Strange things are afoot in the Idea shop Arranged to meet Lloyd and Owen at Retro but ate too many twiglets at work (What do you mean that the big packets aren’t just for one person? ) and ended up feeling very shitty. Coupled with the growing sense of unease I’m trying to get used to when hanging around with lots of people. A lot of it coming from a member in our group, through no fault of his own Barclays last month paid me earlier in the evening than this month so I was also without cash until much later so I couldn’t take O to the sauna or pay back Lloyd. So we left Retro and O took me to the sauna. Giggle. Sat in the jacuzzi chatting — O found something nice to play with and I wandered about enjoying the view. Lost O after he went for a fag and an hour or so later found RobL who told me O had gone. Oops. Stayed waaay too late, having fun for the most part (accidentally groping a balding 40yr old in the darkroom and not realising until I saw him in the light was not fun, but hey, it was dark ). Left at about 5:30am — checked my phone to discover a text from O reading “I guess you must have gone home” which I amusedly replied to. Mild out, sun was just breaking. Little fluffy clouds stained pale yellow by our rising star were etched against the deep blue of twilight. 8°C out so perfect for walking and contemplating life. Realised I feel stronger now than I have in a long while, almost like I’m waking up after a long alcoholic sleep. Realised I’m not the scared boy I used to be, terrified of my friends seeing the real me. I don’t need escapism, I don’t need a crutch. I need to immerse myself in life, revelling in every single emotion, every single part of it, bad or good. And when I am in tune, when my voice again joins the single song, the uni-verse, I will again be whole, and nothing except maybe my throat will stop me. My reverie was halted on Commercial Street by a wizened old hag asking me if I wanted any business. Tsk. Walked to Aldgate and got the 15 home via the 24 hr shop near my old flat. Bought bacon, eggs and OJ as well as Perrier. Posh breakfast. Forgot sausages though, d’oh. Back home at about 6:30am I thought I’d simply upgrade Novak. Well, I had been awake nearly 24 hours and I did think it was a clever idea. My fifth B5 script book had arrived too and I thought I could read whilst the server did things. Almost fell asleep then remembered that my alarm was set so went to bed for half an hour whilst Fedora tried to install a new OS on Novak. Woke up to find out it’d crashed part way through. Grr. So gave up and went to bed until about 11:30. Spent the whole of Saturday arguing with the fucking thing. Eventually got it to sort of upgrade by doing a minimal clean install on my dirty partitions and then had to set about fixing/upgrading the rest of it. So I still don’t have X working and I have lost the settings I painstakingly created for the plasma telly. Grr. Everything else is mostly back to normal. I need to work out how I can upgrade postgres’s DB format though without reverting to the FC4 version, or quotebot will stay dead. Although I’m a little tempted to just rewrite it as part of the site so the quote IDs tally, so I might do that and consign the last bit of FC that JamesOG worked on to the bin. Ah well... Evening came around and we got pizza and watched some Buffy. Simple things, eh? Today I was up earlyish, still trying to get various bits to work on Novak. Have a mystery with wget/links/etc that stops it being able to resolve things. Which is strange. Went out to buy bits at Spitalfields, phoned mum on the bus and wished her a happy mothers day. Bought a kilo of orgasmic fairly traded beans from the veggie shop, as well as some non dairy margarine (It’s really hard to find in super