of 90%+ grade, so that's good. So we celebrated that, and whatever else . . . what you got? So Robert came over, and me, Rob and Tania had sausages, mash and gravy (oh, and some onions, I guess) for dinner, all washed down with a glass or two of Moet & Chandon. I wouldn't usually drink stuff like that, you understand, but they gave me at work, as a . . . er . . . what do you call it . . . as a . . . you know, a kind of . . . 'well done' kind of thing . . . I did something that deserved a bottle of champagne (and also a load of Marks and Spencers vouchers, but that's another story). So . . . we had dinner and I think we stayed in that night . . . M****, Simon, Anna and Rich (I think) appeared later on, back from town, so I played host to them lot for a couple of hours. And then it was probably somewhere between 3 and 4am when I finally got to sleep, but it wasn't a very good sleep . . . sleeping in my front room . . . too much daylight in the morning . . . five hours sleep, max. So all Saturday I was feeling a bit . . . you know, just a bit too blleeeeeuuurrrggghhh. There exists a possible correlation between insufficient sleep and episodes of seizure (well, for me anyway), so I hate it when this kind of stuff happens. I think I had a can or two of Red Bull on Friday night, which didn't really agree with the whole lack of sleep thing throughout Saturday. So then to Saturday . . . I didn't actually leave the house throughout Saturday, but just kind of pottered around the house, wondering whether I should try to catch up on my sleep or not. In the end, I just stayed up and slept a full amount that night. But throughout Saturday, I was again trying to get this crappy old 486DX to work, in some form or another. Trouble is, this computer is so old that it doesn't really know about PCI cards, and everything is ISA, which means jiggling around with memory allocations and interupts for, er . . . well, just the network card, but that's the main thing . . . the network card is the means by which this computer would talk to the outside world. I can't remember how, but one of the many operating systems I tried in this machine (ah yes, I remember now, it was Freescov0.27) managed to work out the memory allocation AND which interupt this network card was working on . . . hell, it even got the thing working, which I was pretty impressed by. But, erm . . . I can't quite remember why, but for some reason I thought it would fun to try something different, so I may have tried SuSE 6.3, something called Pocket Linux and perhaps even Windows 95 at some point . . . I'm not sure. Anyway, eventually I ended up back with Freesco and . . . god, this is dull. Was this really what happened all Saturday? Erm . . . yep, and I was also trying to get First Encounters working on my main PC. God knows why. I think I have this warm, fuzzy glow (?!) about playing Elite and its sequels for many, many hours as a child and teenager. But, hey, the damn thing didn't work, so that was a complete waste of time. And then on Sunday . . . erm . . . new paragraph at this point.

Yes, Sunday . . . we (me, M****, Simon, Anna, Rich and (later on) Tania) all went to York, for a bit of a drink and wander. That was fun. My fondest memory of this day was sitting on the banks of the Ouse, outside the King's Arms, watching the boats go by, a glass of bitter (or lager, or cider, I tried them all) to my side, listening to Simon ranting on and on about boat owners, the sun playing upon the river, shining straight at us. Yeah, that was good. I wish I had my map to hand . . . I remember we started off at Varsity, and popped into McDonalds (some of us were still hungover) and, erm . . . I can't remember which other pubs we went to. Damnit. Well, I can remember, just not their names.