Well then, here we are at entry number 200. I said at the end of the 100th Entry that I hoped things would change for the good of the mind. Little did I know that life would be so much better now than then.

That entry wasn’t actually the lowest I got to. That was probably New Years Eve, when I drove home from work crying, wondering what the hell was the point in my life. I wasn’t going anywhere, I didn’t have any idea of what to do next and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t think of Fran as just a friend. So I made the decision that I’d stop talking to her for a while. The 100th entry came when I was making progress in getting better.

So enough of that, what about now? I don’t think things could actually be much better. I know who reads this, so I’ll try not to enthuse too much about Kate, but she’s great to be with. No one has ever made me laugh as much as she does. I can make her laugh. Even my parents have commented that there is a lot of laughter about when we’re together. So yeah. I won’t go into details, but I’m very, very happy.

What about work? It’s ok. It looks like I’m going to get to work on the projects I want to work on, and I’ve just had a glowing appraisal and a surprisingly good pay review. That should help me sort the last thing I want to change – moving out. Don’t get me wrong, living with the parents is nice, but you know, 22 is probably the limit on when it starts becoming a bit odd to live with your parents. I don’t think buying is viable at the moment, simpley because I don’t think I could get the sort place I want to live on my own, and I’ve always planned on buying when I’ve got someone to buy with. So I’ll be seeing what I can rent and save some money to get a house at some point. How grown up. Worryingly I was also thinking about putting some of my new wages in the pension. Eek! So will I have that sorted by 300 entries? Well, it’s taken 9 months to make the next 100 entries, so possibly. We’ll have to see.

In unrelated news, I picked up the new Green Day album, American Idiot. Oh, my, god. The last album, Warning, was awful. It wasn’t Green Day, or at least, not why I like Green Day. I’m sure to some people it was good, but I got into Green Day in 1998 with Nimrod, and Warning just didn’t do anything for me.

American Idiot, though, is something different. I’d already thought of it as a Punk Rock Opera, because themes play out across the whole album, there are characters, highs, lows and a story. 2 songs weigh in at over 9 minutes, and are made up of chapters. I know essentially, this is not a new idea, but as far as I’m aware it’s not been done in Punk before. It’s not something I expected from Green Day. They of the 3 power chord rock. They’ve absolutely blown me away, this is without doubt, the best album I own. I cannot stress enough, even if you don’t like punk, you have to at least listen to this album once, if you don’t, you’re doing a disservice to yourself. My god. I’ve got to go listen again. It’s only like 20 times now since I got it on Monday…

You offer me a Gmail account. It’s not a personal thing, but I will make judgements about your views on civil liberties if you offer me one. I don’t care whether a piece of software or a person reads the contents of my e-mail. I don’t care if the contents are innocuous. It’s the equivilent of a guy at the post office opening every single piece of your post, noting down the contents and then sending you junk mail based on the contents. It’s wrong and I don’t like it. Just like I was trying to explain to the Asda checkout monkey last Saturday that I didn’t have to tell him my post code.

If you’ve got a Gmail account, well done. Just please don’t expect me to reply an e-mail from one, or at least send me another address to reply to…

Hmm, decided yesterday with Kate that we’re going to go to Edinburgh. Well, it was either that or a cottage on a coast for a weekend, but going somewhere new and exploring together appealed, which is nice. So flights are booked out of Bristol on November 13th, coming back on the 15th. Nice cheapish hotel found too, but it 4* in a Georgian building. Sounds ace to me. I look forward to romantic walks and all that.

Yes, you may have guessed, I’m happy.

At home for once this evening, and even though I’ve spent part of the evening asleep, and the rest setting up a selection of new phones about the house (we can now do SMS on landlines. Madness), I’ve done a little bit of work on this here website. Done a little work on the archive, so you can get to old entries, but still needs a bit of work.

Added about 20 million calls to stripslashes( ) to clear out all of the slashes in the comments.

Work today has been interesting. My pet product has been running slow for the last week, and I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to work out why (not a good idea when you’re already balding). Turns out for some reason I’d put two tables in an SQL UPDATE command, so it was creating a temporary table of 6 million records every time it did an update, rather than just a table of 30000. Oops. I’m at a loss to why I put the second table in there. Must have been tired. Roadsigns should say “Tiredness when programming can kill, take a break every two hours”.

This has been a public service announcement…

Ah ha, all quiet on the western front around here, as I’ve been down in Bristol and Taunton this weekend, playing a game of meet the parents with Kate. Seemed to go ok, don’t think I said anything of the “this boy is poison!” variety. So, yeah, that’s all going swimmingly. Apart from the dreadful hangover on Sunday morning. Eurgh. I think I’ll stick to my usual sweet sweet cider next time, rather than a combination of red wine (3 or 4 glasses), Irish coffee (1 cup) and sherry (1 glass).

Something else to be proud of this weekend is my DIY skills. Take 1 frankly rubbish Ikea bookshelf (like this, only worse and without the brace at the back to keep it upright), with a penchant for falling over when looked at, a ?3.50 piece of wood from Wickes, 1 hacksaw, cut the wood into pieces the size of the gap between shelves, and wedge said pieces in the gap against the main frame. Result? One much more sturdy bookcase and a grateful girlfriend. Not bad for ?3.50

Hmm, I keep trying to make an entry at home on this, and the damn thing keeps failing. Whoever wrote this needs to be shot. Oh wait that was me. I’ll need to investigate.

Slight, minor change to photos made yesterday as I meant to do some coding but ended up on the phone to Kate instead. It’s all CSS you know…

So I’m back from India. We headed off to McLeod Ganj above Dharamsala from Manali, only 10 hours on a public bus, going slowly as we wound our way up into the mountains. We saw a bus that had gone off the road into the river too. 16 people dead. Bit shocking.

So yeah, McLeod Ganj was ace. The Tibetan Government in exile is based there, along with the Dalai Lama. Very spiritual up in the mountains. Unfortunately I got struck down with a cold on the bus, so didn’t get up to much on the first couple of days, while the others went for a hike. I did have quite a good time on my own though exploring, and found the excellent Tibetan Museum. I even saw a film there on the plight of the people they were putting on. Plenty of photos coming soon.

After that was Amritsar, only there for one day and Iniago and I had to leave early to make the flights. Not before we’d seen the frankly mind blowing Sikh Golden Temple. Only 750kg of gold leaf on that. Also went to the India-Pakistan border for the amusing closing of the border ceremony. Got photos of that too.

Back now in the UK of course, and I’ve been very busy. Visiting Kate quite a lot, obviously, which is great. Very happy at the moment.

New today though is the photos section. Not much there ATM, but I’ve got a plan to make the only graphics on it the photos themselves, and use absolutely no tables in the layout. Just divs and CSS. It will work, oh yes. Watch this space.