13:39 the previous day, I forgot to mention: another strange phone call from my mysterious foreigner . . . and another today, at exactly 13:44. Odd. The message is again that one about 'ne quittez pas un correspondent . . . blah blah blah'. Other than that, I have nothing to report . . . no new news.

Well, I've recently discovered that my Sony minidisc recorder/player (Net-MD Walkman MZ-N510) is designed in such a way that if you want to access the data stored on a minidisc via USB (and, therefore, one assumes, obtain a perfect, bit-for-bit copy (?!)), then the only way you can do this is by copying the music onto the minidisc using Sony's own Sonic Stage software. If music is copied on to the minidisc any other way (say, you're recording your own music/sounds), then the only way you can extract the music is . . . well, basically via the line-out. How crazy is that? Yeah, sure, uploading the music in real-time via an analogue line-out cable isn't THAT bad, but it's the fact that they have deliberately crippled the machine in that way, presumably to protect themselves against the ire of record companies (perhaps thinking that people would go copyright-violation crazy if they could rip a CD onto minidisc and then convert it to MP3 within a few minutes). But I got to thinking . . . surely, the stream of data going up and down that USB cable could easily be intercepted and processed and one could perform very basic functions (say, reading the TOC of a blank minidisc) between minidisc machine and computer just to see what the exchange of data is. Once one has a grasp of what's going on, one could then start transferring basic music files between computer and minidisc, to try and spot patterns . . . I guess this is reverse engineering. So, you could have a track that is just one second of absolute silence, then perhaps a track that is a single, pure tone (say, 440Hz) . . . I guess this is another thing, though - reverse engineering of the ATRAC format - but I've no idea how sound is normally encoded in an open-source standard, let alone a proprietary one . . . we're probably getting into the scary realms of Fourier analysis. It just annoys me - anything proprietary . . . and the fact that I can't find my other phono-to-line converter, which would allow me to transfer bits of music from my minidisc to my computer (all those LPs).

My apologies if you're trying to view some of these pages using a dial-up connection. It may take a while. I noticed someone just recently started looking at the page for May at 20:38:48 but the last image wasn't uploaded until 20:42:36. So that's, erm . . . well, nearly four minutes. God, I had no idea. I thoroughly recommend Pipex. The trouble with broadband is that, after a while, you end up taking it for granted and forget how things used to be on dial-up.